Engishiki (Kujo Family Book)

The Law Code That Outlived Its Rivals

Early Heian Japan produced three great compilations of administrative regulation. Two of them, the Kōnin and Jōgan codes, have vanished. Only the third, the Engishiki, comes down to us in full, which leaves it as the most detailed surviving record of how the imperial court actually governed in the tenth century: how it ran its shrines, taxed its provinces, dyed the silks of court dress, and choreographed its ceremonies down to the placement of each offering.

The set of scrolls kept at the Tokyo National Museum, known as the Kujō family manuscript, is the oldest substantial copy of that text in existence. Twenty-seven scrolls remain, and on the back of twenty-four of them sit a second archive: roughly 189 reused documents from the eleventh century, the discarded paperwork of a working government office, preserved by accident because someone needed clean paper for the front.

What the Engishiki Records

Heian government rested on the ritsuryō system, a framework of penal law (ritsu) and administrative law (ryō) adapted from Tang China in the seventh and eighth centuries. Over time the court added amendments, called kyaku, and detailed procedural rules, called shiki, to keep the original statutes workable. The Engishiki is the great compilation of those procedural rules.

Emperor Daigo ordered the work in 905. It began under the minister Fujiwara no Tokihira and, after his death, was carried forward by his brother Fujiwara no Tadahira, reaching completion in 927. The court did not put it into effect until 967. The finished code ran to fifty scrolls and several thousand provisions, arranged office by office through the ministries of state.

The opening ten scrolls cover the Department of Divinities, the office responsible for state religion. Two of them, volumes nine and ten, hold the Jinmyōchō, a register of every shrine then recognised by the court: 2,861 shrines in all. Shrines listed there are still called shikinaisha today, and many across Japan trace their official standing back to this very document. Other scrolls read almost like a manual of court life, specifying the foods served at banquets, the order in which officials stood, the colours and materials of robes, even cooking methods. Because the earlier two codes are lost, the Engishiki is the single richest source historians have for reconstructing tenth-century institutions, ritual, and daily detail.

Why This Manuscript Became a National Treasure

The court's text was copied many times over the centuries. The Kujō family version, named for the aristocratic house that long owned it, was designated a National Treasure in 1981. Its claim to that status rests on three qualities that no later copy can match.

First, its age. The twenty-seven surviving scrolls run from the Jingi rituals through to the kitchen office regulations, with gaps in between and, oddly, a duplicated seventh scroll. The handwriting changes from section to section and the layout is not uniform, signs that several scribes worked on it near the regent's household in the late Heian period. Even so, it is the earliest coherent copy that survives, closer to the original code than anything else we have.

Second, the red ink. Across nearly every scroll, later readers added kana in vermilion to mark how the dense Chinese-style text should be pronounced and parsed. These reading marks preserve the spoken and grammatical conventions of the Heian and Kamakura periods, which makes the manuscript a primary source for the history of the Japanese language as much as for law.

Third, the documents on the reverse. Paper was costly, so the office that produced this copy wrote the Engishiki on the back of paperwork it no longer needed. Turning the scrolls over reveals about 189 documents dated between 966 and 1074. Among them are items that survive nowhere else: a household census from Sanuki Province dated 1004, a provincial handover ledger from Kōzuke, and a 966 letter from the prince Kiyotane. For a period from which little everyday administrative paper survives, this hidden layer is as valuable as the law code on the front.

A single appended scroll completes the set: a set of maps showing the streets of the capital, the palace enclosure, and the inner palace. Though copied later, in the fourteenth century, the maps record the layout of Heian-kyō as it stood in its prime, and they are frequently reproduced in studies of the old capital.

Seeing It in Ueno

The manuscript belongs to the Tokyo National Museum, the country's oldest museum, set within Ueno Park in the Taitō district of Tokyo. Fragile paper of this rank is shown only occasionally and in rotation, so the scrolls are not on permanent view. Anyone hoping to see an original page should check the museum's exhibition calendar before travelling, since the displayed objects in the Japanese galleries change throughout the year.

Even when the Engishiki itself is in storage, the Honkan, the main Japanese gallery building, offers a deep run of calligraphy, sculpture, and craft that sets the manuscript in context. The museum also maintains a research image archive online, where high-resolution photographs of the scrolls, including the verso documents, can be studied closely. Ueno Park itself rewards an unhurried visit, with several major museums, a long avenue of cherry trees, and the precincts of Kan'ei-ji temple all within walking distance of the station.