The aim of the Bibliography is to provide a descriptive list of the largest possible number of extant manuscript and printed works that were created in order to instruct officials and other administrators of imperial China about the technical and ethical aspects of government, and to provide them with tools and manuals to help in the relevant procedures. The present introduction explains how the project originated and developed and describes the organization and contents of the Bibliography; then it devotes some consideration to the more important genres described in it; and finally it discusses the format and content of the Bibliography entries.
1
Origins of the Project
My interest in “handbooks” for officials was an outgrowth of research I had pursued for many years on the ways the late-imperial Chinese state managed a number of ambitious and demanding programs, such as combating famine, creating and maintaining large-scale water-control and irrigation infrastructures, running public granaries, or promoting economic development.1 What seemed remarkable to me was that outbursts of activity and efficiency during the periods of crisis or the special efforts I studied—peaks of state intervention concentrated in space and time, as it were—rested upon a considerable and very sophisticated body of regulations and procedures that were part of everyday local administration. In other words, these regulations and procedures were not just meant for specialists and for emergencies: they were supposed to be mastered, and enforced whenever was necessary, by every local official.
This brought handbooks into the picture. One important source I used to study famine relief was a set of what we may call “famine handbooks” (see section 4.3 in the Bibliography). These were devoted either to the regulations, procedures, and techniques related to famine relief, or to particular famine relief campaigns in the form of collections of documents published to serve as examples for similar operations in the future. Importantly, much the same kind of materials was also found in the few generalist administrative handbooks—essentially magistrate handbooks—I had been able to consult at the time. This meant, again, that both emergency procedures and policies to ensure preparedness were part of a larger stock of practical knowledge that local officials were expected to master if they were to discharge their duties satisfactorily. Besides, these publications—both the specialized treatises and the generalist handbooks—involved not only local officials, but also their technical advisers—their “cabinet friends” (幕友), often called “private secretaries” in the literature—whom I discuss further below.
All this led me to re-examine afresh the problem of official competence, training, and mobilization in the wider context of everyday general administration, and, as a result, to devote more systematic attention to handbooks. Handbooks for officials, especially those of the late-imperial period, have been much used by some authors;2 but apart from a few studies devoted to particular titles,3 they have been little investigated for themselves, as a genre and across dynastic periods.4 In any case, from this interest derived, sometime at the beginning of the 1990s, the imprudent idea of compiling a bibliography of the handbooks aimed for the officials of imperial China and still in existence that would be both descriptive—as opposed to a mere list of titles—and exhaustive.
Coverage
Why was the idea “imprudent,” even though several colleagues and students agreed to join the project along the way and made it a collective effort?5 One reason is that the number and variety of works that can be described as “handbooks for officials” rapidly turned out to be incomparably greater than I suspected at the start, when I based myself on such limited lists as the short notices at the end of Watt’s classic study of the district magistrate in late-imperial China, the mimeographed combined index of 55 handbooks compiled in Kyoto in 1950, or the section on local government in Ma Fengchen’s path-breaking 1935 bibliography.6 Their number and variety are considerable even if we understand “handbooks” in the narrower sense of normative guidebooks aimed at local officials; they are still more so when we bring into our inquiry, as has been attempted here, all the related literary genres and types of contents.
As a result, the Bibliography describes quite a few works that properly speaking do not belong to the category of “handbooks” in the restricted sense of the Chinese guanzhen shu 官箴書 (lit., “books to admonish officials”).7 In effect, as stated at the beginning of this introduction, we have decided to include any sort of text aimed at administrators either with a didactic intention or as a working aid—the limit is often imprecise—all the way from high-minded hagiographic compilations on revered model officials of the past to the most technical and concrete sets of instructions. This broadening in scope is readily apparent in the table of contents at the beginning of this volume and in the discussion of its organization offered below. It obviously made exhaustiveness even more elusive.
Other factors only aggravated the problem as time passed. The nearly three decades of fits and starts it took to bring the project to completion have witnessed profound transformations in the means available to locate and examine Chinese texts. The development of the Internet, in particular the proliferation of online catalogs and databases, has tremendously facilitated locating titles and accessing books in comparison with the time when one had to consult published catalogs (where they existed) or card catalogs (in situ), and visit libraries to see the books.8 So has the multiplication—particularly fast in mainland China in recent years after a golden age in Taiwan through the 1980s—of facsimile editions of ancient books, often in the form of large multi-volume collections. As it has become close to impossible to follow the expansion of digitized and photo-reproduced texts in real time, I have resigned myself to omit a number of new titles, or new editions or reprints of already known titles, in the present draft of the Bibliography, and reserve them for a future complement: doing otherwise would have delayed publication by several more years.
In short, while the Bibliography as it is now offered is indeed a descriptive bibliography (at places generously so), for the various reasons just outlined it is not—could not be—an exhaustive one. Still, a final question remains, that of chronological coverage. “Imperial China” starts with the Qin dynasty,9 but a glance at the 1,165 titles listed in these pages will show that they are massively Ming and Qing works—the latter definitely dominating in numbers—with less than thirty Song texts and very little from the early and medieval empires.10 This obviously reflects the state of the field as far as extant works are concerned, but does it reflect contemporary realities?
It is of course extremely difficult to answer this question. One factor that certainly distorts the picture is what we might call the attrition rate of ancient books, in other words, the proportion of imprints and manuscripts that disappeared with time, of which we can only have an indirect and very incomplete idea. Titles of books no longer extant can be found in a variety of ancient bibliographies or are mentioned in other texts.11 To give just one example, the legal section in the bibliographical treatise of the Song dynastic history lists quite a number of titles that were apparently guides to procedure, commentaries on laws, or collections of judgments comparable to those we have been able to retrieve for later periods, but no longer available.12 Moreover, we can be confident that many more titles existed besides those found in ancient bibliographies, which by nature were selective since they reflected the contents of specific collections (the imperial collection in the case of the bibliographic treatises of dynastic histories). In other words, we are left largely in the dark as to the actual number of texts in circulation in any given period.
The advent of printing in the Song (or shortly before) is another factor to consider. Even though manuscripts—that is, hand copying—never ceased to be an important means to circulate texts in China, the availability of printing certainly spurred the writing and spreading of practical books aimed at a large readership like those described in the Bibliography. And this is even truer of the so-called “second printing revolution,” starting in the sixteenth century, which dramatically lowered costs and increased the productivity of the printing industry, and can only have had a powerful accelerating effect, while at the same time increasing the odds for preservation in proportion to the number of copies printed.13 Still, printing is not synonymous with safeguarding, and we cannot know the proportion of books published in the Ming and Qing that did not make it to modern bibliographies and libraries.
Needless to say, the same holds for texts that circulated in manuscript form, either supplementing or duplicating the printed production, of which the Bibliography offers many examples right through the late nineteenth century; but how about manuscripts dating from before the advent of printing? Here, strikingly, the pre-Song centuries deliver almost nothing in our area of concern,14 not even texts that might have survived by being later included in collectanea or otherwise preserved and printed. This, however, does not mean that such texts did not exist. For several decades now, archeology has brought to light administrative documents from the Qin and Han dynasties inscribed on bamboo or wooden slips that not only illustrate the very high density of written communication within the early-imperial bureaucratic apparatus, but also include a few texts that remarkably anticipate the genres and formats described in the present work. Since they are only reconstructed fragments found in tombs, some perhaps specifically assembled for the burial, and not always consistent in their contents, therefore not “books” properly speaking, we have chosen not to include them in the Bibliography; yet they deserve a few remarks.
The closest probably to the magistrate handbooks of later times is a text entitled Wei li zhi dao 為吏之道 (The way of the official) by its modern editors, found in 1975 in a Qin tomb at Shuihudi 睡虎地 (Yunmeng 雲夢 county, Hubei). Three partly similar texts have been unearthed since then, two of them collectively titled guanzhen 官箴 by their editors, using the generic appellation of handbooks for officials from the Song period onward.15 A further manuscript also drawing from the same textual stock, titled Wei li zhi guan ji qianshou 為吏治官及黔首, was published in 2010 by the Yuelu Academy 嶽麓書院.16 The admonitions in these rather short texts deal with the morals, behavior, and professional ethics of the official in terms that somehow anticipate the Neo-confucian-oriented handbooks of later times, though legalist and Daoist notions have also been detected. It has been suggested that these admonitions served not only to warn officials but also to instruct scribes in the vocabulary and style of the documents they would have to handle. (The texts were all found in scribes’ tombs.)17
Qin and Han tombs also delivered more specialized manuscripts, dealing with technical specialties like the calendar or prognostication, and more interestingly for our purpose, with the law. Legal documents include (1) compilations of laws and decrees (rather than “codes” strictly speaking), admitting of variations and abridgments, clearly intended as a reference for local officials and scribes;18 (2) collections of model judicial cases, either hypothetical (with fictitious protagonists and contents) or “real,” but always with a clearly didactic intent;19 and (3) a text titled Falü dawen 法律答問, found in the same Shuihudi tomb as Wei li zhi dao, which consists of explanations of the judicial procedure and of legal terms proceeding through questions and answers, a format popular in late-imperial times.20
These ancient documents reveal intriguing continuities between the early empires and their late-imperial successors in approaches to justice management, administrative ethics, etc., and in some respects, as we have seen, they anticipate the specialized literature to which the present Bibliography is devoted. Yet this literature would not truly develop until the advent of printing and the emergence of the bureaucratic state from the Song period onward. Despite the problems of coverage alluded to above, this, it seems to me, is something our work reflects rather accurately.
Organization
In its earliest guises, the bibliography project was simply an alphabetic list arranged by pinyin romanization of the titles of the works described. Various indexes and chronological tables were to be appended later in order to help the reader locate what he is looking for—a format already adopted in some large-scale reference books.21
At one point, however, and based on the remarks of readers who had consulted the drafts I was circulating, it was decided that the considerable variety of genres, formats, contents, etc. that had turned up in the course of research made it necessary to apply some structure to the presentation: the works belonging to the principal genres and types of contents needed to be brought together in one way or another, and it was necessary to provide a sense of chronology. Beyond this, however, we hesitated about how exactly to organize this maze of books and manuscripts whose only common feature was their didactic and/or practical aim. Existing models were of no much help. One of the most sophisticated among them, Wejen Chang’s bibliography of law-related works in Chinese history, whose contents partly overlap with the present work, does discuss problems of organization and justify the author’s choices in its substantial preface and in a special essay on classification.22 Chang remarks that the categories found in the Chinese venerable “Four Treasuries” arrangement and its predecessors since the Han dynasty are unsatisfactory, as materials related to legal issues are scattered among different categories and subcategories, depending on their content and form.23 In the same way, modern bibliographic categories, which evolved from Western classifications of knowledge, fit uneasily with traditional Chinese subject matters and genres. The classification developed by Chang for his own bibliography includes four large categories based on contents, namely “Norms” (規範), “System” (制度), “Theory” (理論), and “Implementation” (實務), to which he added a category devoted to comprehensive genres (綜合), such as anthologies of memorials, literary collections, encyclopedias, and the like. These large categories are in turn split into many sections and subsections, with a mix of Western and traditional Chinese headings.
For the longtime user of Chang’s impressive compilation that I have been, this arrangement is not entirely satisfactory. The main reason perhaps is that in many of the works described, the boundaries between rules, institutions, theories, and practices are blurred; and it is a fact that a number of titles have been classified in sections or subsections where one would not in principle expect them.24 While we were confronting the same interrogations as Chang, the structure we have eventually settled on for the present Bibliography is extremely different from his.25 It has been arrived at in a purely empirical way, but has proven to be working reasonably well, and alterations that appeared necessary along the way have been very limited. Probably this is because it was not decided beforehand, but only after a significant amount of research had already been done: we knew exactly what we wanted to classify. Yet I would not go so far as claiming that we found the perfect arrangement. Perfection—complete rationality—is impossible, if only because of the composite nature of many of the books described, which mix up several sorts of admonition and information in varying proportion and could be used for several purposes by their readers. I should also add that some sections and subsections could have been expanded, and that a few more subsections could possibly have been devised, in particular in section 4 (Handbooks specializing in particular techniques).
Whatever the case, the organization outlined below combines (or, rather, compromises between) contents and formats. The detail of its seven parts and of its sections and subsections can be seen at a glance in the table of contents of the Bibliography. In the second part of this introduction I will offer detailed discussions of some of the more important and/or problematic genres in the form of short essays. Here let me briefly delineate the overall organization, part by part.
Part 1, “Works of a general nature,” is a somewhat arbitrary assortment of texts of various forms and contents, of reference works the consulting of which was viewed as important in the training of officials and whose common characteristic is that they were to provide the reader with (1) general admonitions on ethics and behavior for the official (section 1.1)—including the religious dimension discussed in works on accounts of merit and demerit, a genre that flourished from the late-sixteenth century onwards (1.1.2), and also including works in the form of exempla, that is, deeds and sayings by historical model officials (and counter-models in some instances) (1.2);26 and (2) information on the administrative structure (1.4), the latter section only a sample of the considerable amount of literature, often of a commercial nature, that introduced literati, examination candidates, and novice officials to the intricacies and historical origins of state institutions. As for the compilations devoted to the government of particular provinces (1.5), usually put out by provincial authorities but in a few cases by private authors, they clearly belonged to the toolbox of local administrators—not only officials, but also yamen clerks and private secretaries—as they were explicitly intended to help them in their everyday work by offering an updated and user-friendly record of local institutions and of the usually confused maze of provincial regulations and precedents.27 Finally, the somewhat peculiar category called “career autobiographies” (1.7)—all of them Qing works—again belongs to the exemplary, the exemplars being in this case individual authors recording their official career (or fragments thereof) in the first person. Yet the fact that they are “living” exemplars, in the middle of things as it were, and on occasion ready to acknowledge setbacks, gives their testimonies an immediacy absent from more conventional eulogies.
Part 2, “Handbooks for local administrators,” is in a way the heart of the Bibliography, or at least the original core from which it later expanded. Handbooks for magistrates (2.1.1), typically featuring a combination of admonitions on ethics and information on techniques, are the more numerous, but subsections have been devoted to officials of other ranks in the territorial hierarchy as well, with the exception of province-level officials, for whom there were no such handbooks. Also included are handbooks used by personnel assisting the ranking officials, such as private secretaries (幕友), private servants (長隨), and clerks (吏). More analysis of this so-called guanzhen genre is provided in the second part of this introduction.
Part 3, “Handbooks dealing with metropolitan agencies,” introduces the limited number of extant manuals aimed at officials working in the Six Ministries and the Censorate. The works described are quite varied in form and contents, some focusing on ethics and others on practical matters, including rituals and regulations specific to particular agencies. The guides intended for the Ministry of Justice officials involved in preparing the autumn assizes files each year, which are among the most detailed in their technical content, are discussed in the subsection specifically devoted to the assizes (4.1.6) in Part 4.
Part 4, “Handbooks specializing in particular techniques,” deals with a large array of texts that can be described as “working aids,” in other words, technical guides and databases dealing with the various administrative tasks and designed to help officials and their assistants in their daily work. Though technical matters are dealt with in most handbooks for local administrators discussed in Part 2, sometimes to a considerable degree of detail,28 the difference is that the materials introduced in Part 4 are not intended for one particular type of administrator holding a particular sort of function (such as district magistrate, private legal adviser, etc.), but offer resources to any administrator confronted with a particular task, such as investigating crimes and holding court sessions, maintaining waterworks, administering famine relief, managing schools, and so on. The sections in Part 4 are of quite uneven length and coverage—some tending towards exhaustiveness, or at least offering large selections of works, others being more like samples dealing with highly specialized topics that the reader may want to investigate further: such is the case with the sections devoted to water conservancy and irrigation (4.2), public works (4.4), schools and examinations (4.5), salt administration (4.6), and with the mix of texts grouped under “Others” (4.8).
Three sections, each corresponding to a major responsibility of the imperial state, feature quite a substantial assortment of works in the Bibliography. “Law and Justice” (4.1), a proliferating category with many subsections, is by far the most extensive, due to the complexity of the matter and its tremendous importance in the administrative life of the empire. Subsections are devoted to various sorts of guides to everyday practice, such as explanations of the Penal Code (4.1.1), practical presentations of the Penal Code and regulations (4.1.2),29 manuals on procedure (4.1.3), databases of leading cases and legal memoranda (4.1.4) and anthologies of model judgments (4.1.5), materials on the autumn assizes (4.1.6), and forensics handbooks (4.1.7). Questions raised by several of these genres—including handbooks for litigation masters (4.1.8)—will be discussed in detail in the next part of this introduction. So will two other comparatively large sections, also corresponding to major responsibilities of the imperial state, namely, “Famine Relief” (4.3) and “Military Affairs” (4.7).
Part 5, “Records of administration and celebratory compilations,” features works that differ from the handbooks in Part 2 and the anthologies of documents in Part 6 by explicitly advertising for or celebrating the individual officials who are their subjects. Records of administration (政書) are a specifically Ming institution: magistrates were supposed to visit the capital at the end of their three-year term and submit an account of their policies, which would determine their subsequent career. In all probablity only a limited amount of such records were put to print, and we may assume that those that have survived are only one fraction of them. In contrast, celebratory compilations were sponsored either by enthusiastic colleagues or by local notables eager to record and advertise the “good policies” of an official with whom they had been particularly satisfied and to have them maintained by his successors.30 They usually consist of a mix of administrative documents, records of specific policies or achievements (such as infrastructure building), and materials on the official himself (such as biographical data, reports by superiors, eulogies, and the like). The rich documentary material contained in most of the works described in this part, which makes them close to gongdu anthologies (Part 6), and the exemplary function that was explicitly ascribed to many of them, fully justify their inclusion in the present Bibliography.
