Circulating the Code. Ting Zhang
order the Board to collate the original Code and the new substatutes immediately. As for the new substatutes that have been approved and are appropriate, incorporate them into their proper categories and make them follow their original statutes in the Code according to the method when the Code was compiled. Make sure that they are in proper arrangement. In this way, both the Code and the new substatutes will be incorporated into a single book. As for the officials who take responsibility of hearing cases, each of them should have one such book. They can refer to the book at any time and get everything at one glance, which would save them time and trouble as well as prevent them from giving wrong sentences.39
Unfortunately, the emperor ignored Zhang’s advice, probably because at that time the court was too preoccupied with other more serious problems, such as consolidating territory and suppressing rebellions.
The troublesome situation caused by the separation of the Code and new substatutes continued. In 1689, when the empire was basically pacified, Sheng Fusheng (1615–1700), investigating censor (yushi) of the Censorate, brought up the issue of incorporating the updated substatutes into the Code again. This time the emperor adopted the suggestion and appointed several high officials of the Board of Punishments as chief editors. The process of revising the Code formally started. The major tasks of the revision were to (1) incorporate the Substatutes in Current Use into the Code, (2) correct the mistakes in the Manchu translations of the Code, (3) delete repetitive and outdated statutes and substatutes, (4) select and incorporate new administrative regulations into the Code, (5) and select and add explanations and commentaries to the Code in order to clarify the meanings of obscure statutes. The revision process, however, went extremely slowly. Only after nineteen years, in 1707, was the manuscript completed and submitted to the emperor.40 However, the emperor had lost interest, probably because he was preoccupied with solving his succession disputes among his sons and he was agonizing about the cruelty and punishments of the laws. He never returned or responded to the manuscript. The revision process was then suspended, and the officials’ efforts to produce a definitive edition of a complete book of the Qing Code in the Kangxi period failed.
LEGISLATION IN THE YONGZHENG AND QIANLONG PERIODS
When the Kangxi emperor died in 1722, his fourth son, known as the Yongzheng emperor (r. 1723–1735), ascended the throne. Unlike his father, who admired small government and lax regulations, the Yongzheng emperor sought to build an efficient bureaucracy based on solid revenue and effective laws and regulations.41 He soon found the contradiction between the old substatutes in the Code and newly established substatutes intolerable. Only one month after ascending the throne, he issued an imperial edict to provincial judicial commissioners, criticizing the corruption and malpractice prevalent in the legal system. One of the important reasons for the corruption, the emperor pointed out in this edict, was the lack of clarity of the laws: “Sometimes, two different substatutes [and thus two different penalties] can be applied to the same crime. Then officials can manipulate this situation for personal gain. In this way, how can people get any justice?”42 Therefore, when an official brought up the issue of integrating the Code and current substatutes as well as publishing a complete book of the laws, the emperor quickly approved. The compilation process formally started in 1723. The revision process was smooth and fast. In 1725 the manuscript was finished.43
The Yongzheng Code was a considerable improvement on the Shunzhi Code. For one thing, it incorporated “collected commentaries”—including various private and official annotations and explanations to the statutes and substatutes—into the Code. It also finished the process of integrating the Substatutes in Current Use into the Code, realizing the half-century-long dream of Qing legislators. In the Yongzheng Code, the editors reduced the number of statutes from 459 to 436, but they increased the number of substatutes from 449 to 824. They also divided these substatutes into three categories: original substatutes (321 old substatutes in the Shunzhi Code), newly enacted substatutes (299 substatutes established in the Kangxi period), and imperially approved substatutes (204 new substatutes established in the late Kangxi and early Yongzheng periods).44 The Yongzheng Code, in other words, was a “complete book” for all important up-to-date statutes and substatutes for the Qing legal system, designed to serve as a “definitive edition” of the Qing legal code for all to observe.
In the year of his ascendance to the throne, the Qianlong emperor (r. 1736–1795) decided to revise the Code to incorporate new substatutes, delete outdated ones, and modify some laws he deemed too strict. The emperor organized a new Commission on Statutes (Lüliguan) to undertake the revision.45 After five years of revision, in 1740, the commission submitted the final manuscript and received the emperor’s endorsement. This revision turned out to be an important modification of the Code: it established the basic structure and content of the imperially authorized editions of the Code that did not change again until the late Qing legal reforms in the early twentieth century and included three major revisions. First, the editors systematically removed the “collected commentaries” that had been added to the Yongzheng Code, explaining that these commentaries often originated in commercially published law books and lacked authority and reliability, which would easily lead to complication and confusion. Second, although the number of statutes did not change, the number of substatutes increased from 824 to 1042. The new substatutes were drawn mainly from the new substatutes of the Board of Punishments from 1727 to 1739. Third, the Qianlong Code rearranged the sequence of many substatutes. It abolished the time-based labels that had been added to the substatutes in the Yongzheng Code. All the substatutes in the Qianlong Code were thus organized according to their content.46
During the revision process, a new standard for future revisions of the Code was established. Substatutes promulgated after the revision was finished would be revised and compiled every three years. The Commission on Statutes was assigned to do the work, which included examining the imperial edicts and officials’ memorials related to the administration of justice, selecting and editing them into substatutes; collating the old and new substatutes and omitting the outdated and redundant ones; listing the substatutes that should be added, changed, moved, and omitted; and compiling them into a manuscript and sending it to the Wuyingdian to print.47 The books of these new substatutes were named The Expanded Substatutes of the Great Qing Code (Da Qing lü xuzuan tiaoli or Da Qing lü zuanxiu tiaoli). The Expanded Substatutes later became an important channel whereby officials got access to up-to-date laws. In 1746, after the second compilation of the Expanded Substatutes, the Qianlong emperor deemed that every three years was too frequent to revise the substatutes and changed the interval to five years.48 Henceforth, the substatutes were revised at roughly five-year intervals. From 1743 to 1870, the year of the last imperial revision, the substatutes were revised at least twenty-three times.
TABLE 1.1. Dates of Revisions after 1740
| No. | Date | No. | Date | No. | Date | |||||
| 1 | 1743 (Qianlong 8) | 9 | 1783 (Qianlong 48) | 17 | 1825 (Daoguang 5) | |||||
| 2 | 1746 (Qianlong 11) | 10 | 1790 (Qianlong 55) | 18 | 1830 (Daoguang 10) | |||||
| 3 | 1751 (Qianlong 16) | 11 | 1795 (Qianlong 60) | 19 | 1835 (Daoguang 15) | |||||
| 4 | 1756 (Qianlong 21) | 12 | 1802 (Jiaqing 7) | 20 | 1840 (Daoguang 20) | |||||
| 5 | 1761 (Qianlong 26) | 13 | 1805 (Jiaqing 10) | 21 | 1845 (Daoguang 25) | |||||
| 6 | 1768 (Qianlong 33) | 14 | 1810 (Jiaqing 15) | 22 | 1852 (Xianfeng 2) | |||||
| 7 | 1773 (Qianlong 38) | 15 | 1815 (Jiaqing 20) | 23 | 1870 (Tongzhi 9) | |||||
| 8 | 1778 (Qianlong 43) | 16 | 1821 (Daoguang 1) |
Sources: Data from extant imperial editions of the Great Qing Code and the