The commercial printing revolution also made the law more accessible to those outside the official bureaucracy. A new genre of legal imprints called “litigation masters’ secret handbooks” became popular among non-elite readers. These popular legal handbooks demystified and translated complex laws and legal terms into easy-to-understand formats such as rhymed songs and questions and answers. These books compiled legal information useful for commoners and taught it together with litigation skills. Law and punishments in popular handbooks presented law as a tool, a weapon that anyone could use and even abuse to achieve his or her own ends. In other words, popular legal handbooks popularized and vulgarized the laws, empowering readers and encouraging them to use (and abuse) law and the judicial system to solve their problems. The history of popular legal handbooks in late imperial China provides us another salient example on how the book market and commercial publishers challenged state control.
The Qing state and its officials made serious efforts to provide the common people with accurate legal knowledge from the Code through the community moral and legal lecture system. Such knowledge, including many statutes and substatutes regarding important civil and penal laws that commoners would encounter in their lives, was taught orally, with the goal of warning people not to commit crimes and thus promoting public order and morality. The Qing state not only promoted such lectures in China proper but also held similar lectures in frontier regions where the majority of populace were non-Han ethnic groups. Through disseminating orthodox legal information, the Qing state intended to establish judicial authority, stabilize control, and transform (or “acculturate”) local customs in frontier regions. Qing people had unprecedented access to written laws and punishments in the form of texts, speeches, and lectures, thanks to commercially printed editions of the Code, popular legal imprints, and the community lectures.
The popular dissemination of legal knowledge, however, was a double-edged sword. On the one hand, information about the law, particularly punishments, could frighten people into behaving properly. Officials viewed the law as an essential means of moral indoctrination and crime prevention, but legal knowledge was also powerful and potentially “dangerous.” When people knew the laws well, they were more likely to use them to pursue their own ends. Some Qing ruling elites worried that people might be too familiar with the laws and become litigious, which would disturb social stability and add to the workload of the already overburdened judicial system. In other words, there was tension between the state’s interest in disseminating information and its fear that legal knowledge would lead people to manipulate and abuse the law. This tension was rooted in ambiguity and ambivalence about the law in the Confucian classics. While The Rites of Zhou (Zhouli), for example, articulated that a benevolent government should publicize its laws and punishments and let everyone in the realm know them, other classical texts indicated Confucian distaste and distrust for the law, legal knowledge, and litigation.10 Such tension and ambiguity influenced Qing officials’ attitudes toward and the state’s policy on the publication of law books and community legal cultures, and also affected (and more often undermined) the state’s capability and willingness to control the dissemination of legal knowledge.
This study challenges the previous assumptions that the state monopolized accurate legal knowledge, and that neither officials nor the common people knew much about the laws. It demonstrates that the commercial printing revolution in early modern China fundamentally transformed the judicial system and legal culture. Thanks to commercial legal imprints and community lectures, legal knowledge was widely available in the Qing, and both officials and commoners had ready access to it. The book market, rather than the Qing state, led the production and dissemination of accurate legal information. The Qing judicial system depended on the market for timely information. By publishing and circulating legal books, especially The Great Qing Code, commercial publishers and editors redefined the legal system and introduced new sources of judicial authority. Commercial legal publications also transformed popular views of the law and fostered popular legal awareness in Qing local society. The flourishing trade in commercial legal imprints contributed to the formation of a new legal culture in early modern China; features of this culture included the free flow of accurate legal information, the rise of non-official legal experts, a legally savvy population, and a high litigation rate in local society.
Three important genres of legal imprints are central to this study:
Published legal books: I have documented and studied 131 different editions of The Great Qing Code from several major libraries around the world.11 Many of these editions were previously unknown or unexamined. I have also examined more than sixty-five editions of litigation masters’ secret handbooks, fifteen manuals for community legal lectures, and many official handbooks. These legal books provide valuable information on their compilers, editors, revisers, publishers, printers, and target readers from titles, prefaces, general editorial regulations, and paper and printing quality. The printing format, structure, and content of these books also provide clues about how legal information was transformed during the process of communication and dissemination.
Sources regarding the legal publishing industry: These consist of documents about official and commercial legal publishers, such as the archives of the Wuyingdian Imperial Publishing House in Beijing, documents about some provincial publishing houses in the late Qing, and memoirs of bibliophiles. These documents have plentiful information regarding the daily operation, printing process, costs, profits, book prices, and circulation channels of official and commercial publishers in the Qing.
Documents related to government policies on law and legal knowledge: Examples include imperial edicts, official memorials, and administrative regulations. These sources reveal the state’s changing regulations on and officials’ complicated attitudes toward the dissemination of legal information in the bureaucracy and society. Legal case reports from the archives of the central government and some county-level archives illustrate how the dissemination of legal information impacted people’s legal decisions and judicial practice.
1 QING LEGISLATION AND IMPERIAL EDITIONS OF THE GREAT QING CODE
Qing legislators made great efforts to promulgate up-to-date laws for the bureaucracy and society. At least eight imperially authorized editions of the Code were compiled and published, as well as more than twenty editions of the Expanded Substatutes of the Great Qing Code (Da Qing lü xuzuan tiaoli). Qing rulers had a more flexible attitude than rulers of previous dynasties on modifying laws, especially substatutes, to adapt them to social and political changes.1 Qing laws were frequently updated with a large number of new substatutes. Law-making matters, of course, but the circulation and reception of law matters as much as the legislation process itself. After all, laws cannot be effectively implemented unless they are effectively communicated. Active legislation requires an efficient dissemination system. This was especially true for the Qing, a vast empire that had numerous judicial officials working in the huge bureaucracy.
THE PUBLICATION AND CIRCULATION OF DYNASTIC CODES BEFORE THE QING
Codified law has a long history in the Chinese legal system.2 Judicial officials at all levels used the codified law as a standard and authority to judge cases and pass sentences. Because the codified law was one of the symbols of the emperors’ political authority as well as a tool of imperial control over state and society, the authority to compile and issue the dynastic Code belonged to the throne. The state was also responsible for issuing the validated Code and other regulations widely enough that the members of bureaucracy could implement and follow them. Before the late Ming period (1550s–1644), the state by and large monopolized the production and circulation of legal codes. For example, the central government of the Northern Song (960–1127) articulated its exclusive right to print books related to laws, strictly banning the private and commercial printing of legal books.3 An imperial edict issued in the Qingyuan period (1195–1200) states: “Whoever privately prints the penal Code, statutes, regulations, ordinances, or classified statutes is to be punished by 100 blows of the heavy