Case of the Wu Bamboo Slips Register for the Clandestine Inspection of Military Officers and Their Fathers, Sons, and Brothers in the Prefecture

This case, reconstructed from the Zoumalou Wu bamboo slips unearthed in Changsha, concerns an official audit during the Three Kingdoms era. The Eastern Wu state ordered a clandestine inspection to register the fathers, sons, and brothers of prefectural military officers. The primary goal was to uncover undeclared and potentially absconded family members within military households. These "concealed" individuals represented a loss of tax revenue, unpaid corvée labor, and a weakening of the state-controlled military population. The surviving administrative records detail the discrepancies between official family registers and the actual household composition discovered by investigators, exposing widespread evasion of the strict hereditary military service and tax obligations imposed by the Wu regime.

This is not a singular trial with a final verdict but a series of administrative enforcement actions. The unearthed registers, such as Document No. 4923, record specific cases of uncovered hidden relatives. The implied result was forced re-registration, imposition of back taxes and labor duties, and the re-absorption of these individuals into the state's strict population control system, reinforcing their hereditary status as military households.

The central issue was the discrepancy between official household registries and the actual number of male relatives of military officers, highlighting a systemic problem of tax evasion and absconding from the hereditary military caste. The dispute lies in the state's effort to enforce total control over its military population against the private strategies families used to conceal members from corvée and taxation.

These bamboo slips offer direct, unfiltered evidence of the daily administrative and legal realities of state control in the Three Kingdoms. They reveal the pervasive social tension between the Wu government's demand for absolute control over human resources and the populace's resistance through concealment. The case profoundly impacts modern historical and legal studies by providing primary source data on how ancient Chinese regimes enforced corvée labor, taxation, and hereditary military service at the grassroots level, supplementing official dynastic histories with on-the-ground bureaucratic processes.