Archaeologists in central-south Hunan Province have organized 36,000 bamboo slips, about 35,000 of which bear official authentic records from 2,200 years ago, coinciding with the rise of China's imposing Great Wall.

These priceless ancient records, ingrained in official scripts, provide a detailed, encyclopedic account of the imperial Qin Dynasty (221-206 BC), including politics, military affairs, ethnicity, economics, law, culture, geography and administration, said Zhang Chunlong, a noted researcher from the Hunan Provincial Institute of Archaeology, on Friday.

These historical records, believed to have been kept by the Qin court, will shed light on projects examining the politics, culture and economics of the Qin Dynasty, Zhang said.

It was a period of national unification, the building of the Great Wall - which was constructed on and off from the third century BC - cultural and economic boom, but also the period of tyranny under the reign of founding emperor Ying Zheng, which historians believe caused the dynasty to fall at an early stage, said the expert.

Most historians refer to Ying Zheng as one of the most brutal tyrants in China's feudal society as he forced millions of land labourers into slavery and ordered them to build the 10,000-plus li - some 5,000 kilometres - wall and his mammoth imperial palace and mausoleum.

A brief study of the bamboo slips suggests subjects of the Qin Dynasty already had access to a postal service, probably even express delivery, while they were plunged into penal servitude, unable to pay land rent and other debts.

Numerous bamboo slips are believed to carry words like "usury," "payment" and "fees for penalty," which suggest the Qin Dynasty hinged on rigid political and cruel legal systems, according to professor Wu Rongzeng, a noted historian.

About 1,000 of the ancient bamboo slips were unmarked. "But these void slips are equally worth in-depth research so as to determine if they had not been written on in the first place, or if their texts have been eroded by insects and been run down century after century," said a professor surnamed Yuan.

Yuan and his peers have finished cleaning each of the 36,000 slips, and are still working to dehydrate and decolourize them for the sake of restoring their original look and improving their durability.

"The preservation process is slated to be complete by the end of this year," added Yuan.

Unearthed in June 2002 from an abandoned ancient well in Liye Village, Longshan County in western Hunan, these bamboo slips "are providing an essential specimen for our research under the reign of the imperial Qin empire, particularly on the rule of local lords," said Gao Chongwen, an archaeologist from the elite Peking University.

(China Daily March 26, 2005)