For over forty years Pierre-Étienne Will, the eminent historian of late imperial and modern China, has produced a steady stream of important books and articles addressing many different areas of government administration: from managing granaries and fighting famine to maintaining the infrastructure of water control and irrigation, from economic development to forensic science and the implementation of the law. A trademark of Will's research is his thorough mining of a wide range of sources, including (to name just a few) official and personal histories, gazetteers, and administrative handbooks. It is his expert knowledge of the latter that Will, assisted by a team of scholars, shares in this monumental new reference work, Handbooks and Anthologies for Officials in Imperial China: A Descriptive and Critical Bibliography (hereafter Bibliography).

Will explains that the project began in the early 1990s when he had the “imprudent idea” of “compiling a bibliography of the handbooks aimed for the officials of imperial China and still in existence that would be both descriptive … and exhaustive”. Expanding the Chinese category of guanzhen shu 官箴書 (“books to admonish officials”), the work encompasses “any sort of text aimed at administrators either with a didactic intention or as a working aid”. While Will says that the Bibliography is not quite exhaustive, it covers a staggering 1,165 titles. Most date to the Ming and especially the Qing, with a smaller number from other periods: three Tang, 31 Song, 16 Yuan, and 21 Republican. (The inclusion of some works over others is unclear. Why have Empress Wu Zetian's 武則天 (624–705, r. 690–705) Chengui 臣軌 (Rules for Ministers, 685) when, as Will notes, it was lost in China by the Yuan period and only reintroduced from Japan in the nineteenth century? Why not include Zhenguan zheng yao 貞觀政要 (Essentials of Government of the Zhenguan Era, 712), the celebrated compilation idealizing good governance in Emperor Taizong's 太宗 (r. 626–649) reign produced in the aftermath of Empress Wu, which was studied and cited thereafter? (Wu Jing: The Essentials of Governance, ed. Hilde De Weerdt et al., Cambridge University Press, 2020.) In 1465 the Ming court reprinted an influential 1333 edition of the work, later emulated in Lou Xing's 婁性 (js. 1481) Huang Ming zhengyao 皇明政要 (Essentials of Government of the August Ming, 1507) – a title Will does include).

Entries in the Bibliography are organized into seven parts. Part 1, Works of a General Nature, includes General Admonitions to the Bureaucracy; Collections of Exemplary Biographies, Anecdotes, and Dicta; Anthologies of Quotations from Earlier Handbooks; Explanations of the Administrative Structure and Overviews of the Government; Works on the Government of Particular Provinces, etc. Part 2, Handbooks for Local Administrators, includes Handbooks for Generalist Officials and Handbooks for Private Assistants. Handbooks Dealing with Metropolitan Agencies constitute Part 3. Part 4 covers Handbooks Specializing in Particular Techniques in the areas of Law and Justice, Water Conservancy and Irrigation, Famine Relief, Public Works, Schools and Examinations, Salt Administration, and Military Affairs. Records of Administration and Celebratory Compilations make up Part 5. Part 6 deals with Anthologies of Administrative Documents by officials. Part 7 lists Specialized Collectanea. Each Bibliography entry provides the title of the work, its author, date, information on different editions including prefaces and publishers, remarks on its contents, the author's biography, references to the work, modern translations, and bibliographical entries for the same author. All this enables scholars to locate sources for their research. It also helps them understand a work's publication history, reach, and influence as well as the career of its author and the networks in which he was involved. In addition, the Bibliography has a 25-page list of Secondary Works Cited, a List of Congshu, an Index of Authors, and an Index of Works.

So how should one use this monumental work? The author encourages the reader “to browse through the body of the Bibliography” and to read “sections or subsections that deal with a particular field or genre and suggest its development and variety”. However, to research a particular topic one should probe more carefully, especially since there is unfortunately – though understandably given the work's length and complexity – no subject index. Ideally the reader will also have access to the ebook to search for key terms. For example, to find information about locust control, a search for the word “locust” in the ebook complemented browsing the Bibliography. The word search yielded 28 page hits from 27 entries. Three referred to an author's biography rather than a work's contents. Five general handbooks for magistrates and private secretaries mentioned locusts. Unsurprisingly the majority of locust references appeared in handbooks on particular techniques: four in short treatises on locust control and 12 in larger works on famine relief. Additionally, there were three references to locusts in anthologies of administrative documents. An examination of items in the Handbooks on Particular Techniques led to more locust results – although their Bibliography entries did not mention the word “locust” so did not appear in the ebook search. Two examples are the first-known famine relief handbook, Dong Wei's 董煟 (d. 1217) Jiuhuang huomin shu 救荒活民書 (A Book on Relieving Famine and Reviving the People, c. 1193) and the late-Qing compilation of texts on charitable enterprises, Deyi lu 得一錄 (A Record of Single Acts of Benevolence, 1869), by Yu Zhi 余治 (1809–74). A review of the actual texts of more handbooks described in the Bibliography would surely uncover further locust information.

Yet the Bibliography is far more than a search tool. It is full of insights about government administration in imperial China. The texts it describes reveal the tasks of government and those who performed them – especially local officials and their sub-bureaucratic staff, including the private secretaries 幕友 (muyou) who have a palpable and pervasive presence in the handbooks and in the Qing bureaucracy, notably as fiscal and legal specialists. For example, Wang Huizu 汪輝祖 (1731–1807), the famous author of handbooks, spent much of his career as a private secretary. Moreover, many private and commercial guides were produced to aid not just officials and their assistants, but also litigation masters and the people at large, navigate the law. Will makes numerous related observations regarding the circulation and format of books – what constitutes an “edition”; and the use of mnemonics, rhymes, and layouts with multiple registers and tables to present information to explain the Penal Code, statutes, model judgments, etc. – that are valuable to historians of the book, reading, and knowledge dissemination. Indeed, handbooks reflected and shaped a wider political culture beyond the yamen. They had propagandistic uses for self-promotion. In 1855, lessons typically found in a magistrate handbook were even dramatized as an opera in Kunshan style. Handbooks were so important that Koreans wrote and published them and the English missionary translator John Fryer (1839–1928) was inspired to produce a work introducing Western government and political economy in Chinese.

The Bibliography has already aided new research. Ka-Chai Tam's Justice in Print: Discovering Prefectural Judges and Their Judicial Consistency in Late-Ming Casebooks (Leiden: Brill, 2020) and Ting Zhang's Circulating the Code: Print Media and Legal Knowledge in Qing China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2020) both cite drafts of the Bibliography that Will has been generously sharing for years. Now that it is published, many more scholars will benefit from this indispensable handbook to Chinese government for decades to come.