Bǔ Hàn Bīngzhì 補漢兵志
Supplementary Treatise on Hàn Military Institutions by 錢文子 (撰)
About the work
A one-juǎn monograph by Qián Wénzǐ 錢文子 (courtesy name Wénjì 文季, hào Báishí shānrén 白石山人), of Yuèqīng 樂清 in the Southern Sòng. The Hànshū notoriously omits the “Treatise on Military Institutions” (《兵志》) that the Hàn yìwénzhì model would lead the reader to expect; Qián gathers all the references to military organisation scattered through the basic annals, biographies, and other treatises of the QiánHànshū and welds them into an organised, annotated reconstruction of the Western Hàn military system. The work is at the same time a learned exercise in textual harvest and a sharp Southern-Sòng polemic: Qián’s premise is that Hàn-era yùbīng yú nóng 寓兵於農 (lodging soldiers among farmers) preserved the spirit of the Three Dynasties and could, if revived in modified form, cure the swollen mercenary standing-army of the Sòng.
Tiyao
Imperially-approved Sìkù quánshū. Bǔ Hàn bīngzhì in one juǎn, by Qián Wénzǐ of the Sòng. Wénzǐ, courtesy name Wénjì, a man of Yuèqīng. In the third year of Shàoxī (1192) he graduated by shàngshè shìhè 上舍釋褐 (i.e. as a graduate of the highest grade of the imperial academy). He served as Vice-Director of the Bureau of Personnel concurrently with Editor of the National History Bureau, and rose through the ranks to Vice-Director of the Court of the Imperial Clan; afterwards he retired to live below Báishí Mountain and styled himself Báishí shānrén.
In the early Sòng, recoiling from the abuses of the Five Dynasties, the court gathered all the empire’s troops into the capital and called them “Imperial Guards” (jìnjūn). By gradual accretion they came to number more than 800,000—but it was an empty roster, the men were of no use as troops. After the southern crossing, in the haste to patch up the system, recruitment swelled even further and wasteful expenditures grew worse still.
Wénzǐ, observing that the Hàn dynasty followed close upon the Three Dynasties, that antiquity was not yet far away, and that the Hàn still preserved the principle of lodging soldiers among farmers—but that Bān’s Hànshū lacks a treatise on military institutions—therefore picked out from its basic annals, biographies, and various treatises whatever bears on military institutions, gathered them and edited them, and added critical notes and judgments to make this book. At the head of the juǎn is a preface by his disciple Chén Yuáncuì 陳元粹, which sets out at length the reasons for composing the work; for the work is in truth an argument about Sòng affairs, not a supplementary attempt to fill a gap in the Hànshū.
Zhū Yízūn’s 朱彞尊 colophon praises Qián’s words as “near at hand yet pointing far, terse in expression yet broad in significance—not such as could come from those bowed-headed gentry who fold their hands and discourse loftily on nature and destiny.” But once soldier and farmer are once divided, the situation cannot be reunited: if one insists on forcibly restoring antiquity but does not bind the soldiers with military discipline, the troops will not be reliable; if one binds them with discipline, then before the troops are trained the farmers will already have been disturbed. Hence after the Three Dynasties one can only by túnzhòng (military-agricultural colonies) lodge farming within soldiering, and one can no longer by the jǐngtián system lodge soldiering within farming. What Qián argues is the kind of thing one might call “to expound it makes sense, but to try it out is unworkable.” Take the Sòng case itself: hundreds of thousands of troops have for so long fed at public expense that to dismiss them at one stroke and send them back to farming would be sure to produce no peace—they would only band together as bandits. To pare them down gradually leaves the soldiers unable suddenly to become farmers, and the farmers unable suddenly to become soldiers; if a sudden emergency came, with what would one defend? This too is something where one may know the abuse clearly but be unable to remove it abruptly. Yet because what he argues cuts to the heart of the abuses of the Sòng system, and at the same time can supplement the gap in the Hànshū, we therefore preserve and record it for reference.
The Wénxiàn tōngkǎo lists this work as Bǔ Hàn bīngzhì 補漢兵制 (“Supplementary Hàn Military System”), differing from the present recension; but Wénzǐ explicitly says that Bān’s book has no military treatise, so the title Bǔ bīngzhì is the right one—the Tōngkǎo form is doubtless a copyist’s slip.
