元代 吏員出職制 관련 법률공문 어휘 考釋

In traditional Chinese bureaucracy, the term guanli (官吏) collectively refers to both guanyuan (官員, officials) and liyuan (吏員, clerks or functionaries). Generally, guanyuan were responsible for policymaking and administration, while liyuan functioned as subordinate personnel in charge of practical affairs. During the Yuan dynasty, these two categories were administered under entirely separate bureaucratic tracks. Guanyuan were assigned formal ranks from the highest first grade to the ninth subordinate grade and could be promoted automatically, whereas liyuan held no such ranking system. Despite this structural divide, there were institutional pathways that enabled mobility between the two tracks. The promotion of a liyuan into officialdom was referred to as liyuan chuzhi (吏員出職), while conversely, a ranked official temporarily assigned to clerical tasks was termed zhiguan chongli (職官充吏). These practices reflect the distinctive personnel system of the Yuan. One of the major challenges in studying Yuan officialdom lies in the nature of its legal framework. Unlike earlier dynasties that codified law through comprehensive penal codes, the Yuan adopted a danxingfa (單行法, “case-by-case statute”) system, in which laws were issued as individual edicts in response to specific incidents. These were typically preserved as government memoranda, which often lack internal coherence and contain hybridized terminologies, rendering them particularly difficult to interpret. Section 2.1 of this paper examines the structural features of the Yuan personnel system and the institutional framework of liyuan chuzhi. Section 2.2 provides annotated translations of a representative government memorandum where relevant terminology appears in rich detail. Section 3 analyzes key technical terms related to liyuan chuzhi. Some terms—such as kao (考, “recorded days of service”)—are relatively accessible once the promotion system is understood. Others, such as bubu jin (補不盡, “incomplete fulfillment of promotion quotas”), jian yi zi (減一資, “exemption from one evaluation cycle”), and zhe (折, “proportional accounting of service days”), require deeper contextual interpretation. In total, the study addresses 25 headwords grouped into 22 semantic categories. The institutional mechanisms concerning liyuan chuzhi are primarily found in 13 memoranda under the section “Guanzhi II – Yue Ri” (官制二ㆍ月日) of Volume 8 of the Yuan Dianzhang (元典章). Broader regulations on liyuan are addressed in 64 memoranda compiled in the section “Lizhi” (吏制) of Volume 12. In addition, related material is concentrated in Volumes 82 to 84 of the Yuan Shi (元史), which cover quanfa (銓法, personnel statutes) and kaoke (考課, evaluation systems). Future research will continue with further philological analysis and annotated translations of these materials.