Uncertainty in the Empire of Routine The Administrative Revolution of the Eighteenth-Century Qing State [1 ed.]

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Uncertainty in the Empire of Routine

Harvard East Asian Monographs 452

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Uncertainty in the Empire of Routine The Administrative Revolution of the Eighteenth-Century Qing State

Maura D. Dykstra

Published by the Harvard University Asia Center Distributed by Harvard University Press Cambridge (Massachusetts) and London 2022

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© 2022 by The President and Fellows of Harvard College Printed in the United States of America The Harvard University Asia Center publishes a monograph series and, in coordination with the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, the Korea Institute, the Reischauer Institute of ­Japanese Studies, and other faculties and institutes, administers research projects designed to further scholarly understanding of China, Japan, Vietnam, Korea, and other Asian countries. The Center also sponsors projects addressing multidisciplinary and regional issues in Asia. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data [TK] Index by Jac Nelson Printed on acid-free paper Last figure below indicates year of this printing 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22

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This book is dedicated to all of those who tried to make a difference only to find themselves making trouble.

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Contents

List of Figures and Tables

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

Conventions

xv

Prologue: Qing History / Qing Archive

xix

Introduction

1

Part I  Building the Empire of Routine 1 Early Qing Legal Institutions

29

2 Beyond Fact

57

3

Imperial Routines in the Local Archive

103

Part II  After the Unexpected Administrative Revolution 4 Ruling the Empire of Routine

153

5

When the Problem Is the Solution

188



Conclusion

226

Abbreviations

237

Works Cited

239

Index

251

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Figures and Tables Figures 1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8.

Pan Biaocan’s “Formula for the Documents and Registers of a Banditry Case” 64 Cover (front and back) of an 1874 account book recording judgments on cases 134 Two pages from an 1874 account book recording judgments on cases 135 Four pages from an 1817 account book registering incoming and outgoing documents from the Ba County yamen 137 The back cover and first two pages of a prisoner account book from the Ba County yamen 141 Draft of a 1771 prisoner register produced by the Ba County magistrate 143 A late nineteenth-century report from the Turfan prefectural yamen detailing a list of current prisoners 145 A concordance plot illustrating instances of the character for “case” in the Veritable Records 184

Tables 1. 2. 3.

Instances of the character for “case” in the Veritable Records Average number of sanctions reported per ten-day period, 1735–99 Average number of sanctions processed each month for “minuscule officials,” 1735–1799

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183 196 199

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Acknowledgments

In the fall of 2012, as I was sitting in a hotel room in Helsinki making last-minute changes to a presentation on insolvency disputes among merchants in Qing Chongqing, I received an invitation from Jérôme Bourgon to join the Legalizing Space in China working group. The group’s impossible task was to translate the Qing Code. This invitation from a scholar whose work I had read and ardently admired, and whom I had no reason to believe should even know my name, was the beginning of an incredible journey. His inexplicable generosity put me in touch with many scholars of law whose work I held in high regard, many of whom I now consider dear friends and colleagues. My conversations over the years with Alison Bailey, Thomas Buoye, Frédéric Constant, Luca Gabbiani, Du Jin, Kentaro Matsubara, Nancy Park, Tam Kachai, Wang Zhiqiang, and many others who circulated in and out of the group completely transformed my previous interest in local disputes and local administration into a much larger focus on the problem of empire and routine. The pull of the empire only increased once I found myself in this company. Pierre-Étienne Will’s visit to UCLA in the fall of 2013 was another pivotal point. His careful, rich commentary on handbooks and other administrative texts planted the seeds of many questions that later became the backbone of this work. It was during his visit that I was introduced to his fantastic bibliography project, which inspired much of the research leading up to this monograph. His support and generosity throughout my efforts to tackle the world of archive and administration have humbled me. I can only hope that this meditation on the questions that his work has inspired serves as a testament to his collegiality and does not reflect poorly on him where I may have erred.

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xii Acknowledgments

Although this monograph is quite far away in time and space from my dissertation research in the Ba County Archives, in many ways this project is indebted to my experiences as a local historian of Chongqing. Elements of the book date back to my kitchen-table conversations with Rebecca Nedostup during our work in the Chongqing Municipal Archives and the many projects and agendas that unfolded in the years that followed. I must also recognize the importance of the long-time companionship and guidance of Qiu Pengsheng, whose work has continued to influence me since my earliest days as a graduate student. My friendship with Zhao Siyuan of Shanghai Jiaotong University, which began in 2008 when I spent half of the academic year as a graduate student at East China Normal University, has also been a critical part of this project. His brilliant observations about and devoted attention to local sources has been a constant inspiration. It was through his magnanimity that I was able to participate in the remarkable local documents group, where I learned a great deal from others whose ­experience with local sources far exceeded my own. I was similarly inspired by the work of Cao Shuji’s incredible research group and seminar participants. I must also acknowledge my debt to the staff of the Sichuan Provincial Archives. Wherever I am in the world, I always look forward to the next time I can return to my archival home base and the very particular way that the sounds of Sichuan’s many dialects make me feel as though I have returned to a place where I belong. Thomas Duve’s support as the director of the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History (now the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory) gave me the opportunity to spend two beautiful springs in Frankfurt, thinking about legal theory and global legal history with a wonderful cohort. The intellectual camaraderie I enjoyed as a An Wang Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard Fairbank Center was also critical. Eric Schluessel, who later edited an early version of this manuscript, and Ian M. Miller were especially valued conversation partners during my time at Harvard. The bold integrity of Michael Puett opened a path for me in ways that are difficult to articulate, and yet critical. And although Mark Elliott was beholden to a host of administrative duties during my time at the Fairbank Center, his support of my work dared me to dream that others would find it valuable. Michael Szonyi, to whom I owe more than I could possibly enumerate, has been

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Acknowledgments

xiii

one of my dearest and most reckless companions on this journey and many others besides. The support of the American Council of Learned Societies, which allowed me to continue my research in Tokyo, Beijing, and Chengdu, provided me with the opportunity to expand the scope of my earlier scholarship. The curiosity and collegial engagement of the entire Max Planck Working Group on the History of Bureaucracy—generously supported by the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and led by Christine von Oertzen and Sebastian Felten—pushed me closer to the place where the history of law intersects with the history of science. The summer that I spent in Berlin was an incredible time of growth and exploration. This project was undertaken in spite of the best and most reasonable advice of my graduate school mentors, R. Bin Wong and Richard von Glahn. Try as they might to dissuade me from beginning an entirely new book rather than revising my existing dissertation, their years of support for my ambitious projects had long ago conditioned me to reject the easy path for the more interesting one. And so, when I realized that a piece of writing that was once intended to be a quick article was growing into a manuscript-length project, I followed where it led. I apologize for being as stubborn, as ambitious, and as uncompromising as they taught me to be. I owe a special debt to Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, whose support over the years as a mentor and senior colleague helped me move this project through many treacherous passes. It was largely his good name that brought so many excellent scholars from diverse disciplines together to discuss the manuscript at a critical juncture. So in addition to thanking my colleagues in the China field (R. Bin Wong, Eric Schluessel, Chelsea Wang) and my colleagues at Caltech (Tracy Dennison and Phil Hoffman) for their comments at my manuscript workshop, I am lucky to be able to express my gratitude to Mauricio Drelichman, Oscar Gelder­ bloom, Steve Quinn, John Styles, and Francesca Trivellato for their input. They were invaluable in helping me work through the comments of the reviewers of the manuscript. Tracy, Phil, Francesca, Mauricio, and my colleague Jen Jahner were especially generous in their comments on multiple iterations of the introduction. My work also benefited from the critiques of Susan Naquin, Chuck Wooldridge, and Pierre-Étienne

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xiv Acknowledgments

Will on the occasion of my visit to the Modern China Seminar at ­Columbia University. I would also like to acknowledge my debt to the editorial committee of the Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Insti­ tute at Columbia University and to the members of the Harvard University Asia Center Press, especially Kristen Wanner, whose expertise guided this manuscript through the final stages of its journey. Finally, I would like to thank Devin Fitzgerald, my partner in all the best things of my life. Our conversations about book history, material history, text, empire, bureaucracy, and the archive have fueled many of the inquiries whose results occupy the following pages. In addition to being brilliant and uncompromising, he encourages me to take the path of most resistance. He has been the perfect partner for this improbable project, the many others to come, and those that will never see the light of day but bring immeasurable amounts of joy to our home.

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Conventions

Some Notes on the Citation of Late Imperial Sources The citation scheme I employ breaks with several conventions in the field. First, I do not cite the page numbers of Qing institutional compilations. As members of the field are well aware, the convention of referring to a page number in, for example, the Veritable Records of a particular reign goes back to a time when all major China Studies programs could be expected to have a particular published version of that text. In recent years, however, that assumption has become increasingly hollow. Many citations to page numbers in previously published works are now “broken links” that require a great deal of labor to follow. Several of the citation methods I employ are designed to make the links to original sources more durable in our new age of access (and lack of access) to Qing sources in both print and digital formats. This means I refer to entries in various compendia by date or title rather than page number. I consistently refer to entries in the Veritable Records by reign, month, day, and item number. The first entry of the seventh day of the tenth month of the first year in the Qianlong-era Veritable Records (abbreviated as QLSL) thus becomes QLSL 1.10.7: 1. For references to intercalary months (run yue), I add the letter R before the month. The second entry under the eighth day of the fourth intercalary month of the fifth year of the Jiaqing reign, then, becomes JQSL 5.R4.8: 2. This information can be used to navigate any printed copy of the Veritable Records and any digital copies that can be searched by date. I do not use page numbers or juan numbers to reference woodblock texts or reprints of texts from the Ming and Qing dynasties. Much like

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xvi Conventions

citing page numbers of reprinted Qing compendia, citing the page numbers of books printed in the Ming and Qing has also resulted in a host of broken links because those books, too, often underwent several rounds of publication, revision, and compilation. Many of the sources I used were published so widely and expanded so much over time that even the number of a particular juan might have changed over the course of several hundred years. For that reason I use only stable textual identifiers: the titles of the work, chapter, section, and item being cited. As in Veritable Records citations, I organize this information from largest to smallest unit. This means that scholars tracing my citations in their original sources may have to spend a bit more time poring over the table of contents than they would if we were using the same edition and therefore could refer to page or juan numbers, but it also means that scholars using compendia in which the original texts I cite are reproduced or quoted (of which there are many), as well as scholars employing earlier or later editions, actually have a chance of finding the original source I mention. Where information appears in only one specific edition or where the names of titles vary by editions, I cite that specific edition or include that information in the footnote. On the subject of reproduction and collection, it bears mentioning that many of the sources I cite—both those compiled by the state and those written or collected by individual authors—appear in several editions. These editions can vary widely. The “Qing Code,” for example, expanded several times over the course of the centuries, as did the administrative regulations in the Qing huidian (the Collected Institutions of the Qing). Much confusion has resulted from the existing convention of referring to one “definitive” copy of these works. While scholars often have a particular reason for relying solely on a certain version of a text—say, the Qianlong-era version of the Qing Code or the Guangxu-era version of the huidian—the fact that each researcher generally relies on one particular version of imperial compendia tends to mean that the institutional picture constructed in the work is collapsed around a particular time. In a work that proposes to offer an institutional history, this would be a critical flaw. Accordingly, when I refer to a section of the Qing huidian, the reader has the option to seek any edition produced after the year of the law or regulation being cited.

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Conventions

xvii

On the occasions when I cite the Qianlong-era huidian specifically, it is because the item being cited does not exist in the same form (or at all) in later compilations of the huidian. Throughout, I cite Xue Yunsheng’s Remaining Doubts When Reading Substatutes (讀例存疑) when referring to the Qing Code because of its extensive commentary, but the laws and substatutes may be found in any version of the Code promulgated after the date that the law was set forth. Given all of the points just mentioned, I refer to items at varying levels of specificity. Sometimes I simply point to a section of the law or an administrative compendium without referring to its edition. Scholars looking for regulations of the type that I am discussing may then seek out that section in a legal code or an administrative regulation collection in the period relevant to their research. When I refer to infor­ mation that was later changed or deleted, I also include information about the era of the compilation. Readers should assume that if I refer to a regulation from the Kangxi era, they will find the specific text being mentioned in a version of the source from the Kangxi period or later. While this citation format may seem relatively “naked” next to those with information such as date and place of publication, it is meant to be both more flexible and more durable than existing conventions. For scholars interested in the various print and manuscript editions of the Ming and Qing sources cited in the text, they may now take advantage of the long-awaited Official Handbooks and Anthologies for Officials in Imperial China: A Descriptive and Critical Bibliography (2020), by Pierre-Étienne Will and collaborators. This work contains not only the standard details about place and date of publication that scholars usually mention, but also a great deal more information about specific copies and reprints of Ming and Qing legal and administrative sources. Where applicable in my bibliography, I cite the reference number assigned to that text in Will’s Bibliography, so that scholars eager to learn about the history of these works may find the much fuller explanations and critiques therein. Because the numbers assigned to those texts may change slightly with future editions, I maintained the translations of the titles in Will’s Bibliography in my own work, even where they conflict slightly with my own translation schemes, so that readers relying on future editions of Will’s resource will be able to find the entries by name, if not number.

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xviii Conventions

A Note on Official Titles and Administrative Terms To present a clear and consistent picture of the imperial administration both in the capital and in the provinces without weighing the text down with lengthy official titles, I have simplified several conventions regarding official titles and designations. My intention is not to dissemble or to suggest that the finer details of administrative organization are not important, but rather to group together adjacent administrative designations to which the same assertion applies. •

I use the term “central ministries” to refer to all bureaucratic organizations in the Qing capital that were responsible for processing information from the provinces, deliberating on affairs for imperial review, and executing imperial commands, in spite of the fact that not all of these offices were ministerial in the Chinese scheme.

•

Where I mention official titles of individuals, I translate the titles according to standing conventions (with reference to Hucker’s Dictionary and contemporary convention). When mentioned in prose, however, I often refer to them collectively by the most common, or lowest, title under that grouping. Governors-general and governors become “governors”; subprefectural magistrates in independent subprefectures become “prefects”; the legion of subaltern, privately hired, and low-ranking local officials working inside a magistrates’ office become “clerks”; and so on.

•

Similarly, when discussing administrative rungs in the territorial bureaucracy, I employ the most common terminology used to describe their position on the administrative ladder. I use “county,” for example, throughout this work to refer to the lowest level of territorial administration, even though this level also contains what has been translated as “district” and “department.”

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Prologue: Qing History / Qing Archive

This book tells the double-stranded tale of the development of the Qing bureaucracy and its archive. It begins in the early days of the Qing conquest of the Ming Empire, with a focus on the problems of commu­ nication and control as framed by emperors and high officials of the central court. It relates how actors in Beijing tried to solve basic problems of bureaucratic discipline by demanding new forms of information about local administrations in the provinces. The story proceeds by considering the ways in which, over the course of a century, the development of the Qing state both depended on and influenced the development of the Qing archive, and vice versa. It narrates the history of how expanding administrative and documentary standards slowly but surely tied together the offices of the empire in a growing web of imperial routines, culminating in an unexpected administrative revolution in the first half of the eighteenth century. The result of that revolution was a volatile cycle: the more information Beijing received about its officials in the territories, the more concerned it became about local administrations, and the more information it demanded. In this be-careful-what-you-wish-for tale, the more the Qing state learned about itself, the more uncertain it became. I never imagined myself writing a history using the archives of the Qing central court. Like many in my generation, I heeded the call to local history. And I loved the work. I reveled in the mass of unexpected details and the confusion of trying to sort out history from the mess of a county magistrate’s archive. But somehow, at some point, the work of reorganizing the documents of the local administration of Ba County (one of the largest and most well-studied local archives of the Qing) turned into a project about the relationship between the central court,

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xx prologue

the local administration, and the distributed imperial archive that connected them. Somewhere in my attempts to sketch a picture of Chongqing’s ­urban history and my struggle to understand how the city was governed, I became preoccupied with the question of who entered the archive of the county magistrate and why it mattered. From these local considerations, I was led to related questions on a dynastic scale. The more I learned, the more I became convinced that the history of the development of the Qing archive and its management was critical to the history of the Qing state itself. Before I knew it, I had become a local historian looking for answers about the history of the local archives in the capital of the Qing Empire.

The Archive of Chinese History To work in a Qing archive preserved in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) today is to work in a government archive. This is true in two senses. First, according to the Archives Law of the PRC, the preservation of and access to all “historical records,” meaning archives from before the establishment of the PRC in 1949 “whose preservation is of value to the State and society,” fall under the purview of the national archives administration.1 This high-level state organ “makes an overall plan, coordinates the organizations, unifies the systems, and exercises supervision and provides guidance with regard to the undertakings of archives in the whole country.”2 In this system, not only are archives considered the property of the society (and, therefore, the state) whose history they document, but they are also overseen by the PRC government. Individual archival bureaus, the people who work in them, and the scholars who access them are, therefore, answerable to national archive authorities.

1. Supreme People’s Court, Archives Law of the PRC, Article 2. For a discussion of what constitutes a “historical record,” see Moss, “Dang’an: Contemporary Chinese Archives,” 118. 2. Archives Law of the PRC, Article 6.

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Qing History / Qing Archive

xxi

The second sense in which Qing archives held by the PRC are government archives is that they are, by and large, the archives of state offices.3 With the exception of the collections of individual papers, letters, contracts, genealogies, and other sources that twentieth-century historians have personally curated (sometimes under the aegis of academic institutions or collected in municipal or provincial libraries), the vast majority of surviving archival sources available for the study of the Qing were inherited directly from the administrative offices of the former empire. Large-scale archival collections from beyond the archive of the imperial administration are common phenomena only in the twentieth century, and they tend to be extremely recent. The bulk of the historical archive controlled by the PRC constitutes files inherited directly from the Nationalist (Kuomintang, or KMT) government after the denouement of the civil war (1945–49).4 Archives from municipal offices of the Republic of China (ROC) government are organized according to the administrative schemes of that time—likely an artifact of the often-adopted expedient that KMT archives were maintained as the basis of much PRC administration in the years ­immediately after the civil war. The 1940 records of the Chongqing Municipality United Commercial Association (重慶市商業聯合會), for example, are preserved in the Chongqing Municipal Archives of the PRC as the “False Chongqing Municipality United Commercial Association (偽重慶市商業聯合會),” “false (wei 偽)” being a common prefix added to Kuomintang party-state institutions inherited and ­operated by PRC organs before they were transformed. 5 The link ­between an institution that existed in the KMT and the PRC—before being replaced by the large unions under which labor and production were reorganized in the 1950s—is therefore both acknowledged and denied with the assertion that one is the “false” predecessor of the “true” PRC version. 3. As Xu Yuqing puts it, “Private records occupy a very small place in our archival holdings.” Xu, “Differences and Similarities,” 211. 4. On the archival work of the early PRC and its inheritance of KMT holdings and practices, see Moss, “Dang’an.” 5. Examples of this sort proliferate throughout the Chongqing archive, but this one is from Chongqing Municipal Archives, 84-1-278.

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xxii prologue

The particularly durable and profound overlap between archival preservation and administrative function is rooted in an almost unbroken connection (with some important exceptions discussed below) among state functions, lawmaking, the adaptation of administrative conventions, and the writing of history. The early history of the connectedness of the court archive and the compilation of both legal and historical canons, as it has evolved over thousands of years, is well beyond the scope of this work and has been documented abundantly in other studies.6 What this hundred-year history will tackle is how, through a series of seemingly small, technical, and mundane changes to the Qing administration of the imperial archive, the central state invented a crisis—a paper ghost—whose existence has been taken for granted because of the inseparability of archival, administrative, and historical processes in the imperial milieu. This is not because of the gullibility of historians of the Qing. It is a result of the very rupture that made archives novel historical sources to China historians in the 1970s and 1980s and concealed the deeper continuities between processes of representation and control across the twentieth-century divide.

