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Politics and the Supernatural in Mid-Qing Legal Culture

Scholars and laypersons alike used to dismiss the legal system of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) as an exclusively penal system chiefly distinguished by its arbitrariness and brutality (Ch'ii, 1961; Gray, 1878; van der Sprenkel, 1962; for some contemporary views, see Ocko, 1991). Recently, however, a number of studies have amended this view. These studies, focusing primarily on the century or so from 1750, have demonstrated that late imperial administrators used great care in the formulation and application of laws. Scholars now think that, contrary to the popular image that suggested ordinary people would go to almost any lengths to avoid involvement with formal law, people of no account often overcame their instinctive wariness of officialdom to invoke the law to protect what we might call their rights. Thus we now know that consistent rules of evidence governed judicial procedure; that a form of civil law thrived in China; that a complex system of appeals not only existed but was overloaded by no later than the late eighteenth century; and that in general it was thought necessary and desirable to demonstrate a legal basis for judicial decisions. Although the autonomy of such decisions remained susceptible to imperial interference, the exercise of imperial whim was not untrammeled. For example, in routine capital cases it was limited by a system