Part 6, “Anthologies of administrative documents,” deals with a genre—the so-called gongdu 公牘—whose complementarity with handbooks for local administrators I will discuss at some length later in this introduction. It can be roughly defined as administration exemplified by documents written (or at least, signed) by an actual administrator and most of the time compiled by himself,31 as opposed to the prescriptions dispensed in the abstract by handbook authors. The gongdu collections described in this part are of a generalist nature and contain documents on all manner of subjects. Anthologies containing only judicial decisions form an important subset, dealt with in section 4.1.5.
Part 7, “Specialized collectanea,” lists congshu 叢書 specifically devoted to administrative handbooks and guides, either by individual authors or by several authors.
In each part, or section and subsection, of the Bibliography as delineated above, the entries are arranged in chronological order based on the known or inferred date of writing. For the sake of convenience this order is divided by dynastic periods, the Qing being in turn split between pre-1800 [QING A] and post-1800 [QING B], with a section on the Republic [MINGUO] added in a few cases.
2
The structure just described illustrates the considerable variety of the texts I subsume under the general notion of didactic and practical works. In what follows I will analyze certain categories in more depth and explain why certain genres that do not seem to readily belong to the category of “handbooks” have been taken into consideration.
Guanzhen and Gongdu
As far as didactic works are concerned, handbooks for local officials (guanzhen 官箴, Part 2) and anthologies of administrative documents (gongdu 公牘, Part 6)—the former consisting of prescriptive recommendations, the latter providing examples of administrators at work—are the two pillars on which the Bibliography was originally built. The complementarity of the two genres was stressed in 1959 by Niida Noboru in one of the rare essays specifically devoted to handbooks for officials, where he remarked that despite their differences in form and content, guanzhen and gongdu—handbooks and anthologies—are essentially two facets of the same thing, namely, didactic materials for officials.32 Let me discuss them in turn.
Handbooks for Local Administrators
The term guanzhen, meaning literally “admonitions to officials,” is what comes to mind first when discussing didactic works intended for officials in imperial China.33 The genre it refers to actually has been allocated a section, under this name, in the Siku quanshu 四庫全書 arrangement, where it constitutes one of two subsections under the heading “Officials” (職官類) in the “History” part (史部)—the other subsection being that on “official systems” (官制). The first known magistrate handbooks, dating to the late-Northern Song and early-Southern Song, are found there, viz. Li Yuanbi’s 李元弼 Zuoyi zizhen 作邑自箴 (no. 0156), Lü Benzhong’s 呂本中 Guanzhen 官箴 (no. 0157), and the anonymous Zhouxian tigang 州縣提綱 (no. 0158), all of which became classics republished countless times.34 Indeed, the pattern established in these works—what I call the “standard magistrate handbook” format—endured until the very end of the imperial period. It can be described as a combination of, on the one hand, admonitions regarding the personal behavior of the official as both a private and a public person (the zhen 箴 part, properly speaking), and, on the other hand, advice of a more technical nature regarding the various tasks of local government. For example, in Zuoyi zizhen, the first juan (out of ten) has sections on “rectifying oneself” (正己), “regulating one’s family” (治家), and “performing official duties” (處事), respectively—reflecting of course the typical Neo-confucian agenda from self to family to government; then the discussion of “official duties” is expanded into three further juan introducing a wealth of technical details. The second half of the work (j. 5–10) introduces a number of regulations and proclamations aimed at the lower personnel and rural chiefs and at the populace at large: in other words, it somehow anticipates the gongdu format that I discuss later.
Even though the two occasionally seem to overlap, the distinction between the behavioral/ethical and the technical was very clear in the minds of the authors of the time. Certain texts explicitly and carefully distinguish in their organization (as well as in their prefaces) between what belongs to one domain and what belongs to the other. A good example is Xu Tang’s 許堂 early-sixteenth-century Juguan geyan 居官格言 (no. 0173): the work is split into a main text, which is fairly short and consists of terse aphorisms concerning the standards of conduct and competence requirements of the magistrate—this is the behavioral part—and a much longer appendix, entitled “Conditions for implementation” (施行條件), which discusses the concrete details of daily administration—this is the technical part. In another Ming example, Jiang Tingbi’s 蔣廷璧 1539 Jiang gong zhengxun 蔣公政訓 (no. 0177), there are four parts on the magistrate’s conduct and a fifth, longer one, discussing in detail concrete problems of government.
In general, magistrate handbooks inspired by Song models tend to distribute their behavioral/ethical and technical advice among entries that form a sort of arc, starting with the official’s appointment and assumption of office (蒞任), then explaining the various domains of government, with an emphasis on justice and tax administration as well as famine relief, agricultural development, and “improving customs,” and in the more systematic examples ending with the official’s closing of his post (去任) when he is transferred or promoted at the end of his tenure.35 The first entries, dealing with the assumption of office, are especially crucial because this is when a new official shows off his integrity and establishes his authority with the local gentry and yamen staff, and hands down rules for the daily functioning of his administration. Since the handbooks were first of all intended for future officials or inexperienced beginners, this part is sometimes quite developed. As in the Song models, it usually begins with general considerations on personal ethics and behavior. Along the way it offers recommendations regarding how the magistrate should behave in public and technical advice on the best methods to control subaltern personnel and monitor their work, such as (an important topic) the establishment of systems of registers and ledgers that can be checked against each other.
Indeed, according to certain Japanese historians of the so-called Kyoto school, like, prominently, Miyazaki Ichisada 宮崎市定 (1901–95) and Saeki Tomi 佐伯富 (1910–2006), to control clerks was in reality the main raison d’être of the handbooks: according to them, ever since the Song dynasty the literati (士大夫) had lost their grasp on local government and the clerks were the ones who held actual power, thanks to their knowledge of local conditions, stability in their posts, and technical competence. As a result, one major problem for the shidafu if they wanted to survive in the world of officialdom was to protect themselves against clerk malfeasance and manipulation; and magistrate handbooks were principally composed of recipes for that purpose.36
To readers of the Bibliography this view will probably seem quite reductionist. But whatever the case may have been, beyond the general pattern outlined above one finds the most extreme variety in detail, emphasis, and organization, as can be seen when browsing through section 2.1.1. In some works the entries are arranged by sections and possibly subsections clearly distinguished from each other. For example, Wu Zun’s 吳遵 Chushi lu 初仕錄 (no. 0178), composed around 1550, compresses the following sections into one single fascicle, without juan division: (1) Chongben pian 崇本篇 (Revering the Foundation), comprising 20 rubrics dealing with ethical and behavioral issues; (2) Lizhi pian 立治篇 (Establishing Administration), 22 rubrics on assuming office, handing down rules and, so to speak, starting administration; and (3) six sections named after the six traditional domains of government (personnel, revenue, rites, war, justice, and public works), which also corresponded to the six bureaus where yamen clerks worked, for a total 32 rubrics dealing with all the tasks of local government.37
In other cases the materials are introduced in a succession of paragraphs, some fairly short, with or without captions, whose contents and succession more or less follow the typical pattern. This format already appears in Zhouxian tigang (no. 0158), one of the earliest Song manuals, which has 106 comparatively short paragraphs with captions. It is also that of Wang Huizu’s 汪輝祖 famous handbooks at the end of the eighteenth century; Wang’s format, consisting of short entries succeeding each other with no explicit logic, in a style at the same time terse, devoid of pathos, and authoritative, and occasionally adducing the author’s experience, was imitated by many authors during the next hundred years and more, some actually writing expansions of the original Xuezhi yishuo 學治臆說 (no. 0212). Yet another format is Huang Liuhong’s 黃六鴻 much longer Fuhui quanshu 福惠全書 (no. 0193), which follows faithfully the standard pattern but expands it over 32 chapters not entirely free of verbosity, in which a number of recommendations are supported by the author’s own comments, remembrances, and documents. There is a strong personal voice in Fuhui quanshu, which is absent from most earlier handbooks but can be found in many later Qing works.
In some cases the pattern outlined above is replaced by different principles of organization—a case in point is Pan Biaocan’s 潘杓燦 Weixin bian 未信編 (no. 0192), discussed below; it can also be embedded in a larger form, like in Xu Wenbi’s 徐文弼 Xinbian lizhi xuanjing 新編吏治懸鏡 (no. 0211), a handbook dating to the 1760s that seems to have been quite popular in the Qing if we are to judge by the number of copies found in modern libraries. There the materials on “assuming office” (蒞任) are concentrated in the first chapter (out of eight), and there is a detailed discussion of the tasks of the yamen’s Six Offices (六房) in chapter 2; the rest of the book is a sort of mini-encyclopedia on all sort of practical matters of interest to local officials, ranging from medical recipes to cure the victims of homicide attempts to a complete list of the empire’s prefectures and counties with their “four-character” code. But whatever the form, the basic elements of the standard model are always there, albeit with variable emphasis.
The differences of emphasis, in fact, may reflect the historical context, if not the spirit of the times. My general impression is that Ming handbooks—at least before the late-sixteenth century—were of a more factual tone than those of the Qing and with a minimum of ideological discourse. By contrast, Qing authors—from Huang Liuhong in the late-seventeenth century to Yuan Shouding 袁守定, the author of Tumin lu 圖民錄 (no. 0209) in the mid-eighteenth century, Wang Huizu in the late-eighteenth, and Fang Dashi 方大湜, the author of Pingping yan 平平言 (no. 0238), in the late-nineteenth, to cite famous names—almost always convey a sense of the urgency caused by the immensity and difficulty of the tasks at hand, or even an anxiety lest they might not be up to the expectations of the dynasty and, especially, the needs of the people.38 It was under the Qing that notions like “serving the people” (為民), “revering the people” (敬民), or “loving the people” (愛民), which in handbook discourse made their appearance with late-Ming authors like Lü Kun 呂坤, became commonplace. And it was this almost-fanatical devotion to the task of good governance and to helping the people that brought together the most committed among administrators of all ranks, those who called themselves “fellows in ideal” (同好, or 同志) in their prefaces: such terms, which seem to have originated among late-Ming philanthropists, became common among handbook authors only later.
The Impact of Private Secretaries
It is important at this point to recall that in the Qing dynasty the small elite of committed, even enthusiastic, administrators that stood out from the rest of the bureaucracy and were frequent handbook authors also included a certain number of so-called “private secretaries” (muyou). Private secretaries, as is well known, were literati hired by local and provincial officials to assist them in the various tasks of government in a non-bureaucratic capacity. Most were unranked, or at best possessed the status of “Confucian student” (諸生).39 They were basically experts and technicians, but not a few behaved like alter egos of the ranking officials they served, and were regarded as such by them. Many authors could be cited to the effect that “the secretary and the official are like the inside and the outside” (幕與官相表裏), or that “only when an official who has an ability for government relies on a secretary who knows government can he achieve results and avoid mistakes” (有能治之官，尤賴有知治之募，而後可措施無失); so that success is indeed “something they achieve together” (相與有成也).40 An anthology of writings related to both local officials and private secretaries, first published in 1867, was actually entitled “Officials and secretaries are in the same boat” (Guanmu tongzhou lu 官幕同舟錄, no. 0272). In any case, the most proficient among private secretaries published handbooks that were not just technical manuals—although they did publish a lot of these as well, as I discuss below41—but also guanzhen in the noble sense of the term. This is not surprising: after all, a private secretary was supposed to assist his employer in many crucial steps of his career, such as assuming his post (蒞任), going through the account transfer procedure (交代) whenever a post changed hands, dealing with all the basic chores of financial and judicial administration, solving delicate legal problems, and so on; and last but not least, he drafted his reports, judgments, or even (in the case of provincial officials) memorials to the throne. Many of the proclamations, circulars, judicial opinions, and correspondences that fill the gongdu collections were, in fact, the work not of the official whose name graced the cover page and chapter captions, but of the muyou who had drafted them for his sake.
The most famous of these high-profile muyou is without doubt Wang Huizu, who had a long and admired career as a private secretary, followed by a no less admired but definitely shorter career as a magistrate (he was dismissed because of a conflict with a superior). His two handbooks, the 1785 Zuozhi yaoyan 佐治藥言 (no. 0268, for private secretaries) and the 1793 Xuezhi yishuo (for magistrates), were regarded as complementing each other and a must-read for officials. In a joint preface to an early-nineteenth-century new printing of the two works, the famous statesman Ruan Yuan 阮元 (1764–1849) wrote: “Altogether these two books have several tens of thousand words, none of which is not about paying attention to the affairs of state, above, and helping the livelihood of the people, below: they are books of extremely concrete utility. For a beginner to read them is better than ten years of experience!” (此二卷反覆數萬言，無非上重國事，下濟民生，乃極有實用之書。初仕者讀之，勝 於十年閱歷矣).
Private secretaries seem to have entered the administrative stage out of nowhere at the beginning of the Qing.42 Interestingly, the first magistrate handbook composed under the new dynasty (to my knowledge at least), Pan Biaocan’s Weixin bian, was the work of a private secretary. In this book the considerations on the magistrate’s behavior and career, on yamen organization, and on general administration, which are the stuff of standard magistrate handbooks, are delayed until Part 3, titled “miscellaneous” (幾務); Parts 1 and 2 deal with the technicalities of justice (刑名) and finances (錢榖), in other words, what will become the subjects of a great many specialized handbooks for private secretaries in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The blurred spheres of competence of the ranking official and of his technical advisers, and the closeness of their respective discourses, are illustrated by the fact that, depending on the commentator, Weixin bian should be considered a manual for private secretaries or a magistrate handbook. As a matter of fact, although composed by a private secretary, the work can be considered as one of the most useful among early-Qing manuals for local officials.
In any event, even though private secretaries were supposed more or less to monopolize technical knowledge, and were hired for that, aspiring officials were urged to make themselves familiar with technicalities, and many did. As a result, even the specialized handbooks on law of finances composed by private secretaries for private secretaries that I will discuss later may also be considered books for officials.
Anthologies of Administrative Documents
In the “Guanzhen” section of Siku quanshu zongmu tiyao one finds another handbook celebrated as a classic, Lü Kun’s late-sixteenth-century Shizheng lu 實政錄 (no. 0126). Yet it is of a form very different from that of the works just described: it is a composite compilation of texts by Lü Kun, many of them proclamations and exhortations directed at various types of local officials, at the rural chiefs in charge of local compacts (鄉約) and baojia, and at the populace. Instead of being a prescriptive work providing exhortations and advice in the abstract, it is in large part an anthology of actual documents produced by Lü Kun in various official capacities and published as a model for other officials. In other words, it is one of the early examples of what would later be called a gongdu collection, a genre extremely popular in the Qing dynasty.43 It may be noted that, while the Ming produced a considerable amount of standard handbooks responding to the guanzhen format, contrary to the old Song models these handbooks all sank into oblivion during the Qing, to be replaced by such models as Huang Liuhong’s Fuhui quanshu or, later, Wang Huizu’s Xuezhi yishuo and its sequels. By contrast, Lü Kun’s Shizheng lu, which does not have the form of a standard guanzhen, never lost its popularity: it went through many new editions, in the nineteenth century especially, and was widely admired and quoted by Qing authors.
In any case, the inclusion of Shizheng lu in the Guanzhen section of the Siku bibliography suggests how close the two formats—admonitions vs. actual documents, or said otherwise, theory vs. practice—were in contemporary perception. As a matter of fact, several gongdu anthologies have been included in recent reprinted collections of official handbooks.
While scholar-officials have kept in their collected writings (文集) examples of their administrative papers—notably their public proclamations and judicial sentences—at least since the Song, it was, with very few exceptions, not until the second half of the Ming that these were published as separate books with the explicit aim to circulate them among the profession; it then became a large-scale activity during the Qing.44 Importantly, in theory at least most of the pieces published in gongdu anthologies were not regarded as literary pieces (as wenzhang 文章), but were “raw” documents, that is, unedited drafts or copies of originals preserved either in the administrative archives of the places where their authors had served, or in the private archive where they also kept their informal correspondence dealing with government business.45
One of the sources for the development of “generalist” gongdu anthologies from the Ming onwards may have been the “records of government” (政書) that Ming magistrates were supposed to compile and present to the court every three years (the normal duration of their tenure).46 As we have seen, some of these records, whose authors, one assumes, were particularly proud of their achievements, were then published for the sake of self-advertisement, and also—of more interest here—for the sake of example (see Part 5). In this sense, the border with gongdu anthologies is not always clear-cut, and the same can be said of celebratory compilations assembled by other parties (i.e., not by the subject of celebration himself), most of which also included administrative papers, judgments, etc.47
The didactic intention of gongdu anthologies became more pronounced during the Qing. Still, the ambiguity between self-congratulation and pedagogy is rarely absent. It could also be argued that the compilation and publication of gongdu anthologies, by definition first-person documents showing off the writings and actions of their author, could be regarded as acts not only of professional pedagogy but also of filial piety—of honoring one’s parents and ancestors—in exactly the same way as the writing of one’s autobiography as it was envisioned by Liu Zhiji 劉知幾 centuries earlier in his influential Shitong 史通.48
In many cases, the author explains in his own preface that he retrieved some “preserved drafts” (存稿) from his own archive and compiled them for the instruction of his sons and grandsons, but in the end reluctantly allowed them to be printed because of the insistence of his friends, disciples, and admirers, who thought that such an example of good government should not get lost to the profession—with which he often concurs, admitting that if he is willing to publish his papers, it is because recounting his efforts and experiences by simply reproducing documents that show how things were actually done may be useful to his fellow officials, especially those without much experience. And whenever the author does not himself stress the exemplariness of his own experience as reflected in his administrative papers, his friends and colleagues—or descendants when it is a posthumous publication—do it for him in their own prefaces: they almost always claim that the collection of documents in question will be a guide or a teacher (師) for future officials, a method to follow (師法), a standard (規矩), a model (圭臬), a precious mirror (寶鑒), or other such phrases.