The History of the Qing Archive Access to archives for historical study and historians’ approach to the Qing archive have changed dramatically in the past fifty years, and Qing history as a field is still running to catch up with the implications. As recently as 1973, Lo Hui-Min of Australian National University commented on the “remarkable fact” that “the problem of archives has not until recently gained much attention in China.” 7 In her 1980 review of the field, Beatrice Bartlett, a pioneer in the use of archives to research Chinese history in North America, noted that, in a 1971 monograph on

6. The study of historiography (shi xue 史學) has occupied its own place in the Chinese tradition for over a thousand years. English-language studies that introduce some of the concepts referred to here include Ng and Wang, Mirroring the Past; Lewis, Writing and Authority in Early China; Sung, “Between Tortoise and Mirror”; and Fitzgerald, “Later Imperial Histories.” 7. Lo, “Some Notes on Archives,” 203.

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Qing History / Qing Archive

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American scholarly resources for the study of China, “Not one paragraph in the entire book was devoted to the archival resources of the field.”8

The Archive as Draft The history of this neglect begins with the particular place of the ­archive in Qing administration. In the process of compiling its own legal, administrative, and historical canon, the emperors, officials, and historians of the Qing state considered the archive merely the “draft pile.” It contained the ephemera, the errors, the exceptions, and the raw tallies or details of affairs that had to (for the sake of history and for the sake of the present) be either destroyed or woven together into a comprehensive and authoritative narrative. This attitude did not stem from naive neglect of the value of the archive. Rather, it was a recognition of the political imperative to tame the authority of the written word of the state as precedent and tradition. At the level of individual yamen (衙門: the generic name for an office of the late-imperial state), destroying out-of-date archival materials was both a way to protect the record of one’s own tenure and a necessary measure to ensure that authority-bearing documents did not find their way into the wrong hands. As Pan Biaocan relates in An Unreliable Treatise, his mid-seventeenth-century manual for ­county-​ level administrators: Regarding all of the communications, commands, documents, and ­warrants [belonging to the local office], those that do not have to be preserved because of their function should all—without exception— be burned. It will not do to let them continue to exist for later officers to gather together and put to other uses. It is not necessary to hand over any of these materials to later occupants of the office. 凡書札文移牌票。非有用必存者。盡行焚毀。不得遺留。使後官拾去。 致生他議。其一應不須交與後官。9

8. Bartlett, “The Ch’ing Central Government Archives,” 25. 9. Pan, An Unreliable Treatise, “Various Duties, Second Section (幾務下),” “Pro­ motion to Another Post (陞遷),” “Incinerating Informal Registers and Documents

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xxiv prologue

For the county magistrate or the head of any yamen in the empire, the destruction of archival items had two important functions: it invalidated documents bearing the authority of the office that could be misappropriated and it concealed the draft versions of reports and claims that later appeared in (or disappeared from) official reports. Destroying the originals of these documents was, therefore, a rearguard action protecting the authority of the office from misuse by outsiders or scrutiny by later occupants and superiors. The many registers, maps, drafts, and internal pieces of correspondence that scholars have recently ­unearthed in county-level archives are, in fact, a minuscule portion of what would have been produced by those offices. What we see preserved in archives today is a mix of mistakenly preserved drafts, unresolved “active” files, and internal records documenting precedents and decisions for later reference. A similar principle on a much grander scale can be documented in central-state archives. For centuries before the Qing, the dynasties of the central plains had been authoring histories from the archives of the state. By the time of the Qing conquest of the Ming, this practice entailed the compilation of the Veritable Records, documenting the major events of each day of each reign period using original court archives, as well as the larger project of compiling a so-called standard (zheng 正, lit. “correct” or “orthodox”) history for the conquered dynasty, based on the archives now in the possession of its successor. After works of this sort were compiled and an authoritative version had been reached, the original records were customarily destroyed. Even an individual emperor might decide to clean up the archives of his predecessor. In 1677, the sixteenth year of his reign, the Kangxi emperor “personally supervised” the burning of the “original and draft copies” of the edicts of the previous emperor and memorials submitted to the throne by several individuals during the previous administration, as well as their personal registration files, the commands issued to princes, royal greetings, edicts issued to high officials, and notes from the imperial household administration.10 Moving forward, the (‌焚毀簿書)” (note: this section is sometimes reproduced as “Burning Informal Registers and Documents [焚簿書]”). 10. First Historical Archives, Kangxi chao manwen, 14.

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Qing History / Qing Archive

xxv

Kangxi emperor commanded, the various documents generated by the central ministries, such as imperial rescripts, communications, imperial publications, annals, registers, and other such reference materials, should either be “collected and preserved according to established ­precedent” for later inclusion in the Veritable Records or, after outliving their active use in those offices, sent to a central repository. Materials later deemed important to the history of the reign period or dynasty would be compiled into official records and published by imperial proclamation. Instead of exploiting archival sources directly, Lo notes (as every contemporary scholar of Qing history understands well), genera­ tions of historians of the last dynasty have relied on “primary sources” in the formats into which they were compiled by the state: legal codes, institutional compendia, local gazetteers, Veritable Records, dynastic histories, and so on.11 In theory, then, although a yamen might maintain a record for reference as long as it was pertinent, there were only two fates for an archi­ val item: inclusion in some codified form (approved laws, approved histories, etc.) or invalidation. Both fates—canonization in dynastic compilations and erasure—ultimately resulted in the destruction of the original. The archives of the Qing state, according to the inherited and modified historiographical traditions of the Chinese empire, were bound for the flames. Some pieces were destined for destruction to keep invalidated entitlements and commands out of the hands of others. Some bits were slated for erasure because an ambitious emperor ­decided to clean out the storehouses of a predecessor. Furthermore, if an imperial historiographical office of a successor dynasty had converted the archive into a standard history and closed the book, metaphorically speaking, the “draft pile” would have been destroyed. The only problem, as it turned out, was the fall of the imperial tra­ dition. After the end of the last empire, a “Qing Historiography Bureau” was, in fact, established by Yuan Shikai (president of the Republic of China) in 1914 to compile a history of the fallen dynasty. But although a hastily prepared Draft Qing History was declared complete in 1927 and subsequently published, the project—as its title suggests—has

11. Lo, “Some Notes on Archives,” 203.

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xxvi prologue

remained unfinished for almost a century.12 The Qing archive—the working foundation of both the Qing state and its history—was still a work in progress, a mess of loose ends slated for processing and compilation and eventual destruction, when the chaos of the 1920s brought the project to a halt. For the next several decades, the historical project paused as history itself got in the way. The archive began its own journey through troubled times.

The Vagaries of the Qing Archive in the Republican Period, 1912–49 The history of the loss, partial preservation, and institutionalization of the Qing archive defined the evolution of our profession. After the fall of the Qing, the imperial archives from the palace fell under the jurisdiction of the Republic of China’s Ministry of Education. In 1916, the records were transferred to the care of a newly established Museum of History in Beijing. By the 1920s, however, the political order of the fledgling republic was already tenuous in the north. Beijing changed hands several times in the first half of the decade. Cut off from national resources and beleaguered by skirmishes, the city fell on dire times. Pressed for funds, the Museum of History sold off several thousand bags of archival materials as wastepaper. The scattered remains of this transaction were subsequently discovered by Lo Chen-yü (1866–1940), a Qing loyalist and antiquarian who recognized a memorial from the Qing archive at a shop in Beijing. Lo bought back the archive from the wastepaper vendor at three times the price for which it had been sold. Although the Palace Museum (故宮博物館), established in 1924, inherited the remaining archives from the defunct Museum of History, Lo chose not to turn over the archives he had purchased to that municipal institution.13 Instead, in 1924 Lo himself studied them and selected a small portion of the 12. For an account of the compilation of the Draft Qing History and its afterlife, see Chen, “Last Chapter Unfinished”; Peake, “Various Editions of the Ch’ing Shih Kao”; and Griggs, “Ch’ing Shih Kao.” 13. Ni, Ming Qing dang’an gailun, 5–7. For another telling of the history of the Ming and Qing archives in this period, see Dan, Qingdai dang’an congtan.

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archive to publish in a ten-volume series that, in its complete form, is known under the modest title First Compilation of Collected and Printed Historical Materials (史料叢刊初編). Done with that work and ready to turn to other endeavors, Lo sold the archival remnants to Li Sheng-to (1859–1937), a former Qing official turned Republican politician who also had a reputation as an antiquarian and collector.14 After storing the materials for several years, Li sold them to the Institute of History and Philology of Academia Sinica—the national research institution established by the KMT in 1928. The volume of material, after having been sold off, partially destroyed, repurchased, occasionally sorted, and stored in at least half a dozen different locations over the previous decade, was still so large that the scholars of Academia Sinica had not made any inroads in orga­ nizing its collection before the outbreak of hostilities with Japan in 1931. When Japan’s troops attacked Beijing, the Palace Museum collection and the archives in its possession were mobilized for war. Over the course of the next twenty years, the archives “toured” China in crates, sometimes following the various offices and institutions of the fleeing KMT state and sometimes taking separate routes and making long stopovers to hide from the destruction of war.15 Much of this archive never returned to Beijing but was instead diverted to Taiwan when the KMT fled in the face of the civil war with the Communist Party.

Archives in Taiwan By the end of the 1950s, the former palace archives reached the end of their travels. One portion of the mobilized archive settled in Taiwan under the custodianship of the newly established National Palace Museum and the offices of Academia Sinica, which had followed the Nationalist regime to Taiwan. The reestablishment of these ­institutions—directly linked to their predecessors in the republic and 14. On Lo’s career as an antiquarian and art dealer, see Yang and Whitfield, Lost Generation. 15. On the “southward journey,” the “westward travels,” the “return to the east,” and the “return north” of the archives during the wartime period, see Dan, Qingdai dang’an congtan, 12–15.

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xxviii prologue

their imperial analogs from the Qing—was part of a wider program to assert the legitimacy of the KMT state on Taiwan as the heir to Chinese tradition. Transformed by the contestation between the ROC and PRC over claims to China, the archives were well on their path from wastepaper to national treasure. Nevertheless, it took more than a decade for the archives in Taiwan to move from storage to processing and then to display and research. The materials that had been shipped to the island, while a mere fraction of the original archive, took years to organize. Funds were few. In a modest 1967 notice introducing the “Grand Council Archives,” the National Palace Museum announced its intention to microfilm the collection over the next several years, remarking that “thirty-two wooden cases . . . containing an estimated 160,000 Grand Council documents” were eligible for the project, and that although “none of the documents has been arranged chronologically,” the museum proposed a plan to organize and photograph them, inquiring among scholars in North America, “Will anyone interested, or possibly able to raise some money from their universities, or possibly able to contribute from library funds, please write . . . ?”16 In Taiwan, the documents were the treasures of two flagship state institutions: the National Palace Museum and Academia Sinica. It was in this context that many scholars first availed themselves of the imperial archive. By 1971, a portion of the palace archive became available for research in Taiwan’s National Palace Museum. Another portion was made available for in-person use by researchers at Academia ­Sinica. Their availability for use by foreign scholars for the first time in history led Beatrice Bartlett, in a 1980 article reflecting on this period, to declare “the decade of the 1970’s” the “decade of archives” for Qing historians.17 Meanwhile, the work of cataloging the archives continued. A full catalog was not made available until at least a decade after the collections were opened to researchers, many of whom had been navigating the archive with the aid of archivists who have since become part of the lore of that era of scholarship. Both units, the museum and the 16. National Palace Museum, “Grand Council Archives.” 17. Bartlett, “The Ch’ing Central Government Archives,” 25.

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research institute, began to publish printed collections of their archival holdings. Several seminal multivolume reproductions of parts of the Ming and Qing archive were printed in Taipei in the 1980s.18

Archives in Beijing While academic and cultural institutions in Taiwan were organizing one section of the archives that had been mobilized—together with factories, government institutions, newspapers, libraries, and universities— during the war, the other portion made its way back to Beijing, where it had been stored, sold, recovered, stored, sold, and recovered again before its wartime journey. The Palace Museum in Beijing—now reestablished under the PRC—was given possession of the archives once again. From the 1950s through the Cultural Revolution while possession of the archives shifted from unit to unit (eventually winding up back in the ownership of the Palace Museum), the documents themselves remained untouched, in storage in the Forbidden City.19 On one early attempt in September of 1974 to get a glimpse of the notorious but still inaccessible Qing archives, Beatrice Bartlett remarked that, in spite of her inquiries, “Chinese officialdom was silent, however, even on the subject of the location of the archives.”20 By chance, however, she did catch sight of where they were kept. When Bartlett gained access to the Forbidden City palace grounds, she sought out the Wenhua Pavilion, where the materials had been stored before World War II. Like something out of a fairytale, she reported, she peeked through “a warped Qing door” and “was able to capture a fairly good view of a quiet interior courtyard before I was discovered and told to leave.” Five years later, following a request by Chinese scholars at the 1979 National People’s Congress to be allowed access to the archives, the 18. These include, among others, the collection published as Ming Qing shiliao, which entered production in 1972, and the Ming Qing dang’an collection (edited by Chang Wejen) published by Academia Sinica in the 1980s. 19. For a description of the transfer of the archives from one work unit to another during this period, and also for a description of a short visit to the archive by a delegation of North American scholars in the summer of 1979, see Naquin, “Ming Qing Archives.” 20. Bartlett, “Archival Revival,” 81.

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xxx prologue

situation was entirely different.21 The National Archive Bureau proposed the reopening of the historical archives in 1980. The palace collection was transferred to the possession of the Archive Bureau. Although it was often still called the Ming-Qing Archives, its new official name was the First Historical Archives (Di yi lishi dang’an guan 第一历史档案馆), or “The Number One” for short. Access to The Number One was allowed even as organization of the archive continued. When Cheng Pei-kai, a Yale graduate student, visited in 1979, he reported that during his tour of the storage section, “piles of documents were seen, classified only by date, not yet by subject or even by institution.”22 While “the vastness of the collection was impressive,” Cheng admitted, so too was “the magnitude of the task still facing the dedicated archivists of the Cataloguing Department.” The catalog was only partially drafted. Microfilm production had just recently begun. At this early phase, Bartlett reported that “one large room about the size of a tennis court” was made available to those researchers granted access to the collection. As she recalled from her first visit: A notable feature of the tennis court was the intense silence which prevailed there: never have I worked in a library where everyone concentrated on his own research with such zeal. Those who wished to consult left the room and talked outside. In winter even this diversion was discouraged by the fact that while the tennis court and offices were heated, the storage vaults, vestibules, and halls were not.23

By 1980, visitors reported, the “tennis court” was full of readers both from the PRC and from foreign institutions. The “decade of the archives” announced by Bartlett after the 1970 opening of the palace collection on Taiwan had, perhaps, finally begun in the PRC. The opening of the former palace archives in both Beijing and Taipei revolutionized China scholarship. Researchers employing the 21. On this period of opening up and the work that followed, see both Bartlett, “Archival Revival,” and Moss, “Archives in the People’s Republic of China.” 22. Cheng, “Visit to the Ming-Ch’ing Archives,” 99. 23. Bartlett, “Archival Revival,” 89.

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massive central archives brought to light intimate, personal portraits of the careers of emperors and wrote remarkably detailed institutional studies of palace communication and command systems. Studies in New Qing History—a method emphasizing the distinctly Manchu character of Qing rule—became both more feasible and more pressing after access to these new sources revealed the private communications of Manchu rulers and their ministers. A boom in Chinese legal history, employing the long criminal case narratives from the central archives, also resulted from enhanced access to these sources.

From Fever to Chill: Uncertain Access to the Draft of the Past Not long after The Number One opened its doors, the archival fever spread to provincial collections. Many provincial archival bureaus had been formally established in the late 1950s, but it was not until after the National Archive Bureau’s 1980 directive to start opening up historical materials for scholarly access that many of these institutions began preparing for visitors beyond party officials. The organization, sorting, indexing, and photographing of the provincial collections proceeded with relative speed. By the end of the 1980s many major provincial and municipal bureaus began to publish their own archival guides. The possibility of doing research in archives at the provincial level and below (which, as mentioned, entailed access to records from samelevel or even same-named offices at the provincial, prefectural, or county levels in earlier eras) had previously been discussed and even explored by scholars.24 But it was not until the late 1980s that such ­archives were opened up in earnest—reading rooms were built, microfilm machines installed, tables of contents neatly stacked (if illegibly scrawled), and pad after pad of request forms on cheap onion paper

Is this what you had in mind for the line break?

24. The standout example of work by a pioneer in local archival research in China will always be Buxbaum’s “Some Aspects of Civil Procedure and Practice,” for which Buxbaum employed the Tan-Hsin Archives in Taiwan; it remains seminal in the field of Chinese legal history. Another early example of the call to local archives is Huang, “County Archives.”

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xxxii prologue

waited patiently for scholars to fit their descriptions into impossibly tiny boxes.25 In 1989 a committee of North American scholars determined to “survey archives users to learn more about the contents and accessibility of Chinese local archives,” because “one consensus of the participants was the conviction that archival sources in China could provide a significant resource for new scholarship.”26 They published the results in 1996, by which point the rush among North American Sinologists to study local history—a larger part of the exhortation to “discover history in China”—was already well under way.27 Fast on the heels of the archival wave that fostered new scholarship on central-state institutions, discoveries of holdings in provincial and municipal archives began to appear in the early 1990s, notably with the early adoption of local archival research by Philip Huang and his students at the University of California, Los Angeles. By the middle of the 1990s, English-language scholarship in almost every field of Qing history had been overturned or reinvented using local archival sources. Histories of local litigation, community formation, local administration, economic activity, business organization, village or lineage institutions, and all manner of activities only opaquely visible through central-state sources began to proliferate. The tantalizing local archives—and particularly the disputes and crimes recorded in them whose details are obscured in central archival sources and published imperial sources—shifted the entire field toward the local and the social. Throughout the first decades of the 2000s, “archival fever,” which began most notably among North American scholars, spread to the PRC. The pressures to publish with an incredibly high frequency, the relatively low status of the monograph in Chinese academia, and the discovery of so many local archives since the turn of the millennium—it 25. For one archivist’s early assessment of provincial archives at this stage, see Moseley, “Visiting Archives in China.” 26. Ye and Esherick, Chinese Archives, vii. 27. In 1984 Paul A. Cohen argued famously in his Discovering History in China that scholars should pursue a “China-centered” approach to Chinese history, eschewing “Western-inspired assumptions about how history should go” (5). The impact of this intervention is difficult to overestimate.

