明代钦差考

Research on the Imperial Commissioner in the Ming Dynasty

钦差作为由皇帝钦命特遣的官员,在明代国家管理事务中既发挥着不可替代的作用,也呈现出复杂多样的存在形态,这导致了现有研究中对其缺乏整体、专门的关注,在零散的使用中也往往比较随意,出现许多细节性错误。文章通过对明代钦差的详细考证,认为:钦差称谓出现于元代,而在明洪武时期的官方文书中已较多使用;钦差的选派也要经过官僚体系的运作,是皇帝与官员共同合作的结果;其派遣区域以皇帝为中心,既包括地方,也包括京城;其身份凭证除了敕书之外,有的也有关防,甚或印信;明代钦差并非都是钦差大臣,也包括低级官员、宦官及固定差遣者。

As the officials specially dispatched by the emperor,the imperial commissioner played a crucial role in manag-ing the state affairs of the Ming Dynasty with complex and diverse existence forms,which results in the lack of integral and special attention in the existing research and casually some errors in the details about the imperial commissioner in the Ming Dynasty.By our research,this paper has drawn the following conclusions.The title of the imperial commissioner firstly ap-peared in the Yuan Dynasty and was already used frequently in the official documents of the Hongwu emperor period in the Ming Dynasty.The selecting of the imperial commissioner also needed to go through the operation of the bureaucracies and was the result of the cooperation of the emperor and the government officials.Their dispatching areas are emperor-oriented,inclu-ding both the local and the capital.Other than the command papers,they also possessed the Guanfang and the official seals as identity credentials.The imperial commissioners were not held by senor officials in the Ming Dynasty,they also contained the lower-level officials,the eunuch and the officials dispatched regularly.