Some authors published collections of their own papers while still serving as officials, while others waited until retirement. In some cases the compilers were their junior colleagues, or disciples, or private secretaries, or sons. And in other instances the compilation and publication were posthumous: such is the case of one of the collections most used by scholars today, Chen Hongmou’s 陳宏謀 Peiyuan tang oucun gao 培遠堂偶存稿 in 48 juan (no. 0950), prepared by Chen’s adopted son and by his grandson at an unspecified date and reflecting its author’s thirty-year experience as a provincial official in the mid-eighteenth century.49
There exist, to be sure, a few examples of gongdu-style compilations of documents that drew on many authors. Interestingly—and for no particular reason I can think of—they all date from the early-Kangxi period (see Section 6.5). The best known is the large anthology published in Nanjing in 1663 by the playwright-turned-bookseller Li Yu 李漁 under the title Zizhi xinshu 資治新書, which was followed by an even larger sequel in 1667 (nos. 1133, 1135). Contrary to other compilations of the same format printed during the same years, Zizhi xinshu and its continuation went through a quantity of reprints and new editions throughout the Qing dynasty. Yet, allowing for these exceptions, the emphasis in gongdu collections is almost always on the achievements of one individual administrator, whose utterances and actions are illustrated by documents of various types.
The types are not everywhere the same. Still, most anthologies contain in varying proportion examples of (1) correspondence—such as communications to colleagues (移 or 咨), informal letters (稟) or formal reports (詳) to superiors, answers to subordinates (批), etc.; (2) commands—such as directives (檄), orders (諭), rescripts (批諭), and the like; (3) regulations aimed at administrative personnel or at the population at large—such as court regulations (堂規), yamen protocols (款約), procedures (章程), covenants (約), and others; (4) addresses to the people and to yamen personnel—such as proclamations (告示), exhortations (勸諭), prohibitions (禁), etc.; and (5) judiciary pronouncements—such as judgments (判語), court opinions (審語 or 讞語), and other terms,50 as well as answers to litigants (or judicial rescripts, pi 批). Judgments and judicial rescripts constitute a large subset of gongdu materials, and they were often published separately. In the present Bibliography these judgment anthologies are listed in a subsection of “Law and Justice” (4.1.5, “Anthologies of Judicial Sentences and Model Cases”).
The internal organization of gongdu anthologies is also quite variable. Some (like Chen Hongmou’s Peiyuan tang oucun gao, which covers the period 1733–63) are arranged in a strictly chronological order, month by month, progressing from one official position held by the author to the next.51 Others, like Tian Wenjing’s 田文鏡 1727 Fu Yu xuanhua lu 撫豫宣化錄 and its sequels (nos. 0934–0938), make a general distinction between correspondence (文移) and proclamations (告示), arranging the documents chronologically within the two sections. Still others make more complicated distinctions between the different documentary genres, introducing such categories as letters, directives, judgments and judicial opinions, and so on—this is in fact the more usual mode of classification. And finally, there are gongdu anthologies where contents are arranged by topics, either large categories like taxation and justice, or more detailed subjects related to the affairs dealt with by the author during his career.
The variety not only of formats but, above all, of contents is staggering, as a glance at the entries in Sections 6.1 to 6.4 will suggest. In addition, a great many gongdu collections are rich historical sources on the social, economic and administrative conditions in the regions where their authors were in post, or even on particular historical events. (Some are about one particular post, i.e. one particular locality or province, whereas others follow their author along a series of postings.) The collections of judgments, court opinions, and judicial rescripts—either part of a generalist collection or published separately—occasionally provide fascinating information, unfiltered as it were, on everyday life in late-imperial China. Judicial rescripts, in particular, which are essentially responses by the magistrate to the claimants concerning “civil” matters such as conflicts about inheritance, marriage, real estate, etc., teach us as much if not more about grass-roots society in the different regions of China than do the criminal archives of the central government.52 But, again, the aim of these anthologies was rarely to expose conditions or discuss events, or even particular problems; it was to illustrate good government, that is, government by competent and devoted officials, of which of course their authors were convinced that they were valuable examples.
A further factor of variety is that these authors came from every conceivable position in the administrative hierarchy, from magistrate to governor-general: as a result, the documents reproduced deal with the full range of tasks and responsibilities in the territorial administration and contain documents on absolutely every kind of subject of relevance to local government, from the basic tasks of taxation and justice to economic development, maintaining order, improving customs, education, and much more. (In contrast, there exist almost no gongdu collections by metropolitan officials.) They are also a rich repository of evidence about the relations among the different rungs of the bureaucratic hierarchy. While communications upwards (typically, those called either xiang 詳 or bing 稟) are always in a style both respectful and neutral, communications downwards can be stern, impatient, or even scornful. This is notoriously true of the directives and circulars of some of the more activist governors and governors-general in the high Qing—like Tian Wenjing, probably the most scathing of all, or Chen Hongmou—who were quick to denounce the negligence, mediocrity, and careerism of their subordinates. And indeed, publishing this sort of document was meant at the same time to show off the author as a model of strictness and authority and to serve as a warning to local officials: the didactic aim is obvious.
Admittedly, gongdu anthologies are of uneven quality and individuality. In the subgenre of proclamations to yamen personnel and to the population, in particular, there is much repetition, to the point that these pieces often sound as unimaginative variations on set topics. The publication of prohibitions against gambling, brawls, litigation, pilgrimages, religious festivals and nightly operatic shows, or proclamations discouraging suicide, encouraging neighborly (or conjugal) harmony, promoting frugality and hard work, and so on, seems to have been a routine exercise for officials arriving in a new place. As a result, many proclamations on these subjects read very much the same down to the end of the imperial period and from one extremity of the empire to the other. Likewise, the directives and procedures handed down by a new official to his personnel, his announcements that he will accept no gift and tolerate no outside intervention, are always worded in very similar terms: indeed, one wonders what the real effect of all these texts may have been.
Yet many officials included them in their published gongdu anthologies, and even a seasoned governor like Chen Hongmou promulgated the same proclamations again and again and circulated them among local officials under him in each of the many provinces where he served, as can be seen in chapter after chapter of his Peiyuan tang oucun gao. The reason is that, despite their apparent banality and frequent repetitiveness, these pieces were about social behaviors and popular customs that were seen as perennial problems by any bureaucrat eager to do more than simply levy taxes and maintain order. Composing them (or having them composed by one’s secretaries) and posting them everywhere was part of the actions expected from a committed official. I should add that the pieces anthologized in gongdu collections were not all empty routine statements: most anthologies feature orders, prohibitions, sets of regulations (章程), and other such commands dealing in detail with very concrete problems, specific to the time and place where they were issued.53 All these texts—the routine and the specific—were a natural feature in collections meant to provide future colleagues with examples to follow.54
However, even if the pedagogical dimension is usually prominent, or at least present, in gongdu anthologies, literary self-glorification or family status enhancement sometimes seem to have been the main motive for publication. A question has indeed been frequently asked in the course of our project: should every anthology of administrative documents by individual authors be included, even obscure family publications clearly meant to advertise an author’s public virtues rather than serve colleagues with useful examples? The line between the truly didactic and the purely self-serving is never easy to draw, and even printed anthologies without much circulation or actual impact—even unpublished manuscripts, in fact—at least made the claim to be models for the profession. This is why it was decided to include in the Bibliography everything of this sort that came to our attention.
This does not mean, I admit, that we have been able to include all the gongdu anthologies still in existence. They are not always easy to locate in library catalogues or stacks, because librarians may have catalogued or stored them in unlikely sections and because many of them bear titles that at first sight are not suggestive of their contents. Besides, many exist only in single copies not held by any of the major libraries we have been able to explore. And finally, it is likely that a great many titles were composed and printed but must be considered lost today.55 Still, unexpected yet interesting titles spring up regularly, in particular in recently-published reprint collections, and will have to be described in a revised edition of or sequel to the present Bibliography.
The Problem of Memorials
If our project has included gongdu anthologies, why not include published collections of memorials (奏疏, 奏議, 奏稿, and other terms) as well? It is a fact that administrative documents and memorials to the throne are sometimes published together in an individual author’s anthology of government papers. More to the point, the topics they discuss may be fairly close, or even exactly the same, and with a comparable level of detail. Yet memorials (zou) and administrative papers (gongdu) are almost never mixed up in the same section, but are clearly separated—as indeed they are in all the literary collections (文集) that contain examples of them.56 A typical example is seen in Tian Wenjing’s Fu Yu xuanhua lu and its continuations, already alluded to, where memorials, official correspondence, and public proclamations are each recorded in separate chapters, the latter two taking in fact much more space—and this is why it went without saying that these works should be included in the Bibliography. Still, in most cases the memorials and gongdu were published as separate works.57
Why was this so? The reasons were both form and purpose. To begin with, memorials, being written for the emperor and liable to be marked with the imperial vermilion brush (硃批), were of a class separate from all other documents. But there is more than that. As I see it, the publication of memorials by individual authors had a literary, political, and social, much more than practical and didactic, significance. Indeed, because of their political—as opposed to administrative—content, the very fact of privately publishing memorials was long considered a sensitive matter, especially in the Qing: let us not forget that the Yongzheng emperor ordered that all the rescripted memorials (硃批奏摺) from the Kangxi reign be returned to the palace, and that from then on memorials should be immediately returned after their authors had read the rescripts.
There are a few exceptions to this pattern, however. Thus, in the late-Wanli period of the Ming dynasty, when initiatives for reform were largely stymied by the emperor’s unwillingness to respond to communications from civil officials, some of the latter began publishing collections not only of gongdu but also of memorials as an informal way to record and perpetuate reforms of administrative practice in particular offices. A good example is Bi Ziyan 畢自嚴, who in the wake of several gongdu collections (see under Zaijin kuanyi 菑祲窾議, no. 0743, and Tao Min wenwu jinyue, no. 1108; others are known by their title but no longer extant), produced six distinct collections of memorials for each of the higher offices in which he subsequently served: their intended function may have been quite close to that of his earlier gongdu collections.58
In sum, even if some memorials could possibly convey a wealth of information useful to government practitioners, including in the lower levels of the administrative apparatus, they were—especially the palace memorials (奏摺) under the Qing—unique documents since in theory at least they conveyed a direct dialogue between emperor and official. Their contents were by definition directed at the throne, not at the author’s superiors, colleagues, subordinates, or constituencies, as was the case with the communications and proclamations collected in gongdu anthologies. As such, it was less obvious to publish them as examples of administration at work, considering in particular that their authors were almost exclusively officials occupying the highest positions of responsibility (such as provincial governors, ministers, or censors), in other words, people who, in theory at least, were not in need of being taught their job.59
For all these reasons, with few exceptions published collections of memorials to the throne have not been included in the didactic literature that is the subject of the Bibliography.60 Admittedly—and this goes beyond memorials—the distinction between the didactic and the political sphere is not always straightforward. Still, administration can be taught in handbooks as a set of procedures, behaviors, and techniques which are (or should be) accepted as givens and which are meant for implementation; by contrast, policies are a matter of statement and debate. This, incidentally, is why a collection like the famed Huangchao jingshi wenbian 皇朝經世文編 (1827)—which contains many memorials and private letters, as well as a variety of essays—does not seem to me to belong to the didactic sphere either, even though much of the proposals, discussions and denunciations of bad practices it contains find echoes in the guanzhen and gongdu that are the basis of the Bibliography.
Technical Handbooks
Works exclusively devoted to the technical aspects of government are of a nature essentially different from guanzhen and gongdu, in the sense that they do not aim to “admonish” their readers to conform to moral, behavioral, or professional values, and do not present them with actual models of action, but convey neutral and precise information on how to perform any number of administrative tasks. There is a degree of overlap in contents, to be sure, since most handbooks for local officials feature sections devoted to technical matters, as we saw, and gongdu anthologies likewise include documents dealing with the same domains—be it tax administration, famine relief, justice, local defense, or whatever. However, what I call technical handbooks are different because, in a general way, they are entirely focused on a particular technique or set of techniques and on the related tasks, rather than on the men who were supposed to use the techniques in question and perform the tasks.
Technical handbooks are described in Part 4 of the Bibliography. Before discussing a few important genres described in some of its sections and subsections, however, a word needs to be said of the technical handbooks explicitly written by and for private secretaries (muyou) (found in Part 2, section 2.2.1).
Technical Handbooks for Private Secretaries
Discussing earlier the contribution of private secretaries to local administration from the mid-seventeenth century onwards, I suggested that among their writings we distinguish between purely technical handbooks and the much less numerous works that could be (and were) regarded as belonging to the guanzhen sphere in the sense that they discussed not only techniques, but also behavior, character, and values.
To be sure, the distinction was never absolute. After all, even the purely practical guides written by secretaries dealt with administrative domains that were almost always discussed in magistrate handbooks and were indeed the foundation of local government. These specialties can be more or less subsumed under the twin disciplines of law (刑名) and finances (錢榖). As a matter of fact, xingming and qiangu were the specialties of the top two private secretaries in any local official cabinet (幕府) in Qing China, who were commonly referred to by the same two terms. Even though, ideally, a magistrate should be knowledgeable about every technicality, under the Qing at least it was generally admitted that, even so, without these two assistants he would not be able to do much.61 They were expected to be conversant with every law and regulation, national or provincial, check on every detail, control the work of clerks, advise their employer on what to do and not to do, and draft his official correspondence and reports. It is therefore not surprising that manuals for muyou went into considerably more detail about such matters than standard magistrate handbooks.
Specialized manuals for muyou, which seem to make their appearance during the first half of the eighteenth century, can be classified into (1) “generalist” manuals covering both justice and finance, plus possibly a few other subjects; (2) manuals for legal specialists; and (3) manuals for fiscal specialists.
Manuals for fiscal secretaries (section 2.2.1.2.), which typically bear titles like Qiangu zhaiyao 錢榖摘要 or Qiangu beiyao 錢榖備要, are the most numerous. A few were published works—some, like Wang Youhuai’s 王又槐 1793 Qiangu beiyao (no. 0284), becoming quite popular and going through several editions; but a majority were manuscripts, anonymous most of the time, that circulated among the profession, being in the process enriched with additions and updates scribbled in the margins, and replicated over and over. The actual numbers of such manuscripts in existence at any given time must have been incomparably larger than what can be retrieved in present-day libraries. They illustrate the transmission of a kind of knowledge that was not really “secret,” despite frequent claims to the contrary, but certainly very specialized. Not only did this knowledge need to be constantly updated as new regulations and precedents kept being published, it also had to be adapted to the specificities of particular provinces, with which officials might not be familiar since they were by definition appointed from outside—and it was in fact the same with their muyou, who most of the time seem to have looked for employment far from home.62 Whatever the extent of their provincial specialization, all the qiangu manuals cover, with few variations, the totality of the economic functions of county-level administrations, from taxation and local budgets to famine relief, agricultural improvement, infrastructures, and much more.63
The situation is somewhat different with handbooks for legal secretaries (section 2.2.1.3).64 Though specialists of law were the most sought after and best paid among private secretaries, and their “learning” considered the most important to their employer, works that discuss the tasks of the post in their entirety, as do handbooks for financial secretaries, are surprisingly few. Mostly, the tasks of legal secretaries are discussed in the sections devoted to them in generalist handbooks for private secretaries, such as Wan Weihan’s 萬維𩙶 1773 Xingqian zhinan 刑錢指南 (no. 0266) and a few others. For more detailed materials, legal specialists and their employers would turn to more specialized kinds of works, dealing with the Penal Code, procedural rules, criminal jurisprudence, forensics, etc., that concerned all administrators and were part of a “national” system to a much higher degree than fiscal and economic policies, where provinces had more leeway to adapt to local socioeconomic realities. It is to this massive and diverse set of judicial treatises aimed at helping officials and their assistants in their everyday work that I now turn.
Technical Treatises on the Law
The specialized literature on law and justice produced in late-imperial China is truly immense. Interestingly, and for reasons we can only speculate about, it seems to have grown at an unprecedented rate in the nineteenth century.65 But as in other domains, the rise of private-secretary specialists had a profound impact on the literature from the early decades of the Qing onward, even though they did not monopolize the field. Their impact in fact varied according to the different genres outlined below.
(1) Guides to the Judicial Procedure
We have, to begin with, technical guides meant for practitioners, that is, in the Qing at least, not only officials but also the secretaries who advised them, even though they had no authority to intervene publicly.66 (In contrast with the handbooks for muyou discussed above, these guides, including those written by and in fact for muyou, are almost always phrased as giving advice to the officials themselves.) While helping the inexperienced beginner was a frequent justification for publishing handbooks in general, it acquired special urgency when it came to judicial matters. One complaint often encountered in prefaces is that literati are full of scorn for legal studies and only interested in philology, poetry, and writing examination essays, and that, as a result, when one day they are appointed to a magistracy and suddenly confronted with the reality of courts—with all the shouting and violence and with all sorts of crafty people trying to take advantage of them—they are at sea, become panicked, and make terrible mistakes.
