Order Seals
Order Seals were an innovative new system instituted by Tairazun Durun during his reign. Basically a temporary "boost of power" granted by the Tairazun himself, the order seal allows an official thus endowed to, for a certain period of time, circumvent certain higher authorities in order to get its task completed. The name comes from the fact that such seals normally came with distinct orders, ie. the task that was meant to be achieved in the first place.
While this system of temporary circumvention is well-known within the military, it has never been instituted in the civil service before the accession of the Lein. Yet, even as Tairazun Durun began and pushed the sweeping and massive reforms that saw the centralising of state power in his Six Ministries, he realised that the multi-tiered bureaucracy, while more than adequate for day to day tasks, might be ill-suited for crises. For that, as for military crises, one needed an officer to be authorised to carry out orders at all cost for the time being; drawing on that experience he instituted the order seals.
The issuing of order seals contains several procedures. Firstly, the Tairazun must draft and sign an appropriate edict, and order the making of a wooden seal which could be carved and made in two days; then, once both the edict and seal are complete, the official is summoned, the orders that are his are read to him, and the period of authorisation is made clear. Since all Imperial documents must be dated, this makes it easy to trace if any official has been overstaying his authorisation by comparing the date of the document with the date of expiry of the seal.
Such seals are, of course, potentially dangerous political weapons; because of that they are often only given in times of crises, as to a particular canal official during a flood to allow him to mobilise men and repair barriers, or to a military logistics official to allow him to mobilise manpower to move a particularly important supply caravan to relieve an army. By law the authorisation period should not be less than 10 days, and certainly must not be more than a year.
