Dynastic History | Nara Palace Site Museum 平城宮跡資料館 — The Tax Record the Court Threw Away

The state that ran Heijō kept much of its paperwork on wood. Clerks wrote on strips of it, tied labels to consignments with it, practised characters on it, and shaved the surface clean to write again. The strips, the labels and the shavings went into the palace ditches and refuse pits, where waterlogged ground held them for twelve centuries.

Sustained excavation of the palace site began in 1959 and has recovered them in tens of thousands. On 15 September 2017, 3,184 were designated National Treasures in four classes — documents, consignment and attachment labels, writing practice and graffiti, and the shavings — and they are held by the National Institutes for Cultural Heritage.

The consignment labels are the reason the collection matters to anyone who was never at court. Each was tied to a load at a district or provincial storehouse, and each carries the province, the district, the village, the commodity, its measure and the year; the loads were due in the capital before the end of the eleventh month. The annals record what the court decided. The labels record what left a named village and whether it arrived.

They are shown at the Nara Palace Site Museum on the palace grounds, run by the research institute that dug them up, in an annual autumn exhibition the institute calls 地下の正倉院展 — the Shōsōin underground, after the imperial repository at Tōdai-ji. Admission is free.

📸 Cover: consignment labels (荷札木簡) excavated at the Heijō Palace site, on museum display — the tablets, not the museum building; photograph by Wikiwikiyarou, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons