Three Elders system and household registers
The Wei shu basic annals record that on the jiaxu day of the second lunar month of Taihe 10 (AD 486) the court for the first time established the Three Elders (三長) of the dang (黨), li (里) and lin (隣) units and fixed the household registers of the people.
What this does and does not establish
An official history compiled 551-554 by Wei Shou under the Northern Qi from Northern Wei records; the English is an AI working translation. The annals state the measure in one line and do not give the size of the units. The dated headers in the retained file and the retained file place the starts of months 2 and 3 on 21 March and 20 April, respectively. Month 2 lies wholly in Julian 486.
- Read through an AI working translation.
- Region
- East Asia
- Theme
- Politics and institutions
- Kind of record
- Placed in a year. A source places this in one year. It is listed under that year; no day precision is invented.
How it is dated
- Date reference
- 太和 10 (太和十年 as numbered by the annals), lunar month 2
- How we use it
- Year assigned from the lunar month under which the Wei shu annals enter the item; the sexagenary day was not converted to a Julian day.
The date reference is this project’s reading of the source’s date. It may give an era name, a reign or a calendar in a normalised form rather than in the source’s own words; the dating notes say what the source prints.
Dating notes from the research record
Lunar month 2 of 太和 10 = Julian 486-03-21 to 486-04-19, per Academia Sinica 兩千年中西曆轉換 year table(s) 太和10.html (sha256 ed34ce0ce646…); 太和10-m2.html (sha256 9774faeb8441…); 太和10-m3.html (sha256 11c1b23eaab4…); 太和10-m4.html (sha256 7958e9ca72fe…); 太和10-m5.html (sha256 0c2a3a7d8df3…); 太和10-m6.html (sha256 54ce1aca7076…); 太和10-m7.html (sha256 263a805218fe…); 太和10-m8.html (sha256 87d0850e0e1e…); 太和10-m9.html (sha256 f90be17de545…); 太和10-m10.html (sha256 25db99103449…); 太和10-m11.html (sha256 18cd9c79c989…); 太和10-m12.html (sha256 0f6bf7e76a91…); 太和11.html (sha256 d275ac42d83c…); the whole month lies in AD 486. The cached month-query headers date day one of successive lunar months; the preceding day is the earlier month’s last day. For a combined regular/intercalary interval the regular month’s dated cells establish the split. A month-query page may still show only the first month in its table body.
File names and line numbers in these notes, and in the limits above, refer to the project’s retained copies of the cited sources. Names such as calendar_headers are the project’s calendar look-ups, and “the investigator” is the research step that prepared the record.
Sources and quoted text
Line and character numbers under “Location” refer to the project’s retained copy of the source. For database rows, “Edition” names the batch of rows that was fetched together.
Source 1 · Supports the statement
Wei shu (Book of Wei), basic annals
Wei Shou (魏收), Northern Qi court historian
The credit or link shown here was corrected after an audit of the retained source.
Quoted text (Classical Chinese)
二月甲戌，初立黨、里、隣三長，定民戶籍。AI working translation into English; not official or authoritative
Second month, jiaxu day: for the first time the Three Elders of the dang, li and lin were established, and the people's household registers were fixed.
Source credit and reuse conditions recorded for this source: Source: Wei shu, juan 7下, zh.wikisource transcription (revision 2460667). English renderings are AI working translations, not published translations.
Exact source version
128dae426cb9626039c5891bd22ef20cbef06a3d725877c783c245dfd136782eChecks and changes
Source checked 2026-11-05. An independent AI evidence review supports this bounded, attributed wording. That review does not guarantee historical truth. How records are checked
This is a corrected version of this record. During research, before this release, an earlier version was withdrawn after independent review and replaced by this one.
Revision s1h_486_wei_1_r2
Exact revision fingerprint
362797c26c756219a0b0edf1d3b133cb7ad8471186f1f9b933b5edce4838793a