Empty Seal Case

Timeline

1. 1373–1376Ministry of Revenue, Yingtian Prefecture · Yingtian PrefectureIn the early Hongwu era, clerks of provincial commissions and prefectures and counties had to carry registers to the capital's Ministry of Revenue each year to reconcile funds, grain, and military supplies. Because the round trip covered thousands of li and ministry rejections had to be corrected on the spot, counties and prefectures pre-sealed blank documents, filling them in after ministry objections. This was an administrative custom of the time, not uniformly motivated by embezzlement.
2. 1376Yingtian Prefecture (Nanjing) · Yingtian PrefectureThe emperor saw blank seals as devices left by corrupt clerks for cheating, and flew into a rage. According to the History of Ming, Treatise on Punishments, chief seal-holding officials were sentenced to death and assistants given one hundred strokes and frontier exile. Fang Xiaoru records that provincial memorializing officials and those who had affixed seals in their stead were all slated for execution. Local officials such as Prefect Fang Keqin of Jining were implicated. The chancellor and censors dared not remonstrate.
3. 1376Yingtian Prefecture (Nanjing) · Yingtian PrefectureZheng Shili of Ninghai submitted a memorial during the call for remonstrance following an astronomical anomaly, arguing that blank seals were a stopgap necessitated by long roads and ministry corrections, that the seals bore era names and could not be misused, and that prefects and magistrates should not be executed for a grave crime. The emperor refused to listen and had Shili beaten and exiled. His elder brother Zheng Shiyuan had also already been punished over the blank seals. This became key internal evidence for the ninth-year dating.
4. 1376–1382Ming dynasty territory · ChinaThe Empty Seal Case and the later Guo Huan Case are often cited together as the two great cases in which Hongwu severely punished fiscal corruption. The Treatise on Punishments states that the executions in both cases were excessive. Death tolls range from hundreds to tens of thousands. On the year: Fang Xiaoru explicitly writes that the blank seal affair began in the ninth year of Hongwu; Chen Wutong and others once argued for the eighth; the Treatise on Punishments' 'fifteenth year' is hard to reconcile with the deeds of Zheng Shili and Fang Zheng. This entry adopts the ninth year/1376, with confidence level disputed.