II.9 Palace Memorial with Grand Council File Copy (錄副奏摺), QL 33.09.17

Once fully evolved, the palace memorial system was a two-way communications medium that was much less confidential than it once had been, not least because it involved the regular production of file copies for the later reference of grand councillors and members of the Grand Council staff.  Thus, beginning in the early Qianlong reign, before a memorial was sent back to its author with a vermilion rescript, it was first copied out by Grand Council clerks for storage in a reference file, later stored in the Office of Military Archives (fanglue guan 方略館). The press of business, and the need to get rescripted memorials back to their authors quickly, meant that these copies, or lu-fu, had to be prepared speedily in a running script, with many deletions. Generally, material that was available in other forms (for instance, long quotes of imperial edicts, which were available in record-book form) was omitted for the sake of efficiency. Because many Grand Council copies were stored monthly in bundles as they were made, they are sometimes referred to as yue-zhe bao 月摺包.  Another type of lufu consisted of those copies made of materials all related to a single event, such as a military campaign; these were kept in separate record books sometimes called zhuan'an dang 專案檔 or just zhuandang 專檔. Access to these materials was strictly limited to the Grand Councilors and their clerks.

For the historical researcher, a major advantage of this archival source is that enclosures in memorials (lists, depositions, maps and diagrams) were generally not returned to their senders, but kept in the palace with the lu-fu copies. Because in most cases the First Historical Archives has failed to keep these enclosures with the copies they were originally filed with, it is often impossible to date them and reconnect them to their original memorials. This is unfortunate, since the enclosures are an invaluable resource for the historian; the lu-fu are thus of particular value, since those auxiliary materials are also noted down.  Furthermore, since many, if not most, of the lufu yuezhe bao have been microfilmed or scanned, they are more easily accessible to researchers in cases when original documents are unavailable.

At the same time, the lu-fu pose special challenges to the user who is not already practiced at reading xingshu 行書 script (this is not as serious an issue with the Manchu lu-fu, which are not so difficult to decipher as the Chinese lu-fu). One useful resource for the student interested in learning to recognize the standard forms of xingshu is Fred Fang-yu Wang's Introduction to Chinese Cursive Script (Yale, 1958).

Document 9 consists of a palace memorial and its lu-fu copy. It concerns an episode in the "soulstealing" affair of 1768. Compare the original with the copy to see what parts are omitted (you can keep your place by following the elevated characters in both versions).