WU ZHAO’S ZHOU DYNASTY CONTAINED ROUGHLY 350 prefectures (zhou 州), presided over by Prefects, and 1500 districts (xian 縣), administered by magistrates. Each prefecture was broken into three to six districts. “As late as 657,” Denis Twitchett observes, “there were only 13,465 ranking officials to control a population perhaps in excess of 50,000,000.” With a population of 50 million people in the early Tang empire, the average magistrate was responsible for 60,000 people. The primary role of these local officials was to collect revenues—grain and cloth tax—and to coordinate corvée labor. Prefects with appointments in and around the capital were often up-and-coming men on a fast track to promotions to higher-ranked positions in the imperial court. On the other hand, a court official guilty of offending the ruler or committing minor malfeasance might be punished with a demotion to become a local official in a remote district. As in any other culture, premodern or modern, some local administrators were conscientious, competent, and effective, while others were negligent, inept, and avaricious. While stories of both good and bad local officials appear in Court and Country, Zhang Zhuo was clearly partial to the more lurid stories of maladministration, power-mongering, and staggering incompetence.

JUDICIOUS PEI ZIYUN SOLVES THE CASE OF THE MISSING COWS

Known as the “father-and-mother official,” the county magistrate was the lowest-level official who was part of the formal government bureaucracy. They were aided (or, at times, hindered) by an extensive sub-bureaucracy of clerks, village heads, local elders, wardens, bailiffs, strongarms, and runners. In addition to reporting to the Prefect, these magistrates were also responsible for levying grain and cloth taxes; managing floods and droughts; supervising construction and repair of dikes, roads, and bridges; adjudicating local disputes; and solving crimes. Thus, these local officials were also detectives. Extensive Records places the passage from Court and Country below in its chapters on “Brilliant Investigators” (jingcha 精察):