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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
LI Mingkui, LIN Hai-tao
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DOI:10.17265/2159-5836/2026.05.006
Yuxi Normal University, Yuxi, China
The Tongzheng Bianlan (A Handbook of Copper Administration) is a significant work among Qing Dynasty documents on Yunnan’s copper administration. It systematically records regulations concerning copper mine locations, transportation, casting, procurement, and other aspects, holding irreplaceable value for research on Qing economic history, fiscal history, and Yunnan local history. However, academic understanding of its textual transmission has long been vague, its relationship with another crucial text, the Yunnan Tongzhi (Records of Yunnan Copper), remains ambiguous, and the two existing modern collated editions contain various degrees of errors. Based on a survey and examination of library holdings domestically and abroad, this paper systematically sorts out the major extant versions of the Tongzheng Bianlan for the first time. These include a Jiaqing-era manuscript held in Taiwan, the Guangxu 13th-year (1887) engraving by Zeng Jifeng held in the Yunnan Provincial Library, and other scattered manuscripts, establishing a genealogy of its textual transmission. Through in-depth textual comparison, this paper proposes that the Tongzheng Bianlan was an “administrative handbook” derived from the Yunnan Tongzhi compiled by Dai Ruizheng. It was streamlined and supplemented with practical regulations by secretarial staff within the Yunnan Provincial Administration Commission, representing two distinct yet related texts with different emphases. Building on this, the paper provides an academic critique of the punctuated edition by Wei Mingkong and Wei Zhengkong (2013) and the annotated edition by Chen Yanli (2017), assessing their achievements and shortcomings in base text selection, textual emendation, and punctuation. Finally, from multidisciplinary perspectives including philology, economic history, and institutional history, the paper argues for the unique historical value of the Tongzheng Bianlan and proposes a comprehensive collation and research plan aimed at producing a more refined and reliable text for the study of Qing copper administration.
Tongzheng Bianlan, textual formation, version transmission, comprehensive collation
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