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seems that hardly a year has gone by without a dozen new “unprec­ edented” discoveries of archival caches—combined to spread the ­local history craze among scholars in the PRC. Searches on almost any ­historical topic on the Qing in a PRC scholarship database now consistently return dozens of “case studies,” many of which were plucked from local archives. It was against this background that I came up as a graduate student in the early 2000s, in a field that was all about the faxian (發現 “discov­ ery”). Many a time I sat in seminar rooms at PRC universities where fellow graduate students were told that their research needed to be newer. A new archive, a new document, a new reading of an existing document, a new way to overturn existing scholarship. The fruit hung so low in those days that, on one rainy day at the Shanghai Municipal Library (which houses one of the few extensive nonstate collections for the study of Qing history), I was told by a professor that I ought to pursue a topic other than the one I proposed for my dissertation because someone had “already written a book about that” (emphasis added). Discovery was so easy that it seemed a minimal requirement. The transformation of the field of Qing history that resulted from the widespread exploitation of both central and local archives is undeniable. Things that used to be taken for granted about the Qing court, about Qing society, about Qing administration in the provinces, about provincial or county-level histories, and about the lives and intrigues of Qing subjects have been overturned and reinvented. Almost no truism from a generation ago still stands. The gains of these decades of scholarship are so many and so profound that it is impossible to appreciate how far the field, as a whole, has come. Any scholar reading a book published before the year 1990 must interact with scholarship across a massive historiographical gulf. Anecdotes pulled from litigation dossiers preserved in local archives, or witty quips carefully transcribed from the rescripts on memorials preserved in The Number One, or gritty details carefully excised from homicide cases seem to adorn ­almost every chapter of every monograph produced in the field of Qing history over the past decade. But the age of discovery in the archives seems to be drawing to a close. It could never be taken for granted that the archives would always be available to scholars—indeed, as Ye and Esherick noted in their 1996

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xxxiv prologue

survey, “The opening of Chinese archives in the 1980s . . . represents a clear break with past practice” in the PRC and before.28 Archives in China—from the Qing to today—have taken “the selection, editing, and publication of documentary series as the preferred method of ­making archives available to the public.”29 This work has never ceased. Massive, wildly expensive volumes containing selections from, reprints of, or digital reproductions of information in provincial, local, and national archives seem to emerge on the market every day. The unending work of “processing (zhengli 整理),” in the immediate sense of organizing for use but also in the much larger sense of editing, publishing, and refining into history, has been a constant hum in the background of the era of archival fever in the PRC. But now, as digitization projects lead to taking archives “offline” for extended periods, as certain documents are “edited” out of existence, as requirements for access tighten in contrast to the trend toward “opening,” worried scholars have begun to wonder whether the archive is returning to its historical state: that of a draft pile to be sorted and then erased. Indeed, the project of historical compilation has recently been resumed in earnest. After a few hasty attempts to annotate the Draft Qing History in Taiwan—one of which was completed in just a year by the Research Institute of National Defense under the leadership of Chiang Kai-shek in 1960 and at least one of which seems to have been abandoned in the 1990s—a new project has emerged on the horizon.30 That new endeavor—the Qing History Project (Qing shi gongcheng 清史工程)—launched in 2002 with a ten-year deadline and the goal of producing a Qing history of roughly 30 million characters, divided into a proposed ninety-two volumes. In an announcement on Central China Television news, organizers declared that this Qing history would fill a great void: “In the 5,000 years of the history of Chinese civilization, twenty-four large-scale works of ‘standard history’ have already been edited. The Qing dynasty—which lasted for 268 years—is a very important dynasty in the history of our nation, but to this day 28. Ye and Esherick, Chinese Archives, 19. 29. Ye and Esherick, Chinese Archives, 18. 30. For a quick overview of the annotations of the Draft Qing History in Taiwan, see Chen, “Last Chapter Unfinished.”

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it still does not have a ‘standard history.’ The compilation of a Qing History will fill this blank space in history.”31 The project, overseen by a National Qing History Editorial Committee (Guojia Qing shi bianweihui 国家清史编委会) and primarily housed in a series of small, austere offices in Beijing, is in fact a collection of hundreds of projects. Yearly national competitions award funds for research in areas that require further work, and teams of scholars are still being added to the growing project (now almost a decade past its initial deadline.) When the Qing History Project concludes, scholars may rightfully wonder whether this new accomplishment in the “processing” of the Qing archive will result in a further reduction of access. Once the Qing archive has made the full transition from the foundation of the state to the compilation of a definitive history of the dynasty, then a rationale for closing the draft pile exists. If the Qing archive is truly rendered into history, it might disappear from it. In the following pages, I document the ebb and flow of archival availability in the first century of the Qing as it was intimately connected to the prerogatives of a state, an administration, and a historymaking (or history-claiming) entity. The historiographic tensions, the truth-claiming imperatives, and the politics of representation are directly connected to the more immediate and urgent politics of archival preservation and access in China today. But the following pages tell a different side of the story: that of a fledgling dynasty, having only recently conquered the world’s largest empire, expanding its reach into the local archives of the territories to establish some modicum of control over the massive bureaucracy that it now presided over. This narrative arc—which today seems to be concluding with the shrinking of the horizon of access and interpretation—begins with an empire’s search for some kind of certainty. How that story ends remains to be seen.

31. Qing History Project, “Qing shi bianzuan.”

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Introduction An Information-Centered Approach to Studying the Qing State

T

his is a history of the development of the distributed archive of the Qing Empire (1644–1912), from the middle of the seventeenth century to the middle of the eighteenth. It tells the story of the processes that shaped what was and was not recorded in the archive of the Qing. It is also a story with a surprise ending, wherein the attempts to stamp out corruption in the course of the first century of Qing rule over conquered Ming territories actually created evidence of corruption. The logic of this seemingly paradoxical development is as straightforward as it is puzzling: the same documentary processes that the central Qing administration used to find and combat malfeasance among local offi­ cials in the provinces were responsible for generating an archive full of reports documenting corruption. For hundreds of years, therefore, evidence of Qing strategies to better control and discipline the imperial bureaucracy have been interpreted as evidence of the Qing state’s loss of control over its administration.

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2 Introduction

Uncertainty and Empire Empires are uncertain enterprises. They connect vast, often diverse spaces under the authority of a throne that must insist on absolute obedience to its most urgent prerogatives while simultaneously accommodating a wide spectrum of variation. Their scale, their diversity, and the constant interplay between strict imperatives, on the one hand, and flexible implementations of policy across variegated terrain, on the other, have made history’s largest empires perennially, definitionally, and certainly uncertain. The uncertainty of the imperial enterprise protects both the throne and its subjects in many ways. The talented monarch may guide entire swaths of administrative activity with philosophically powerful and internally consistent commands that remain wide open to interpretation, reserving the right to blame or praise officials, who are forced to improvise programs to realize the vague or infeasible promises of the throne. Clever rulers may use the uncertainty of policy implementation to force delegates of the throne into positions of perpetual insecurity, never allowing the servants of the state to forget their dependency on the benevolence of the monarch. Subjects may benefit from the uncertainty of policy implementation under broad imperatives by carving out spaces capable of preserving community integrity under the capacious umbrella of empire. When wielded skillfully, the uncertainty of an imperial regime accommodates multiple realities, balanced across a seemingly fixed and secure framework.1 The imperial balancing act between diversity and unity dictates that the tension among constitutional tenets, concrete rules, and lived experience both resolves and creates problems of governance. At the same time that uncertainty might provide a flexible space for the coexistence of distinct interests, it can also threaten the interests of all involved in the imperial enterprise. This uncertainty of empire has allowed historians to study the intersection, contestation, and interaction of various 1. The recognition among members of the Qing bureaucracy of the “conflict between the ideological need for a fixed order and the need to adapt to changing cir­ cumstances” is discussed in Metzger, Internal Organization of Ch’ing Bureaucracy, 81.

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3

interests and actions across large structures. Studies of contests between those at the top of imperial power structures and those at the bottom, or compromises struck among widely differing groups, or strategies of survival for those seeking to hide behind the anonymity of imperial tropes have all illustrated the complexity that exists in the spaces created by uncertainty. This study takes a diachronic approach to the study of uncertainty in empire. Rather than plumbing the richness of possibility present in the uncertainty of a specific moment and focusing on its synchronic dimensions, it examines how one empire’s response to uncertainty evolved over time. The result is a history of information gathering, reports, regulations, tightened deadlines, personnel sanctions, and archival auditing requirements that slowly accumulated over a century: from conquest in 1644 to the middle of the 1700s. By observing a century-long arc of the Qing court’s attempts to overcome its own perennial uncertainty via collecting more information about and producing more regulations for local administrations, this history documents how the last dynasty slowly but profoundly altered the epistemological foundations of its own empire. The Qing state ultimately transformed what it sought to observe. Over the course of roughly a century of quotidian efforts to produce greater bureaucratic accountability, the emperors and officials of the last empire unknowingly collaborated in an unexpected, unintended, and heretofore overlooked administrative revolution. The primary impetus behind this shift was the desire of the Qing central bureaucracy for greater certainty about the compliance and dependability of local officials operating in an empire so large that most administrative interactions took place via documentary communications. The central state’s myriad attempts to observe and control the behavior of local officials were, in the Qing and by later historians, broadly understood as measures to stamp out malfeasance. Any individual report or regulation designed to curtail certain unwanted behavior in the territories might achieve its objective. But over time, as the tools governing “corruption” in the territories increased exponentially, ­information about malfeasance in the territories also multiplied. The more the Qing central court sought to root out corruption, the more corruption it found. By the close of the eighteenth century, the men at

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4 Introduction

the helm of the Qing state became convinced that it was in the throes of decline. The irony of this administrative revolution—authored by myriad agents but engineered by none—is that it remained invisible to both actors and historians. The creation of new information ecologies building up to the administrative revolution of the eighteenth century was so slow and so subtle that the tectonic effects on the bureaucracy were imperceptible even to the men at the center of the state interacting with them. Emperors and officials saw what seemed like a sudden spike in malfeasance throughout the territorial administrations from the middle of the eighteenth century forward. But the correlation between the observed trends and the increased scope of observation was so obscured by the urgency of the problems being discovered that it remained uninterrogated. The profound and yet subtle nature of this administrative shift presented a serious challenge: successes in reporting were understood— by Qing actors, outside observers, and generations of historians—as failures of governance. The dawning realization of the scope of local problems and possible malfeasance, which had existed since well before the implementation of the new Qing reporting regime, triggered a crisis of confidence in the state at precisely the moment that its control over local officials had reached unprecedented heights. The specter of decay that looms in the background of historical narratives about decline in the nineteenth-century Qing seems to be validated by a host of sources from the middle of the eighteenth century forward. Indeed, any individual piece of evidence or any single phenom­enon observed appears to support this long-standing interpretation. Thus the same information that triggered the Qing’s own crisis at the turn of the nineteenth century has supported historians’ portrayals of dynastic decline that are more or less in line with the story as Qing actors, themselves, understood it. The radical epistemological shift of the eighteenth-century Qing state has, therefore, been reproduced in the background of histories today without being recognized as an outcome of the eighteenthcentury regime’s administrative revolution. This is a critical problem precisely because it operates below the surface of historical inquiries and constantly influences the evidence used to answer them. While

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individual scholars scrutinize their own sources, the abundance of materials documenting decline in other areas looms just beyond the critical foreground. The effect of the growing discourse of crisis and corruption on extrapolation and interpretation, therefore, grows exponentially toward the margins of a study’s focus. To shift our perspective and illu­minate the course and dimensions of the Qing’s eighteenthcentury administrative revolution, we must develop a new appreciation for the role of text in maintaining and determining the uncertain imperial enterprise.

The Empire of Routine: Text and Information in the Qing Empire Although the narrative of administrative transformation at the heart of this story is full of the cat-and-mouse games played by some historical actors in their attempts to monitor and curtail the actions of others, the proper subject of this story is the mousetrap itself. By focusing on the evolution of the memorials, reports, cases, registers, archives, memoranda, audits, pledges, and various processes of review employed to understand and govern the empire, the following chapters document how, piece by piece, the buildup of an information regime designed to make the central state more certain about the reliability and compliance of its own officials transformed the very nature of the imperial administration. Critical to this story is an understanding of the role that text played in mediating the governing structures of the empire. The written communications that bound the Qing state together were not only the strands that connected local cases to imperial commands; they were also threads in a delicately woven, seemingly intelligible tapestry, tying together vastly different places in a single dynastic framework that was, itself, the product of interweaving the philosophical and his­ torical canons of the state. The Qing imperial enterprise was a sustained, complicated, sophisticated exercise in textual coordination. The stakes of maintaining the perfect textual register of empire were so high that even some of the Qing’s most famously capable emperors can seem like anxious grammarians, poring over the heaps of texts that came across the imperial desk.

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6 Introduction

Take, for example, the Kangxi emperor (r. 1661–1722). One of the most renowned monarchs of Qing history, the Kangxi emperor is known for his strong leadership, his military capabilities, his intellectual curiosity, his cosmopolitan approach to empire, and even his artistic appreciation. But not even this emperor, who towers over many others in the memory of history, considered himself above double-checking every single character in the writings that arrived on his desk. As he remarked in a memorial from the forty-sixth year of his reign: In the summary memorials on the affairs of the Ministry of Punishments, if there is even a single incorrect character, We personally correct it with the vermillion brush and send it back. Similarly, We read every single one of the memorials from the capital offices and the yamen in the territories in their entirety. Some have said that We need not read them all from beginning to end. But in every single memorial We see whether or not there are mistaken characters, and We correct them. When the translators fail to capture a correct meaning We amend it. In times of war, We personally read three to four hundred memorials in the course of a single day, overlooking nothing. Lately, with only fifty or forty memorials in a single day, it’s a simple task to read everything. Anything less would be the mark of a neglectful mind.2

Looking back on his youth in the last decade of his rule and reminiscing on his various successes, the Kangxi emperor listed as one of his defining achievements the fact that he read hundreds of memorials a day and “never once overlooked a single character (曾無一字疏略).”3 2. KXSL 46.12.20: 1. 3. KXSL 52.7.10: 3. The Kangxi emperor was not alone in claiming credit for personally looking over every character in each memorial that came across his desk. The most famous paragon of the emperor-as-paper-grader archetype is probably the Hongwu emperor. It is often claimed that the founding Ming emperor oversaw 3,391 affairs in 1,660 separate memorials over one eight-day period late in his reign. The earliest iteration of this claim that I have found is in Ch’ien, Traditional Government in Imperial China, 94. It is repeated in Hucker, Ming Dynasty, 43, and also in Wu, “Transmission of Ming Memorials,” 281. Bartlett has calculated that this would entail an average of 5,000 memorials per month (with an even larger number of decisions to be made, assuming multiple proposals per document). See Bartlett, Monarchs and Ministers, 347 n. 6.

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7

Modern readers might find the Kangxi emperor’s claims improbable and his pride in carefully reading reports misplaced. But text played such an important role in mediating between the various realms of the administration that this emphasis on reading was warranted. The systems through which information traveled were engineered such that even a single character’s difference could signal an important problem. The mechanisms and evolution of those systems are far more complicated than the brief representation here can adequately convey.4 But for the sake of clarity and simplicity, the following brief sketch of the documentary process explains the links between an imperial command, the execution of that command, the supervision of officials delegated by the throne, the relation of information about local realities, and the creation of new legal and administrative prerogatives.

Central Review All routine administrative affairs that reached the imperial throne for approval were part of a system of documentary circulation that I refer to as “central review.” The exact terms and processes of central review differed for distinct items—the central review of budgeted expenses for water conservation, for example, were different in some ways from the central review of sentencing proposals for homicide cases—but I use the blanket term “central review” (which has no single equivalent in Qing bureaucratic parlance) to refer to the set of regulations and conventions that allowed the emperor to gather information, assert his final decision-making prerogative, and disseminate commands across the bureaucracy. The concept of central review did not exist as a stable, general category in the Qing bureaucracy. The system was not invented ex nihilo, 4. Seminal works on the problem of communication and command at the imperial center—many of which focus on the Ming, when several of these institutions were first modified or created—include Wu, Communication and Imperial Control in China and “Transmission of Ming Memorials”; Hucker, “Ming Government” and Ming Dynasty; Farmer, Early Ming Government; Bartlett, Monarchs and Ministers; Fairbank and Têng, “Types and Uses of Ch’ing Documents”; and Elliott, “ManchuLanguage Archives.”

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8 Introduction

nor was it engineered as a whole. Instead, the features of central review emerged from centuries of accretion and the cross-pollination of myriad documentary processes employed to communicate and decide on affairs reserved for the prerogative of the throne. Much of what was shared by the various documentary forms employed in central review was spread by rote practice and convention, as officials moving to different yamen throughout the empire took practices from one office into another, and as regulations in one sphere of administration were adopted in others. These changes could happen either suddenly or over very long intervals. Despite being diverse in their origins and numerous in their idiosyncrasies, certain features of central review had concretized by the time of the Qing conquest of the Ming Empire (1368–1644). To maintain efficiency and productivity in spite of the abundance of administrative items reported to the throne, the handling of centrally reviewed affairs had several formal attributes. All centrally reviewed affairs required the explicit permission of the emperor for execution. The execution of those affairs, furthermore, was determined by imperial routines. And finally, the very routines and regulations that informed the handling of centrally reviewed affairs were generated and scrutinized through the central review process. The Throne as Hub First, all centrally reviewed routine affairs were submitted to the throne via the memorial system—a set of stringent documentary standards and regulations that defined routine communications between the throne and the bureaucracy.5 Some affairs—capital punishment cases and routine province-level tax remission reports, for example—were memorialized directly to the throne from gubernatorial offices in each of the provinces. Others—such as cases regarding individuals sentenced to exile or impeachment allegations against local officials in the provinces—were reported first to the central ministries, which would compile summary empire-wide reports and recommendations that were then memorialized to the throne. How an 5. The specifications on drafting and handling memorials are recorded in various regulations at DQHD: 內閣, 職掌, 進本, and 票擬.

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affair was memorialized and by whom could be determined by imperial statutes, ministerial regulations governing each administrative function, or the reporting conventions of each office. The streamlined communications of the memorial system facilitated a high degree of integration between the central state and the various offices of the empire. In this system the throne was the hub for this massive flow of information and command. The imperial ­rescript—the personal approval or command written in the hand of the emperor himself—was required to keep official matters moving through the administrative system. The throne’s burdensome responsibility in issuing decisions on all affairs subject to central review was made more feasible and productive by the assistance of the capital bureaucracies that processed routine affairs, imperial councils that joined the emperor in deliberations on materials submitted to the throne, and the Censorate, which scrutinized routine communications for personnel issues and large-scale policy problems.6 The centrality of the throne thus gave the emperor the ability to exercise his prerogative over any individual matter; at the same time, given the work performed by the entire central administration, his role could sometimes amount to little more than countenancing already processed information with his vermillion rescript. Routine Affairs Second, centrally reviewed affairs were governed by regulations, making them routine administrative duties. Not all routine duties were reported to the throne, and not all affairs reported to the throne were 6. The Censorate and its officials scrutinized the routine affairs of the imperial administration. It was empowered to remonstrate not only with the entire bureaucracy but also with imperial councils and even the emperor himself. To facilitate this work, censorial officials were situated throughout the imperial bureaucracy at every critical communication and decision-making node. Censorial officials in the provinces performed both routine and random checks on local officials and participated in the compilation and audit of documents for the evaluation of official personnel through­ out the empire. The censorial apparatus was conceivable only in the context of the highly uniform structure of the emperor-centric system of central review, which demanded that massive amounts of information flow through a single hub. For an institutional history of censorship in the Ming, see Hucker, Censorial System of Ming China.

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10 Introduction

routine. Only those cases meeting both conditions were a part of the system of central review, which governed matters that required the approval of the throne and that could be processed according to statutes maintained by the central bureaucracy. Because routine affairs were decided with reference to existing regulations and precedents, the majority of the work required to process these matters could be performed in the Six Ministries of the capital, where the archives of previously decided cases and the compendia of administrative regulations were most up-to-date. In their whir and hum, the capital ministries generated, processed, deliberated on, and oversaw all of the routine administrative affairs that required both accord with Qing regulations and imperial approval. Each of the Six Ministries specialized in one of the fields of routine administration as defined by the hexapartite division of imperial administration into the realms of War, Personnel, Rites, Works, Punishments, and Revenue.7 In practice, however, their operations often overlapped. Because of the interconnected nature of the sixfold division of the late imperial administration, statutes dictating the reporting and review of any particular routine administrative affair might be dispersed across several ministries. The Ministry of Revenue, for example, might maintain detailed regulations regarding budget requirements that grew out of a single edict about a specific problem. The Ministry of Revenue’s regulations on revenue reports might then be further supplemented by regulations in the Ministry of Personnel dictating sanctions for officials who failed to perform the required duties in a correct or timely fashion. Criminal malfeasance in revenue collection could, furthermore, be covered under criminal statutes codified by the Ministry of Punishments. Thus, while each area of routine governance was linked to an imperial command (either by a specific Qing emperor or by a Ming predecessor, whose imperial commands were ensconced in the governing institutions inherited and adapted by the Qing), and each area of routine governance also fell under the domain of one of the Six Ministries, 7. For a brief summary of the Yuan and Ming institution of the Six Ministries, which was the foundation of the Qing organization of the central bureaucracy, see Hucker, Censorial System of Ming China, 25, 39–41.

