Attached county

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An attached county or satellite county, sometimes left untranslated in its Chinese name as a fuguoxian, was a kind of historical tertiary administrative division in late Imperial China. It was a xian (generally translated for this period as "county" in English) based within the capital of a fu (generally translated for this period as "prefecture"). As such, many of the county magistrate's usual duties and powers were subordinated to the prefectural administration and he was subject to much closer supervision than usual. Although an attached county was given first rank among the divisions of a prefecture and known as the "head county", the position was avoided by most scholar-bureaucrats. A Qing proverb held that, "If you had done something bad in your previous incarnation, you would be an average magistrate now; if you had done something worse, you would be a magistrate of a prefectural attached county; but if you had done something worst, you would be a magistrate of a provincial attached county" ("前生不善，今生知縣；前生作惡，知縣附郭；惡貫滿盈，附郭省城").