Circulating the Code. Ting Zhang

on a new page, the original text would not be interrupted when the new pages were bound into the Code.

      When each edition of the Expanded Substatutes was completed, it was issued mainly through administrative channels. Although some editions of the Expanded Substatutes are listed for sale in the “Catalog of the Wuyingdian Books for Circulation” to individual readers, few copies were sold.⁸¹ Government offices above the county level were the main recipients of the Wuyingdian’s editions of the Expanded Substatutes. In memorials reporting on the Code revision process, officials mentioned that they would distribute the Expanded Substatutes to “the yamens inside and outside the capital that had judicial responsibilities (neiwai wenxing yamen).” In one memorial submitted in 1789, officials offered a more detailed list of the recipients of the book, including governors-general, governors, generals in the frontier regions, and prefects.⁸² County magistrates, who assumed the most important responsibility for local judicial administration, were not in the list of recipients of the Wuyingdian’s Expanded Substatutes. Since the publishing process in the Wuyingdian was slow, the Board of Punishments regularly published compilation of new or revised substatutes before the Wuyingdian published the formal editions of the Expanded Substatutes. The board often printed “draft editions” (caoben) of the Expanded Substatutes and circulated them in the bureaucracy when the revisions were finished. Provincial governments often reprinted new substatutes issued by the board through the administrative channel and issued them to local governments.⁸³

      In addition to Wuyingdian editions of the Expanded Substatutes, information about updated substatutes was circulated in several other channels. The Beijing Gazette (Jingbao or Dichao) was probably the most timely and efficient way for Qing people in and out of the bureaucracy to access updated laws. Published regularly every few days, the Beijing Gazette contained communications from the capital, such as edicts, rescripts, and memorials, many of which led to the establishment or revision of the laws. Writings of Qing officials and commercial publishers indicated that they frequently relied on the Beijing Gazette for updated legal and administrative information.⁸⁴ However, the Beijing Gazette was much less authoritative than the Code or the Expanded Substatutes as a source of updated laws. In most cases, the Beijing Gazette did not explicitly include updated substatutes or regulations issued by the central government. Instead, it contained imperial edicts and memorials that would eventually lead to the change of the laws. Therefore, its legal information often had not gone through the compiling and editing process in the Commission on Statutes, and its form and content were often different from the final version of updated substatutes issued in the Expanded Substatutes. Moreover, Qing legislators were selective when establishing new substatutes, and thus a large percentage of legal information contained in the Beijing Gazette would not become formal laws, and judicial officials could not cite it when sentencing legal cases.

      The Qing government was administrated on the cheap.⁸⁵ The concern of cost and efficiency was probably the main reason the Qing central government chose to circulate only updated substatutes rather than the whole updated editions of the Code. From the perspective of readers, however, using these updated substatutes issued separately from the Code was not convenient. Judicial officials had to read updated substatutes and the Code together extremely carefully to fully understand the changes to the laws and to cite the right substatutes when sentencing cases. The situation became even worse when several editions of the Expanded Substatutes had been published but the Code itself had not yet been updated. It was quite easy for readers to confuse the outdated substatutes from the old editions of the Code with the updated ones in the Expanded Substatutes if they were not reading with sufficient care. Officials complained about this situation. Wang Ding (1768–1842), executive minister of the Board of Punishments, pointed out in 1830: “The substatutes accumulated quickly.… They have been compiled every five years. Although the compilations were done in a rather careful way, nowadays the Expanded Substatutes issued by the Board has accumulated to a large number of volumes. Because these new substatutes have not been sorted out, we cannot avoid feeling perplexed and confused.” An acting provincial judicial commissioner in the Daoguang period also complained that “with the gradual accumulation of the new substatutes, the old editions of the Code are difficult to read.”⁸⁶ Accumulation of updated substatutes and their separation from the Code led to confusion among judicial officials. Many of them thus turned to commercial editions of the Code, which were updated more frequently than the imperially authorized ones.

      CONCLUSION

      In his classic study of the laws and administrative regulations of the Qing bureaucracy, Thomas Metzger argues that Qing law books were “written in a straightforward style full of fairly loose but still clear expressions.” He also points out that a weakness of these law books was that compilers usually failed to categorize the contents and to pull together “all information having practical bearing on a topic.” As for the compilation and distribution of the Qing law books, he distinguished the penal law (the Code and the Expanded Substatutes) from the administrative laws, arguing that regular revisions and publications of the Code were efficient and facilitated judicial procedure, in contrast with irregular revisions of various administrative regulations, which to some extent impeded administration. He also pointed out that “there was bound to be a huge gap between publication and the bureaucracy’s output of cases as a whole,” but he admitted that “to what extent the amount of compilation kept up with the need is not clear.”⁸⁷

      Metzger based his research mainly on books of administrative regulations. Careful examination of the publication and distribution of the imperial editions of Code and the Expanded Substatutes sheds new light on the topic. First, it is difficult to discuss the Qing period as a whole in terms of the publication and distribution of law books. The mid-Qing central government efficiently published and distributed high-quality editions of the Code and the Expanded Substatutes, but the work was slow and quality low in the early and late Qing period. Second, the Code and the Expanded Substatutes were indeed clear in their contents. Editors made efforts to compile precise legal information in these books and organize it in an easy-to-understand way so that officials could understand what had changed in the laws when they received and read an updated edition of the Expanded Substatutes. But the accumulation of updated substatutes and their separation from the Code created confusion, which could result in disorder in judicial administration. Further, readers must have suffered from the significant decline of printing quality after the Qianlong period, which sometimes made the texts in the Code and the Expanded Substatutes rather difficult to read. Third, careful examination of the distribution of the imperially authorized editions of the Code and the Expanded Substatutes indicates that there was a gap between the official publication of the Code and the Expanded Substatutes and demand for these books among officials. Subprovincial government officials, including circuit intendants, prefects, and county magistrates, who usually needed to deal with legal cases on daily bases, could not receive imperial editions of the Code. Officials complained that it was difficult for them to get access to these books; people outside the bureaucracy had a much harder time getting them.

      The last imperially authorized edition of the Code was published by the Wuyingdian in 1870. Because of the persistent financial crisis in the late Qing, the court found it could spare no funds to maintain such a lavish publishing institution as the Wuyingdian. At the same time, the state publishing sector was gradually taken over by the newly rising provincial publishing bureaus, established by high provincial officials as a means of cultural restoration after the Taiping rebellion. As a final blow, in 1869 a huge fire broke out in the Wuyingdian, destroying many old woodblocks and printing presses. Soon after that, the publishing activities in the Wuyingdian were formally ended.