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the regulations that constituted the larger system of central review were distributed across the institutions of the central state. For this reason, affairs submitted to the throne for approval were subject to deliberation in all of the ministries that might have knowledge of pertinent precedents or regulations pertaining to the matter at hand. Each of those ministries would research and deliberate on the matter destined for imperial review, providing recommendations to the throne. In addition to recommending imperial responses based on their knowledge of specific administrative domains, the capital ministries also oversaw the proper handling and examination of routine assignments on the standard administrative calendar (such as the inde­ pendent schedules for the Ministry of Revenue’s audits of provincial revenue reports, the Ministry of Personnel’s deliberation over administrative sanctions, the Ministry of Works’ oversight of regular city wall maintenance, the Ministry of Rites’ organization of imperially mandated rituals, and a host of other routine processes). Furthermore, even after the affairs processed and reviewed by the Six Ministries were approved by the throne, these capital offices were responsible for tracking the various territorial yamen responsible for executing the imperial decision in accordance with regulations. Validation and Innovation Third, the process of central review was not only a means of scrutinizing day-to-day affairs; it was also a critical part of creating and modifying dynastic institutions.8 The movement of information and commands up and down the imperial bureaucracy might simply be single-instance iterations of situations already established in the existing laws and statutes of the dynasty (which, like the Six Ministries, were also organized according to the hexapartite division of the late imperial state). But any decision or occurrence that seemed at odds with the existing regulatory framework of the state could, in the very process 8. On the creation and compilation of regulations, see the various essays collected in Moll-Murata et al., Chinese Handicraft Regulations, especially Su, “Compilation, Content, and Function,” and Song, “Exploration of the Origins, Characteristics, and Research.” For an in-depth discussion of the materials, processes, and information generated by regulatory compilation in the field of handicraft, see Song and MollMurata, “Notes on Qing Dynasty ‘Handicraft Regulations.’”

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12 Introduction

of central review, trigger a revision or addition to the regulations, standards, precedents, or prevalent interpretations of dynastic practice. The regulations used to process cases and recommend decisions to the throne spanned a range of formality. At the least formal level were the uncodified precedents contained in the archives of each minis­ terial office. These archives contained the “fixed cases (ding’an 定案)” that each ministry had previously processed (by convention, the fixed cases handled by the Ministry of Punishments are instead referred to as “leading cases,” or cheng’an 成案). These were merely resolved files from previous affairs that might be used as references for future ministerial deliberations in the capital. Lacking the official power of precedent, the cases were explicitly excluded from being used to argue cases by analogy. Multiple imperial edicts explicitly forbade authors of memorials and proposals from citing these cases as precedent, since they were merely archived cases used for ministerial reference, but knowledge of them circulated throughout the bureaucracy and they were often referred to in the quotidian deliberations of the ministries.9 Above the level of the fixed case was the ministerial precedent (zeli 則例). Each ministry was responsible for the review of the affairs that fell under its jurisdiction, for the adaptation of rules to fit changing circumstances as gleaned from the constant flow of reports to Beijing offices, and for disseminating knowledge about changing administrative norms. If a loophole or complication or conflict in the regulations were revealed by a fixed case, it could lead to a modification of ministerial precedent. At irregular intervals, such precedents were edited and published for internal use as official ministry-level regulations.10 Occasionally—rarely at first, and then with increasing frequency— ministerial regulations were further edited and reviewed by the central state offices responsible for the compilation of dynastic regulatory compendia. These massive projects, which entailed reviewing, editing, 9. For a description of the authority, use, and publication of leading cases in the Qing, see Will, Bibliography, xlviii–liii; and Li, “Qingdai zhong’an.” 10. These regulations circulated so widely and were published (or copied) so frequently that every library at every university with a well-established Sinological tradition has examples of ministerial precedents in their collections. For an overview of some of the most common examples of this genre, see Chang, Zhongguo fazhishi shumu, 56–90.

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and finalizing key ministerial precedents for wide dissemination, culminated in explicit imperial endorsement. Ministerial regulations were raised in this way to the level of imperially approved regulations, literally “regulations on [previously decided] affairs (shili 事例).” In a 1774 edict commanding two capital offices to update and disseminate their statutes, the Qianlong emperor comments on the relationship between the two, since imperial regulations emerged from ministerial ones: Each of the ministries is a general hub for the cases from each of the provincial territories. The normal generation of imperially approved regulations (事例) is largely the result of deliberations on the advantages and disadvantages of adapting practice to certain places and times. These things cannot but be compiled into ministerial precedents (不得不纂為 則例) so that everyone in both the capital and the provinces may know and follow them.11

Ministerial regulations promoted to the level of imperial regulations would eventually qualify for inclusion in the Qing huidian, the regulatory compendium for the entire imperial state.12 Just as imperial approval could convert ministerial precedent into dynastic regulation, an imperial rescript (a command written in the hand of the emperor on a memorial) could convey the authority of the throne with the force of law. Many edicts resulting from central review were simply confirmations of the proposed handling of an issue as outlined in an initial memorial and recommended by the capital ministries that had collaborated to review and research the affair before bringing them to the throne for decision. In these cases, the imperial brush simply confirmed what procedure dictated and what the relevant ministry had proposed. Because these imperial edicts merely reinforced existing 11. QLSL 39.7.21:1. 12. For insight into some of the early Qing discussions on incorporating ministerial precedent into the dynastic code, see Metzger, Internal Organization of Ch’ing Bureaucracy, 167–232, and Zhang, “Information and Power,” 27–33. For a his­ tory of the incorporation of regulations into the section of the Collected Institutions that comprised the Qing legal code, see Qin and Zhou, “Pursuing Perfection.”

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14 Introduction

norms and regulations, although they are preserved in the archive they were not compiled for further dissemination. In cases that did not entail the straightforward application of a statute, a one-time solution might be commanded by imperial edict. Such commands varied greatly, from vague exhortations to specific instructions to threats of punishment if provincial administrators did not tighten up their administrations. For affairs that involved larger problems and required a larger-scale policy response, the emperor could direct the relevant ministries to construct a set of regionally and temporally specific precedents for conducting a particular campaign in response to a reported issue (a fundraising campaign, for example, or a banditry-extinguishing campaign). Although these campaign-style policies were, in theory, applicable only for a certain space and time, provincial officials often used the precedent of other campaigns to request similar privileges, citing previous imperial commands in applying for special consideration under similar circumstances.13 For affairs that illuminated perennial and empire-wide problems, or common errors in implementing imperial policy, imperial edicts might be issued to correct behaviors across the administration. In these cases, the edict would circulate to all ministries and provincial administrations for execution throughout the empire. Editors of the Collected Institutions would select the most durable and pertinent of these empire-wide commands for inclusion in future editions of the dynastic administrative compendium. In some cases, even the Qing Code itself—which was merely the Ministry of Punishments section of the huidian—would be modified to reflect new regulations (referred to, in legal parlance, as substatutes, or li 例). The intimate relationship between the review of affairs being submitted for approval, on the one hand, and the processes of regulatory innovation, on the other, made central review vital to the center’s attempt 13. This is one reason information about imperial communications with other provinces—such as those recorded and circulated in the imperial gazetteer—could be extremely useful for provincial governors. On the official and unofficial circulation of memorials and imperial commands in the imperial gazette, see Mokros, “Communication, Empire, and Authority.” For a nineteenth-century example of just how sophisticated these sorts of precedent-based campaigns became by the late Qing, see Kaske, “Fundraising Wars.”

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to discipline officials in the territories and to the state’s efforts to adapt to changing circumstances. The routines and statutes of the empire were refined as they were enforced. With its interlocking processes of information gathering, enforcement, and innovation based on the ­everyday circulation of routine affairs throughout the bureaucracy, central review was a critical site of state formation. The administrative complexity that resulted from central review relied on the communication of information from throughout the realm to the throne, whose deliberation with the central ministries led to the adaptation of routines and regulations in response to changing circumstances and new information. The Qing empire of routine was, in this manner, the product of constant feedback, connecting every office of the empire in both enforcing and generating the law of the dynasty.

Collaboration, Composition, and Command in the Qing Empire Under this system of emperor-centered communication and command, large swaths of the empire were bound together by adminis­ trative routines, in spite of great variation in local circumstances. A basic tension existed, therefore, between the universal claims of sovereignty and realistic barriers to the propagation of imperial commands throughout the empire. A long-standing emphasis, both in the Qing imperial tradition and in the imperial traditions inherited from the Ming and its predecessors, on the centrality of the emperor to the moral, cosmological, and natural processes of all-under-heaven placed a strong demand on the imperatives of the throne. Qing rulers, like those in the dynasties before them, adamantly and consistently rejected the delegation of all affairs pertaining to the “life-loving virtue (hao­ sheng zhi de 好生之德)” of the Son of Heaven to others.14 The taking 14. For a discussion of the relationship between the “life-loving virtue” of the sovereign and the execution of the law, see the chapters “A General Discussion on the Duty to Punish (總論制刑之意)” and “Caution in the Use of Penal Institutions ‌(慎‌刑‌憲)” in Qiu, Daxue yanyi bu. A translation of these chapters by Jérôme Bourgon and Maura Dykstra will appear in volume 1 of a forthcoming work edited by Timothy Brook and Dai Lianbin, tentatively titled Ming Statecraft: Chinese Political Economy in the Fifteenth Century.

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16 Introduction

of lives in punishment for crimes, the waging of war, the prevention of and responses to famine, the promotion of timely agricultural activities, the spread of moral education, and the correct performance of imperial rituals were all affairs that bore directly on the livelihood of the people, and therefore were paramount concerns of the throne. The refusal to fully delegate affairs pertaining to the imperial prerogative, however, did not mean that local officials and provincial administrations lacked autonomy. Many affairs of administration—even those falling directly under the authority of the throne—existed both outside the realm of statute and outside the world of reporting. Although the power to decide capital punishment cases, for example, was strictly monopolized by the emperor, many of the details leading up to the decision made by the throne were outside the control of the central state: the protocols for apprehending suspects, the myriad minutiae of a criminal investigation, and even choices about how to report a case to Beijing all bore directly on the final outcome and yet fell outside of the tools used by the central bureaucracy to monitor local administrations. The further up the administrative chain that reports of local facts traveled, the more standardized the narratives in them became, ­because they had to fit within dynastic routines. The centripetal standardizing forces that shaped documents as they traveled up the chain of review were part of a very purposeful harnessing and taming of the chaotic world of facts contained in local cases.15 This process was intended to obscure difference at the local or phenomenological level for purposes of bureaucratic legibility and to suppress ambiguities or problems that did not bear on the most elevated priorities of the dynasty. With information being filtered, translated, edited, and aggregated at every step of the way, the reports that finally arrived in Beijing were necessarily incomplete. This incompleteness was the artifact of a critical com­ promise: the system of central review could process large amounts of highly routinized information, but only at the cost of occluding a host of details about local realities. 15. For a technical and compelling description of memorial contents and for­ matting, see chapter 2 in Wang, “Dilemmas of Empire,” 14–33.

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Most day-to-day administrative processes were, therefore, not known to the central bureaucracy, either because they fell outside of the dynastic regulations or because they existed beyond the world of facts that were consistently reported in the central review process. The further down the administrative ladder—and the closer, therefore, to the lived experiences of subjects—the more likely it was that administrative activities were either not governed by regulatory standards or remained beyond the view of the central bureaucracy’s censorial and accounting practices.

The State of the Archive The Qing approach to disciplining its own state was adapted to solve the problems and exploit the possibilities specific to the mechanics of the distributed imperial archive. In the distributed archive of the Qing, affairs that traveled up the administrative ladder lost their original resolution as they moved closer to Beijing, but the information that was edited out of later reports remained at the lower levels of the administration. This means that documents and reports on issues reviewed in Beijing varied from office to office. The archive of each office that handled a report as it moved from the locale to the center retained a distinct imprint of the information that would later be further routinized and obscured. Although local affairs were not represented in high fidelity in the memorials arriving at the capital, the fact that information existed in an “original” form in the first yamen report and in “filtered” forms in higher offices was critical to the Qing search for certainty about its own officials. Because each report was distinct from the one that followed, every action that any official reported to superiors—no matter how great or how small—could be scrutinized not only as fact but also as representation. Representation and responsibility were intricately inter­ twined in an empire so large that it could be ruled only remotely, via text. Each claim in every report contained not only the potential to obtain real knowledge about the empire, but also the possibility of using multiple data streams to pinpoint how each office contributed to

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18 Introduction

the representation of local realities to the imperial bureaucracy. The result was one of the most dizzyingly sophisticated mechanisms of principle-agent control in the history of bureaucracy.

The Seal-Holding Official A key to the Qing court’s search for certainty in the fuzzy margin between fact and report was holding every official responsible for his office and for those below him. In the Qing distributed archive every official was a load-bearing cornerstone. Every office in the empire was the responsibility of the one official appointed to preside over its affairs. That official was given possession of the seal of the office—the object required to ratify all documents bearing the authority of the yamen. The seal-holding official (zhengyin guan 正印官) in each office often worked with a large support staff: some adjunct officials with appointments from the court, some personal servants and advisers, and some staff who spent their entire career working in the local office regardless of the officials appointed to head that office, as well as local figures who liaised between the yamen and the communities under their jurisdiction.16 The number of individuals whose actions the seal-holding official was accountable for could be quite high; when the infamously upright magistrate Liu Heng arrived to assume his position as Ba County magistrate in 1825, for example, he reported finding more than 7,000 illicit employees associated with the county yamen, to say nothing of the others working under his authority.17 In the context where the duties of each yamen were performed by dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of individuals, seal-holding officials were administrative lynchpins. As the possessors of the seal of office, they were responsible for finalizing reports, queries, orders, and all forms of textual authority associated with the office they held. Their seal of approval was required for every official command associated with 16. On the privately hired experts who served in yamen, see Chen, “Legal Specialists and Judicial Administration,” and Cole, “The Shaoxing Connection.” On the clerks and runners who remained attached to individual yamen, see Li, “Qingdai Baxian yamen,” and Reed, “Money and Justice” and Talons and Teeth. 17. Zhao et al., Qing shi gao, “Biography 265.”

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the yamen over which they presided. This authority gave seal-bearing officials the final power to decide how to implement imperial policy in the locale and how to represent the locale to higher levels of the administration. Their authority also meant that, as the sole representatives of imperial power in their jurisdiction, seal-holding officials were closely scrutinized as a proxy for both the doings of subjects under their administration and the affairs of the staff working in the yamen. Central and local officials in the Qing understood quite well that, since local cases were handled at the discretion of and under the authority of the seal-holding officials, any problems with the handling of those cases were essentially problems of personnel management. Every single document submitted for central review, therefore, represented both an on-the-ground administrative situation and an opportunity to scrutinize the seal-holding officials representing the locale to the court and the court to the locale. In an empire connected by routine, central command and local experience interacted in a space of uncertain assertions of truth and authority. The seal-holding officials of the empire were responsible for these spaces and were therefore both powerful and vulnerable.

Many Processes, Uncertain Authors: Agency in the Empire of Routine The nominal purpose of the increasingly stringent reporting requirements during the first hundred years of the Qing—as reconstructed in the following chapters through imperial edicts, policy discussions from dynastic compendia, individual memorial collections, central state a­ rchives, and regulatory publications—was to bring the ruler closer to the empire and the territories closer to the throne. In their search for certainty about the compliance of their own administration, Qing rulers and high ministers sought to broaden their oversight of local administrative processes by expanding routine demands for information and compliance. Each administrative innovation met with a variety of provincial responses, depending on local incentives and problems. Some officials struggled to cover up existing practices when new reporting demands threatened to force them to light. Others rushed to report a problem

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20 Introduction

pertaining to new imperial demands with the ostensible aim of securing protection, praise, or promotion, in the face of a campaign that made their exposure inevitable. Several high-level provincial officials earned reputations as daring reformers when they chose to respond to increasing demands for accountability by experimenting with new regimens of scrutiny over local officials or by making local policies more legible to central officials. The host of responses to any single administrative demand—in an era when multitudes were accumulating—led to imperfect, uneven, frequently jarring, and consistently contradictory responses to the expansion of administrative routines into new areas. For this reason, the administrative revolution that occurred as a result of a century of expanding routine demands is difficult to see: it was a process that was both authorless and author-full. As successive chapters make clear—using magistrate manuals, administrative handbooks, county-level archival documents, and prefectural archives—responses to the central state’s attempts at gathering information to enforce greater compliance were multifaceted and often led to both the stated objective and several unintended, unforeseen, and often undesired responses from provincial officials coping with the tensions between local incentives and central court demands. The links between changes to county-level administrative practice, the routines of high provincial offices, and information demands from the central state are frequently difficult to pinpoint and apparent only in the aggregate. In fact, the effects of the state’s information-gathering strategies rippled outward in so many directions that their influence is often difficult to associate with their origin. Because it took time for offi­ cials in the provinces to respond or adapt to central demands, central officials often demanded more information or created new regulations before strategies for coping with earlier innovations were yet settled. This lag both complicated and obscured the responses of the provinces to administrative shifts. A single county magistrate’s response to a central edict might not appear in the historical record until a decade after the related regulations first appeared in the dynastic registers. The emperors and high officials who often take center stage in the history of the dynasty are, therefore, present in this story, but in a narrative of these dimensions, they are only partial and imperfect agents, responding to immediate needs in ways that seem reasonable

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enough, and yet also responsible for later unforeseen and seemingly unconnected developments. In this narrative, then, what any historical actor wanted to achieve, or was capable of, or accidentally inspired, or discovered, was the product of not only that particular individual’s action but also the further actions and reactions of myriad others with conflicting interests and working in widely differing contexts. Because these interactions could be simultaneous or delayed and could involve other actors near or far, the responses to decisions by historical agents are necessarily contradictory. This key point—that the empire of routine emerged from a cacophony of responses to differently played roles in prolonged and large-scale administrative processes—requires that the historian’s habit of pinpointing the motivations, actions, and frustrations of each individual be set aside for a more pluralistic representation of each action and the responses to it. The Shunzhi emperor might be both a hapless child and the most powerful monarch in the world when a decree is issued in his name.18 The Qianlong emperor can be both a paranoid megalomaniac and a rational actor responding to institutional stimuli when investigating allegations of corruption.19 An ambitious governor known as an imperial favorite might be, at the same time, little more than a mouse finding its way through the imperial plot, holding up the throne’s interest at the same time that he actively undermines it.20 Low-level local officials, for their own part, may be considered terrifying authorities— holding the power of life and death over the subjects in their jurisdiction and single-handedly concealing facts from the nominally omnipotent emperor—at the same time that they are also the likeliest victims of the administration, suffering for the faults and the demands of every other actor higher up the chain. Neither extreme is strictly true, but the actions of each person-position reflect both potentials. 18. The strong conciliar aspect of early Qing government is an important part of Qing history, especially in the wake of the conquest of the Ming. For a detailed look at how the regency overseeing the Shunzhi emperor influenced palace politics, see Lui, Two Rulers. For an overview of the history of the Oboi regency that presided over the minority of the Kangxi emperor, see Oxnam, Ruling from Horseback. 19. The seminal work that explores this spectrum is Kuhn, Soulstealers. 20. A thoughtful illustration of this tension can be found in Akçetin, “Corruption at the Frontier.”