Submitted respectfully on collation, third month of the forty-sixth year of Qiánlóng (1781), by Chief Compilers Jì Yún 紀昀, Lù Xīxióng 陸錫熊, Sūn Shìyì 孫士毅, Editor-in-Chief Lù Fèichí 陸費墀.
Abstract
The Bǔ Hàn bīngzhì is the most coherent Sòng-period reconstruction of Western Hàn military institutions and, simultaneously, one of the principal Yǒngjiā 永嘉 utilitarian-school polemics on the Sòng standing-army problem. Composition is bracketed: the author was a Shàoxī 3 (1192) graduate of the imperial academy and the work bears a 1214 (Jiādìng jiǎxū 嘉定甲戍) preface by his disciple Chén Yuáncuì 陳元粹, who in fact had already studied the work at the time of his own apprenticeship — implying that the manuscript circulated in some form considerably before the formal preface. The notBefore / notAfter range here (1192–1214) reflects this evidence; a date in the 1200s is most likely.
The work is organised under sixteen rubrics covering the recruitment cycle (yòng mín — gēngzú 更卒, wèishì 衛士, cáiguān qíshì 材官騎士, shùbiān 戍邊, fù 復), the imperial guards (láng and the nánjūn 南軍 / běijūn 北軍), the sānfǔ 三輔 metropolitan commands, the city garrisons (chéngzhōng bīng 城中兵), the standing field force at Xíngyáng 滎陽, the commandery and frontier troops, the bùdūwèi 部都尉 and nóngdūwèi 農都尉, and the dependent-state (shǔguó 屬國) cavalry. Each rubric is built up from quotations of the Hànshū with extensive interlinear commentary drawing on Yīng Shào, Rú Chún 如淳, Yán Shīgǔ 顏師古, the Hàn yízhù 漢儀注, and the Hàn jiùyí 漢舊儀, marshalled to demonstrate that the Hàn knew no permanent body of “soldiers” maintained at public charge: men were liable to limited rotation only, the bulk of the populace remained productive, and the fiscal disaster of the Sòng was unknown. Chén Yuáncuì’s preface — which is in fact the work’s true polemical heart — sets out the contrast in five clauses: (1) Hàn levies were of fixed term, vs. Sòng careerists; (2) Hàn troops were dismissed home after action, vs. Sòng troops permanently fed by the state; (3) Hàn troops carried their own kit, vs. the Sòng chūnqiū yīcì (twice-yearly clothing grants); (4) Hàn troops were levied locally, sparing long-march costs; (5) Hàn had no permanent commanders with whom to rebel.
The catalog meta gives Qián Wénzǐ’s dates as “fl. 1160 – 1215”. His CBDB index year (16223) is 1134, with no firm birth/death year recorded, indicating the same uncertainty: the Shàoxī 3 (1192) graduation and Jiādìng 7 (1214) preface are the only secure points.
Translations and research
Standard editions: Wényuāngé Sìkù; modern punctuated reprint in the Sìkù quánshū photo-reproduction. The work is treated as a primary source in modern studies of Hàn military institutions — see Hans Bielenstein, The Bureaucracy of Han Times (Cambridge, 1980), passim, on the wèi-shì, cái-guān, and qí-shì; Michael Loewe, “The Organisation and Conduct of Hàn Military Action,” in The Cambridge History of China vol. 1 (1986), pp. 152–179. For the Sòng-side reception, the work is one of the canonical sources for the Yǒng-jiā utilitarian critique of the Sòng standing army; see Wáng Zēngyǔ 王曾瑜, Sòng cháo bīng-zhì chū-tàn 宋朝兵制初探 (Zhōnghuá shūjú, 1983), and the discussion in A Military History of China, ed. Graff & Higham (Westview, 2002), pp. 99–135. No translation into a Western language located.
Other points of interest
Zhū Yízūn’s 朱彞尊 endorsement (cited in the tíyào) and inclusion of the work in the Wényuāngé Sìkù despite its narrow scope reflect the high Qīng-evidential-school regard for Qián’s combination of meticulous source-collation with hard-headed institutional analysis — qualities the Sìkù compilers found rare among Southern Sòng dàoxué-influenced authors. The textual variant Bǔ Hàn bīngzhì 補漢兵志 (preserved here) vs. Bǔ Hàn bīngzhì 補漢兵制 (in the Wénxiàn tōngkǎo) is a small but instructive case of catalog drift, flagged by Jì Yún himself.