During the Qin and Han dynasties, the central government gave preferential treatment to garrison soldiers and corvée laborers (i.e., officials, commoners, and convicts), stipulating that local governments were to provide hui 槥 (transport coffins) to those from among these groups that had died on duty and transport their corpses from the frontiers back to their hometowns for burial. Recently excavated bamboo slips reveal an enormous amount of new details concerning hui as well as the institution of coffin transportation, making it possible to depict a more complete picture of this system. Smaller than guan 棺 (burial coffins), hui were simple wooden boxes mainly used to transport the body. They were also seen as a burial implement but only on occasions when severe natural disasters occurred. Moreover, when used as a transport coffin, hui transported the material remains of the deceased, such as clothing. Prior to the delivery of hui, local governments first made sanbian quan 參辨券 (three-part wooden tallies) that recorded the category and number of the remaining items as well as personal information of the deceased; the local government and officials who had accompanied the transportation of hui both retained a copy, with the third being left in the coffin. According to Qin legal regulations, local governments were to inscribe the name, origin, rank, and other identifying information onto both the coffins and accompanying documents.
In this paper, I reconstruct the administrative processes of transporting the deceased to their hometowns, notably from the reporting of death until burial. When doing so, I have discovered a complex and rigorous institutional system designed to ensure the safe arrival of the corpses to their destinations. I contend that, in light of current textual evidence, hui shu 槥書 (transport coffin documents) do not constitute a set genre of official communication. Furthermore, the administrative impulse to transport the deceased is comparable, in my view, to that of the frontier soldiers and laborers’ desire to return home after the completion of their duties. Within the institutional system of coffin transportation, the customary idea that hometowns comprised one’s identity found an analogue in administrative procedure. Legal texts of the medieval and later periods demonstrate that subsequent dynasties adopted the political tradition of returning the deceased to their hometowns by means of hui. This practice should be understood as an institutional assurance of the customary belief that the spirits of the dead should return to their origins.
transporting coffins; death on the frontiers; returning the deceased to their hometowns; administrative procedures and documents
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