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22 Introduction

For this reason, even though each chapter presents the administrative innovations of a particular era, linking several central initiatives in the context of their attempt to grapple with some aspect of the problem of administrative oversight, the effects of these policies might not be apparent until later chapters, at the very moment that new administrative mandates emerge. Thus, although the threads outlining the forces behind information demands in one chapter run beneath the sur­ face of the narratives in the next, by the end of the work all of the strands will be understood as connected in reciprocating, reverberating ways. Only when the net of reporting and analysis is spread widely enough, and its weave is dense enough, can we appreciate the full scope of the eighteenth-century administrative revolution.

The Plan Because the documentary tools used by each of the Six Ministries and related offices formed a coherent set of patterns across the administration, the expansion of the Qing empire of routine can be documented in every facet of routine civil administration. To demonstrate how, without intending to act on the whole state apparatus, a series of seemingly straightforward documentary reforms in one field of governance could crescendo into the broader crisis of the mid- and late eighteenth century, I begin by focusing on a single, fairly well-studied facet of central review: the scrutiny and approval of criminal sentencing proposals from the provinces. The review of these memorials was one of the most paper-intensive and also philosophically important components of the operation of the central bureaucracy’s administration. In cases where the behavior of imperial subjects violated the legal sanctions of the state, magistrates were expected to apply the law with technical precision and absolute fidelity in a “highly centralized system” of fact finding, judgment, and review.21 The routine punishment memorials for capital crimes (described at length in chapter 2) are among the most abundant types of archival documents preserved in the First Historical Archives of Beijing. Reviewing every capital 21. Wang, “Judicial Reasoning and Political Legitimacy,” 44–71, 184.

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sentence proposal sent from the provinces was such a high priority for the Son of Heaven, given the throne’s commitment to presiding over life-and-death affairs of the empire, that the Kangxi emperor insisted that the Ministry of Punishments forward every day’s newly arrived memorials even when the royal court was in summer retreat at Rehe.22 These cases are also among the most commonly used sources in the field of Qing history, mined by scholars seeking to both reconstruct the Qing justice system and write local histories based on the testimonial narratives contained in the cases. The large scale of the review of sentencing proposals, the importance of the throne’s claim to complete power over the life and death of its subjects, and the abundance of magistrate manuals, imperial edicts, local archival materials, regulations, and policy debates documenting the key institutional changes to the review of sentences and the multitude of responses to those requirements make it a rich field of study. Memorials proposing criminal sentences for capital crimes are, therefore, an excellent candidate for illustrating how a seemingly straightforward quest for certainty through information gathering ­actually transformed the structure of the state, its epistemological foundations, and both historical actors’ and historians’ assessments of the viability of the Qing bureaucracy from the eighteenth century forward. The first three chapters, part I of the book, discuss how, after the fall of the Ming, three Qing emperors and their courts conceived of and attempted to address problems of information related to sentencing in capital punishment cases and the scrutiny of provincial officials’ handling of those investigations. Chapter 1 describes the extent to which a great lack of information hampered the ability of early Qing emperors to enforce dynastic regulations pertaining to the investigation, trial, imprisonment, and sentencing of suspects. It then introduces the first steps taken by the Shunzhi (r. 1644–61) and Kangxi emperors and their courts to generate enough information to police local officials. The chapter employs standard imperial sources documenting regulatory processes and policy debates to demonstrate how, after introducing statutory demands about the types of information officials were 22. KXSL 51.10.29: 1.

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24 Introduction

required to submit to Beijing and stricter deadlines for communications from the provinces to the capital, the possibility of regulating case handling in greater detail first emerged and then culminated in a regulatory boom under the reign of the Kangxi emperor. Chapter 2 introduces a dilemma inherent to the forms of information that, by the turn of the eighteenth century, were being routinely communicated to Beijing in the form of sentencing proposal memorials. The problem emerged from the state’s combination of two objectives—to establish legal discipline through the execution of proper sentences and to establish bureaucratic discipline through the scrutiny of officials investigating cases—in one documentary form, the sentencing-proposal narrative. Drawing from magistrate manuals, official handbooks, imperial discussions about the format and problems of sentencing narratives, and various administrative writings, chap­ ter 2 documents the construction of case narratives and the multiple opportunities for local officials to conceal inconvenient truths from Beijing. It shows how the tensions inherent in the unification of two very distinct objectives—legal and bureaucratic discipline—in a single documentary stream compelled Qing central officials and emperors to seek more, and different, sources of information to resolve dilemmas of observation. The third chapter—which looks at the turning point in the long administrative revolution documented in this volume—describes the novel reforms of the Yongzheng era (1721–35) that fundamentally shifted the terms of interaction between local and central state actors: the regulation of yamen archives throughout the empire. This chapter reconstructs a series of fundamental paperwork reforms, so subtle that they have never before been discussed in scholarship, to demonstrate how the Yongzheng emperor laid the foundations of a system of archival accountability during his short reign. This innovation has gone entirely unnoticed; it was not the subject of court debate, and in fact many of the emperor’s policies seem like modest solutions to the dilemmas discussed in the two previous chapters. Initially instituted as a simple pro forma requirement to audit and account for the records of each yamen on the occasion that the office was transferred from the authority of one seal-holding official to another, this reform spurred a gradual but steady proliferation of local reports about individual yamen activities

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25

and at the same time led to a synchronization of archival reporting processes that linked local and central information cycles. These innovations paved the way to an administrative revolution whose impact would be felt only decades later. The next two chapters and the conclusion, part II of the book, discuss the implications of this administrative coup as its repercussions unfolded in the mid- and late eighteenth century. What seemed like an unremarkable paperwork requirement turned out to provide exponentially greater opportunities for scrutiny on the part of the imperial bureaucracy than had been feasible before. The result was the expansion of the Qing empire of routine. The creation of multiple archival data streams and the synchronization of local and central reporting processes that followed from the Yongzheng emperor’s reporting requirements allowed emperors and officials in Beijing to learn vastly more about the imperial bureaucracy than their predecessors ever could have known. Chapter 4 demonstrates how the yamen-level archival policies of the Yongzheng era led to a proliferation of new ways of accounting for workloads, official activities, and local conditions in the provinces from the Qianlong era (1735–96) forward. It introduces the process whereby administrative workloads previously invisible to the central administration were made intelligible through the “case-ification” of the entire bureaucracy. The routinization of masses of new information pertaining to administrative activity gave emperors and officials more knowledge about provincial affairs than previous administrations could have ever hoped to gather. The chapter unpacks how this change fundamentally altered the central administration’s expectations of high-level provincial officials and the state’s scrutiny of provincial workloads in the second half of the eighteenth century. Chapter 5 continues to assess the effects of the administrative ­revolution, documenting how the Qianlong court responded to the ­uncertainties produced by new information—by demanding even more new forms of information. It demonstrates, in several instances, that having information about problems in the provincial administrations led to even more ambitious reporting demands. The availability of a richer and more robust data ecology at the local level allowed central officials to track the evolution of errors and misrepresentations

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26 Introduction

discovered in the central review process, where previously local officials had been able to obscure the origin or nature of an idiosyncrasy because there were no yamen-level reporting standards in place. ­Central officials were better able to locate office-specific errors or malfeasance by triangulating multiple local data streams to track false or suspicious claims in centrally reviewed cases. New forms of information made available to the Qianlong administration drove the central state deeper and deeper into local archives and provincial administrations in its search for certainty. This cycle is the subject of the conclusion, in which I posit that the textual solutions to the patently early-modern concerns of the early Qing—an empire presented with the problem of how to rule a massive and diverse territory with serious information constraints and enforcement problems—escalated into the patently modern problems of local representation and raised political contestation to the empire-wide level in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The very success of the early Qing attempts to better discipline and govern its administration and the territories under its jurisdiction resulted, ­ironically, in a full-fledged constitutional crisis as the empire of routine connected village-level, provincial, and imperial networks of information.

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Part one

Building the Empire of Routine

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Chapter One

Early Qing Legal Institutions Justice and Discipline in the Conquered Empire

I

n 1616 when the Qing dynasty was founded—before it was even called the Qing, before its people were even called the Manchus, and before its troops crossed over the Great Wall to conquer the Ming—the posthumously titled Tianming emperor, Nurhaci (r. 1616–26), declared a monopoly over justice.1 He issued an edict commanding that: In all affairs, if a single individual arrogates authority over judgment [to himself] it necessarily gives rise to disorder. Any subject of the nation who encounters a problem should issue a complaint before the open forum (國人有事當訴於公所). Every five days [affairs] will be tried and judged. If someone illicitly lodges an accusation to one of the various houses of the court ministers, the one who illicitly tries the affair and issues judgment must be apprehended for punishment. Any royal prince or court minister guilty of such an offense shall be bound and held to 1. Faithful to the chronology of the Qing state as it unfolded slowly over decades of retelling, most historians date the founding of the Qing to the year 1636, when Hong Taiji—son of Nurhaci—changed the name of his father’s dynasty (the Later Jin) to Qing. Those focusing on the history of the preconquest Qing state treat the Later Jin era and the reign of Nurhaci as distinct from the Qing and the creation of the Manchu ethnicity by Hong Taiji as a group distinct from the Jurchen. This volume represents the Later Jin as the Qing, and Nurhaci as the Tianming emperor, based on the most ambitious history of the Qing state, the one preserved only in the QLDQHD and in no other versions of the huidian.

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Building the Empire of routine

await open trial. Those who resist and fail to submit will be punished heavily. Obey this.2

The single-forum method of controlling the interpretation and execution of justice was extremely direct: the emperor and his council personally presided over the one and only legitimate court of the empire.3 Any justice dispensed by the princes or officials of the dynasty outside of this forum was a challenge to the sovereignty of the ruler and was, therefore, itself a crime. This strictly centralized approach to legal discipline proved untenable only twenty-eight years later, when Qing forces conquered Beijing in 1644. The seizure of Beijing was unexpectedly swift. In the spring of 1644, amid widespread unrest, the rebel leader Li Zicheng attacked the Ming capital. The Ming emperor committed suicide, and Li Zicheng established his own Shun dynasty, ascending the Ming throne. In ­retribution, Ming general Wu Sangui allowed the Qing troops through the Shanhai Pass in the Great Wall to crush the rebels. But under the command of Prince Dorgon (1612–50), Qing forces occupied the former Ming capital and took possession of the fallen empire in the name of the six-year-old Shunzhi emperor, who still resided in the Qing court to the north of the Great Wall. It would take the Qing decades after this unexpected coup to quell the disbanded Ming troops, the Ming court’s claim to the throne in exile, domestic unrest, and wars with rebellious generals who had earlier allied with the conquering Manchu state. But even though the consolidation of the “great enterprise” of the new dynasty required more than a generation of further effort, the Qing could not delay 2. This command, not documented in earlier surviving sources, appears as the first item at QLDQHD: 刑部, 聽斷. 3. The evidence for preconquest Manchu forums of justice is scarce. For an early but authoritative attempt to reconstruct the systems of Qing justice before the Manchu conquest of the Ming (using conventional sources) see Na, Qingdai zhongyang sifa, 18–80. For a more recent discussion of the central forum of justice before Hong Taiji’s 1631 edict to adopt the Six Ministries model (and, perforce, to integrate a Ministry of Punishments into the administration of justice), see Sun, Qingdai de sixing jianhou, 44–48. For a survey of a great deal of evidence and detail about preconquest Qing justice, see Zhang and Guo, Qing ru guan qian guojia falu.

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addressing an immediate problem: how to exercise their dynasty’s monopoly over justice across a newly conquered territory that had so vastly and suddenly expanded. The throne in the Forbidden City of Beijing managed more than a thousand county-level jurisdictions scattered throughout the vast territory. The southeastern coast was more than a thousand miles from Beijing, as was the Tibetan Plateau in the extreme west of the empire. The more tenuous territorial holdings of the extreme southwest—ruled indirectly through the mediation of allied “native” jurisdictions—were nearly two thousand miles away from the capital, beyond forbidding mountain ranges and dangerous waterways. The Manchu state dispatched several of its most loyal bannermen to serve as generals and governors throughout the territories and stationed Eight Banner garrisons at strategic locations to maintain order and communicate important information to the throne. But the size of the conquered Ming was too vast to not rely on the former institutions and officials of the vanquished state. To ensure that the magistrates administering the counties of these far-flung territories did not betray the interests of the state, the Ming had established sprawling networks of supervisory and censorial officials. Prefectural seats in important strategic or administrative regions were assigned prefects who supervised the work of surrounding county magistrates. Above the prefectures were circuits, each comprising several prefectures overseen by a circuit intendant. Above them, in the provincial capitals, were the governors responsible for overseeing the entire provincial administration. Governors were aided by judicial commissioners, who were responsible for overseeing the review and audit of criminal cases in the province. In addition to the supervision of the provincial administrative hierarchy, the territories of each province were subjected to random audits and inspections by roaming censorial officials who reported directly to the throne. Thus, there were two mechanisms for review and inspection: one operated within the provincial bureaucracy and the other bypassed the province and reported directly to Beijing. It was across these distances and through these administrative mechanisms that deliberations over legal matters had to travel before being presented to the Qing throne for judgment. This multitude of

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Building the Empire of routine

institutions introduced the problem of scale to the now vastly expanded Qing dynasty as it attempted to monopolize justice. Unlike the preconquest system of trial, which all but ensured the emperor’s ability to judge the criminals in his domain, justice in the former Ming territories was administered via the massive imperial bureaucracy. The new Qing empire was so large that, although a common imperial truism dictated that the handling of justice was an affair that “bears on the harmony of Heaven itself (gan tian he 干天和),” expedients had to be adopted. The cost of bringing every accused individual in every single case to the capital would have bankrupted the empire and furthermore would have resulted in massive delays in the delivery of justice. The emperors of the Ming and its predecessor dynasties had not directly held trials in the imperial court for more than a thousand years. Instead, justice in the conquered empire had relied on two concessions, which the Qing now inherited. The first concession was jurisdictional. The emperor retained the prerogative of judgment only over cases that might bring the heaviest penalties: exile to a penal colony and execution. The crimes associated with these punishments were considered the worst possible offenses, and in demanding the final say in these cases the emperor retained both the power over life and death in the legal system and the right to access knowledge about the most egregious crimes committed in the domain. Other cases carrying lighter punishments (or pertaining to accusations not discussed in the law) were resolved at the discretion of provincial offices. While crimes falling below the level of central review were still supposed to be determined according to the legal code where relevant statutes existed, the only mechanism for guaranteeing fidelity to dynastic law was the random inspection of imperial censorial officials in the provinces. The critical distinction between centrally reviewed cases and affairs falling below the level of central review defined the operation of the Ming (and later Qing) system of justice.4 The second concession was procedural. Although the emperor maintained the prerogative of final judgment in cases involving the 4. For an explanation of this distinction as it appeared in Qing institutions from the Yongzheng era forward, see Xu, “Neijie yu waijie.”

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Early Qing Legal Institutions

33

highest crimes, their investigation, handling, and reporting were overseen by the provincial administrations. Once they arrived in the capital, the cases were further deliberated and scrutinized by the central ministries before their consideration by the emperor. Relying on composite processes to investigate, summarize, and review cases before a decision by the throne, the system of central review could facilitate a monopoly over justice only if the bureaucracy itself was strictly disciplined. The constraints and advantages of central review—capable of delivering large amounts of processed information to the throne, but at the cost of relying on an army of officials to translate lived facts into a highly formalized reporting language—demanded that the emperor come to grips with a legal apparatus heavily embedded in a bureaucratic system. This system of central review was predicated on the notion that the emperor not only could not sit in judgment over every crime but also could not even sit in judgment over every criminal sentenced to death. To maintain the power over life and death for those who had violated imperial law, the throne had to rely on bureaucratic rationale and routine processes to distill and convey information about crimes that might have been committed thousands of miles away, in places where the emperor and his bureaucrats had never set foot. Now that its conquest of the Ming was complete, the Qing court had to grapple with the problem of exerting a monopoly over justice in a massive territory ruled by the world’s largest bureaucracy.

Early Adoption of Ming Institutions In the course of only a few short months, the Qing had gone from presiding over an ambitious military empire on the steppes to controlling the complex administrative apparatus in the capital of the Ming, an empire whose sheer size made the earlier Qing insistence upon one exclusive forum for justice in the dynasty impossible. However, since Hong Taiji (r. 1626–43) had commanded in 1632 that the Qing would operate on the precedents set forth in the Ming huidian, the Qing state was not entirely unprepared for interacting with Ming bureaucracy.

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Building the Empire of routine

The extent to which Hong Taiji’s policy was realized before the Qing conquest of the Ming is unclear, although the Manchus and their allies were at least familiar with the institutions of the newly conquered territory. Indeed, during the early phase of the occupation of Beijing, Qing forces received assistance from a council that included not only Qing princes and generals but also Ming defectors who had come over to the Manchu camp either before or after the conquest. The postconquest Manchu court therefore included an unlikely band of Ming ­heroes and villains. Eunuchs associated with reviled Ming palace factions advised the Qing alongside Ming generals who had defected and famously virtuous or competent Ming officials who were actively recruited by the conquering dynasty, in addition to the pool of Ming appointees who simply continued to govern their jurisdictions under the new dynasty. In the weeks following the Qing occupation of Beijing, Prince Dorgon, the conquering general and uncle to the child emperor, issued three expedient decisions and one command to consolidate Manchu control over the judicial apparatus in the former Ming territories. The first expedient—an order issued on June 7, 1644, the day after the Qing army entered Beijing—addressed the problem of staffing the bureaucracy. Dorgon unilaterally decreed that every official in every yamen in the empire should report their current title to Beijing, where a registry of currently employed officials would be compiled for the new Qing bureaucracy. Special provisions were made for any talented officials who had fled the rebel armies of the late Ming and now wished to return to their station. Any who were prepared to serve the Qing were required to wear the queue, to take up the Manchu cap appropriate to his office, to accept all institutions of Qing rule, and to “rip out at their roots all corrupt practices from the Ming.”5 With this, the currently serving officials and soldiers of the Ming were offered entrée to the Qing bureaucracy. The second expedient addressed the problem of regulating the massive bureaucracy that the Qing had just recruited en masse. On July 5, 1644, Prince Dorgon adopted a proposal from two members of his inner council, the disgraced Ming official Feng Quan (1595–1672) 5. SZSL 1.5.3: 3.

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Early Qing Legal Institutions

35

and the former Ming general Hong Chengchou (1593–1665). The two advisers proposed that the bureaucracy inherited by the Qing should ­continue to operate according to Ming regulations.6 Since much of the attention of the Qing central court remained fixed on the task of achieving military security, this decision, together with the wholesale recruitment of existing Ming ­bureaucrats, resolved one of the most immediate and fundamental problems of the conquering Qing army: the staffing and regulation of a bureaucracy large and capable enough to run the massive empire. The third expedient resolved the question of the standard of judgment to be followed in the new territories. Following Prince Dorgon’s command to adopt the Ming bureaucratic regulations for the new Qing state, Regional Inspector of Shuntian Liu Yindong (1631 jinshi), a Ming official who had remained at his post, requested that the conquerors make a ruling about what legal standard the courts of the empire should use. In response, Prince Dorgon commanded on July 21 that officials continue to rely on the statutes outlined in the Ming Code.7 With this, the basic structures for administering justice in the new ter­ ritories were confirmed and remained more or less in line with their Ming precedents. By the end of the summer of 1644 the Qing had successfully seized the Ming capital and converted the former Ming state into an army of Qing bureaucrats—on paper, at least. Prince Dorgon had determined all of the basic elements of a system of legal discipline: a legal code, a bureaucracy to wield it, and a set of institutions and regulations to govern that bureaucracy. The Qing would operate in the former Ming territories using Ming bureaucrats, Ming statutes, and Ming laws. Dorgon’s expedients ensured that the newly acquired territories could be held and governed according to a basic standard. But beyond that immediate concern, the conquering Manchu state was eager to implement institutions of governance particular to the new dynasty. To that end, on September 1 Prince Dorgon issued a command in response to the proposal of a well-regarded former Ming official, Sun

A bit loose to keep pagination. Ok as set?

