著者

髙村 武幸

出版者

東洋文庫

雑誌

東洋学報 = The Toyo Gakuho (ISSN:03869067)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.91, no.1, pp.1-34, 2009-06

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Within the study of the history of the Han Dynasty, a subject that relies on excavated historical sources, official documents constitute the main body of primary sources, particularly in the study of government administration. Correspondence, on the other hand, which exists in lesser quantity than official documents, has in the past been considered to be unrelated to administration and the legal system, and consequently, very little research has been done to date on the subject. However, as indicated in even some of the related research to date, there are examples of connections of correspondence to the activities of the government bureaucracy. Hence, this paper examines a selection of correspondence from the Juyan and the Dunhuang Han wooden documents (居延・敦煌漢簡) containing content related to the public sector and considers how correspondence should be placed within the stud of documents related to Han Dynasty administration.There is a surprisingly large and varied amount of correspondence related to many different aspects of public affairs. A survey of the correspondence reveals that documents known as guanji (官記) and fuji (府記), previously thought to be forms of official document, are in fact fundamentally forms of correspondence. It also becomes clear that there are missives that, despite having a correspondence format and style, performed the same function as public records submitted from higher to lower (下行) and lower to higher (上行) organizations. Thus, “official correspondence” was widely used in administrative settings, in the same manner as documents.In most instances, “official correspondence” was used to handle matters that had not yet reached the stage of official document production, or to deal with problematic matters that would be inappropriate for official documents. This correspondence was written in the simple, private writing style of the time and was used when there were matters that needed to be resolved in a “private or secret” fashion. By adroitly dividing their affairs between formal official declarations and private correspondence, Han Dynasty bureaucrats were able to nimbly and organically manage the administrative matters of state.The author concludes that research on this type of dual “document administration” should be turned to the content of government-related correspondence and how this body of documentation functioned, in order to gain a better understanding of the real state of Han Dynasty affairs. Furthermore, the viewpoint taken in this article will hopefully prove effective in studying the large body of correspondence found among the excavated materials related to the late Eastern Han, Wei and Jin Dynasties.