Читать книгу Circulating the Code - Ting Zhang - Страница 14

Compared with a multivolume book like the Code, the Expanded Substatutes was much smaller and contained only the revised substatutes and thus took less time and money to print. The 1740 edition of the Code, for example, was a forty-seven juan book. The Expanded Substatutes printed in 1746 had only two juan. The cost of printing the Expanded Substatutes was also far lower. According to the “Catalog of the Wuyingdian Books for Circulation,” the price for the Code was about 1.1 taels, and the price for the Expanded Statutes was only 0.05 taels (see table 1.2). From 1746 to 1870, Qing laws were formally revised twenty-two times, but only five imperial editions of the Code were published (see table 1.1). In other words, in most instances of Code revisions, only the Expanded Substatutes was formally published and distributed, not the entire Code. The Expanded Substatutes, therefore, was one of the main official carriers of the updated laws circulating in the Qing bureaucracy.

Each edition of the Expanded Substatutes consisted of newly revised substatutes, which were usually sorted into five categories: expanded, revised, revised and merged (xiubing), revised and moved (yigai), and removed substatutes.⁷⁸ Substatutes in the Expanded Substatutes were compiled according to the sequence of statutes in the Code. In other words, each substatute appeared under a specific category of the laws based on the original category of statutes in the Code. This arrangement made it easier for the readers of the Expanded Substatutes to correlate the statutes and substatutes in the Code with the updated substatutes. The printing style of the Expanded Substatutes closely followed that of the Code. Both usually used the same size and quality of paper, and the characters were usually cut in the same size and style. In fact, each page of Expanded Substatutes was designed so that users could bind it into the Code, and the Code was also designed in a way that the new substatutes could be easily inserted. In the “General Editorial Principles” of the first edition of the Expanded Substatutes, the editors explained this arrangement in detail:

The Code is divided into six sections [bu], and each section has general categories [zongmen]. Under each general category, there are the categories of statutes [lümu], and the substatutes follow the statutes. Now we have examined the Code and found that each category of statutes does not follow the previous category on the same page, but starts on a new page. It was originally designed to leave some spaces [for inserting new substatutes] and make it easier for the readers to look for. Therefore, we make the new substatutes follow the statutes, and put each of them under the related categories of statutes that are used as titles for the substatutes in the book. Each category also starts on a new page, and the font and size of the characters are printed in the same style as those of the Code. In this way, the Expanded Substatutes can be read as a single book, and its pages can also be easily combined with the Code.⁷⁹

Because all editions of the Code published by the Wuyingdian used the traditional thread-binding style, it was not difficult to unbind the original pages, insert some new ones, and sew them back again into a book.⁸⁰ Moreover, since each category of statutes in both the Code and the Expanded Substatutes started on a new page, the original text would not be interrupted when the new pages were bound into the Code.

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

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

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