Fable
The person who searches the archives and the person who organizes the archives
Mr. Lu at the county office did two things every day: search the old archives in the storeroom for precedents, then write rulings for new cases based on the precedents he found. The storeroom held thirty years of case files, stacked in bags up to the roof beam, and every time Mr. Lu searched the archives it took most of the morning.
The clerk later assigned Old Cai to Mr. Lu as a helper, specifically to organize the archives. Old Cai spent an entire month rearranging the storeroom from top to bottom—shelving by year, labeling by case type, and building cross-indexes by the names of people involved. When Mr. Lu looked through the archives again, he was three times faster, and he praised Old Cai's ability to everyone he met.
But the good times did not last. His superiors rejected five of Mr. Lu's rulings in a row, with the comment: "Improper citation." This meant he had cited the wrong old cases. Mr. Lu was unconvinced and checked three times himself, only to find that he had indeed cited them incorrectly: of the four old cases he cited, three had causes of action that did not match, and the remaining one used a sentencing standard that had already been changed the year before last.
Mr. Lu could not understand—Old Cai kept the files neatly organized, and whatever he wanted could be found, so why did he still cite the wrong thing? He squatted in the archive room for another two days and found the problem was not "whether it could be found" but "finding the wrong thing": Old Cai arranged files by year, and all cases accumulated in the same year were piled together. But some related old cases spanned several years, and Old Cai placed them on three different shelves. Mr. Lu stopped at the first volume and had no idea there were two more.
After hearing the reason, the secretary set a new rule for Mr. Lu: every time an old case was checked, Old Cai had to first list all possibly related case files, and Mr. Lu had to read through all of them before writing. When the rule was first introduced, Mr. Lu complained it was slow, but after a month, returned approvals dropped from five to zero.
People in the yamen later summed it up: no matter how neatly Old Cai arranged the archives, it was only “storing well” — he could not decide which files Mr. Lu should read, which ones should not be missed, or how to write after reading them. Searching files, comparing, judging, and writing — this process was Mr. Lu's own craft.
Someone asked the clerk: "Does your office rely on Old Cai or on Mr. Lu?" The clerk said: "Without Old Cai, Mr. Lu could search all day and still not gather the materials. Without Mr. Lu's judgment, no matter how neatly Old Cai arranges things, he could not write a single official reply. The two are not doing the same step of the work."