6. SZSL 1.6.2: 1. 7. SZSL 1.6.18: 3. Three months later a formula was approved for converting whipping sentences to canings. See SZSL 1.9.11: 2.

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Xiang (1606–51), who had been promoted to supervising secretary of the Office of Scrutiny for Punishment in the Qing’s Grand Secretariat as part of the conquering Qing army’s “seeking worthy officials” campaign. Sun proposed that a “book of punishments (xing shu 刑書)” be compiled to suit the current times, on the authority of and in accordance with the standards of the new dynasty.8 To compile a new code for the Qing’s rule over the former Ming territories, exist­ing Ming statutes and administrative punishments would be explained and debated before the court so that Qing ministers could determine which regulations were in accord with the times and fit to preserve, and which must be emended or deleted. A new law—the law of the Qing—would then be drafted and, on its publication, serve as the dynastic legal standard.

Establishing a Monopoly over Justice: Central Review in the Shunzhi Era In the autumn of 1644, five months after Qing armies took Beijing, the Shunzhi emperor arrived in the new capital of the Qing to take the throne as the Son of Heaven. On that occasion, the field administration of the triumphant Prince Dorgon would formally cease to exist, to be replaced with the imperial state under the authority of the child emperor. Although Prince Dorgon’s power unquestionably remained ­superior to that of his lord, the administration of the empire would from then on have to be conducted in accord both with the reassembled council of Manchu princes and the conventions and institutions of the emperor-centered Ming bureaucracy that the Qing had adopted as its own.9 In November, when the young Shunzhi emperor ascended to the Dragon Throne, the child ratified an imperial edict formally recognizing the regency of his uncle and patron, Dorgon, and lavishing him with extravagant rewards. A long list of policies adopted by the new dynasty was set forth in a lengthy proclamation announced with all the pomp and circumstance of an emperor’s first decree. The 8. SZSL 1.8.1: 5. 9. For an overview of the Dorgon regency, see Lui, Two Rulers.

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Early Qing Legal Institutions

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commoners who had suffered at the hands of the Ming and in the ­vicissitudes of dynastic transition were to be given special leniency: a general amnesty was announced for all crimes committed before the Qing troops had entered Beijing, so long as they were voluntarily confessed to the new regime. The only people excepted from this amnesty were criminals guilty of the Ten Abominations—the worst classes of crime in Ming law—and those Ming officials who had been guilty of corruption. Beyond these special provisions for extraordinary leniency and extraordinary punishment, the Shunzhi emperor formally announced the reinstatement of the Ming system of triple review (san fu zou 三‌覆‌奏). Recommendations from the provinces proposing capital ­sentences were automatically rejected twice after the first round of reviews by capital ministries, to ensure that each case was reviewed a total of three times before being handed over to the emperor for a final decision—hence, “triple review.” With the Shunzhi emperor’s decree, the routine function of the Qing legal system—comprised at this early time mostly of elements borrowed directly from the conquered Ming— replaced the field administration of conquering Qing troops. Seven months after taking the throne, the Shunzhi emperor commanded his officials to “quickly compile and edit [the legal statutes] for imperial perusal, so that they may be established and published,” and required the Three Legal Offices of the capital—the Ministry of Punishments, the Court of Judicial Review, and the Censorate—to “meet to conduct a detailed examination of the previous statutes and report on them.”10 The resulting code was reportedly studiously checked by the young Shunzhi emperor three times before being deliberated by the ministers of the inner court for annotation. An imperially sanctioned draft was completed in 1646, just over two years after the Qing had taken Beijing. The resulting work, which up until then had merely been referred to as a book of punishments, was published as The Great Qing Statutes with Collected Explanations and Appended Sub-statutes (Da Qing lü jijie fuli 大清律集解附例). The new legal system of the Qing was a far cry from the open court on the steppe where the early Qing rulers had directly exercised a 10. SZSL 2.5.7: 1.

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monopoly over justice in their empire. One advantage of this new ­approach was that it allowed the legal system to operate on Ming precedents while the Qing conquerors dealt with rebels, Ming princes claiming the throne in exile, and an unsettled empire. Also, with the promulgation of the new Qing Code, a patently Qing legal system had been established. In subsequent years, discussions about the administration of justice fell from the fore as the Qing turned its attention toward consolidating its conquest.

Confronting the Bureaucratic Demands of Central Review Five years after the promulgation of the Qing Code, new revelations and political realities forced the Qing to reevaluate its achievements in the realm of justice. It was eight years after the conquest. Prince-Regent Dorgon had died during a hunting expedition at the close of the year 1650. The Shunzhi emperor, now approaching thirteen years of age, ruled under a new regent but had begun to insert himself into affairs of state in a way that the previous regency had not permitted. The teenage monarch began to develop an interest in the problems plaguing the justice system of the Qing. In 1651, the Shunzhi emperor received a disturbing report from Zhao Jinmei (1620–92), supervising secretary of the Office of Scrutiny for Punishments. Zhao claimed that provincial authorities were not submitting criminal sentencing proposals for review according to imperial deadlines.11 Small delays could easily become large problems in a bureaucracy as massive as the one that the Qing had inherited, and this problem had dangerous consequences: suspects might languish in jail for months or even years before a resolution of their case. Zhao’s memorial introduced a troubling suspicion into the mind of the Shunzhi emperor: if indeed territorial administrations were failing to report on the cases of individuals being held in prisons pending trial, and those cases were never reviewed by Beijing, then the central state’s control of the judicial apparatus was control in name only. 11. SZSL 8.R2.16: 2.

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A month later, the young emperor declared his concerns in a rescript responding to a particular case of administrative sanction that had resulted in the death of the imprisoned official: On the sixth day of this month, We were personally reading over memorials. In the criminal narrative sent from Governor Chi Riyi bringing impeachment charges against Liu Zusheng, he remarked that Zusheng had contracted an illness in prison and died. On this account We have been pondering: the empire is so vast; how many people have died in its many prisons? Some die of illness. Some die of hunger. Some die from torture. Some even die as a result of the plots of depraved and cruel wardens. All of these pitiful fates: they are so numerous they cannot be counted. We are deeply aggrieved by it. . . . Those prisoners who die under the force of the law do so because it is fitting for their crime. But for the others: those who, without guilt, perish from a perversion of justice, this is a case in which Our court must illuminate its humaneness by establishing laws.12

The Shunzhi emperor expressed concern that those suffering under the judicial system were not the ones judged fit for punishment but, rather, those who had fallen victim to the bureaucracy’s incompetence. “Death by prison” was not the result of a legal decree or the fiat of the emperor— it was a miscarriage of justice.13 What disturbed the emperor even more was the idea that, at this point in the fledgling Qing dynasty, the provincial administration ­appeared to have been functioning properly. Beijing received numerous reports from censorial officials in the provinces impeaching countylevel officials for inattentiveness to their duties or poor judgments, creating the illusion that the central state was informed about the problems of the empire and its administration of justice. However, if delay and abuse existed on a scale as large as Zhao’s report suggested, then somewhere in the sprawling administrative chain, information was being successfully obscured from the throne. The Shunzhi emperor 12. SZSL 8.3.8:1. 13. Prison time was not a recognized punishment in the Qing legal system; rather, it was an expedient for ensuring that criminals awaiting a proper sentence were kept from the general population. Death in prison, therefore, was considered an injustice.

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commanded the Ministry of Punishments and the Censorate to ensure that governors and regional inspectors in the provinces held circuitand prefecture-level officials responsible for inspecting local prisons and reporting on malfeasance within them. As the Shunzhi emperor’s concern about the masses of prisoners awaiting justice reveals, merely having laws and deliberating on the cases memorialized to the throne did not entail control over the judicial apparatus. The institutions of imperial review in the capital were predicated on the assumption that the myriad officials in the Qing’s territories were delivering sound information to the capital in a timely fashion. Because some information had been arriving in Beijing, it was easy to assume that the central state was fairly well informed about affairs in the territories. But these new revelations suggested that the throne’s information was woefully incomplete. In an empire as large as the Qing had become, justice was both a legal problem and a bureaucratic affair. The Qing’s central judicial apparatus could function properly only with the participation of officials in the provinces. Legal discipline—the ability of the Qing to execute the law—could not be achieved without bureaucratic discipline—the guarantee that officials would comply with dynastic imperatives. After the Shunzhi emperor’s realization that the central state’s control over the law could seem to operate smoothly while the territorial bureaucracy that it nominally controlled actually operated in ways that contradicted dynastic imperatives, a new set of problems began to occupy the attention of the central court. In a system of justice predicated on the emperor-centered routines of memorial communication, any failure in the circulation of information through Beijing was necessarily a failure of both the bureaucracy and the legal system. The problem now clear, the Qing state began one of its first attempts to reform inherited Ming institutions of justice.

Exhortation, Frustrated Expectations, and Accounting for Major Cases The Shunzhi emperor’s command in 1651 that the territorial bureaucracies tighten up their administrations was an example of one of the most common genres of imperial commands: the exhortation.

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Attached to some profound wish or frustration on the part of the monarch, the exhortations of the throne are often among the most literary and philosophical texts produced and archived by the Qing bureaucracy. Certain later Qing emperors, especially the Yongzheng emperor and his successor, the Qianlong emperor, are known for particularly scathing, impassioned, and penetrating writings in this genre. Although the visceral quality of these imperial utterances is often used to illustrate the throne’s commitment to a new program or its exasperation in response to an affair of particular importance, in fact, an exhortation is marked by its expressive quality in contrast to its practicability. These “commands” often preceded later pushes for detailed reform, but in themselves they rarely offered the sort of systematic or substantial content required to make durable changes to the administration. Indeed, there is no evidence that officials in the territories responded to their monarch’s plea in this case. Proof to the contrary, in fact, was offered in 1654, four years after the Shunzhi emperor’s exhortation, in the fifth year of his personal rule. In that year Wei Xiangshu (1617–87), supervising secretary of the Office of Scrutiny for Personnel, memorialized to the seventeen-year-old emperor that even the territorial bureaucracy governing the capital municipality itself was in flagrant violation of the regulations regarding the dispensation of justice. Wei stated that “more than two hundred or three hundred” prisoners could be found in each of the prefectural detention centers adjacent to the capital municipality.14 The shockingly high number of off-the-book prisoners crowded on the edge of the capital itself suggested—Wei proposed—an urgent and widespread lack of the bureaucratic discipline required to provide ­justice. Wei opined: “There is no way to redress injustice in this circumstance. And just consider how many more [such cases] exist in the provinces!” Clearly, although legal institutions were in place, the emperor had yet to establish a system of justice capable of operating justly.

14. Wei, Hansongtang quanji, “Memorials (奏疏),” “A Communication Offering Four Items to Aid the Sagely Leader in the Careful Governance of the People (恭陳 四款以佐聖主勤民大政事疏).”

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Exhortation had failed; institutional change was needed to bring the administration to heel and prevent unnecessary suffering. In the same memorial in which he outlined this egregious problem of bureaucratic discipline, Wei offered a solution: criminal cases in various stages of review could be audited in a manner analogous to the complicated budget and expenditure review methods of the Ministry of Revenue, which routinely received reports on fiscal matters sent from the provinces. If the central state could establish an analogous method of accounting for sentencing cases destined for central review and the prisoners associated with them, Wei reasoned, the central court might be better able to hold local officials accountable for the administration of justice in the provinces. Wei proposed a yearly summary on the progress of all such cases that were still being processed in each province. This proposal offered a substantive solution to the gaps in reporting by requiring supervisory and censorial officials in the provinces to produce meta-accounts of the tallies and deadlines of all cases under their administration. These bird’s-eye summaries—unlike the piecemeal reports that had been flowing into the capital—would offer the possibility of accountability on a provincial scale. If more information could be gathered about prisoners whose cases had not yet been processed, or whose sentences had not yet been handed down, then the officials in Beijing could spot delays or backlogs and command the responsible local bureaucracy to fix the problem. The Shunzhi emperor sent the proposal to the appropriate ministries for deliberation. When the proposal was endorsed by the relevant capital offices, he commanded circuit-level officials in every province to “gather together all of the major cases (da’an 大案) pertaining to punishment,” in all subordinate jurisdictions, “whether settled or open, and compile them into a register for imperial inspection.”15 Much like the fiscal commissioner of each province, who was responsible for sending summary revenue reports to the Ministry of Revenue, the ­judicial commissioner of each province became responsible for gather­ ing and auditing information about legal processes and then reporting

15. SZSL 11.8.22: 1. This command appears at DQHD: 都察院, 六科, 直省爰書.

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the summary figures on open cases to the Ministry of Punishments in a yearly memorial. Demanding accountability for deadlines in capital case reports was the first step toward guaranteeing that cases slated for triple review were actually delivered to the central state for deliberation. Previously, officials in Beijing could judge only the cases that provincial administrations sent to them and only according to the timeline of the territorial offices (rather than the deadlines of the central state). The implementation of a reporting requirement could—in theory at least—flag instances of delay. Collecting information about open cases eventually destined for central review was a critical step toward address­ ing the problem of “death by prison.” However, like many demands for new forms of information and accountability, even this success paved the way for new revelations about other failures in the information network on which the central state relied for the execution of its commands. In a 1658 memorial, “Illu­ minating the Duties of the Judicial Commissioner,” Censor Wei Yijie (1616–86) pointed out that only information about new cases was being captured in the regular reports now sent up to Beijing. Wei had discovered several thousand “piled-up old cases (chenji jiuan 陳積舊案)” that were not being processed.16 Some of these delayed cases, Wei reported, dated all the way back to the year of Qing conquest, when the now twenty-year-old Shunzhi emperor had been a six-year-old boy. If the Qing wanted to be able to scrutinize the problems that local officials sought to obscure from the central state, then it would need to gather knowledge about the territorial administration itself. One problem was that the Qing relied on a single stream of information, the sentence-proposing memorials and reports on their handling, for updates about the entire justice system. Wei concluded that “a method of inspecting and monitoring these cases must be established” independent of the reports about these affairs from the province to the central state, asking, “Or else how will the outcries of injustice in the provinces be heard, how will the case backlog be cleared, and how will the state operate efficiently and punishments be administered clearly?” He 16. Wei, Jianjitang wenji, “Memorials (奏疏),” “Illuminating the Duties of the Judicial Commissioner (明藩臬之職掌疏).”

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suggested that, in addition to accounting for cases, prisons be audited as well. Wei proposed that every prefecture and county should be required to maintain prison registers for cases that had not been resolved. Furthermore, they should report information about pending cases to the judicial commissioner of the province. The judicial commissioner could then be required to submit yearly reports on pending cases and prisoners to the governor, who would forward the information to the Ministry of Punishments and the Censorate. In this way, Wei concluded, “The central ministries will have some basis for investigating and examining the situation. In this manner the system of justice and imprisonment will be rectified, and offenders will not be left to rot in the jails and thus offend the harmony between Heaven and Earth!”17 Wei’s proposal was discussed by the capital ministries and adopted by the Shunzhi emperor. The problems pointed out by the censors proposing policies to the Shunzhi emperor revealed an important source of injustice: incomplete information. In theory, the functions of auditing and disciplining the bureaucracy were covered by the provincial and capital censorial administration, which had been in place since the Ming.18 But even though the Shunzhi emperor received regular reports from censorial officials revealing problems in the territories, he learned that having some information could be just as dangerous as having no information. Receiving regular reports from the provinces had created an impression of normalcy while concealing massive gaps in the throne’s information sources. Revelations about exactly how much the central state 17. SZSL 15.5.4: 4. 18. In the brief period between the death of the Shunzhi emperor and the beginning of the Kangxi era, the general provincial censors were retired, and responsibility for reporting on abuse and personnel problems was integrated into other provincial positions. The end of independent censorial supervision marked the beginning of a new level of integrating audits and responsibility into the regular provincial apparatus. Thenceforth, rather than being scrutinized by independent censorial officials, audits of revenue were conducted under the financial commissioner. Personnel reports became the responsibility of the circuit- and prefectural-level offi­ cials. The administration of the law was supposed to be monitored by the judicial commissioner. See SZSL 18.6.1: 3.

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did not know served as important warnings to the Qing state in the Shunzhi era. It became clear that the Qing central court needed more comprehensive and systematic information about all of the functions related to case review if the central review system itself was to function as intended.

Regulating the Territorial Bureaucracy in the Kangxi Administration By the end of the Shunzhi reign in 1661, when the twenty-four-year-old emperor succumbed to smallpox, the Qing central state had only begun to grapple with a critical problem: to ensure legal discipline in the empire, it had to establish the bureaucratic discipline on which imperial legal deliberations depended. Gathering information was the first step toward demanding accountability for the processes that fed into the legal apparatus. Reporting loopholes had to be closed. Before control over the bureaucratic processes feeding into the machinery of justice could be achieved, the emperor and his ministers had to know which jails prisoners were dying in, which offices had cases piling up, and who should be held responsible for fixing the problems of delay and failure to report. The system of central review was surprisingly vulnerable to these mundane concerns. What seemed, on its surface, a matter to be determined by imperial central mandate had turned out to be a much trickier question of resolving problems of agency and control in a large imperial bureaucracy. The Shunzhi-era demand that provinces inform Beijing about the status of cases slated for imperial review and the integration of circuitlevel prison audits into imperial reporting standards introduced new methods of holding officials accountable for their handling of criminal cases in the territories. However, how these new expectations might be translated into a system of enforceable regulations was still unclear. In a pattern that would repeat itself several times, the informationgenerating gains begun in one era led to questions about how to make use of the additional information in the next. Information problems turned into enforcement problems, and those new enforcement problems often turned into new information problems, beginning the cycle

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all over again. Thus, the problems brought to light in one era became the policy debates of another. The struggle to translate Shunzhi-era ambitions into practical policies spanned the first decades of the reign of the Kangxi emperor. By the dawn of the Kangxi era in 1661, the Qing had been in control of the former Ming territories for almost two decades. The empire was not yet fully in the grasp of the Manchu conquerors, but major strides had been made. The Qing court now had the luxury of time to concern itself with the quality of the territorial administration. Much as his father had done, when the Kangxi emperor personally wrested the reins of the state from the hands of his regents, he expressed dismay at the state of the Qing administration of justice. However, the reasons for his lamentations contrasted with those of his father: by now, so many cases were arriving at the capital that the central administration had begun to consider the discrepancies in how these cases were being handled in the provinces. Now armed with a generation of experience and new sources of information, Qing officials began to set forth new standards for the administration of justice. In 1667 the Kangxi emperor expressed his suspicion that “governors are handling cases sloppily and confusing details in an attempt to resolve them rapidly.”19 As an immediate measure, the Kangxi emperor commanded that any governor muddling a case or reporting it improperly should be punished. Truly, this was a classic “exhortative” edict from a young emperor. And it might have remained nothing more than an empty admonishment, except that his concern about the inappropriate handling of the cases reported to Beijing was followed by a flood of new regulations. The new rules, which constituted a new administrative judicial standard, pertained broadly to stamping out abuses and tightening up reporting standards.

The Administrative Judicial Standard The Shunzhi reforms delivered information to Beijing that brought several problems in the justice system to light for the first time. The Kangxi era became a period of intensive regulatory expansion. The early 19. KXSL 6.4.4: 1.

