Paper and the Beginnings of Bureaucracy in Fifteenth-Century Dai Viet

Paper and the Beginnings of Bureaucracy in Fifteenth century Dai Viet Bureaucracy requires paperwork, and so the adoption of a bureaucratic system of administration brings with it the movement of paper as a major part of the new regime. I shall examine the adoption of the Ming Chinese form of bureaucracy by its contemporary, the government of Dai Viet (northern Vietnam), in order to see the role of paperwork in the change of the form of administration. How did the paper move? What did it record? What difference did this movement of paper make for the government and the country at large? In the 1460s, a new, young, and unexpected king ascended the throne of Dai Viet in its capital of Thang-long (Hanot). Assisted by a growing number of scholars, this king, Le Thanh-tong, transformed the government from an aristocratic regime to the modern sinic-style bureaucracy, adapted from that of contemporary Ming China. Establishing the first regular triennial Confucian examinations in the Ming fashion, this ruler brought the scholars into his government and changed it into a bureaucracy. The bureaucracy required paper to function. Orders went out; reports and memorials came back. Two emphases appeared: first, legibility (recording the human and material resources of the realm); second, access (of the throne to all information in the realm and of all officials and the people to the throne). The central agency for all this paper was the Communications Office in the capital. How did the government adjust to the increased use of paper in its operations? What problems came to exist in this use? How did paper change things?