Hence the usefulness, in particular, of the manuals devoted to judicial procedure, in other words to such topics as receiving complaints, judicial hearings, investigating cases, cross-questioning, forensic examinations, the use of torture, writing sentence proposals, and so on. These questions are discussed in part or in totality in a large number of works as well as in specialized sections devoted to them in generalist handbooks.67 As far as monographic works are concerned—the ones listed in section 4.1.3—a few titles from the Ming have been preserved, but most of those known to me date to the late-eighteenth century and after, with a majority due to muyou authors. Wang Youhuai’s Ban’an yaolüe 辦案要略 (no. 0457)—by a private secretary—and Liu Heng’s 劉衡 Dulü xinde 讀律心得 (no. 0462)—by an official—can be cited as classics of the genre.
(2) Simplified Presentations of the Law
Another category of practical guides especially helpful for beginners but used by seasoned administrators as well is the rather large ensemble of simplified or redesigned presentations of the Penal Code and of the administrative regulations known as chufen zeli 處分則例 (lit. “regulations on sanctions”) that appeared in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
First are the “rhymes” (section 4.1.2.2), consisting of uncomplicated verse easy to memorize, which compress with much ingenuity the essentials of the Penal Code, or parts of it, such as the degrees of mourning, five punishments, degrees of exile, types of homicide, essentials of forensics, etc. They are occasionally accompanied by explanations in prose. Some of these rather simple works were in fact aimed at the citizenry as well, so as to inculcate them with the consequences of bad behavior. As far as separate publications are concerned, all the examples I know of date from the nineteenth century. The use of mnemonic songs (often called gejue 歌訣) for propaganda, or simply to help people master complicated matters, is much older, however, and numerous examples are found in generalist works.
Then are the tables (tu 圖 or biao 表) (section 4.1.2.3), that is, the presentation of bodies of laws and regulations in a graphic form where the original texts are abridged, and more importantly, where their logic is made immediately apparent through the layout of the page—one of the catchwords for this type of presentation being zhizhang 指掌, or something as simple as pointing at your palm. Resorting to tabular representation to present complex data is an old technique in China: one example that comes to mind is the set of tables opening the Penal Code since the beginning of the Ming, of which the most ingenious perhaps are those dealing with mourning categories. The first extant example known to me of an independent work using tables to describe the legal system is the 1734 Qiangu xingming bianlan 錢穀刑名便覽 compiled by a private secretary named Dong Gongzhen 董公振 (no. 0432). From then on, the genre appears to have been extremely successful, if we are to judge by the number of titles published, new editions, pirate editions, and also by the many copies preserved in present-day libraries.68 Due to the clarity of the tables’ layout and their user-friendly arrangement, they were (and still are, in fact) an excellent means of finding one’s way in the maze of statutes and substatutes that composed the Penal Code, not to speak of the even more complicated administrative regulations. They must have been prized by both beginning officials as a convenient introduction to the law and the more seasoned practitioners as a useful tool in the midst of judicial activities, where legally well-founded decisions had to be made fast. The prefaces and fanli are quick to insist, however, that using the tables is not sufficient in the long run: for the professional administrator they are rather a “clue” (引線) that indicates where to go in the more complete texts.
(3) Commentaries to the Penal Code
These complete texts were, essentially, those of the Penal Code and of the administrative regulations (則例), the latter codified in a large quantity of official publications. Here a distinction must be made as concerns the present Bibliography. On the one hand, the basic texts (i.e., without commentaries or explanations) published by the government cannot be considered “handbooks” or working aids, and have therefore been excluded from the present selection: they were meant not to teach or help, but to command—or to put it otherwise, they were the substance of the law, that to which one needs to be properly introduced by didactic works. In contrast, the many editions of the Penal Code with commentaries (section 4.1.1) put out by individual authors (be they officials or commoners), which flourished under the Ming and Qing and many of which were commercial publications, rightly belong to the category of didactic works.69 In any event, these, not the government imprints, were the editions of the Code that local officials and their assistants routinely used. The commentaries followed the order of the statutes (which they quoted in full most of the time);70 they were written in simple language—as opposed to the terse idiom, at times bordering on the obscure, that is so peculiar to Chinese penal law—and the layout and printing of the page was designed to be user-friendly. Such books were not scholarly studies for armchair specialists or legal theorists, they were intended as textual aids, research tools, guides for decision-making, and repositories of data for the judges and their advisers.
We hope to have located most of the texts still extant, but there certainly existed more, both manuscript and printed.71 In any event, the variety is considerable, and it is especially so during the Ming. In a way, the genre is dominated by the contrast between Ming and Qing. To begin with, practically all commented editions of the Penal Code in the Ming were produced by officials, whereas with very few exceptions those in the Qing were the work of private secretaries specializing in law.72 Another difference is that, whereas Ming works in this category display much variety and even inventiveness, their Qing successors are characterized by their conformity. In the late-eighteenth century they found a more or less final form, replicated in countless commercial editions nearly through the end of the dynasty.
The variety of Ming commentaries—even though they generously quote from each other—is readily apparent when browsing through section 4.1.1. The first ones are contemporaneous with the early recensions of the 1397 Da Ming lü 大明律 that established the pattern of the Penal Code for the rest of the imperial era, with its seven parts (general notions plus laws corresponding to the “Six Ministries”) divided into 30 sections in part inherited from the Tang Code, and preceded by a set of tables and diagrams. The 1521 compiler’s preface to Da Ming lü jie fuli 大明律解附例 (no. 0338) mentions the existence of more than ten previous commentaries. The genre seems to have developed greatly from the Jiajing era onward, particularly after the promulgation of the 1585 Wanli Code, which officialized the practice of directly attaching the substatutes (條例) to the relevant statutes instead of publishing them separately in official compilations named Wenxing tiaoli 問刑條例.73 A number of these private editions of the Code with commentaries dating from the Jiajing and Wanli reigns display an encyclopedic bent that make them go well beyond the usual bounds of the genre, even though the text of the Code remains the backbone and organizing principle. Typical of this period are commercial editions splitting each page into two or three horizontal registers packed with a vast amount of explanatory and/or ancillary materials, such as quotations from institutional compendia, models for writing any sorts of documents (judgments, reports, and so forth), explanations of terms, cross-references to other statutes, rhymes, hypothetical cases (introduced by jiaru 假如, “supposing that …,” and ending with the question zuo he wenni 作何問擬, “how to adjudicate?,” or variants thereof, followed by the judgment proposal), materials on forensics, proclamations, lists of terms and phrases used in judicial documents, and in some instances advice and admonitions on official behavior similar to those in magistrate handbooks—all of this in addition to the text of the Code accompanied by a running commentary that in many instances borrows from earlier similar works. Some of the practical information—e.g. on terminology and phrasing in legal documents, or hypothetical cases—is actually quite close in form and content to what is found in handbooks for litigation masters (on which see below).
One work stands out among this proliferation, because of its concentration on purely legal matters at the expense of ancillary materials, of the originality of its thorough-going commentary on the text of the Code, which both explains its meaning and discusses legal issues, and finally, of its profound influence on Qing commentaries: this is Wang Kentang’s 王肯堂 Da Ming lü fuli jianshi 大明律附例箋釋 (or Lüli jianshi, and other variant titles) (no. 0371), with a 1612 preface, of which an influential Qing adaptation was published in two separate editions in 1689 and 1691. Wang Kentang’s Jianshi (as it is usually referred to) is indeed acknowledged as one of the two major sources of the general commentary incorporated into the 1725 official edition of the Qing Code,74 and it is consistently quoted in all later commentaries. The other important source, both of the 1725 official commentary and of subsequent private commentaries, is Shen Zhiqi’s 沈之奇 1715 Da Qing lü jizhu 大清律輯注 (no. 0378). The author of this highly innovative work does draw inspiration from a host of Ming commentators, Wang Kentang among them, but by his own estimation about half of his commentary represents his own views.
Significantly, and contrary to his Ming predecessors, Shen Zhiqi, the first original commentator of the Code during the Qing,75 and the most influential, was not an official but a private secretary about whom we know very little. As I mentioned, it is the same with his successors, at least those whose work circulated widely and exerted real influence. Such is the case of Wan Weihan’s 萬維𩙶 1766 Da Qing lüli jizhu 大清律例集註 (no. 0382), whose contents were adapted to the new organization and content of the Code set by the 1740 Qianlong edition. Both Shen and Wan are important sources for a new format that emerged at the end of the eighteenth century and was to dominate the market in the nineteenth. The works following this new format contain not only the text of the statutes and substatutes, with the Yongzheng official commentary (all in the lower register of the page), as well as quotations from earlier commentaries, first of all Shen Zhiqi (in the middle register), but also a variety of relevant materials such as memorials, exchanges between provincial governors and the Ministry of Justice, officially circulated leading cases (通行成案) that could be adduced as precedents,76 and regulations on sanctions (處分則例) (all of this also in the middle register). In other words, they revived the late-Ming tradition of private encyclopedic editions of the Code, with the difference that the reference materials included were all government documents, as opposed to the ancillary materials of every description mentioned above.
These late-eighteenth century and nineteenth-century commentaries appeared under a number of more or less similar titles containing phrases like huizuan 彙纂, quanzuan 全纂, or tongzuan 統纂, expressing their ambition of collecting all the commentaries available. Most share the same yellow cover-leaves (i.e., title-pages, feiye 扉頁) containing advertising texts, and the same front matter, including imperial edicts printed in red.77 All the compilers were legal secretaries, who in some cases worked as teams whose members shared the different sections of the Code among themselves and usually communicated with each other through correspondence, but in some examples convened the equivalent of seminars that would be held for significant periods of time, usually in Hangzhou or in the region.78 By far the most successful title was the 1826 Da Qing lüli zengxiu tongzuan jicheng 大清律例增修統纂集成 (no. 0393), a Hangzhou product that seems to have been sold all over the empire, and of which innumerable updated editions were put out in Hangzhou and elsewhere right through the end of the Qing dynasty (the extremely long list of editions under no. 0393 is probably incomplete).
(4) Leading Cases and Ministry Memoranda
The compilations of “leading cases” (成案) and similar materials are another genre that flourished during the eighteenth and especially nineteenth centuries and appears to have been extensively used by jurists, in particular those who worked for review authorities such as the Surveillance Commissions in the provinces and the Ministry of Justice in Beijing.79 These compilations, some very large, can be described as databases of judgments reviewed and approved by the central authorities—nominally by the emperor, whose rescript was indispensable, though in most cases the actual decision-makers were the officials of the Ministry of Justice or of the so-called Three Judicial Offices (三法司), i.e., in addition to the Ministry of Justice, the Censorate (都察院) and the Court of Judicial Review (大理寺). The cases reviewed were essentially capital cases, the only ones to be automatically submitted to the central government for review and final decision.80 Only leading cases that had been officially circulated (通行)—typically, by being published in the Peking Gazette—could be explicitly cited as “precedents” in judgments; but the rest were regarded as useful models of legal reasoning that helped judges to decide on the correct analogies when there were no directly applicable article in the Code and to fine-tune judgments so as not to risk rejection.81 As a matter of fact, several anthologies are devoted to “rejected cases” (駁案) and intended to illustrate the sort of flaws in presenting a case and referring to the Code that led the Ministry of Justice specialists to refuse a judgment proposal and return the file requesting more investigation and/or a better argumentation.
Indeed, the ministry’s specialists were regarded as the ultimate experts in matters of interpretation of the Code, and in any event they were the de facto ultimate deciders to conclude a case. During the 1780s the “ministry memoranda” (說帖) that recorded their internal discussions concerning the legal interpretation of specific cases came to be used as an archive of precedents within the ministry itself; and once they began to be circulated and published they were regarded by the bureaucracy at large as a repository of authoritative advice.82 Ministry memoranda are of variable length, some recording a case almost in its entirety, but most concentrating on the discussion of doubtful points of law therein. They are therefore different from leading cases, which are “concluded” (成) cases. Yet they often are featured together with leading cases in the same compilations, the classic example being the highly popular Xing’an huilan 刑案匯覽 (no. 0516) and its sequels. For this reason, both shuotie and cheng’an compilations are found in the same section of the Bibliography (section 4.1.4).
A majority of cheng’an and/or shuotie databases, especially in the nineteenth century, were anonymous works, often left in manuscript form. When they were not anonymous, their compilers were either private secretaries who combed through the Peking Gazette and possibly the archives of the provinces where they served, or officials, in particular those who served or had served in the Ministry of Justice, where they had direct access to the materials stored there and were able to make copies. Practically all collections follow the order of the statutes in the Penal Code, each piece being keyed to the statute applicable, making consultation comparatively easy—as long as one is familiar with the structure of the Code—all the more so when they are equipped with detailed tables of contents and when the central margins in the body of the work (the so-called banxin 版心) indicate the statute applying or the category of crime discussed on the page, and possibly the province where the case occurred and the name of the culprit. This mode of classification was an important plus for users, including Ministry officials, since the original pieces in the Ministry of Justice archives were arranged in a strictly chronological order.
Wang Zuyuan 王祖源, the compiler of a small collectanea of texts on judicial administration printed in Sichuan in 1880 and titled Mingxing bijiao lu 明刑弼教錄 (no. 0710), speaks of [Da Qing] Lüli huizuan 大清律例彙纂 (no. 0383) and Xing’an huilan—both big compendiums, one of code commentaries and the other of judicial cases—as works that must be kept near at hand by judges, even though they are too massive for quick reference during a court session, which is why one also needs shorter handbooks. One century earlier, in 1781, the preface to Bo’an xinbian 駁案新編 (no. 0488)—a comparatively large collection of “rejected cases”—posited that this sort of compilation was of great use for helping magistrates not just to find materials for analogies, but also to deliver better judgments by connecting the circumstances of each case and the text of the law.
Still, one may well imagine that a number of local officials had only a hazy idea of all the riches and subtleties stored in such repositories: the literature is not lacking in complaints that freshmen administrators having just emerged from the examination system do not know anything about law and indeed consider it a vulgar topic. With few exceptions, even professionally-devoted field officials with a good knowledge of the Penal Code—of whom there were probably more than is often said—could not match the level of juridical erudition and theoretical sophistication of the officials who reviewed their decisions at the Ministry of Justice. But in the Qing at least, as we have already seen, local officials spent significant amounts of money to pay specialized advisers who could mobilize that sort of knowledge for their sake. All the important commentaries to the Qing Code were compiled by specialized muyou, and it is probable that their reading public was largely composed of their colleagues; thus the inscription on the cover-leaf of Dulü peixi—not strictly speaking a commentary to the Code, to be sure: “To be scrutinized by the gentlemen of the private secretariats” (燕臺諸先生鑒閱).
Whatever the case may have been, both the commentaries and databases must be seen as extensions of the handbooks and working aids, more massive in contents but essentially belonging to the same sphere, hence their inclusion in the Bibliography.
(5) Anthologies of Model Judgments
Anthologies of leading cases—which did not appear until the eighteenth century—were not the only places where judges could find examples of sound and unimpeachable judgments respecting the letter and spirit of the Code. Another category of useful works was the individual anthologies of judgments—sometimes called “casebooks”—privately published by the officials who had delivered them (section 4.1.5). There was in fact a rich tradition of collective (as opposed to individual) compilations of model cases and judicial sentences by celebrated judges of old, originating with the famous Song-period Yiyu ji 疑獄集 (no. 0536), Zheyu guijian 折獄龜鑒 (no. 0538), and Tangyin bishi 棠陰比事 (no. 0539), which endured as classics throughout late-imperial times. Another, somewhat different, collective compilation dating to the Song is Minggong shupan qingming ji 名公書判清明集 (no. 0537), a collection that recorded judicial sentences culled from contemporary archives in Fujian. Compilations of judgments by a multiplicity of authors appear to have been much rarer in later times, however.83
As already noted, anthologies of their own judgments by individual authors published as examples for the profession may be regarded as a subgenre of the gongdu generalist collections, most of which contain sections devoted to judgments. In other words, getting an overview of the judicial activity of individual officials entails examining both the specialized anthologies discussed here and the relevant sections in generalist gongdu.84 Individual judgment anthologies made their appearance in the sixteenth century, and they multiplied in the Qing.85 Contrary to the leading cases discussed above, which by definition are final judgments, a large number of the pieces in individual anthologies are, rather, judgment proposals submitted by the magistrates and prefects for review by the higher courts: local officials were not entitled to conclude on their own authority criminal affairs entailing more than a beating as punishment.86 Regarding the so-called “minor affairs” (細事), in contrast, magistrates and prefects enjoyed a high level of autonomy. Their decisions—sometimes lengthily argued—feature in their individual collections either as “judgments” (判語), sometimes “judgments delivered in court” (堂判 or 堂諭), or as “answers to complaints” (批詞, or simply 批); the latter, which are in fact much more numerous, could be handed down in the course of a lawsuit—as an act in the procedure—or conclude it, in which case the arrangements ordered by the official did not necessarily involve a punishment.