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Kangxi administration added to the growing list of administrative sanctions for abuses in the legal system; as more types of malfeasance came to light, more regulations appeared on the books. Problems ­related to the execution of justice that were not previously governed directly by Beijing, such as the prolonged detention of prisoners and the illegal use of torture to elicit confessions, were increasingly subjected to the scrutiny and regulation of the central state.20 One also sees in records from the era sanctions for accepting illicit compensation to commute corporal punishment, for proposing incorrect sentences, and for failing to modify sentences after a general amnesty.21 To these were added a batch of sanctions for violations involving property related to cases, such as sanctions for not locating or retrieving money owed to the court or for failing to turn money over to the victim from whom it had been taken.22 These regulations represented the first attempts to establish fixed expectations about the abuses being discovered in local courts that, although decried by the Shunzhi emperor, were not yet the targets of specific sanctions. Another prolific field of regulation in this era concerned the handling of information. The Kangxi administration introduced several regulations on underreporting or misreporting information pertaining to criminal cases.23 New regulations specified sanctions for failing to deliver paperwork in time for provincial and central review.24 There were also new prohibitions on altering or obscuring information about 20. Regulations preventing the illicit use of instruments of judicial torture from ‌, as early as the eighteenth year of the Shunzhi reign can be found at QLDQHD: 吏部 考功清吏司, 斷獄, 用刑違式. The section was later reorganized in the Guangxu-era huidian, where its contents were distributed among multiple sections, including DQHD: 刑部, 名例律 , 五刑 and DQHD: 刑部, 刑律 , 斷獄 , 決罰不如法. For the original command pertaining to deaths of prisoners, see KXSL 9.11.18: 1. This was later added to the huidian (as a Kangxi year eleven regulation) at DQHD: 刑部, 刑‌律, 斷 獄, 淹禁. 21. See QLDQHD: 吏部, 考功清吏司, 斷獄, 官員斷獄不當 and DQHD: 刑部, 刑 律, 斷獄, 斷罪不當; KXSL 4.4.9: 3 and related statutes at QLDQHD: 吏部, 考功清吏 司, 斷獄, 官員斷獄不當; and QLDQHD: 吏部, 考功清吏司, 斷獄, 官員斷獄不當. 22. QLDQHD: 吏部, 考功清吏司, 斷獄, 官員斷獄不當. 23. See, for example, the Kangxi-era and later regulations at DQHD: 刑部, 刑律, 捕亡, 盜賊捕限; as well as QLDQHD: 吏部, 考功清吏司, 人命, 命案檢驗. 24. KXSL 12.12.8: 1.

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a case in order to change its outcome or to avoid punishment for malfeasance, as well as regulations against altering testimony and obscuring information about debts owed to the court. 25 More specific regulations on the transfer of prisoners and sanctions for prisoner ­neglect were added to prevent deaths in prison.26 New sanctions were instituted against officials who failed to detain a minimum number of wanted suspects in open banditry cases, along with rules prohibiting officials under these new pressures from underreporting crimes by ­incorrectly classifying them, falsely claiming that criminals who had not yet been captured were already in prison, and framing commoners as bandits to reach arrest quotas.27 An increasing number of problems that had never been regulated by the central state became targets for reform. In a pattern that would repeat in later periods, the success of the central court’s bid to centralize legal and administrative processes had resulted in an abundance of new policies in the subsequent era.

The Difficulty in the Deadlines One of the most innovative regulatory reforms of the Kangxi era was directed at the problem of deadlines, which had come to the attention of the throne in the Shunzhi era. The Oboi Regency that retained power during the era of the Kangxi emperor’s minority had grappled with the problem of deadlines for cases that were destined for imperial review and issued new regulations to address it.28 Deadlines for centrally ­reviewed cases were, therefore, already in place by the time the Kangxi emperor took the helm of the state, but existing deadlines were set only at the summary level—from the date that a case began to the date that 25. DQHD: 刑部, 刑律, 斷獄, 官司出入人罪 and QLDQHD: 吏部, 考功清吏司, 斷獄, 官員斷獄不當. 26. QLDQHD: 吏部, 考功清吏司, 人命, 命案檢驗; QLDQHD: 吏部, 考功清吏‌司, 斷獄, 用刑違式 and 提解. 27. QLDQHD: 吏部, 考功清吏司, 賊盜 , 地方緝捕竊盜 ; DQHD: 刑部, 刑律 , 捕‌亡, 盜賊捕限 ; and QLDQHD: 吏部 , 考功清吏司, 賊盜 , 地方緝捕竊盜 (this regulation is repeated in the Guangxu-era huidian at DQHD: 刑部, 刑律, 捕亡, 盜‌賊 捕‌限). 28. See DQHD: 吏部, 處分例, 直省衙門事件限期.

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it was memorialized to the throne by the governor. These summary deadlines allowed officials in the provinces to push off the blame for delay on one another. Important tasks continued to go undone without any single individual to take responsibility. Wei Yijie, the author of the prison audit proposal in the late Shunzhi era, suggested that this problem could be addressed by adding in-province deadlines: As for the affairs handled in the various provincial yamen, there has never yet been established a set of guidelines or procedures for managing them. For this reason there are many cases in which an affair may go unresolved for years and years. [I therefore] humbly request [that], in addition to the swift deadline for responding to imperial orders, there be established a deadline of not more than twenty days for every yamen dealing with ­either any communications from the central ministries or affairs pertaining to the civil and military jurisdictions under the command of the governor. If an affair is difficult to resolve, then permission for an extended deadline must be asked for and received, or else investigation and punishment will follow from a failure to adhere to the timeline.29

This proposal was approved and codified as a Ministry of Personnel regulation, that “at no stage is the presiding official [of any yamen currently handling a case] permitted to exceed a twenty-day limit; [and] the deadline for any affair that cannot be handled within the established limit can be extended only after a direct request.”30 Officials in violation of the regulation were to be punished at the discretion of the governor. While the standing summary deadline for managing criminal cases remained on the books, after the introduction of this regulation every yamen faced a strict timeline for any portion of case management on their docket. This simple shift created office-level accountability when handling was delayed. However, the lack of an enforcement or 29. KXSL 1.6.1: 1. 30. See the regulation from the first year of the Kangxi reign at DQHD: 吏部, 處‌分例, 直省承辦欽部事件限期.

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supervisory mechanism overseen by the central ministries threatened to make this regulatory innovation a dead letter. Because the new deadlines and the punishments for ignoring them were all expected to be applied at the provincial level, governors had to be held responsible if their subordinates failed to resolve cases within the proper time frame. Wei proposed that deadlines should be extended only after a request to the central ministries from the governor. Lenience, therefore, could be obtained only at the cost of sharing more information about local case-handling problems with the central bureaucracy. Procedures for requesting such permission were introduced soon after the more refined deadlines were promulgated. In cases that were “difficult to resolve (nan jie 難結),” such as those awaiting the transfer of a prisoner from a neighboring province, or those in which the offender had not yet been captured, the local official in the yamen of first instance was required to report the details of the case to the governor, who could then request permission from the capital ministries to extend the deadline. Governors were made personally responsible for imposing administrative sanctions on all officials under them who failed to complete “easy-toresolve (yi jie 易結)” cases within the established deadlines or who failed to report the circumstances of difficult-to-resolve cases.31 In essence, this regulation allowed flexibility within the newly imposed provincial deadlines in exchange for sharing information with the central state about difficult-to-resolve cases further up the bureaucratic ladder.32 These new deadline policies paved the way for increasingly demanding expectations in the provinces. The requirements turned each case into a question of responsibility at the office level, linked to punishments and scrutiny by the governor. Later, more detailed regulations on reporting specific types of cases and more constrained deadlines for particularly pressing cases were added to this framework.33 In 1684, 31. This regulation is compiled at DQHD: 刑部, 吏律, 公式, 官文書稽程. 32. DQHD: 吏部, 處分例, 直省承辦欽部事件限期. In the fifteenth year of the Kangxi era, sanctions were added for governors who either failed to ensure that easyto-resolve cases were handled by their deadlines or failed to request deadline extensions and to explain why the cases qualified as difficult to resolve. 33. See the multiple regulations at DLQB: “Ministry of Personnel (吏部),” “Eval­ uation (考功司),” “Deadlines for Imperially Mandated and Ministerial Affairs (欽件 部件限期).”

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for example, demerits were attached to the failure to manage easy-toresolve affairs: any official who accumulated enough demerits by delay­ ing one affair for too long or delaying multiple affairs could be demoted or expelled from officialdom.34 This innovation made superiors in the provincial bureaucracy more responsible for finding sources of delay, punishing officials who failed to comply, and reporting problems to Beijing. The establishment of office-specific deadlines for handling cases in the provinces meant that any official who failed to perform his duty in a timely or proper manner could be sanctioned by his supervising officials. This made each governor both directly and indirectly responsible for the failure of provincial offices to meet their deadlines. These new expectations, furthermore, were encoded in the new integrated administrative sanctions of the era.

Supervision and Responsibility in the Provinces Once standards for judicial administration at the local level had been established, the Kangxi court turned to the problem of compelling supervising offices in the provinces to enforce this new thicket of procedural regulations. It increasingly fell to the governors, judicial commissioners, circuit officials, and prefects in the provinces to scrutinize local officials’ handling of cases and ensure that each new regulation was obeyed. The more regulations restricting the behaviors of local officials, the greater the expectations grew for supervision, scrutiny, and sanctions imposed by superior officials in the territories. From the late seventeenth century forward, one sees a sharp increase in the number of regulations explicitly specifying sanctions for both the officials who initially committed an infraction and their super­visors. This marked the beginning of integrated administrative sanctions, under which supervisors could be held liable for the offenses

34. The edict can be found at KXSL 23.3.2: 2. The codified form of the regulation was put under DQHD: 吏部, 處分例, 直省衙門事件限期.

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of their subordinate officials.35 This innovation—a regulatory structure that tied the incentives of high-level provincial officials to the mundane administrative duties of their subordinates—bound together the officials in provincial bureaucracies with mutual forms of responsibility and scrutiny. The proliferation of integrated sanctions was a sign and a component of an increasingly concrete vision of how provincial superiors would be held accountable for the administrative performance of their subordinates.36 The new regulations on case handling increasingly included sanctions for supervising officials who failed to detect or report problems in their ranks. These regulations, and similar ones that followed in later periods, did not change the standards or conditions of case handling but, rather, added a new layer of requirements for supervisors overseeing case handling by introducing sanctions through the Ministry of Personnel on the timely resolution and reporting of cases to Beijing.37

Conclusion: The Early Qing as an Era of Regulation By the turn of the eighteenth century, early Qing efforts to confront delay and abuse in the justice system formed a new regulatory foun­ dation for governing the officials in charge of handling cases in the territories. With the body of regulations about case handling, criminal 35. For an early example of an integrated sanction, see the regulation from the third year of the Kangxi era that specified punishment for any governor who failed to report a delay caused by an official under his jurisdiction. See DQHD: 吏部, 處‌分‌例, 直省承辦欽部事件限期. 36. This process began early in the Qing, when the structure of the administration in the conquered Ming territories was abandoned in favor of consolidated provincial administrations. For more detail on this process, see Guy, “Governing Provinces.” For a look at the evolution of the provincial administrations in this era, see Guy, Qing Governors and Their Provinces. 37. See, for example, the Kangxi-era DLQB, “Ministry of Personnel (吏部),” “Chinese Appointments (漢缺),” “Recommending Outstanding Officials (保‌薦 卓‌異),” “Recommending Cruel or Wicked Individuals as Outstanding (濫將貪酷 桌‌薦)”; as well as QLDQHD: 吏部, 考功清吏司, 賊盜 and DQHD: 吏部, 處分例, 直‌省 承辦欽部事件限期.

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cases whose sentences were dictated by the laws of the Qing and the deliberations of the Ministry of Punishments were increasingly subjected to a field of regulation falling under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Personnel, where the majority of case-handling regulations were preserved and to which problems of discipline were referred. This regulatory growth paired the top-down authority of legal ­interpretation, over which the monarch retained his monopoly, with demands for a bottom-up accounting for provincial responsibilities in the case-handling process. By the end of the seventeenth century, several new demands were being made on the provincial administrations responsible for proposing criminal sentences to the throne. Deadlines had been tightened to eliminate delay. Regulations about many aspects of the case-handling procedure were put into practice. The duties of supervisory officials had been articulated, where previously officials had been able to exercise their discretion. Unlike the essentially unenforceable blanket prohibitions against illicit behavior handed down by court officials in the Shunzhi era, these new regulations were matched to specific punishments often graded according to their severity. Consider, for example, the S­ hunzhi-​ era 1656 regulation on incorrect sentencing (duan zui bu dang 斷‌罪 不‌當), which read: Every official presiding over a trial who commits a single error in judgment is fined three months’ salary. Two errors, fined six months’ salary. Three errors, one year’s salary. Four to five errors, demoted one grade and transferred. Six to seven errors, demoted two grades and transferred. Eight to nine errors, demoted three grades and transferred. Ten and above, cashiered.38

Contrast this with the 1670 Kangxi-era iteration of this regulation: For every official presiding over a case who mistakenly drafts a verdict of death by slow slicing to a criminal who should have been sentenced

38. DQHD: 刑部, 刑律, 斷獄, 斷罪不當.

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to beheading or strangulation, demote that official by one grade and transfer him, and fine the supervising circuit official and governor one year’s salary. For those who mistakenly draft a sentence of death by slow slicing for a criminal who should been sentenced to military exile or banishment, demote that official by four grades and transfer him to another post and demote the supervising circuit official by two grades and the supervising governor by one grade and transfer him to another post. For those who mistakenly draft a sentence of death by strangulation or beheading for a criminal who should have been sentenced to military banishment or exile, demote that official by three grades and transfer him to another post and demote the supervising circuit official by two grades and the supervising governor by one grade but allow him to remain at his current post. For those who mistakenly draft a sentence of military banishment or exile for a criminal who should have received a flogging with the light or heavy bamboo, demote that official by one grade and transfer him to another post and demote the supervising circuit official by one grade and fine the supervising governor six months’ salary. In cases where [the drafted punishment is merely one grade above the correct punishment, such as those in which] the criminal should be strangled but is sentenced to beheading, or should be banished but is sentenced to military exile, or should be flogged but is sentenced to banishment, the Ministry of Punishments shall require a change to the drafted punishment but no administrative sanctions will be issued. If the incorrectly drafted punishment is already executed and the prisoner dead, cashier the presiding trial official, demote the supervising circuit official by four grades, and demote the supervising governor by three grades and transfer him to another post. A similar punishment will be administered against all officials who had a hand in deciding in cases in which an innocent person has been executed on the basis of an incorrectly drafted punishment. If the trial official mistakenly hands down a sentence of beheading or strangulation for a criminal who should have been sentenced to death by slow slicing, demote him by one degree and transfer him to another post and fine both his supervising circuit official and the governor one year’s salary. If an incorrect sentence of military exile is drafted for a criminal who should have been sentenced to death by slow slicing, demote the trial official by two degrees and transfer him to another post, demote his supervising circuit official by one degree and transfer him to another post, and demote his supervising governor by one degree but allow him to retain his post. If an incorrect sentence of

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military exile is drafted for a criminal who should have been sentenced to death by beheading or strangulation, demote the trial official by one degree and transfer him to another post, and fine his supervising circuit official one year’s salary and his supervising governor six months’ salary. If an incorrect sentence of banishment or flogging is drafted for a criminal who should have been sentenced to military banishment, fine the trial official one year’s salary, his supervising circuit official six months’ salary, and his supervising governor three months’ salary.39

In addition to the broad ambitions outlined in the regulation above, this later version specifies the types and grades of errors being mentioned, matches punishments specifically to them, and incorporates integrated administrative sanctions for supervising officials who failed to detect and correct the errors of their subordinates. The introduction of deadlines, mechanisms for enforcing responsibility for meeting them, substantive regulations about the duties attached to case handling, and sanctions demanding that high-level officials properly supervise those responsible for cases in their jurisdictions would lead to a heretofore unrecognized revolution—albeit a slow and subtle one—in the way the central state related to its territorial bureaucrats. New regulations were designed to address problems that emerged from information that had only recently been made available to the central state. The regulatory expansion of the early Kangxi era, therefore, reflects a shift from mere information gathering to the disciplining of personnel. Governors and other high-level provincial officials were increasingly made responsible for the offenses of their underlings. In short: the provinces were called to task for the role they played in ensuring that the legal monopoly of the emperor remained viable. And the central state was pulled deeper and deeper into the complicated world of case handling at the local level. Many of the late seventeenth-century regulations were, as the following chapters will demonstrate, basically unenforceable. But even if this remarkable period of regulatory growth did not immediately entail a capacity for enforcement, it reflected the fundamental ambition of 39. DQHD: 刑部, 刑律, 斷獄, 官司出入人罪.

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early Qing regulation in the field of legal review: after the establishment of the mechanism of review itself, concern shifted to the problem of ensuring that the delivery of criminal cases for judgment by the throne was not threatened by or generating abuse in the provincial bureaucracies. The dual ambition of the Qing legal system—absolute control by the throne over the interpretation and execution of cases above a certain level, on the one hand, and the imposition of bureaucratic discipline to ensure the absence of abuse or error, on the other—is key to understanding how the development of Qing mechanisms of reporting, supervision, and interpretation led to an administrative transformation in the eighteenth century. This first pass at collecting information, articulating regulations, and weaving together responsibility for everyday administrative tasks at both the highest and lowest levels laid the foundation for the innovations to come and the adminis­ trative revolution that eventually redefined how the central state related to the provinces and the locales they governed.

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Chapter Two

Beyond Fact The Centrally Reviewed Case as Process and Genre

I

n the Qing state’s struggle to strengthen its monopoly over criminal justice by tightening reporting standards and promulgating new regulations, the success of its new measures was not instantaneous. Concerns about their enforceability remained unresolved. In this period of heightened routinization in the handling of centrally reviewed cases, the particular nature and limits of the information arriving in Beijing became pertinent to the central state’s efforts to tighten its control over the apparatus of legal judgment. With new urgency, central state bureaucrats and their provincial counterparts began to reevaluate the forms and limitations of centrally reviewed cases. The documentary tools of double scrutiny—evaluating both officials and the cases they handled—had been developed over hundreds of years before the Qing to exert both legal discipline and bureaucratic discipline, and they were so sophisticated that scholars are still evaluating their uses and dimensions.1 This chapter diverges 1. On the rhetorical dimensions of these sources—a primary focus in North American scholarship—see the essays collected in Hegel and Carlitz, Writing and Law. Much East Asian scholarship about these sources has focused on the procedures of litigation and judgment from the perspective of Qing subjects. Several such essays are cited in the pages that follow, but perhaps the most comprehensive examination is an unpublished manuscript by Chang Wejen currently circulating under the title “Judicial Process of Late Imperial China.”

