Circulating the Code. Ting Zhang
Code on the crime of premeditated murder.
Qing legal records contain a surprisingly large number of cases like this one—cases that suggest that ordinary people, as well as officials judging them, were quite familiar with the law. These cases raise several major questions about legal knowledge and Qing society: How were Qing officials—such as the magistrate in Du’s murder case—informed about the laws? How did commoners—such as the murderer Du—know about the law? In what forms—and in what venues—did legal information circulate? How did legal knowledge influence people’s actions and decisions? Did the Qing state try to control the dissemination of legal information? What were the cultural, political, and judicial implications of the circulation of legal knowledge?
Scholars have usually assumed that most Qing subjects knew little about the law, as there was no easily recognizable system of legal education. Scholars have also assumed that the Qing state monopolized the production and circulation of accurate legal information and kept the common people in the dark, with little access to precise and up-to-date legal knowledge. These assumptions date back to the Orientalist roots of social science. For example, Max Weber argued that Qing officials received no professional legal training and knew nothing about the law. The Qing legal system was a total disaster because it was run by “amateur officials” with little legal knowledge, in contrast to western Europe’s efficient legal system run by “professionals.”3 Similarly, Wejen Chang’s “Legal Education in Ch’ing China,” the most comprehensive English-language study to date of Qing legal knowledge, argues that the Qing state disappointingly lacked formal legal education for both officials and the common people.4 As a result, he concludes, Qing officials had no workable legal knowledge, and the common people could get only fragmented and imprecise ideas about law through sources such as lowbrow novels, plays, and operas.
This narrative about nonexistent legal education and legal knowledge accords with the once dominant assumption that the traditional legal system of China had failed. Qing laws and legal institutions had lacked “separation of power, due process, respect for individual rights, and civil law,” in sharp contrast to the “dynamic and progressive” law and legal system of modern Western Europe. Qing law was viewed as “a tool of autocratic control,” and most of the populace found the law and the legal system too intimidating to turn to when they had problems.5 In recent years, however, based on newly opened local legal archives, scholars have challenged this narrative about the traditional Chinese legal system, especially on the level of judicial practice. They have found that Qing society was more litigious than previously thought, so it was not unusual for people to turn to the court to resolve their disputes. The cost of litigation was not as intimidating as scholars previously thought, and local magistrates often sentenced cases according to the statutes and substatutes of The Great Qing Code.6 Many of these “new Qing legal history” studies imply that both officials and the common people were more or less familiar with law and legal procedure. But none of these studies has explained how officials and commoners got access to legal knowledge. Even as law has gained presence, the narrative of deficient legal education and legal knowledge has not been seriously challenged.
During the Qing, most reliable legal information circulated in book form, but historians of print culture usually focus on the Song and late Ming periods, when there were important technological breakthroughs and when many elegant editions were produced. The publishing history of the Qing period has long been ignored because of the perception of stricter government censorship, the diminished quality of books and illustrations, and the decline of lavish publishing centers in the Jiangnan area.7 However, as historian Cynthia Brokaw argues in her pathbreaking work on Qing printing history, these declines accompanied a sharp rise in the quantity of printed books, a much broader reading audience, lower prices of books, and an expanding publishing industry in other areas of the Qing empire.8 Brokaw’s important work is however, focused on Sibao, a rural printing center in Fujian, which published few legal books. In recent years, some historians begin to examine several genres of legal imprints, such as official handbooks (guanzhenshu) and litigation masters’ secret handbooks (songshi miben), but none has systematically analyzed the impact of commercial printing revolution on legal culture.9
This book explores the production, circulation, and reception of legal knowledge in Qing China. It focuses on the flow of legal information through both textual and oral channels and the role of legal information in the formation of early modern Chinese legal culture. Drawing on methodologies used in recent scholarship in the fields of print culture and legal history, it demonstrates that the late Ming commercial publishing revolution (ca. 1550s), which continued in the Qing, had a huge impact on the way legal information traveled. Before the late Ming, most books related to the state’s laws were published by official publishing agencies, and accurate legal information was by and large confined within the government. Beginning in the late Ming, however, more and more commercial publishing houses engaged in compiling, printing, and selling legal books, including the Code—the most authoritative legal text in the judicial system. As a matter of fact, the Qing period witnessed a publishing boom in books related to the law.
Analysis of the archives of the Wuyingdian Imperial Publishing House and other official publishers shows that the Qing state did not provide enough usable editions of The Great Qing Code (Da Qing lü jijie fuli or Da Qing lüli) to its judicial officials. The imperial editions of the Code were expensive, updated slowly, printed in a limited number, and issued only to high-ranking officials. Among 131 editions of the Code that I have found, only eleven were published by official publishing houses. Official editions could not meet the demand of officials and commoners who wanted—and needed—to get precise legal knowledge from the Code. In this context, commercial editions flourished and filled the gap. Most Qing legal books were commercially printed and sold freely on the book market, available to anyone who could afford them.
Commercial publishers and non-official editors played a leading role in supplying judicial officials with access to printed, up-to-date editions of the Qing Code. Careful comparison of imperial editions and commercial editions shows that, surprisingly, commercial editions of the Code were not simply reprinted copies of the imperial editions. Commercial publishers and editors reorganized the text of the Code and included additional legal information that was not authorized or approved by the imperial government, such as private legal commentaries, administrative regulations, and case precedents. By the 1800s, based on popular editions published in Hangzhou, commercial publishers had established their own standard format for compiling and publishing the Code, a format quite different from that of imperially authorized editions. These commercially printed Hangzhou editions quickly dominated the book market and became the most widely used and authoritative texts in the Qing judicial system and society. All commercial editions of the Code published after the year 1800 discarded the design of imperial editions and closely followed the content and printing format of these Hangzhou editions.
The commercialization of legal knowledge enhanced the judicial authority of private legal commentaries and case precedents, which were printed along with the imperially promulgated statutes in commercial editions of the Code. Qing officials frequently referred to private commentaries and case precedents when making judicial decisions. County magistrates, such as in murderer Du’s case, who received little formal legal training and were not given imperially authorized copies of the Code could easily buy commercial copies and locate specific provisions when sentencing a case, thanks to the reader-friendly arrangement of texts in commercial legal imprints. Easy access to the laws encouraged officials to make judicial sentences based on the Code more frequently.
Quite different from the old image that the state paid little attention to its officials’ legal education, this research shows that the Qing government established specific and effective regulations regarding officials’ legal training. The Qing rulers especially emphasized such education for newly appointed county magistrates. Although the state did not itself provide formal legal education to officials, it encouraged new officials to buy and read legal books, including the Code, various administrative regulations, official handbooks, and legal treatises, after they passed the civil service examinations and waited for appointment to official posts. The state also established legal examinations for new officials and required new magistrates to pass these examinations before being actually