"Court Gazettes" and "Short Reports": Official Views and Unofficial Readings of Court News

Abstract

The growing interest in current affairs among the twelfth-and thirteenth-century Chinese elite, in and outside officialdom, was evident in the circulation of a wide variety of news genres ranging from court gazettes, collections of memorials, anthologies of examination essays, miscellanies, Song history textbooks, and encyclopedias. The gazette was a court publication listing new appointments, dismissals, foreign missions, excerpts of edicts and memorials, as well as a schedule of audiences. In principle its circulation was restricted to court officials and regional and local administrators. Commercial printers routinely defied publishing laws, bribed clerks and officials working in the drafting and transmission offices, hunted down copies as soon as they appeared, and printed pirated copies. These were printed in the capital and from there made their way to the provinces. Such unofficial editions were officially labeled ”short reports” and were associated in official discourse with unfounded rumor and factionalism. This article investigates the readership of and reader responses to ”court gazettes” and ”short reports.” It argues that the distinction between ”short report” and ”gazette” was drawn very differently in the official bureaucratic communication network and derivative semi-official networks.