Grand Secretariat
By the height of the Qing dynasty in the 18th century, memorials from bureaucrats at the central, provincial, and county level supplied the emperors (and modern historians) with personnel evaluations, crop reports, prices in local markets, weather predictions, intelligence on social affairs, and any other matter of possible interest. Memorials were transported by government couriers and then copied and summarized by the Grand Secretariat, which itself had been perfected in the preceding Ming dynasty. They would be copied by clerks and entered into official registers.