A subgenre of the “casebook,” limited in numbers but always of the highest interest, consists of often lively narratives in the first person in which the judge recounts in detail his investigations and concentrates on his own actions, deliberations, possibly uncertainties, and on his dealings with the litigants, witnesses, and other people involved, and sometimes with his superiors. Even though some of these texts are evocative of gong’an 公案 fiction and contain little legal reasoning, they are definitely records of real cases and meant to offer the reader examples of judicial ingenuity and professionalism. In this way they must be considered alongside the more formal documentary collections of judgments.87
To these publications, which dealt with actual cases, should be added a number of collections of fictitious judgements. Here an important distinction must be made between, on the one hand, collections consisting of models of judgment-writing aimed at examination candidates (examination judgments were a peculiar genre that endured through the eighteenth century),88 occasionally at clerks and other personnel in charge of drafting actual judgments; and, on the other hand, those containing hypothetical judgments intended for officials and their underlings (and used by litigation masters as well), in other words, people who were dealing with actual cases. The publication of hypothetical cases appears to have been common in the Ming.89 They are typically composed of an account of the facts, introduced by jiaru 假如 (“assuming that …”), or simply ru, followed by an answer (答) consisting of a judgment proposal (there are variants to such phrasing). They are signaled, among other characteristics, by the fact that the individuals involved bear fictitious names using the order of the Baijia xing 百家姓 for the surnames and the tiangan 天干 numerals for the given names (so, Zhao Jia 趙甲, Qian Yi 錢乙, and so on). Though a few independent works are entirely or partly devoted to hypothetical cases (see Zhaoni jiaru 招擬假如, no. 0692, and Zhaoni zhinan 招擬指南, no. 0693), the latter mostly feature as ancillary materials in the private editions of the Code with commentaries discussed earlier.90
(6) Autumn Assizes Materials
The term cheng’an (leading case) is sometimes used by authors referring to a very peculiar format of case reports, namely, the short abstracts, called qiushen lüejie 秋審略節, produced by Ministry of Justice officials in the course of the autumn assizes procedure which kept them busy for several months every year.91 The purpose of the assizes, which involved the Three Judicial Offices (including the Ministry of Justice) and the emperor himself, was to review the cases of all the criminals in the empire who had been sentenced to capital punishment with the proviso “to be implemented after the assizes” (監候, lit., “waiting in prison”), and decide on whether they would be proposed for immediate execution (情實, lit., “circumstances established”) or benefit from a reprieve (緩決, lit., “decision postponed”).92 The proposals eventually submitted to the emperor relied on a careful examination of the circumstances and legal arguments in the files, the conclusion of the ministry officials being encapsulated in the abstracts mentioned above.
A number of anthologies of such abstracts were compiled beginning in the late-eighteenth century (a large selection features in section 4.1.6 together with guides to the autumn assizes procedure and relevant regulations). They are often found in the form of manuscripts, most of which must have been compiled by Ministry of Justice personnel for their own use as reference and “model” (圭臬). They were said to be jealously kept as secret treasures, and outsiders allowed to have a glimpse had much difficulty to make copies. But published collections eventually appeared, which were implicitly and sometimes explicitly intended for the judicial bureaus (讞局) in the provincial capitals that prepared every year the files of capital cases submitted to the Ministry of Justice for the next session, together with their own propositions for the final verdict. (Criminals waiting to know their fate were imprisoned in the localities where the crime had been committed, and as the case might be would be executed there.)
(7) Forensics Manuals
The conclusions from the forensic examination of a victim were of course crucial in determining the punishment inflicted on a criminal, in other words, whether or not he would be condemned to death, and if so, to what sort of death penalty: only an autopsy could confirm or contradict the confessions and testimonies, establish whether or not a certain blow had been lethal, suggest whether the wounds observed revealed an intent to kill, distinguish between suicides (or accidents) and homicides, and so forth. These conclusions were sometimes hotly debated, not only by the relatives of the criminal and of the victim, but also by the superior courts—right through the Ministry of Justice Bureau of Autumn Assizes which prepared the dossiers for imperial review—whenever they found inconsistencies in the file or had doubts about the sincerity of the investigation.
As is well known, the entire process of forensic examination followed a manual whose founding version was Song Ci’s 宋慈 1247 Xiyuan jilu 洗冤集錄 (no. 0630)—a title that clearly suggests that there already existed documents on forensics, here “collected,” which is indeed confirmed by archeological findings going back to the Qin dynasty.93 A number of variants or imitations of the text circulated during the next centuries, until the Qing published an official version in 1742, titled Lüli guan jiaozheng xiyuan lu 律例館校正洗冤錄 (no. 0643).94
By itself, the Xiyuan lu is no more than a practical guide, a sort of how-to book combining a certain kind of medical knowledge, a range of methods for autopsies, and careful attention to judicial procedure: that is how it originated in the Southern Song, and as far as its contents are concerned it remained so until the end. In the eighteenth century, however, its status changed when for the first time its text was rather significantly modified: the new version of Xiyuan lu compiled in 1742 by the Bureau of the Code (Lüli guan) of the Ministry of Justice, which retained only about 60% of the original Song work, became a government text with an authority equal to that of the Penal Code, and the only one officials were allowed to use and to refer to in their reports.95 This new Xiyuan lu was subject to criticism almost from the start, and in the following decades it was privately enriched with various commentaries, notes, and additions (notably leading cases) whose contents were in part based on the commentators’ field experience: to a degree, forensic science was making progress as time passed, but this progress was not taken into account in the official version, the only one quotable in the procedure, which stayed unchanged to the end of the dynasty.96 Hence the importance—both for the contemporary practitioner and for the present-day historian—of the private editions of the work, most of them nineteenth-century expansions of a 1796 private edition of the official Xiyuan lu enriched with commentaries and additions, titled Xiyuan lu jizheng 洗冤錄集證 (no. 0649) and prepared by Wang Youhuai 王又槐, the legal adviser already mentioned in connection with the private editions of the Penal Code that dominated the nineteenth-century market. (See also Xiyuan lu xiangyi 洗冤錄詳義, no. 0658, and Xiyuan lu yizheng 洗冤錄義證, no. 0664.) Section 4.1.7 of the Bibliography describes these and earlier versions of Xiyuan lu and similar texts as well as a variety of specialized treatises and documentary anthologies dealing with the theory and practice of autopsies, discussing legal and procedural problems, and offering materials easy to grasp by the uninitiated.97
(8) Handbooks for Litigation Masters
The hypothetical cases I mentioned earlier, found in a number of Ming works, have a close equivalent in a genre that at first sight should not feature in a bibliography devoted to “handbooks for officials”—the so-called handbooks for litigation masters, or songshi miben 訟師秘本, which made their appearance in the late sixteenth century and continued to be published through the last years of the Qing.98 The activities of the legal specialists who produced them, which were not unlike those of our lawyers (except that they were not allowed to appear in court and had to operate from behind the scene), were regarded by the authorities with the highest suspicion, or even as completely illegal. Even before the publication of songshi miben was formally outlawed in 1742, in official texts litigation masters were often called songgun 訟棍, or “litigation thugs,” more or less equivalent to “pettifoggers.”99 Yet it is clear that they were not all vicious manipulators eager to enrich themselves by encouraging people to go to court and more often than not causing the ruin of both plaintiff and defendant. Browsing through their handbooks reveals that they performed highly useful services not only to individuals embroiled in conflicts, but also to people having to deliver assessments or guarantees to the authorities, or to communities requesting help from, or trying to work out arrangements with, the local government: their area of competence was doing paperwork in the prescribed manner and using persuasive language, and their strength lay in their familiarity with the ways of the administration, and possibly in their personal ties with people in the yamen.
Whatever the case may have been, after some exchanges with Professor Fuma Susumu 夫馬進, a leading student of the genre, it was decided to include a subsection (4.1.8) on handbooks for litigation masters at the end of the section on “Law and Justice.”100 There are indeed good reasons for doing so. The first is what I just mentioned: examples of accusations (告) and rebuttals (訴), followed most of the time by the magistrate’s arbitration or judgment (批, 審語, etc.), occupy the larger part of the text of typical songshi miben and more or less define the genre: the structure is comparable to that of the hypothetical cases encountered in a variety of late-Ming publications for officials, and so is the anonymity of the protagonists in most of the cases recorded, clearly showing that these are not real cases.
Another reason—especially during the last decades of the Ming—is the sometimes striking resemblance between the more elaborate songshi miben and the “encyclopedic” editions of the Penal Code with commentaries and extra materials described earlier, which are typical of the same period. The two share the method of splitting up the page into parallel horizontal registers and filling them with contents partly overlapping: for example, the long lists of phrases and catchwords, sometimes arranged by the six domains of government activity and meant to enhance the rhetoric and make the written complaints and judgments more persuasive, which are a typical feature of songshi miben, are also found in perfectly respectable editions of the Code with commentaries.101
Finally, like private editions of the Code, the more carefully edited songshi miben contain a quantity of materials and explanations on the Penal Code, rhymes to help memorize legal notions, quotations from the Code and collections of substatutes, models of judgments and of proclamations by officials, models of administrative documents, etc.; in other words, information in principle useful for officials, but here provided to the users of justice rather than those who dispense it.
The booklets that litigation masters published anonymously (or pseudonymously) and circulated in generally lousy imprints bearing catchy titles102 are guides to the judicial procedure in their own right, just like so many handbooks aimed at administrators. The difference is that the procedure is seen from the viewpoint of the plaintiffs and defendants, not of the judge and his underlings, and with a sometimes aggressively adversarial stance: the aim is not fair and impartial justice, it is to win. What is striking in any case is that songshi miben convey a legal culture that is virtually the same as that of the official side—as a matter of fact, all of these books, those for officials and those for litigation masters, were collectively called “legalist books” (法家書). One should perhaps speak of songshi miben as a genre situated at the fringe of the administrative world and regard litigation masters as a sort of interface between the legal specialists in the state apparatus and the public at large. Indeed, it has been recently shown by scholars like Chiu Pengsheng 邱澎生 that there was real professional and intellectual continuity between legal clerks, legal muyou (in the Qing), and litigation masters—that in fact not a few switched from one occupation to the other. Chiu stresses in particular the proximity between the world of litigation specialists and that of private secretaries, both professions participating in the same antagonistic judicial culture and having an impact on the popular understanding of justice that could only dismay officials.103 No doubt, officials too read songshi miben, if only to better understand the mentality and attitude of the people who faced them in the tribunal.
Works on Famine Relief
As I noted, the guides, manuals, databases, and other practical literature related to justice administration, discussed above, were intended to assist administrators of every description in participating in what was regarded as one of the most crucial state functions—not just preserving law and order, but warning the populace about crime and its punishments and maintaining the fundamental hierarchies of family and society; in other words, “educating” the people (教), or “civilizing” them (化).
Another crucial, and in a way symmetrical, state function was to “feed” them (食), that is, ensure their prosperity (富), a precondition, in the classical Confucian vision of things, for educating them.104 There were several ways of doing this: maintaining low taxation, building productive infrastructures (essentially for irrigation and drainage), improving agricultural techniques, and, importantly, protecting the producers against the consequences of natural disasters, such as famine, vagrancy, the destruction and breaking up of assets, and so on; or in modern terms, guaranteeing their socio-economic reproduction and the preservation of their communities: this was the object of “famine relief” in its wider meaning, subsumed under terms like huangzheng 荒政 (famine administration), jiuhuang 救荒 (famine relief), or jiuzai 救災 (disaster relief).
The canonic source for famine relief in imperial times is a frequently cited passage of the Rituals of Zhou (Zhouli)—the late-Warring States or early-imperial text supposed to describe Western Zhou institutions—that lists the Master of the Masses’ (大司徒) twelve policies to combat famine and “keep the multitude gathered together” (聚萬民)—preventing the break-up of communities, vagrancy, and banditry being clearly a central concern. They are: (1) distribute the profits (散利); (2) reduce taxes (薄征); (3) postpone punishments (緩刑); (4) relax corvée labor (弛力); (5) give up prohibitions [on exploiting mountain and marsh resources] (舍禁); (6) suspend monitoring [of markets and customs stations] (去幾); (7) curtail rituals (眚禮); (8) cut back on funeral rites (殺哀); (9) store away music instruments (蕃樂); (10) increase marriages (多昏); (11) implore the spirits (索鬼神); and (12) eradicate banditry (除盜賊). Though in really bad years the Ming or Qing court might make a show of saving on its expenses and rituals, only some of these admonitions, such as tax reductions, encouraging charity, or easing restrictions on commerce, made their way into what became the standard repertory of famine relief in late-imperial China, which essentially took shape under the Song.
Indeed, the founding treatise on famine relief was produced in the Song. While there were obviously historical examples of state-sponsored relief before and especially under the Song, only with Dong Wei’s 董煟 late-twelfth-century Jiuhuang huomin shu 救荒活民書 (no. 0728) were such examples assembled into a coherent system relying on a set of policies and techniques. The underlying pattern discernible in Dong’s work, and in many later treatises as well, distinguishes between preliminary measures to ensure preparedness once natural disasters occur, emergency measures during the event, and post-disaster reconstruction measures.105
Though a sizable number of works are described in the section of the Bibliography devoted to famine relief (4.3), the list is not exhaustive.106 This is partly due to the fact that the limits of the field are not always clear. In a general way, one should distinguish between (1) prescriptive works detailing relief methods and regulations, and (2) accounts of particular relief campaigns, usually in the form of documentary anthologies. Among prescriptive works, some are scholarly compilations, occasionally quite large, in the form of source-books illustrating the various methods of combating famine with an abundance of historical precedents,107 while others offer a terse enumeration of methods. The latter is particularly true of Qing prescriptive manuals from the eighteenth century onwards, in particular those written by private secretaries, which essentially rely on the rules prescribed by the state: by then famine relief had become a highly regulated administrative field, and the point was to instruct the reader in how to operate by the book.108 As for documentary records, at least some were explicitly intended as models and published accordingly.109 Others were of a purely local importance and appear to have been preserved as an archive (they are often manuscripts),110 though they could be used as a precedent and a repository of useful methods in the (likely) event of similar disasters. Still others seem to have been meant first of all to commend the efficiency and humanity of the official who directed the relief—or, in a particularly conspicuous instance, of the emperor himself.111 As the various descriptions above frequently apply to the same individual works, the arrangement in this section is strictly chronological, rather than by subsections devoted to particular genres.112
Military Handbooks
The last domain—still under the general category of “technical handbooks”—that needs to be briefly considered is that of the military. Justice and famine relief, the subjects of the works considered above, are discussed in the generalist handbooks for administrators and in gongdu anthologies as well, sometimes at great length. In contrast, military matters feature only marginally—when it comes to relations between civil and military officials, for example, or to local defense during particularly insecure periods like the last decades of the Ming or the mid-nineteenth century rebellions.113 Local defense was first of all the responsibility of magistrates and other local civil officials, as opposed to the professional military; but even larger military responsibilities were by no means a monopoly of career military men: notoriously, many of the generals who led campaigns against rebels or foreign invaders were civilian high officials—the commanders-in-chief (經略) of the Song and Ming and the leaders of the campaigns against the Taiping and other rebellions in the nineteenth century come to mind.114 For their part, military officers also belonged to the state apparatus and were expected to cooperate with their civilian colleagues. In short, there always was a degree of porousness between the worlds of civil servants and military officers, as indeed several handbook authors emphasized, and it was especially so in times of emergency. For this reason, the many technical guides published by and for military leaders definitely belong to the present work. The literature devoted to military affairs, beginning with countless editions of the so-called Seven Military Classics (Wujing qishu 武經七書), ancient texts that had been assembled and published on imperial orders in the eleventh century, and including massive historical encyclopedias such as the 240-juan Wubei zhi 武備志 of 1621, seems to have been proliferating, particularly in the second half of the Ming.115 The Bibliography offers a sizable selection of works with a clear didactic and practical intent, even though the distinction with more bookish compilations is not always easy to make.
Treatises and handbooks on military affairs contain a considerable amount of repetition—as do many of those on civil administration, to be sure. What seems unique, however, is the resurgence in the Qing, after a period of about a century and a half during which many late-Ming works dealing with military matters were forgotten or prohibited116 and almost no military handbooks were published, of a body of literature that had been produced between the Jiajing reign and the fall of the Ming. This resurgence, caused by new alarms in peripheral regions of the empire from the turn of the nineteenth century, and later by large-scale rebellion, took the form of either republication or straight-faced plagiarism.117
Two main contents can be distinguished in what I tend to regard as the “Ming model” for this genre, admittedly with strong Song antecedents, which remained influential until the creation of the “new armies” (新軍) inspired by Western models at the end of the Qing: (1) highly professional discussions of the daily routines of training, discipline, armament, tactics, and the various forms of combat concerning armies in the field: the standard example here is Qi Jiguang’s 戚繼光 prestigious Jixiao xinshu 紀效新書 and Lianbing shiji 練兵實紀 (nos. 0793 and 0794), which were based on the experience gained by their author during the campaigns against the so-called Japanese pirates (Wokou 倭寇) in the 1560s; and (2), treatises devoted to local defense, i.e., defending both cities (守城) and their hinterland (守鄉) against bandits, rebels, or foreign invaders, which are typical of the last decades of the Ming—starting with Lü Kun’s 呂坤 Jiuming shu 救命書 of 1607 (no. 0818)—and include several works antedating the fall of the dynasty by only a few years.
To these must be added strategic overviews discussing the defense of the empire’s borders, the command hierarchy, the distribution of troops, logistics, etc., as well as collections of biographies of famous generals. Such treatises can only partially be described as having a didactic and practical, rather than erudite or political, intent: they were first of all reference works for policy-makers, and in fact the same could be said of large-scale compilations devoted to famine relief or hydraulic control, for example. Still, that at least some of these overviews and exemplary collections were considered a must-read for professional soldiers of various ranks is confirmed by an entry in Xunfang zongyue 巡方總約 (no. 0255), a guidebook for touring censors composed in 1594, which claims that when evaluating military officers their knowledge of such texts as Wujing zongyao 武經總要 (no. 0788), Wujing qishu, Wujing jieyao 武經節要 (an abridgment of the latter), Baijiang zhuan 百將傳 (another Song compilation), Baizhan qifa 百戰奇法 (no. 0790, more technical to be sure) and Fanglüe zhaiyao 方略摘要 (a Jiajing-period work by Zhao Dagang 趙大綱), must be regarded as important.118
In the present Bibliography, besides those on general treatises (4.7.1) and local defense (4.7.2, with an appendix on baojia and militia), a subsection has been devoted to coastal defense (4.7.3).
