Attached county
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 based within the capital of a fu.
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".
History
Since the Yuan dynasty, some zhou began to be compact to dissolve their attached counties, thus they had direct authority over their walled cities along with environs, rather than via any county. Since the Ming dynasty, all the attached counties of zhou were eliminated.Under the Ming and Qing, it was standard for every prefecture to have an attached county with a limited role within and around the prefectural capital.
There were, generally, multiple attached counties in larger prefectures: three and four in one instance, respectively, two in all others. In such cases, their boundary ran through the walled city, and their owned yamen were sited in the appropriate sectors.
Some attached counties are reserved so far. However, with urbanization, many of them have been merged, similar to the consolidated city-county in the US.