Information, Medium & Society: Eighteenth International Conference on Publishing Studies

Abstract

In the beginning of the eighteenth century, official casebook emerged as a new genre in the vibrant development of commercial printing in Qing China. Compilers of official casebooks would normally collect from several particular types of legal documents within the Qing bureaucracy such as leading cases (cheng’an 成案), Board memoranda (shuotie 說帖) and rejection cases (boan 驳案). Unlike other casebooks or private commentaries of the Qing Law Code, these casebooks were deemed “official,” containing the most authoritative and up-to-date explanation of laws from the Board of Punishment, the Bureau of Codification (lüli guan 律例馆), and in some cases the Qianlong emperor (1711-1799) himself. The printing of official casebooks met with increasing popularity well into the nineteenth century, with the publication of sequels. This phenomenon was in tandem with the dynamic law-making process during the reign of the Qianlong emperor, which saw an enormous expansion in the number of new sub-statutes added to the Code. In this paper I argue that official casebooks were welcomed as they helped officials make rulings in criminal cases that would better fit the Board of Punishment and the emperor’s legal thinking. While scholars of Qing legal history are apt to study both central and local legal archives, it is equally worthwhile to examine the large collection of extant official casebooks that sometimes better capture the dynamics of legal thinking.