Overall, the description of genres and contents offered above should be enough to get a fair idea of the incredible variety, breadth and complexity of the administrative culture of imperial China and how it evolved, of the ideals it proclaimed and constraints it confronted, of the intellectual resources and practical knowledge marshaled, of the experience accumulated—and of course, of the works composed to transmit and preserve all of this, which are the subject of the Bibliography. To get a more detailed understanding not only of principles and realities, but also of their social and political contexts, the reader is encouraged to browse through the body of the Bibliography: not read it from cover to cover, to be sure, but perhaps sections or subsections that deal with a particular field or genre and suggest its development and variety, or the descriptions of gongdu anthologies and judgment collections concerned with a particular region or period.
To help this an explanation of the organization and contents of the individual entries in the Bibliography—of what can be found in them—is in order. The last part of this introduction is devoted to such technical and practical considerations.
3
Each Bibliography entry includes a series of rubrics (see below for their abbreviated names) that provide information on the author and editorial history of the work under consideration, a description of its content, and—as the case may be—mention of secondary literature referring to it. An entry forms a closed unit in the sense that Chinese characters are indicated only at the first occurrence of a word or name. Cross-references are provided where necessary. For the sake of consistency, with few exceptions the translations of official titles and names of institutions follow Hucker’s Dictionary of Official Titles. A series of abbreviations are used for frequently used terms, reference works, libraries, and contributors’ names; they are detailed in the lists that follow this introduction. When the age of an individual is mentioned it is always given Chinese style, i.e., in sui 歲.
The principles adopted for each rubric are discussed below in the order of their appearance in the entry. (Any one of rubrics 6–9 below may be absent if there is no relevant information.)
(1) Title
The title of the work in pinyin romanization and Chinese characters is preceded by a serial number and followed by the number of juan and a tentative translation. (The serial numbers are used in the author and title indexes and can be scanned at the top of the page.) Cross-references are provided in the case of variant titles. When the title proper is preceded by prefixes inserted by publishers, such as “newly engraved” (新刻), “newly promulgated” (新頒), or even longer self-promoting phrases in some late-Ming commercial publications, the latter are put in square brackets and in most instances not included in the translation.
(2) Author
In principle this refers to the individual whose name features on the cover-leaf and/or in the chapter headings. (It may happen that the name is omitted but can be known from prefaces or other paratexts.) As far as possible a distinction is made between “by” (usually 著 or 編), meaning that the author is the actual writer, “compiled by” (輯, 編輯, 纂, etc.), meaning that he assembled and organized materials culled from other sources, or in a few cases “supervised by,” or possibly “approved by” (鑑定), meaning that the named individual oversaw the writing/compiling done by others, whose names are usually supplied as well. The name of the author/compiler is followed by (a) his style(s) (字), sobriquet(s) (號), and posthumous title (諡) (as styles and sobriquets appear frequently interchangeable in biographical sources, the distinction here cannot be taken as absolute); (b) his dates of birth and death, when known; (c) his date of jinshi or juren, when applicable; and (d) his place of origin (county and province). “Anon.” means that there is no known author/compiler.
(3) Date
The date of the work is that of writing and/or first edition (when they can be assumed to be the same or very close). It is sometimes the date of the author’s preface, almost by definition coinciding with the completion of the text, but possibly earlier (occasionally much earlier) than the date of the first known edition. When a text is of uncertain date, the date is marked by “ca.” if a close approximation is possible (e.g., based on the contents), or replaced by “n.d.” otherwise. The placing of undated texts in the chronological sequence of a section or subsection is based on guesswork.
(4) Editions (Ed.)
The present Bibliography attempts to retrace the complete editorial history of a work, in other words, to list all known editions. This translates into “Ed.” rubrics ranging from one sole entry (when a work is not known to have been republished, and in the case of most manuscripts) to dozens of entries for a few works that went through innumerable new editions and reprints—either extremely popular works or highly useful manuals that were in high demand among administrators.119 Forming as precisely as possible an idea of how many times a text was republished is obviously important to evaluate its influence.120 Yet despite our efforts we cannot always be sure to have identified every extant edition, especially for works that remained popular for long periods and kept being reprinted in many places by any number of commercial outfits.
Another, related, problem is that the practices of traditional Chinese publishing make it difficult to exactly define what an “edition” is—that is to say, how it can be distinguished from other editions of the same text. To begin with, even copies of an edition printed with the same printing blocks can look different in some respects, since they were printed on demand, sometimes over a long period of time, and it was always possible to change the order of prefaces or other paratexts such as the fanli and table of contents, to insert or remove tables of contents for individual chapters, to remove prefaces or add new ones (with a date posterior to the original engraving), and so on, even though the title, name of publisher and date on the cover-leaf, assuming there was one, remained unchanged.
Then, there is the problem of “new editions.” Here “new” translates two words, chong 重 and xin 新, which were used interchangeably to designate a new edition of a text already published, though apparently xin could also mean an “original,” or “first” edition. Strictly speaking, only a new or revised “engraving” (鐫, 刻, 刊), i.e., a partially or completely different set of printing blocks, produced either by the same or by a different entity, should be regarded as a “new edition.” The case is particularly clear when the format is not the same, with a different number of columns and/or characters by column, or with punctuations or upper-margin commentaries added or removed, and of course when the text itself has been edited or emended, the number of juan changed, etc.
The situation is much more ambiguous in two cases. First, it might happen that a set of printing blocks would be sold or given to another publisher that legitimately printed it under its own name—most of the time that of a “hall” or “studio” (mostly 堂, also 館 or 齋)—indicated on a new cover-leaf and in some cases engraved at the bottom of the central margin of folios, and possibly with a different date of publication. (“Publisher” here means the entity that “stores the printing blocks” [藏板] from which copies may be printed on demand. In some highly commercialized contexts the outfit that sold the books could be distinct from the one that owned the blocks, and this is sometimes duly indicated.) How far should such editions be considered “new”? The same questions arises in the case of facsimile editions (翻刻), which were unauthorized imprints—though hardly illegal strictly speaking, despite the occasional threat of prosecution (翻刻必究) on cover-leaves—made by tracing the original imprint by hand on sheets of transparent paper, then using the sheets to carve new blocks. These are in effect pirate editions, sometimes unashamedly reproducing the original cover-leaf, or dispensing with a cover-leaf altogether, but quite often putting the result under a new cover-leaf bearing the name of a different publisher, possibly with a new date, and occasionally with an advertising statement to the effect that contrary to the others this “new edition” is entirely devoid of errors. The practice appears to have been particularly widespread in the world of commercial publishing, but it must also be recalled that producing a non-commercial facsimile could be regarded as a perfectly legitimate undertaking to spread a text for the public good, as government offices or charitable organizations sometimes did.121 Again, these are “new” but not different editions, though it is obviously necessary to take them into account to evaluate the circulation and influence of a text. To give just one example, but quite typical, let’s consider Fuhui quanshu, one of the Qing era’s most popular magistrate handbooks: we have listed a dozen editions printed by a variety of “studios,” almost all of them undated, and there is every reason to think that there were more; all of those we have seen differ only by their cover-leaves, sometimes by the placing of an appendix consisting of model letters, but otherwise are strictly identical in content and page layout: they were obviously using the same printing blocks or produced by facsimile.122
It is not always easy to distinguish between the various modes of producing different imprints from the same text. Likewise, if government imprints are easily identified, it is most of the time difficult to decide whether an edition produced by a “studio,” even with a family name attached, is a private or a commercial product. Besides, many imprints simply do not provide any indication at all about the entity that published them. On the other hand, it may happen that prefaces, fanli, and other paratexts provide the most precise and detailed information on the date and circumstances of producing an imprint, on the sources used, the persons involved, and so on; but such occurrences are only a minority.
To be on the safe side, our choice has been to systematically list all the editions of any given work that came to our attention and could be thought to differ by their publisher, their date, their physical layout, or their content. Admittedly, the risk of reduplication due to insufficient information—of regarding as a different edition what is in fact another copy of the same edition with slight differences, like a missing cover-leaf—is unavoidable. Careful comparison of the materiality of imprints sometimes helps reduce that risk, but more often than not the dispersion of copies among several libraries makes such comparison difficult, especially where photocopying or photographing raise problems. Still, the recent multiplication of photo-reproductions and the development of online availability, noted at the beginning of this introduction, have notably improved the situation.
Importantly, we have also listed manuscripts and modern editions known to us, in the latter case both photo-reproductions and typeset new editions. Manuscripts may be hand copies of published works that presumably were difficult or too expensive to acquire (typically, a manuscript would be made from a borrowed printed copy).123 They also may be original texts that were never printed and have only survived by chance and ended up in modern collections. This does not necessarily mean they were known only to their owner/writer or to a close circle, and were therefore devoid of influence, since they could be shown to visitors or colleagues, or circulate through transmission or further copying. As we have seen, this was clearly the case with a number of handbooks for private secretaries in the Qing. Likewise, some manuscript databases of judicial cases or ministry memoranda exist in several copies, possibly with variants due to updating, while some unique items were undoubtedly consulted by a multiplicity of officials and assistants working in the same office.
As for modern editions, it has seemed that they deserve to be included in the Bibliography, if only because of their accessibility in a large number of libraries. Well-produced facsimile editions can be a useful substitute to the (always preferable) originals, and typeset editions, at least the more scholarly ones, provide useful introductions, notes, and punctuation.
All the problems just discussed must be kept in mind when consulting the entries under the “Ed.” rubric. They attempt to characterize the particular edition described by providing, whenever possible, (a) its date, (b) the publisher, and (c) the authors and dates (when available) of prefaces, postfaces, and other notes or colophons. Whenever more information can be found in prefaces, postfaces, etc., on the circumstances of production, it is likewise provided. As far as dating is concerned, some explanation is in order: when a date is indicated, it means that it is explicitly given on the cover-leaf, sometimes in a cartouche at the beginning or end of the book. However, when this is missing but a date of engraving can be deduced from a preface, fanli, or postface, it is indicated between square brackets. When none of this is available, the edition is regarded as “undated.”124
Finally, with few exceptions all the editions we have been able to identify are signaled by the name of one or several libraries where they are held, provided at the end of the entry between square brackets (for a list of abbreviations, see below).125 Here an important caveat is in order. We have by no means attempted to list all the libraries where a given edition is available, which would have been a task well beyond our means. The libraries indicated in the Bibliography are (1) those where the edition considered has been examined, most of the time the actual copy, but occasionally in microfilm (many libraries are now refusing to allow their rare books to be physically consulted) or online; and (2) other institutions where we know that the edition is present and whose catalogs provide useful information. An edition that has been actually seen is marked by an asterisk. Likewise, when several libraries are indicated at the end, those where the edition has been actually seen are marked by an asterisk.
(5) Remarks (Rem.)
This is the tiyao 提要, in other words a description of the contents. As will be seen, though descriptions are of uneven length and detail, they all provide information on the content and organization of the text, and whenever possible on its sources and circumstances of creation. In many cases an evaluation of the contents is attempted—of their novelty or lack of it, of the sources used, of the public addressed, of the writing or compiling style, of the degree to which a writer’s personal experience is involved, of what can be known of a work’s influence, and so forth. This is why the Bibliography is “critical,” as opposed to a mere enumeration of mulu headings (which we also offer in many cases). In short, we have allowed ourselves a degree of flexibility in the content, level of detail, and presentation of the “Rem.” rubric.126
(6) Author’s Biography (Bio.)
Whenever possible information is given in more or less detail on the author’s or compiler’s career, with a view to providing context to the composition of the work considered. Biographical sources, both ancient and modern, are indicated. Local gazetteers have been extensively used, for they often provide information on lesser-known individuals absent from standard biographical sources.127 On the other hand, we have not attempted to list all the sources in the case of famous authors whose biographies feature in a quantity of specialized collections. These are usually listed in standard biographical dictionaries such as Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period, Dictionary of Ming Biography, or Songren zhuanji ziliao suoyin, to which we systematically refer. In a general way, it may be noted that, contrary to ranked literati, private secretaries are most of the time lacking biographical information other than the few bits of evidence that can be retrieved from prefaces. Finally, we have systematically consulted the Academia Sinica online biographical database, Renming quanwei renwu zhuanji ziliao chaxun, whose entries refer to many biographies (and occasionally quote them in full), and, importantly, complement them with archival sources in the case of Qing officials.
When the Bibliography contains several works by the same author, the “Bio.” rubric appears at the first occurrence, with a cross-reference given in the other ones.
(7) References and Studies (Ref. and Studies)
This rubric provides a selection of references to (1) bibliographies and descriptive library catalogs mentioning the work examined, and (2) books or essays where it is discussed or described, even briefly.
(8) Translations (Transl.)
Known translations in any language, including modern Chinese, are cited.
(9) Bibliography Entries for Same Author
This rubric cross-references the other works by a particular author or compiler that are described elsewhere in the Bibliography.
Finally, the name of the contributor who authored the entry is indicated at the end between square brackets. (See below for a list of acronyms.) When two or even three names appear, it means that the work has been separately examined by several contributors, the entry being a synthesis of their notes. However, all entries in the Bibliography have been systematically checked, edited, and occasionally complemented for biographical and bibliographical information, by myself. All the errors and omissions that no doubt remain are therefore my own responsibility.
Pierre-Étienne Will
Paris, 12 February 2019
See, among others, Will, Bureaucracy and Famine in Eighteenth-Century China; Nourish the People (with R. Bin Wong); “State Intervention in the Administration of a Hydraulic Infrastructure”; “Clear Waters vs. Muddy Waters”; “Développement quantitatif et développement qualitatif en Chine”; “Official Conceptions of Economic Development in Late Imperial China.” [For complete citations, here and elsewhere in the book, see under “Secondary Works Cited” at the end.]
An outstanding example is Ch’ü T’ung-tsu, Local Government under the Ch’ing; likewise, Hsiao Kung-chuan, Rural China; and John R. Watt, The District Magistrate in Late Imperial China. Wejen Chang’s Struggle for Justice in China, soon to be published, is also extensively referring to this literature.
Examples include Étienne Balazs, “A Handbook of Local Administrative Practice of 1793,” a study and select translation of Wang Huizu’s 汪輝祖 Xuezhi yishuo 學治臆說 (no. 0212 in this bibliography); Satake Yasuhiko’s studies on and translation of Li Yuanbi’s 李元弼 Zuoyi zizhen 作邑自箴 (no. 0156) in his “Sakuyū jishin” and “Sakuyū jishin no kenkyū”; and Djang Chu’s presentation and partial translation of Huang Liuhong’s 黃六鴻 Fuhui quanshu 福惠全書 (no. 0193) in A Complete Book Concerning Happiness and Benevolence, which since its publication tends to be the main, when not the only, magistrate handbook cited by English-speaking authors. Nimick, “The County, the Magistrate, and the Yamen,” Appendix A, is devoted to a sizable selection of Ming magistrate handbooks.
But see Will, “Ming Qing shiqi de guanzhenshu yu Zhongguo xingzheng wenhua”; Guo Chengwei, Guanzhen shu dianping yu guanzhen wenhua yanjiu. See also the essay by Niida Noboru cited below, note 32.
Hence the frequent use of the first person plural in this introduction. The list of colleagues who contributed entries is provided below, p. lxxix–lxxx. Among them, Jérôme Bourgon, Chen Li, Claude Chevaleyre, Luca Gabbiani, Guo Runtao, Jérôme Kerlouégan, Nancy Park, and Shum Wing Fong devoted substantial amounts of time at various points during the project’s protracted history to explore bibliographies and library holdings, make copies of materials, provide notes describing their findings, and read over earlier versions of the manuscript. Natacha Stupar also participated in the early stages of collecting materials. A special mention is due to Thomas Nimick, whose collaboration has extended from beginning to end; besides his profound knowledge of Ming history and institutions, Nimick contributed several ideas crucial to the format eventually adopted for the Bibliography.
See John R. Watt, op. cit.; Kyōdai Tōyōshi kenkyūshitsu, Kanshin mokuji sōgō sakuin, indexing 7 Song works, 4 Yuan works, 4 Ming works, and 40 Qing works. Ming works, in particular, were found to be much more numerous than found in these sources. As its title indicates, Ma’s Qingdai xingzheng zhidu cankao shumu only examines Qing works; for local government (including the provincial level), see p. 111–44.
As a matter of fact, some recent collections with the words guanzhen shu in their title, such as Guanzhen shu jicheng, do include texts that do not belong to the narrow category covered by this term.
It must be noted, however, that in not a few cases the conversion from card to electronic catalog has resulted in the disappearance of titles that are now difficult or even impossible to trace. In the entries of the present bibliography the mention “not in cat.” refers to titles which have been physically seen, either by us or by other authors, and sometimes photocopied or photographed, but have since dropped out of online catalogs and become impossible to find.
It stops in 1912. Yet a few entries from the early Republican period reflecting the persistence of imperial models and values have been inserted in the Bibliography.
Texts dating to the Yuan are also quite rare in the Bibliography, though a not insignificant amount of administrative and especially legal literature still exists. Certain collections of precedents comparable in purpose to Yuan dianzhang 元典章 (no. 0476), such as Tongzhi tiaoge 通制條格, Zhizheng tiaoge 至正條格, and Zhiyuan xinge 至元新格, should probably feature in a future supplement. These and others will be detailed in the chapter on Chinese sources in The Cambridge History of the Mongol Empire, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2020). (Bettine Birge, personal communication.)
