초록/요약

This research examines the structure of the local administration and the significance of “private advisors(muyou)” in the early Qing, based on the information provided in A Complete Book of Happiness and Benevolence, compiled by Huang Liuhong. Due to the structure of Qing local administration, county magistrates were often not qualified to execute all of their expected diverse and complex task. Moreover, there was not any systematic structure to support the magistrates on these precise tasks. Therefore, officials relied the so-called private advisors, individuals who had professional experience and qualifications to administer these tasks. In A Complete Book of Happiness and Benevolence, there are multiple references to these personal advisors in the local administration of counties. These examples reveal the difficulties one would face in these challenging situations and how the personal advisors could offer assistance. Huang Liuhong, known for this attention to details in these various county-level tasks, not only acknowledged the existence of these individuals but also viewed them in a positive light. In many ways, Huang's perspective reveals the lack of precise control on the county level, as well as the various difficulties inherently existent in the Qing bureaucratic system. Especially, the rise of demand for these private advisors are also closely connected to the over-supply of qualified scholar-official candidates, a phenomenon especially visible after the mid-Ming e