PROVI NCIAL AND LOCA L ADMINISTRA TION 675
PROVINCIAL ADMINISTRA TION
Reorganization o{ Local Districts
In the feudal age of Chou times local administration was divided between the
realm of the king or ruler and the autonomous fieflike districts of the feudal lords.
Local districts in the king's realm were governed by royal officials, but the fiefs
of the feudal lords were governed by the lord's officials. After feudal lords were
replaced with local magistrates in thc Ch' in dynasty, fiefdoms were replaced by
a two-tiered structure of local administration run by burcaucrats, and districts
(hsien) were organized in larger commanderies (chan). Some fcudal enclaves
retained in the Han dynasty were run by magisterial officials under feudal lords
until they were eliminated during the Revolt of the Seven Kingdoms in 154 B.C.^2
Local administration became more complex in later periods. The Chin regi me
in the third century A.D. could not maintain an orderly hierarchy of local admin-
istrative units because ccrtain eommandery prefects and district magistrates inde-
pendently attacked their neighbors to expand their own territory. Warlords on
the frontier also established commanderies on their own authority, granting them-
selves high-ranking titles even though the population was too small to fit the
rank. To establish some kind of regularity among the districts of variable size,
the Northern Ch'i government in the late fifth century subdivided eommanderies
into nine grades according to their size with similar subdivisions for districts as
well. Since Minister of War Yang Shang-hsi was particularly alarmed because
many districts were too small in area and population and yet had heavy quotas
of taxation, he recommended a reorganization of local districts to bring all of
them up to a minimum size.
In Sui and Tang times the commandery was replaced by the Chou (prefec-
ture), the Fu was used for a Chou loeatcd in a capital, and the grand protectorate
(Tu-hu-fu) was put in charge of several Chou. Sung dynasty local administra-
tion became even more complex because of an increase in the types of districts
and the habit of appointing many capital officials to magistracies as concurren-
cics. The hierarchy of prestige among local magistrates derived from the rank
of the capital post he ld by a concurrent official rather than the magistrate's rank.^3
In the Ming dynasty large-sized Chou were changed to Fu, which either con-
trolled prefectures with their own subordinate districts or ran districts directly.
Ch'iu Chiln charged that because district boundaries had not been redrawn to
keep up with changes in population, some large prefectures (Fu) might control
several dozen prefectures and districts while others had barely two or three. Since
the disparity in the population of individual districts was just as diverse, he rec-
ommended that the Fu, Chou, and Hsien each be divided into three grades accord-
ing to population. U nits that were too small could be joincd with others or dropped
in rank, and larger ones could he raised in rank. Productivity could also be used
to reorganize the ranks of districts to improve the fairness and equality of dis-
trict quotas of taxes and labor service.^4