This Bibliography does feature a few such titles for which reliable information about their contents (as opposed to a mere title) has been preserved. Some entries also rely on descriptions of works we have not been able to trace, found in particular in Ma Fengchen’s bibliography and in Xuxiu siku quanshu zongmu tiyao, a large compilation of handwritten tiyao drafted in the 1930s in Beijing under Japanese auspices and now available in print.
Examples of such titles would include Xingfa zuanyao 刑法纂要 (12 j.), Duanyu lichen 斷獄立成 (3 j.), Xu Yiyu ji 續疑獄集 by Wang Hao 王皡 (4 j.), Lü yinyi 律音義 and Lüling shiwen 律令釋文 by Sun Shi 孫奭 (1 j.), Pan’ge 判格 by Zhang Pi 張伾 (also cited in Xin Tang shu), Lüjian 律鑒 by Zhao Zhuo 趙綽, and several more. See Songshi, 204/5137–45.
The notion of “print run” in the Chinese traditional printing industry raises delicate questions that will be briefly considered in the third part of this introduction.
Excluding, in other words, government-produced bodies of laws or ordinances and institutional accounts, which do feature in some quantity in the bibliographical treatises of the Suishu and the two Tangshu. However, one finds a few mentions of commentaries on penal law (which are part of the Bibliography, see section 4.1.1): one example is a commentary to the Jin 晉 code by Zhang Fei 張斐 entitled Lüjie 律解 (21 j.). The only surviving among these commentaries is of course Tanglü shuyi 唐律疏議, the official commentary to the Tang Penal Code.
A 65-slip text titled Zhengshi zhi chang 政事之常, featuring language close to Weili zhi dao but set in table form, has also been found in 1993 in a Qin tomb at Wangjiatai 王家台 in Hubei. For a synthetic study mobilizing several texts, see Lu Jinping, “Qinjian guanzhen wenxian yanjiu.”
See Staack, “The Wei li zhi guan ji qianshou Manuscript,” and references therein.
See Barbieri-Low and Yates, Law, State, and Society in Early Imperial China, 1102; Venture, “Livres et documents dans la Chine ancienne,” 298–301. Both studies refer to the vast secondary literature devoted to the archeological texts they discuss. See also Wilkinson, Chinese History: A New Manual, 306–8.
See Barbieri-Low and Yates, op. cit., 89ff.; Venture, op. cit., 273–6.
Barbieri-Low and Yates, 89–109; Venture, 276–8. Two main texts are concerned, respectively titled Fengzhenshi 封診式 (Models for Sealing and Physical Examinations), consisting mostly of hypothetical cases, and Zouyan shu 奏讞書 (Book of Submitted Doubtful Cases). The title renderings are those proposed by Barbieri-Low and Yates, who also offer a commented and annotated translation of Zouyan shu (pp. 1171–1416). The same authors regard the latter text as a collection of more or less extended judicial cases compiled by and for judiciary scribes and subjected to a degree of literary embellishment, making some of them close to the later gong’an xiaoshuo 公案小說 genre.
On Falü dawen, see Venture, 278; Zhang Boyuan, Lüzhu wenxian congkao, 1–20. Barbieri-Low and Yates, 30, translate the title Answers and Questions on Legal Principles and Statutes.
See e.g. William H. Nienhauser’s epoch-making Indiana Companion to Traditional Chinese Literature. The alphabetically arranged body of the book is preceded by detailed essays on the various genres of literature to which it is devoted.
Chang, Zhongguo fazhi shi shumu, vol. 1, preface, esp. 3–8, and the section entitled “Fenlei de biaozhun yu fangfa” 分類的標準與方法, 29–47. Chang’s approach to the domain of Chinese law encompasses much more than legal and judicial matters in the narrow sense. Note, too, that besides traditional works his bibliography also includes modern studies, either dating to the Republican period or published in Taiwan.
In addition, these classifications are not always stable. Thus, it is a common experience to find the same work on legal matters classified under either “officials” (職官, in “History” 史) or “Legalists” (法家, in “Philosophers” 子) in bibliographies or library catalogs using the sibu 四部 arrangement. Likewise, anthologies of administrative documents by individual authors (section 4.1.5 and Part 6 in the Bibliography) may be found under “Officials,” “Legalists,” or “Individual collections” (別集, in “Literary collections” 集), depending on the case.
To give but one example, one would not expect a section on “leading cases” (成案) in the part on “Norms” alongside laws and regulations: though some leading cases had the status of legal precedents, they were first of all records of judicial practice and of the practical and theoretical problems raised in applying the law, with ad hoc (non-codified) answers sanctioned by imperial rescript. This section on leading cases is then followed by a section on “usages” (慣例) containing purely practical guides on forensics and on judicial procedure.
The problem of classification was discussed during my École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales 2001 seminar, which was attended by several collaborators of the Bibliography (Jérôme Bourgon, Claude Chevaleyre, Luca Gabbiani, Jérôme Kerlouégan, Nancy Park).
The proclaimed usefulness of collections of exempla as far as the instruction of future officials was concerned is nicely put in Wang Yilin’s 王一麟 preface to Zengding fenlei linmin zhizheng quanshu 增定分類臨民治政全書 (no. 1137), a work expanding on an earlier compilation titled Zhizheng 治政: “Zhizheng originally collected the essentials regarding policies for promoting the good and suppressing abuses as implemented by famous sages and eminent men, past and present. To proclaim everlasting rulings based on this book is to hand down inexhaustible models! To want to make officials who take up their posts reflect this pedigree, isn’t this tantamount to studying cloth-making in order to produce beautiful brocades?” (治政一書，原以裒集今昔名賢碩彥興利除弊之大端，以之著章程于不朽，即以之垂效法于靡窮，欲使後之服官蒞政者鏡厥源流，無為美錦而學製也).
Some collections of provincial regulations are indeed included in collections of “handbooks for officials” like Guanzhen shu jicheng. According to Wang Zhiqiang (“Lun Qingdai de difang fagui,” 121), the majority of the regulations collected in such shengli 省例 came from local officials and had been confirmed by the provincial authorities.
This is especially true of several handbooks of a purely technical nature used by private secretaries who specialized in either justice or financial and economic matters (2.2.1.2 and 2.2.1.3), on which more below.
Here codified administrative regulations of the type called “regulations on administrative sanctions” (處分則例) are regarded as a part of “law” inasmuch as they were codified and are often mixed up with penal statutes in the same presentations.
This sort of work could also be compiled by the official’s descendants or disciples.
A subsection (6.5) contains the comparatively small number of anthologies devoted to documents written by multiple authors.
See Niida, “Ōki bunko shiki,” 157–64. This essay is included in the catalog of the Ōki Bunko, a special collection at the Institute for Oriental Studies, Tokyo University, probably the place in the world with the highest concentration of Chinese handbooks for officials and other works on government.
In antiquity the terms zhen, guanzhen, zhenyan 箴言, or zhengui 箴規 meant admonition or criticism directed by the officials to the ruler; the opposite meaning of admonitions directed by the ruler to officials apparently was imposed by emperor Xuanzong 玄宗 of the Tang (r. 713–55). On the history of the term guanzhen, see Xia Guisu and Xia Nanqiang, “Shuo guanzhen.”
On Song magistrate handbooks, see for example Lau Nap-yin, “Cong guanzhen kan Songdai de difangguan”; Furubayashi, “Sōdai no kanshinsho ni tsuite.”
See e.g. Wang Huizu’s Xuezhi yishuo (no. 0211), one of the Qing classics of the genre.
See Saeki, Fukkei zensho goi kai, intro.; Miyazaki, pref. to Kyōdai Tōyōshi kenkyūshitsu, Kanshin mokuji.
See the relevant entry for a full enumeration of the sections in Chushi lu.
Such tension and anxiety, at least among the most committed among officials, were inherent to the situation of men who were torn between the sense of pride they got from their ideological competence and their charisma and the “shame” caused by their inability to be up to the task and their having to accept punishment for this very reason. On this point see the valuable remarks in Metzger, The Internal Organization of Ch’ing Bureaucracy, esp. 261ff. According to Metzger (p. 267), one of the aims of the handbooks was to endow officials with the “motivational commitment” they needed to fully commit themselves despite the difficulties and risks involved.
A trope in prefaces to books compiled by muyou is that the author was too poor to prepare for the examinations—or did prepare but repeatedly failed—and therefore had to turn to a career of private secretary or, as it is often said, to “study law,” to make a living. (Private secretaries, especially those specializing in law and finance, could earn quite substantial salaries, and they represented a major item in their employer’s personal budget.) However, one did find in the private cabinets of high officials individuals with the rank of juren, but without career prospects, or still trying their luck to succeed at the jinshi, as Wang Huizu, for example, did for many years.
These utterances are found in Zhang Tingxiang’s 張廷驤 1883 preface to Wan Weihan’s 萬維 Muxue juyao 幕學舉要, in Rumu xuzhi wuzhong 入幕須知五種 (no. 1164).
For more details on the publication process of muyou handbooks, especially those specializing in law, see Chen Li, “Zhishi de liliang.”
The term “private cabinet” (幕府, lit. “tent government”) had a long pedigree, however, but before the Qing it referred to the advisers of military commanders. Several explanations of the sudden ubiquity of muyou in the system from the very beginning of the Qing dynasty have been proposed. One of the most popular among Chinese historians is the notion that the Manchu and Chinese bannermen who took over a sizable proportion of local administrative positions during the first few decades of the new regime were ignorant and uncultured people unable to cope with the complexities of Chinese administration and law, and that they therefore had to hire Chinese assistants to do the work in their place.
For a study of gongdu in the Qing, see Yamamoto Eishi, “Shindai no kōtoku to sono riyō.” Yamamoto lists and briefly describes a total 55 titles from the Kangxi period by officials of every rank, most of which feature in the present bibliography.
In Miki et al., Dentō Chūgoku handoku shiryō mokuroku, and in Yamamoto, “Shindai no kōtoku to sono riyō,” a number of collected writings (wenji) are listed alongside gongdu (or judgments) anthologies for the odd one or two juan of administrative documents they include. One can get an idea of the inclusion of gongdu materials in a variety of author’s collected writings from the descriptions offered in the section on individual authors’ wenji in Wejen Chang’s bibliography (Chang, 3:1162–1236). With rare exceptions, wenji have not been included in the present bibliography.
This was in particular the case of the letters, called bing 禀, that local officials addressed to their superiors in order to figure out their opinion on a given topic: only thereafter would they report (詳) on the same problem in a formal document of which a copy would be kept in the administrative archive. See discussion in Will, “From Archive to Handbook,” 154–60.
On these triennial visits, see e.g. Wang, “Dilemmas of Empire,” 115–23.
Chengjiang zhiji 澄江治績 (1740) and its sequel Chengjiang zhiji xubian 續編 (1743) (nos. 0900–0901) are a particularly good example.
Liu Zhiji (661–721) was the first to discuss autobiography in his celebrated treatise on the writing of history. See Shitong, 內篇, j. 32, “xuzhuan” 序傳. See also Pei-Yi Wu, The Confucian’s Progress, 50–60.
An earlier version, now lost, seems to have been started by Chen Hongmou’s adopted son a few years before Chen’s death.
Magistrates were empowered to pronounce final judgments (判) in “minor affairs” (細事) only. For crimes entailing punishments higher than beatings, they submitted judgment proposals to the higher courts. “Court opinions” is the translation proposed for yanyu by Jiang Yonglin and Wu Yanhong, “Satisfying both sentiment and law”; another sort of judicial document, found especially in Ming collections, is what the same authors translate as “verdicts,” zhaoni 招擬. For their respective characteristics and articulation, see ibid., 32–33.
This is also the case of the two extremely rich collections of administrative papers by the Mongol prefect and governor Yuqian 裕謙 (1793–1841), Mianyi zhai oucun gao 勉益齋偶存稿 and xucun gao 續存稿 (nos. 1029, 1033).
For studies of local society based on such sources, see for example Hamashima, “Pekin toshokan sō Hoyō gendoku kan shō” and “Minmatsu Kahoku no chihō shijin zō”; Yamamoto, “Kenshō no ninshiki to jittai”; and Will, “Adjudicating Grievances and Educating the Populace.”
For just one example, see Zhang Wuwei’s 張五緯 Fengxing lu 風行錄 (no. 1014).
A great many proclamations/prohibitions by field officials are photo-reproduced (in some disorder, and without a convenient means to trace them in the original books) in the volumes of Zhongguo gudai difang falü wenxian, ser. 2, Gudai bangwen gaoshi huicun, and other such collections.
One comes across mentions of gongdu collections cited in the other works or in the biographies of their authors, but absent from all the known catalogs and bibliographies. To give one example, we know that Lu Zhuo 盧焯, a Chinese bannerman who was governor of Fujian and Zhejiang during the years 1734–41, composed works entitled Guan Jin lu 觀津錄, Mu Bo zhenglüe 牧亳政略, Cheng nie Zhongzhou lu 秉臬中州錄, Fu Min lüe 撫閩略, and Fu Zhe lüe 撫浙略, which were most likely gongdu anthologies (Janet Theiss, personal communication to Luca Gabbiani), but which we have not been able to trace.
There are only few exceptions. An example is the collection of political and administrative writings by Li Zongxi 李宗羲 (1818–1884), published posthumously by his disciples and descendants as Kaixian Li shangshu zhengshu 開縣李尚書政書 (no. 0908), which features a combination of letters, directives, reports, and memorials arranged according to the succession of posts held by the author, with a majority of letters and memorials. The work, whose head chapter includes imperial edicts related to Li as well as his autobiography, is typical of the celebratory compilations mentioned earlier.
Historically, published collections of memorials appeared much earlier than gongdu anthologies. A certain Wang Shaogong 汪紹恭, who wrote a postface for the 1820 Wanjiang congzheng lu 皖江從政錄 (no. 1020), claims—with some exaggeration—that “Since the Tang and the Song Court ministers each have special collections for their memorials; but the [policies] propagated by wise prefects and magistrates are scattered in their biographies and not published in book form.” According to him, the gongdu genre was recently set by Tian Wenjing’s Fu Yu xuanhua lu, Wang Huizu’s Xuezhi yishuo (which is definitely not such a thing), and Zhang Wuwei’s Weinengxin lu 未能信錄 (no. 1016). In reality the genre largely antedated these authors, as can be seen in the relevant sections in the Bibliography.
Tom Nimick, personal communication. For Bi Ziyan’s gongdu and memorials collections, see his biography under Zaijin kuanyi 菑祲窾議 (no. 0743).
There existed handbooks of memorial phraseology, however, but these were most certainly used not by the officials themselves but by the secretaries or subordinates who drafted memorials for them. A typical example is Benxue zhinan 本學指南 (no. 0257).
In the same way, collections of letters—even called gongdu—between high officials dealing privately with political issues do not belong to the “didactic” sphere, even in the wider sense that has been adopted for the present work. A case in point might be Shen Shixing’s 申時行 Lunfei jiandu 綸扉簡牘 (1596 preface), in 10 j., a highly interesting collection consisting of “answers” (da 答) to high officials—especially grand coordinators (巡撫)—discussing every sort of problems during the period when Shen was chief Grand Secretary (1583–91).
A few model officials prided themselves in their handbooks on being able to manage without any muyou, however.
The so-called law of avoidance (迴避), which prevented officials from serving in their home provinces, did not apply to private secretaries. Yet available information suggests that many if not most traveled a lot in search of employment, and that some could move through several provinces during their career. As is well known, a great many muyou across the empire hailed from Zhejiang, more specifically from Hangzhou and Shaoxing prefectures. Shang Xiaoming’s statistical study of Qing muyou shows that Jiangsu and Zhejiang surpassed by far the rest of the provinces as breeding ground for private secretaries (see his Qingdai shiren youmu biao, table and graph on p. 29–30). (This very thorough study is based on a sample of 1,364 individuals for whom biographical information is available, and thus is at risk of discounting the great mass of anonymous people who filled the ranks of lower-ranking cabinets. Many muyou authors of important works described in the Bibliography are absent from the sample.)
See for an example the 24 rubrics in the 20-fascicle anonymous manuscript Qiangu beiyao (no. 0285).
On the significance and influence of muyou legal handbooks, see Chen Li, “Zhishi de liliang.”
As can be seen when browsing through the relevant sections of the Bibliography. I do not think this is an illusion stemming from a higher proportion of books from later periods being preserved in modern libraries.
Private secretaries were not permitted to participate in forensic examinations or to appear publicly in court hearings. However, they would discuss everything in private with their employer, draft his reports, and even assist him directly “from behind the screen” during hearings.
For example Huang Liuhong’s Fuhui quanshu (no. 0193) has extended sections on court hearings, judgment writing, autopsies, and so on. Huanyou jilüe 宦游紀略, Gao Tingyao’s 高廷瑤 career autobiography written sometime between 1820 and 1830 (no. 0145), which was regarded as the equivalent of a guanzhen-style handbook and had much reputation in the second half of the nineteenth century, also has important developments devoted to these questions.
For a full study of tabular adaptations of the Code and administrative regulations, see Will, “La réglementation administrative et le code pénal mis en tableaux.”
