Beside the cover page, the printing quality of other pages in each of the three editions also declined. In the 1725 edition, the characters throughout the text were neatly cut, tidy, and easy to read. Although the woodblocks were cut by different craftsmen, the style of the characters was uniform. The woodblocks were also apparently newly cut, and the edges of each stroke were sharp and clear. Compared with the 1725 edition, the quality of the printing in the 1825 edition was obviously inferior. The woodblocks were worn, and sometimes it is even difficult to identify the characters (figure 1.1). The situation was worse still in the 1870 edition. Many characters are blurry and difficult to read. The woodblocks are significantly worn, the printing was done carelessly, and the style of the characters is not unified. Characters on some pages are dramatically different from those on other pages. Generally speaking, the 1725 edition was exquisite by any standard and could be viewed as a work of art, the 1825 edition was of lower printing quality but was still readable, and the printing quality of the 1870 Code was nearly unacceptable—the text was not only unpleasant to read but sometimes even illegible.
FIG. 1.1. Blurred characters in the 1825 imperial edition of the Code, caused by careless printing and a worn woodblock. Da Qing lüli, “Santai zoushu,” 1a, printed in 1825 by the Wuyingdian. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
An important reason for the decline in printing quality was that the Wuyingdian used the same woodblocks for many years. The maximum printing capacity of woodblocks ranged from several thousand to more than twenty thousand copies based on the quality of wood and the care devoted to block preparation.76 Because of the relatively dry climate in Beijing, the Wuyingdian’s woodblocks were prone to crack after years in storage. Therefore, if the Wuyingdian intended to maintain high printing quality, it needed to repair or recut the woodblocks regularly. However, in printing the Code, it seems that the Wuyingdian usually used the same woodblocks to print several editions. There were no significant changes of the structure or content of the Code after 1740. For each Code revision process, the Qing legislators added some new substatutes and deleted some outdated ones. Most of the content was not changed. Therefore, the Wuyingdian usually did not need to recut all of the woodblocks. In most cases, it just took out the woodblocks in which the content had been changed, replaced them with new ones containing the revised substatutes, and printed them together with the old, unchanged woodblocks. Even in the Qianlong period, when the printing activities in the Wuyingdian were most active and financially secure, they did not recut the woodblocks for printing the Code for more about fifty years after 1740. In 1789, when the officials of the Commission on Statutes intended to print the revised Code, they found that many characters on the old woodblocks were blurred and suggested that all of the woodblocks be recut. This was approved by the emperor.77 Readers of the later editions of the Code printed by the Wuyingdian were not so lucky. Judging from the later editions, many blurred or even cracked woodblocks were still in use. For example, there was an obvious crack on the page of Foge’s memorial in the preface of the 1825 edition, which showed that the woodblock for printing this page had been used or stored for many years. Then, on the same page of the 1870 edition, the crack was still there, and the characters were even more blurry (figure 1.2). It is clear that the cracked woodblock had been kept in use. Although it was cheaper to reuse the old woodblocks to produce new editions of the Code, it significantly lowered the printing quality, which made it difficult for the Wuyingdian’s editions to compete with commercially published ones.
FIG. 1.2. The same page (“Foge zoushu,” 1a), from the 1825 imperial edition of the Code (right) and the 1870 imperial edition (left). The same crack appears just below the middle of both pages, indicating that the same cracked and worn woodblocks were used to print both editions. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
PUBLICATION AND CIRCULATION OF THE EXPANDED SUBSTATUTES
Compared with a multivolume book like the Code, the Expanded Substatutes was much smaller and contained only the revised substatutes and thus took less time and money to print. The 1740 edition of the Code, for example, was a forty-seven juan book. The Expanded Substatutes printed in 1746 had only two juan. The cost of printing the Expanded Substatutes was also far lower. According to the “Catalog of the Wuyingdian Books for Circulation,” the price for the Code was about 1.1 taels, and the price for the Expanded Statutes was only 0.05 taels (see table 1.2). From 1746 to 1870, Qing laws were formally revised twenty-two times, but only five imperial editions of the Code were published (see table 1.1). In other words, in most instances of Code revisions, only the Expanded Substatutes was formally published and distributed, not the entire Code. The Expanded Substatutes, therefore, was one of the main official carriers of the updated laws circulating in the Qing bureaucracy.
Each edition of the Expanded Substatutes consisted of newly revised substatutes, which were usually sorted into five categories: expanded, revised, revised and merged (xiubing), revised and moved (yigai), and removed substatutes.78 Substatutes in the Expanded Substatutes were compiled according to the sequence of statutes in the Code. In other words, each substatute appeared under a specific category of the laws based on the original category of statutes in the Code. This arrangement made it easier for the readers of the Expanded Substatutes to correlate the statutes and substatutes in the Code with the updated substatutes. The printing style of the Expanded Substatutes closely followed that of the Code. Both usually used the same size and quality of paper, and the characters were usually cut in the same size and style. In fact, each page of Expanded Substatutes was designed so that users could bind it into the Code, and the Code was also designed in a way that the new substatutes could be easily inserted. In the “General Editorial Principles” of the first edition of the Expanded Substatutes, the editors explained this arrangement in detail:
The Code is divided into six sections [bu], and each section has general categories [zongmen]. Under each general category, there are the categories of statutes [lümu], and the substatutes follow the statutes. Now we have examined the Code and found that each category of statutes does not follow the previous category on the same page, but starts on a new page. It was originally designed to leave some spaces [for inserting new substatutes] and make it easier for the readers to look for. Therefore, we make the new substatutes follow the statutes, and put each of them under the related categories of statutes that are used as titles for the substatutes in the book. Each category also starts on a new page, and the font and size of the characters are printed in the same style as those of the Code. In this way, the Expanded Substatutes can be read as a single book, and its pages can also be easily combined with the Code.79
Because all editions of the Code published by the Wuyingdian used the traditional thread-binding style, it was not difficult to unbind the original pages, insert some new ones, and sew them back