By Xinhua
Changsha : China’s earliest household registers have been deciphered from a bunch of Qin dynasty (221 BC-207 BC) bamboo slips excavated from Liye, in Hunan province in Central China.
“According to the registers, slaves and maids were listed as their masters’ household members by the population management system in China’s first united empire of Qin,” said Yun Chae Sok, a Korean scholar, who specialises in reading Qin bamboo manuscripts.
Some 37,000 bamboo slips were excavated from Liye, an ancient city on the border of the present-day Hunan and Sichuan provinces, along with other burial accessories in 2002.
Dubbed an encyclopaedia of the Qin Dynasty, these bamboo-slip manuscripts wooed experts from around the world to study them.
About 80 experts from China, America, Japan and Korea gathered last week in Liye at an international forum to exchange their views after the discovery of the relics.
The experts verified 24 bamboo slips as household registers, with ten well-preserved ones and 14 fragmentary ones.
“These are the first evidence ever discovered to testify to the household registration system of Qin dynasty,” said Yun of the Kyungpook National University in Korea.
His view was shared by Lai Ming Chiu, a professor from the Chinese University in Hong Kong.
“We knew from historical books and records that Qin empire had a rigorous household registration system. The deciphering of these bamboo manuscripts have now proved that assumption,” said Lai.
The registers carry information such as address, class, birthplace, official position and name of the male housemaster — followed by other male members of the family, females, and children. Close relatives, concubines, private slaves and maids were also listed.
Experts did not give specific examples of the registers, but said by adding servants to the household registration, the empire held tighter control of its people, especially the transient population.
Yun Chae Sok believes that a township level government, which was affiliated to the Qianling County of the Qin empire, wrote the ancient household registers.
Experts have not been able to give a comprehensive explanation of the management of the Qin dynasty’s household registration system, since the reading of the ancient characters written on the bamboo slips has progressed slowly. So far, less than one percent of the bamboo slips excavated in Liye have been studied.