On Code commentaries, see e.g. Fu-mei Chang Ch’en, “Private Code Commentaries”; Zhang Jinfan, “Qingdai sijia zhulü”; He Qinhua, Zhongguo faxue shi, 2:210–326; He Min, “Qingdai zhushi lüxue tedian”; Id., “Qingdai sijia shilü jiqi fangfa”; and Zhang Boyuan, Lüzhu wenxian congkao.
There are a few exceptions, however, the best known being the 1674 Dulü peixi 讀律佩觿 (no. 0373), a popular treatise which is organized around key phrases, terms, and notions instead of following the order of the Code.
For instance, Li Yumei’s preface to Xingbu shuotie jieyao 刑部說帖揭要 (no. 0513) mentions three works by a certain Cai Zhongxiang gong 蔡忠襄公 from the mid-Ming period, viz. Ming lü jingzhu 明律精註, Dulü yuantou 讀律源頭, and Fulü xiangjie 輔律詳節, none of which seems to be available today: the first is clearly a commentary to the Code, the second is probably a code handbook, while the third introduces Ministry of Justice memoranda—discussed below—and contains the first mention, reportedly, of the term shuotie. (The only Cai Zhongxiang mentioned in the Ming is Cai Maode 懋德 [1586–1644], who is not particularly known as a legal specialist.)
Apart from the 1674 Dulü peixi, the exceptions are mostly early-Qing adaptations of the late-Ming Lüli jianshi by Wang Kentang (discussed below) (see nos. 0371, 0374; see also Lüli jieshi 律例解釋, no. 0380). Other Qing commentaries by officials include Lüli bianlan 律例便覽 (no. 0395) as well as the more vernacular Da Qing xinglü zeyao qianshuo 大清刑律擇要淺說 (no. 0396). For an overview of “private” Qing commentaries, see Zhang Jinfan, “Qingdai sijia zhulü de jiexi”; Ch’en, “Private Code Commentaries.”
It has been argued that tiaoli should rather be translated “precedents” until the 1740 Da Qing lüli (promulgated in 1742), when they acquired for the first time an authority equal to that of the 436 statutes (律), and even superior in case of conflict between the two. For the sake of simplicity we have kept “substatute” throughout in the present work.
This 1725 Yongzheng Code is the only official version of the Ming or Qing codes to include a general commentary attached to each statute (as distinguished from the additions in small characters inserted in the text to make it less terse and remove ambiguities). Though the general commentary disappeared from the Qianlong Code promulgated about fifteen years later and enforced through the end of the dynasty, it does feature in the private editions of the Code with commentaries that more or less monopolized the market in the nineteenth century, on which more below.
If we except Wang Mingde, whose Dulü peixi is a treatise rather than a continuous commentary.
“Leading cases” (cheng’an 成案, lit. “concluded cases”) are discussed below.
For detailed descriptions see under Da Qing lüli quanzuan (no. 0386) or Da Qing lüli zengxiu tongzuan jicheng (no. 0393).
See e.g. Da Qing lüli huizuan (no. 0383) and several of the following entries. Several editions provide lists of the muyou who participated in such collective projects, in which a number of names are recurring. The most prolific and best known among them was Wang Youhuai 王又槐, active at the turn of the nineteenth century and author of several handbooks described in the Bibliography, who like a great many legal specialists in the Qing was a Hangzhou native.
For more details on these compilations, see Will, “From Archive to Handbook,” 173–84.
However, some early cheng’an compilations (see Dingli cheng’an hejuan 定例成案合鐫, no. 0477, and Xinli cheng’an hejuan 新例成案合鐫, no. 0478) contain cheng’an dealing with matters other than judicial: in such cases cheng’an means an imperially approved regulation rather than a concluded judicial case.
According to Thomas Buoye, “Confucian Justice and Capital Crime,” “Judging from their organization and appearance these publications were primarily intended to serve as reference works for magistrates seeking guidance in adjudicating cases or as textbooks for would-be legal secretaries. As reference works and pedagogical tools, these works may have served a role similar to that of Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England in nineteenth-century America. Under different historical circumstances they might eventually have become the core of a Qing legal curriculum.”
Keeping written records of these discussions at the Bureau of the Code (律例館), whose officials were considered the most knowledgeable in legal matters and were systematically consulted, appears to have begun in 1784: see e.g. Chen Tinggui’s 陳廷桂 1811 preface to Shuotie 說帖 (no. 0509). However, the term shuotie is said to have made its appearance during the second half of the Ming in a treatise called Fulü xiangjie, now lost (see above, note 71), suggesting that there were already some sorts of ministerial materials or precedents that could “assist the Code” (足與律例相輔者). Officials outside the Ministry of Justice must have accessed and used shuotie compilations beginning in the early-nineteenth century. Zhang Zengpei’s 張曾霈 1833 preface to Xingbu shuotie jieyao 刑部說帖揭要 (no. 0513), one of these compilations, emphasizes its usefulness for local administrators by using the term guinie 圭臬 (“model,” “standard”), found in the prefaces of countless magistrate handbooks or gongdu anthologies; other prefaces to similar compilations likewise speak of shifa 師法 (“a master’s model”) or jindai 津逮 (“guide”).
Yu Maoxue’s 余懋學 1608 Renyu leibian 仁獄類編 (no. 0543) is one example. See also Li Yu’s 李漁 1663 Zizhi xinshu 資治新書 and its 1667 sequel (nos. 1133 and 1135), about half of which is devoted to judgments (判語) by a multiplicity of officials.
For a general assessment and analysis of panyu 判語 (judgments), see Morita, “Shindai no hango.” The same author (p. 746–51) provides some additional details on the contents of the works listed in Shiga, Shindai Chūgoku no hō to saiban, appendix.
For an overview of Ming casebooks, see Tam Ka-chai, “Justice in Print,” 78–93.
Some anthology authors provide not only their judgment proposals, but also the rescripts of the superior courts. See for example Qiu Huang’s 邱煌 1839 Fupan lucun 府判錄存 (no. 0569).
The best known among such first-person casebooks is Lan Dingyuan’s 藍鼎元 Luzhou gong’an 鹿洲公案 (no. 557), which dates to the 1720s. All the other examples are from the nineteenth century and apparently did not enjoy the same literary success as Lan’s work.
The venerable ancestors of the genre, namely, Zhang Zhuo’s 張鷟 Longjin fengsui pan 龍筋鳳髓判 (no. 591) and Bai Juyi’s 白居易 Baidao pan 百道判 (no. 0592), date back to the Tang dynasty. The art of writing examination judgments involved using the proper historical and literary allusions, and resorting to parallel “four-six” (四六) prose.
In the Qing they mainly appear in the handbooks for litigation masters discussed below. This evolution is perhaps related to the multiplication of publications featuring leading cases (cheng’an), which played a similar role, though at a higher level of sophistication.
Note, however, that hypothetical cases used for pedagogy seem to have appeared quite early: for example, Lidai panli pandu, vol. 1, 113–55, reproduces some of them (called nipan 擬判 by the editor) found among the Dunhuang manuscripts. Indeed, as I mentioned earlier, some documents excavated from Qin and Han tombs already display a similar format.
Every year each provincial bureau (清吏司) in the Ministry of Justice selected two officials and one clerk from among its personnel and sent them work full-time in the Autumn Assizes Bureau (秋審處). On the autumn assizes system in general, see Sun Jiahong, Qingdai de sixing jianhou; on the abstracts, ibid., 160ff. On the literature produced by the system, see more generally Sun Jiahong, “‘Buzhong mi’ yu ‘zhenzhong mi’.”
After several reprieves a criminal would see his sentence commuted to a lesser punishment, such as exile. Two other categories considered by the assizes concerned a much smaller number of cases, namely “deserving compassion” (可矜), and criminals sent back home to take care of aged parents (留養).
The Washing Away of Wrongs is Brian McKnight’s felicitous rendering of “Xiyuan lu.” His 1981 translation is based on the original Xiyuan jilu. Later this original version was sometimes called Xiyuan lu, which in time became a sort of generic title for all the versions of the text.
For an overview of the history of the text, see Will, “Forensic Science and the Late Imperial Chinese State,” 89–104. See also Zhang Song’s 張松 essay in Zhang Jinfan, Qingdai lüxue mingzhu xuanjie, 516–20.
The official Xiyuan lu was compiled and engraved by the government in the wake of the compilation of the new Qianlong Penal Code (Da Qing lüli), which has an imperial preface dated 1740 but was not ready for printing and distribution until 1742. See Chen Chongfang, “Qing Lüli guan jiaozheng xiyuan lu.” From then on the two texts were often printed and circulated together.
There is an interesting contrast here with the Penal Code, whose statutes remained unchanged but which was constantly enriched with substatutes endowed with the same authority and based on living jurisprudence.
The autopsies themselves were performed by lowly “coroners” (仵作) under the personal supervision of local officials, the latter being held fully responsible for the conclusions entered in the reports and urged to familiarize themselves with the Xiyuan lu text. On traditional forensics and its procedural embedding, see also Will, “Developing Forensic Knowledge through Cases in the Qing Dynasty.” Xie Xin-zhe, “L’idéal de la preuve,” offers detailed textual analyses and insists that Chinese traditional forensics was dominated by procedural issues and should not be regarded as “legal medicine” and studied as a branch of the history of Chinese traditional medicine. Indeed, most Chinese students of the field speak of fayixue 法醫學 and tend to evaluate Chinese traditional techniques against modern scientific legal medicine: see e.g. Jia Jingtao’s classic Zhongguo gudai fayixue shi.
In reality the term songshi miben dates from the Qianlong period, when the government attempted to proscribe this sort of publications. It should also be remarked that publishing model forms of complaints and information on the legal procedure antedated the emergence of songshi miben in the Ming. The Yuan-period examples published in Lidai zhenxi sifa wenxian, vol. 1, under the titles Cizhuang xinshi 詞狀新式 and Gaozhuang xinshi 告狀新式, extracted from a later edition of the Southern Song encyclopedia Shilin guangji 事林廣記, are a case in point.
Though songshi miben were outlawed in 1742, there is no want of publications posterior to that date, and litigation masters are present in the sources right through the end of the imperial period.
The 21 works listed in this subsection are no more than a substantial selection among a genre that seems to have proliferated in late-imperial China, with a lot of repetition and borrowing. Fuma, “Shōshi hihon ‘Shōsō ihitsu’ no shutsugen,” 159ff, lists 37 titles, but there definitely exist more of them. Other important studies by Fuma include “Shōshi hihon no sekai” and “Min Shin jidai no shōshi to soshō seido.”
See for an example the 1609 Xingtai falü 刑台法律 (no. 0369), compiled by two officials who served together in the Office of Scrutiny for Justice (刑科),.
The titles are often a variation of the phrase “Xiao Cao yibi” 蕭曹遺筆 (Bequeathed Writings from Xiao and Cao), alluding to two legalists who assisted the Han founder Liu Bang: the fiction was that the contents came from notebooks left behind by the two great men.
See for example Chiu’s essay “Yi fa wei ming.”
Among many possible quotes, see Lunyu, XIII, 9: 子適衛，冉有僕。子曰，庶矣 哉。冉有曰，既庶矣，又何加焉。曰，富之。曰，既富矣，又何加焉。曰， 教之; or in Legge’s rendition (Confucian Analects, 179–80), “When the Master went to Wei, Zan Yû acted as driver of his carriage. The Master observed, ‘How numerous are the people!’ Yû said, ‘Since they are thus numerous, what more shall be done for them?’ ‘Enrich them,’ was the reply. And when they have been enriched, what more shall be done?’ The Master said, ‘Teach them.’”
In certain works it is the explicit organizing pattern. See e.g. Jiuhuang ce 救荒策 (no. 0751) and Qinding kangji lu 欽定康濟錄 (no. 0757).
Compare with the table in Shao Yongzhong, “Zhongguo gudai huangzheng shiji,” 35–38, or the table of contents of Zhongguo huangzheng shu jicheng.
The largest perhaps is Qi Biaojia’s 祁彪佳 Jiuhuang quanshu 救荒全書 (no. 0748), which was motivated by the 1641 famine in Zhejiang but did not make it to print because of Qi’s suicide at the time of the Qing conquest.
On the eighteenth-century “administrative turn” in famine relief, see in general Will, Bureaucracy and Famine.
An outstanding example is Fang Guancheng’s 方觀承 Zhenji 賑紀 (no. 0760), a dossier on a 1743–44 large-scale famine relief campaign that was published ten years after the event.
A number of such manuscripts have been transcribed in simplified characters in the collection Huangzheng shu jicheng, certainly the largest repository of sources on famine relief in imperial China. Regrettably, their present location is rarely indicated.
This is the 1802 Qinding xinyou gongzhen jishi 欽定辛酉工賑紀事 (no. 0765), a massive collection of documents published on the orders of the Jiaqing emperor and celebrating the relief directed from the throne during the catastrophic floods that had afflicted the metropolitan area the year before. The work was to be distributed everywhere to show off the benevolence of a ruler eager to emulate his glorious predecessor, the recently deceased Qianlong emperor, and to propose the methods implemented as examples. The organization of the work (by chronology, not by topics) somewhat detracts from its pedagogical value, however.
For a definition of famine relief literature and an analysis of genres, see Shao Yongzhong, “Zhongguo gudai huangzheng shiji,” chap. 2; also see the thoughtful and highly detailed discussion in Xia Mingfang’s introduction (序言) to the collection Zhongguo huangzheng shu jicheng.
A few gongdu anthologies are indeed largely or entirely devoted to their author’s efforts to defend his city and territory. Examples include Huang shaoqing Shu you jinglüe yishu 黃少卿蜀游經略遺書 (no. 0975), which is mainly about defense against aborigines in the southwest in the 1560s, Renwu pinghai ji 壬午平海紀 (no. 0982), about a 1642 campaign against piracy in the lower Yangzi, Shou Bao lu 守寶錄 (no. 1040), about the defense of Baoqing prefecture (Hunan) at the beginning of the 1850s, and Shou Qi gongdu huicun 守岐公牘彙存 (no. 1045), about the 15-month siege of Fengxiang prefecture (Shaanxi) in 1862–63.
The case of the Manchu and Mongol military commanders put in charge of all major operations under the Qing, at least until the mid-nineteenth-century rebellions, is peculiar, as they came from the banner military hierarchy and a number of them also pursued careers in the higher rungs of the civil bureaucracy.
See e.g. the section devoted to “militarists” (兵家) in the joint catalog of rare books in Mainland China (Zhongguo guji shanben shumu, 子, vol. 1).
Several Ming works were copied into the Siku quanshu, however, including Tang Shunzhi’s 唐順之 Wubian 武編 (no. 0792), He Liangchen’s 何良臣 Zhenji 陣紀 (no. 0799), and Qi Jiguang’s Lianbing shiji and Jixiao xinshu (see below); several more have notices in the cunmu 存目 catalog of works not deemed worthy of inclusion but deserving to be mentioned and described.
The best example of such revivals is Pingpi baijin fang 洴澼百金方 (no. 0825), a text extremely popular in the nineteenth century that seems to have appeared in the late-1780s and turns out to be a rehash of Jintang jiezhu shier chou 金湯借箸十二籌 (no. 0823), compiled ca. 1639 while the Ming were subjected to Manchu incursions. Wubei jiyao 武備輯要 (no. 0826) is also a case in point.
See Xunfang zongyue, 33a.
An example of the first situation is Chen Hongmou’s Wuzhong yigui 五種遺規 (no. 0071), for which we provide a still open list of ca. 25 Qing editions; for the second one, see e.g. the manual of forensics with commentaries Xiyuan lu jizheng and its revised versions (no. 0649), with a list of 35 editions.
At least as important would be a knowledge of how many copies of a given edition were produced, but here we are reduced to conjecturing. The notion of a “print run” is essentially foreign to traditional Chinese publishing, since as a rule only a few copies would be printed at first, and then printouts would be made on demand, the printing blocks being preserved until wear made them unusable. Still, the equivalent of a print run is sometimes mentioned for works explicitly published for large distribution or even propaganda. See e.g. Tumin lu (no. 0209), 1857 ed., mentioning a governor who printed 1,000 copies of the text for distribution, or Muling chuyan 牧令芻言 (no. 0245), where print runs of 1,000 copies are also mentioned. At least a sense of the likely success of a given edition can be gained from the number of modern libraries where it is found (sometimes in multiple copies), but we have not attempted to assess this systematically.
For example, the cover-leaf of Wang Zhiyi’s 汪志伊 Huangzheng jiyao 荒政輯要 (no. 0766), an important famine relief treatise, bears the words “it is perfect to reproduce!” (翻刻最善).
The same observation can be made about a number of undated editions of Li Yu’s Zizhi xinshu, all put out by different “studios.”
Carefully hand copying a valuable text or a rare edition was also regarded as a distinguished activity for literati.
Many library catalogs still date what are in fact undated editions using the date of the preface, sometimes of the latest preface. This practice is extremely misleading. For example, most if not all of the editions of Lü Kun’s 呂坤 Shizheng lu 實政錄 (no. 0125), both imprints and manuscripts, listed in catalogs as “1598 editions” are later Ming and Qing editions so dated by librarians because of the date of the preface, which was written by the compiler of the original edition.
However, library indication is not given for modern reprints, which are found in most specialized libraries and for the most part are still available on the market.
This approach is similar to that in the entries on works (as opposed to authors) in Nienhauser’s Indiana Companion (which in general tends to provide more extensive analyses than in the present Bibliography) and those in Wang Yuhu’s excellent Zhongguo nongxue shulu.
Only a selection of gazetteer citations is provided, however, the emphasis being on significant career events (e.g., the date of appointment to a position, or dismissal, etc.) and biographical essays (傳).