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from an analysis of the literary dimensions of these materials and what they reveal about the lives and deaths of Qing subjects—the focus of a majority of scholarly interest—to consider how the central state and its territorial officials used the case narratives sent up to Beijing for review. Employing magistrate manuals and litigation handbooks, I reconstruct not only the process of creating the documents involved in drafting a sentencing proposal but also the information game and the conflicting interests that lay behind decisions about what to include and what to obscure at every turn. The “legal cases” commonly used in scholarship on Qing history to illuminate various snapshots of local life are, therefore, here presented as masterpieces of bureaucratic coordination involving the orchestration of myriad administrative objectives. This chapter contributes to the already flourishing study of the relationship between fiction and narrative in Qing legal history by drawing heavily on magistrate manuals and other administrative guides to illustrate how the “legal cases” of the Qing dynasty in fact served two purposes. One was the widely assumed objective of legal discipline: the aim of the state to review and fix judgments according to the imperial standard. The other objective was “bureaucratic discipline”: those features of case reporting standards and review activities that focused not on the problem of legal interpretation but on ensuring that the bureaucracy was meeting the ever-proliferating and difficult-to-enforce standards set by the central administration. This second objective has been obscured by a focus on law and legal processes alone, in spite of the seriousness with which Qing officials considered bureaucratic discipline in reviewing cases. The documents that scholars of Qing history often refer to as “legal cases” in fact comprise two distinct components. The first is the case narrative (zhao 招), which combines information culled from the reports of multiple offices and culminates in the routine punishment memorial submitted to the throne. The second is the series of original case files (an jian 案件) generated in the course of investigating and handling an affair; these were preserved in the case dossiers (an juan 案卷) archived in every individual yamen that participated in the resolution, review, and judgment of a case. What scholars generally refer to as a “legal case,” then, must be considered two separate sets of objects: first, the single intelligible narrative for review, formed through

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various collaborative efforts, and second, the host of diverse documents recording the actions of each yamen and kept on file in each office for reference. Only when these two sets of documentary practices are viewed separately can we understand the interplay between them. The two components of a “legal case” were constructed in tandem from the very beginning. Every recommendation of punishment sent up to Beijing for review began in a county yamen.2 In that original county office, and in every other office that a case passed through, a dossier dedicated to the case would be created. That dossier would contain any original files generated by that particular yamen related to the investigation, review, and deliberation of the case, and it would remain in that office (with a few exceptions) for later reference. The original documents in each case dossier—arrest summonses, copies of rescripts, deadline requests, hastening orders, arrest orders, communications between arresting jurisdictions, testimony transcripts, descriptions of jails, reports on prisoners, informal reports on investigations, pledges by coroners and collective responsibility heads and jailers and victims collecting recovered loot, injury examinations and autopsy reports, ministerial deliberations, and even the emperor’s comments on cases being reviewed— ​were therefore all preserved separately (sometimes in their original form and sometimes in duplicate) in a host of different archives. Most of the information about an initial report and investigation remained on file at the local level; the case that eventually reached Beijing for consideration would have been refined down to a single narrative of the crime, its investigation, and its legal interpretation. The case narrative that traveled from office to office up to Beijing and then back down to the province was, therefore, made up of quotes from or summaries of information in dossiers from several yamen, while each office retained the drafts that it created and the communiqués sent to it from other yamen. In this sense, the narrative sent up and down the bureaucratic hierarchy was a necessarily incomplete object. It was a synthesis of facts forged into one narrative when in fact several narratives existed. 2. For the regulations on filing suits and courts of first instance, see DLCY: 刑‌律, 訴訟, 告狀不受理.

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The collapsing of the facts from multiple case dossiers into a single unified case account enabled officials in the central bureaucracy to address the problems of legal discipline and bureaucratic discipline simultaneously. By juxtaposing an overarching narrative with quotations from individual files produced by multiple yamen, supervisors all the way up the administrative chain had the opportunity to scrutinize both the case and subordinate officials’ handling of it.3 This multiauthored, multiarchive, synthetic approach to case summary and review was a common and important tool of bureaucratic communication; its function must be fully understood before we approach the documents generated from it. The Qing central state could have demanded copies of every original yamen file pertaining to a single crime, rather than relying on these composite narratives. Having access to the full, original information about a case and how it was handled would have given the state ample opportunity to scrutinize both the crime and the officials investigating it, but such informational demands would have resulted in case files containing hundreds if not thousands of pages. The labor required to review that amount of information would have required at least as many officials—possibly more—reviewing the files as it had taken to compile them. The central bureaucracy would have had to expand by thousands or perhaps tens of thousands to accommodate such an approach. It would have entailed such a massive expansion of the central ministries that no proposal to do so was ever recorded in the Qing dynasty annals. The final case narrative as it was presented to the emperor was thus much more than a set of facts about a crime committed in some corner of the empire. It was a documentary genre that tied together materials from the archives of yamen all the way from the humble county magistrate’s office to the very top of the state, in a long chain of shared responsibility and mutual scrutiny, the importance of which was only 3. This “nested quotation” format in bureaucratic communication was neither unique to the Qing nor particular to cases sent up for sentencing review, as Chelsea Wang’s excellent work on Ming memorials has demonstrated. See Wang, “Dilemmas of Empire.”

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heightened with the introduction of integrated administrative sanctions by the end of the Kangxi era. The stakes of case review were therefore high not only because they bore on the lives or deaths of individual subjects, but also because they measured the integrity of the territorial bureaucracies. To clearly illustrate the dynamics dictating the investigation, narration, and review of the multitude of case narratives arriving in Beijing, this chapter begins with an in-depth examination of how the various documents involved were made—from the initial report of an incident to the decision in the capital—as well as the chains of command and communication that led back down to the locale for execution of the judgment. By moving step by step through the lifetime of a case, this chapter demonstrates that what is generally treated as a single “legal case” was, in fact, a combination of several distinct documentary forms that were generated by officials with varying interests. The multitude of objectives pursued by actors collaborating in the writing and review of these cases meant that, no matter how much the central state desired to achieve both legal and bureaucratic discipline, their combination in one set of intertwined documentary practices engendered a critical tension: the danger and the allure of the “perfect case.”

From County to Capital: The Journey of a Case Like the emperors of the early Qing, historians have access only to glimpses of the legion of archival materials from multiple yamen out of which final case narratives were composed.4 Just a handful of countylevel archives survive from the Qing, and what does survive tends to be from the nineteenth century or later. Even fewer archival materials from the prefectural, gubernatorial, or other provincial offices survive. And given that final, complete case dossiers were probably kept on file in the provincial capitals, scholars furthermore have rarely found examples of 4. The relative abundance of county-level documentation has made this exercise possible for the yamen of the county magistrates. For a look at some of the countylevel documents and local processes, see Terada, “Qingdai zhouxian.”

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them, meaning that the county-level cases they use to study homicide, banditry, and other crimes pertaining to capital review often cannot be corroborated using central-level archives, which raises the possibility that those county dossiers are not, in fact, representative of the cases actually sent up for review. Owing to the volume and variety of sources drawn from multiple levels of the administration to compile a single “legal case,” scholars have not often been able to use original case materials to reconstruct every level of case deliberation.5 Historians therefore face the same kind of information anxieties that Qing emperors and bureaucrats grappled with: for the most part, we are left to struggle with a large (but incomplete) number of the materials generated to meet the demands of central review. Scholars already understand a great deal about the heavily stylized nature of the sentence-proposing memorials sent to Beijing for judgment. Never­ theless, because researchers tend to rely either on county-level archives or central archives to write history, and because access to the few fragments of case archives at other administrative levels is extremely limited, the questions of how and according to what objectives multiple offices collaborated to generate a single “legal case” have fallen by the wayside. This chapter’s exposition of that feat of collaborative narration follows the flow and format of one model for a complete case narrative from Pan Biaocan’s Kangxi-era An Unreliable Treatise.6 The treatise is the first known magistrate’s handbook to have been produced under the Qing, and it is based on Pan’s experience as a private legal secretary in the yamen of several magistracies in multiple provinces.7 Originally from Zhejiang Province, Pan was driven to the profession by the loss of his family fortune. He compiled his handbook from manuscripts of the reports and orders he drafted while serving under various magistrates, a document collection that he took with him into retirement. The title— An Unreliable Treatise—reflects his consternation over reproducing possibly corrupted copies of original drafts. 5. One notable exception is the remarkable article by Constant, “Xingke tiben de nicheng.” 6. Pan, An Unreliable Treatise, “The Administration of Justice, Second Part ‌‌下),” “Formula for the Documents and Registers of a Banditry Case (盜案書 (‌刑‌名 冊‌式).” 7. Will, Bibliography, 1:xxix.

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While magistrate manuals, private secretary handbooks, case compilations, and advice books for officials may be considered unreliable in many ways (either because they reproduce edited or faulty copies of original manuscripts or they feature exceptional examples), these materials—recently compiled into an authoritative bibliography by Pierre-Étienne Will and several coauthors—represent an extremely valuable and underexploited source for insights into provincial administrative practices. The formulae and advice in them are the sole documentary evidence we have of what happened in several yamen whose archives do not survive, and they were also important sources of information and models for the officials who used them. While administrative practices could differ in substantial ways from one post to the next, and while yamen documentary standards certainly shifted over time (as we will see later in the chapter), these sources help pinpoint some of the “best practices” that circulated in the Qing. They are also one of the few places where magistrates and yamen staff frankly discuss the strategies of textual practices at the local level, so we may rely on them for hints about how central-state practice created specific incentives for local administrative behavior. The text of Pan’s “Formula for the Documents and Registers of a Banditry Case” (fig. 1), for example, is a framework for arranging the facts of a crime into a case narrative. It runs just over four pages in length, but by the time administrators completed all forty of the lines in Pan’s model with the information they prompted, a case could rapidly expand to dozens of pages. However, no matter how long the case narrative became and how complicated the process of its compilation, the structure of centrally reviewed cases cleaved closely to the common narrative standard to facilitate the state’s processing of the high volume of information it received. The stylized and structured format of these documents had a dual purpose: to enforce legal discipline and bureaucratic discipline. With one uniformly organized documentary format, the Qing aimed to scrutinize both the crimes being committed and the officials handling them via the same highly routinized stream of information. But this strategy had a high cost: the interweaving of multiple reports about both cases and case handling resulted in artificial narratives that made it hard—for emperors and historians alike—to discern fact from formula.

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[CO here

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Fig. 1.  Pan Biaocan’s “Formula for the Documents and Registers of a Banditry Case.” From “The Administration of Justice, Second Part (刑名下),” in Pan, An ­Unreliable Treatise (1684).

The Case in the County: The Yamen of First Instance Every criminal case began with a plaint or report to the county magistrate. Any subject, collective responsibility head, soldier on patrol, or yamen employee who witnessed a crime or uncovered evidence of one was obligated to submit notice of it to the county yamen. As soon as a crime was reported, a dedicated case file would be established and preparations would begin for an investigation. From the moment that a case was created, the county yamen began to generate documentary information that would later have to be summarized and accounted for in communications to superior offices. The county-level dossier of every case that eventually traveled up to Beijing began with the first report of the incident. As the official presiding over the local yamen, the county magistrate was ultimately responsible for all aspects of compiling both a case dossier and a narrative for review.8 In the case files that remained ­a rchived in the county office, every aspect of the investigation was documented in forms, orders, memoranda, reports, and summaries 8. On the regulations dictating the magistrate’s performance and the standards for local investigation as understood through the Qing Code, and for some examples from the Ba County Archives, see Liao and Jiang, Qingdai Sichuan, 208–22.

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that were issued from or copied into the dossier. In the narrative that traveled up the administrative chain, the original information in the local dossier could be obscured, elaborated, or carefully framed to nudge the facts of the investigation in a certain direction or to cover up administrative foibles. Any evidence of inconsistency in the final case report to superior offices could trigger an investigation of the office handling the case. While small, common errors—a few days’ delay or a seemingly minor misrepresentation of someone’s testimony—might be explained away or smoothed over, serious discrepancies between the report and the original archive could end a magistrate’s career if they were discovered. The first concern of a magistrate overseeing an investigation was time. Immediately after receiving the report of a crime, the clock began to tick. Standard preparations had to be made to ensure that a sufficient first report could be filed with superior offices in a timely manner. A dossier would be created for tracking all official correspondence, ­orders, and reports attached to the case. Responsibility for executing orders and organizing the file would be assigned to a specific employee in one of the six primary departments of the county yamen (the Punishments Department being the most common in cases involving death or robbery).9 If the suspect was still at large, the magistrate would draft an order of arrest. Depending on the case, rewards for the capture of suspects could be earmarked and published via proclamation.10 As soon as the initial orders were made, an investigative party would be assembled to examine the evidence. The magistrate was expected to travel to the scene of a reported crime in person with a small retinue of assistants to conduct both a survey of the physical evidence and an initial inquisition. Any people who had had witnessed the crime, who lived or worked in proximity to the scene, who had a connection to the victim, or who had discovered and reported the affair were to be brought together at the scene of 9. For a summary of the offices of the county yamen in the Qing and the types of documents handled by each, see Li, “Qingdai Baxian yamen.” 10. For one example of a proclamation issued regarding such an award, see Gangyi, What Magistrates Must Know, “Formulae for Drafts and Dispatches: Punish­ ‌ ments Department (刑房文移稿件式),” “Homicide and Banditry Cases (命‌盜‌案),” “Displaying a Notice of Reward for Arrest (懸賞購拏示).”

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the crime for questioning. In cases involving physical violence, a coroner would be assigned to conduct an examination into the cause of the death or injury of the victim and would file his own report in accord with centrally determined standards.11 If a suspect had been apprehended, his or her testimony would be taken as well. At the conclusion of the initial investigation, draft transcripts of all of the testimony of witnesses and suspects were added into the case dossier together with reports from yamen staff on the physical condition of the scene and the victim or victims. The first section of Pan’s model report (see the first eleven lines in fig. 1, reading from right to left) describes how the information from the initial investigation collected in the county-level case dossier should be laid out in the narrative sent to Beijing.

Such-and-such person from such-and-such village from such-and-such county/department reported such-and-such affair, saying etc., etc. The neighbors are such-and-such persons, the village head such-and-such a person, baojia head suchand-such a person The place is such-and-such a place The witnesses are so-and-so A list of missing items (transcribed in full) Testimony The victim testified, saying etc., etc. The neighbor testified, saying etc., etc. The village head testified, saying etc., etc. The baojia head testified, saying etc., etc. The local witnesses testified, saying etc., etc.

11. The development of standards for autopsies has been a subject of considerable scholarship, since forensic science proliferated in China from a very early date, as demonstrated by the thirteenth-century publication of the forensic manual by Song Ci, Washing Away of Wrongs. For one example of how forensic procedure and reporting were standardized during the Qing, see the coroner’s form that was

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In the first five lines of a report, the county official was to describe the initial crime report, the individual who submitted it, the office to which it was submitted, and its contents. The sixth to the eleventh lines then laid out information from the testimony taken from the initial inquisition. The first quarter of a final case narrative, therefore, would be taken up with information about who had claimed what about the facts of the incident in the initial phase of investigation. Interestingly, what was missing from this opening section of the summary case narrative model, if it had been constructed as a full account of the initial report and investigation, was all of the information about the physical evidence from the initial investigation. Although the preliminary investigation would have been conducted at the same time as the first round of testimony, such details do not appear in Pan’s formula until after the county magistrate’s report to his superiors. This curious discrepancy between the order in which a case was actually handled and the order in which it was narrated is worth probing further, as it involves the critical relationships between “first facts,” the reporting process, and the authoring of case narratives as distinct from case dossiers themselves. First Facts The significance of the first facts of the case to demonstrating later investigative outcomes gave the early documents in the case dossier a position of unique importance. Before the possibility of weighing all of the evidence existed, the magistrate was expected to discover and record the seemingly incidental facts from the scene of the crime and initial testimony in order to construct a unique picture of the outcome of a crime. This specific set of details—the first facts of a case—later had to dovetail perfectly with the magistrate’s attempt to construct a narrative of the crime. The initial examination and designed and promulgated by Beijing for use in local yamen—and which survives in hundreds of cases in the Sichuan Provincial Archives—at SPABX 清 006-01-00255: 5–22. The form retained in the Sichuan county archive is based on the format circulated by the Beijing government in 1712. For a description of this “Generally Promulgated Corpse Form (通頒尸格),” refer to the Kangxi-era work by Zhang Guang­ yue, A Complete Collection of Precedents, “Judgment and Imprisonment (‌斷‌獄),” “Incorrect Examination of the Wounds of a Corpse (檢驗尸傷不以實).”

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interrogation files in the county-level dossier were considered the most intimate and true facts of the case and, therefore, constituted the primary evidence against which all later attempts to reconstruct the crime were judged. Wang Zhiqiang has characterized this scrutiny of the relationship between first facts and outcomes as a system of judgment based on a “coherence of proofs.”12 According to this Qing standard, investigations could be considered complete only when they produced explanations for every single idiosyncratic detail about the scene of a crime that could not be explained at the time of the initial investigation. The resolution of discrepancies between the first report of the crime and the discovered facts of the initial investigation was considered an ­especially important criterion by which the success of an investigation could be judged.13 The ideal case narrative began with a puzzle and concluded with the only possible explanation capable of aligning all of the pieces. The burden of proof differed depending on the nature of the crime. In a homicide case or an affray, the injuries first recorded in an investigation would later have to be matched to a blow-by-blow reconstruction of the attack and to the exact dimensions of any recovered weapons.14 In crimes involving the destruction or theft of property, a list of missing or disturbed items compiled at the time of the first ­examination of the scene could, similarly, be used to reconstruct the details of an act of robbery, theft, or vandalism—hence the line in Pan’s model for banditry cases dedicated to listing the stolen items described in the initial plaint. The two lists—the one offered by the victim and the other compiled based on the investigation of the scene—would then become important benchmarks. Recovered loot could be matched to earlier descriptions of items to establish whether or not an individual 12. See Wang, “Judicial Reasoning and Political Legitimacy,” 20–33, and “Qingdai xing’an zhuzheng yizhi.” 13. Indeed, according to a 1647 regulation that reiterated an existing convention from the Ming, all cases had to be tried on the basis of the first suit. For the text of the 1647 edict, see the Shunzhi year four regulation on this subject at QLDQHD: 刑‌部, 聽斷. For the statute in the Qing Code, see DLCY: 刑律, 斷獄, 依吿状鞫獄. 14. Tian and Li, Instructions for Magistrates, “Examining Injuries (驗傷).”

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found hiding the illicit goods was indeed connected to the incident.15 Similarly, false claims about the nature of the missing items could be used to challenge the account of a victim suspected of concealing facts. The collection of evidence was therefore a critical task for the county magistrate: potential red flags had to be spotted to verify later theories of the crime. A detail that the entire case could later turn on (a knocked-over dresser, or the color of the victim’s skin, or the time at which the suspect was spotted in the street) would not be considered valid evidence if it had been overlooked in the first stage of the investigation. At the scene of investigation, everything from the direction from which the offender arrived at the scene, to how he or she entered the location where the crime was committed, to whether anything was broken or disturbed in the house as part of the commission of the crime needed to be noted and diagrammed if possible, together with the relative position of any neighbors or potential witnesses.16 Because the minutest details of an initial investigation could be considered essential proof in later stages of the case, a magistrate had to note not only that clothing was missing at the scene, for example, but also what color of which items of clothing were stolen; not only that money had been stolen, but specifically how much money was missing, and so on. The First Report A summary of the basic facts of the report of the crime, the course of the initial investigation, and the most striking evidence discovered at this initial stage had to be reported to supervising yamen by the county 15. As elaborated by Tian and Li, “The resolution of a homicide depends entirely on the injuries to the corpse (人命重情。全憑屍傷定案).” What the corpse or the injury was to a claim involving violence, property was to cases involving theft, and analogous procedures of investigation would serve as the basis for later case devel­ opments. As one late eighteenth-century manual put it, “To break the case [involv­ ing theft or robbery], one must have the loot as evidence (破案必须脏据).” For the original text of this manual, see Wan, Essentials of Private Secretary Learning, “Banditry Cases (盗案).” 16. For a description of this process, see Chu Ying, Some Help for Beginning Magistrates, “Collective Examination of Banditry Cases (盜案會勘).”

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magistrate within days of the initial accusation. This stage of the case occupies only two lines of Pan’s model:

This aforementioned item was reported on such-andsuch year, month, day Dispatched such-and-such person to apprehend, with so-many days as a deadline (specify individually for each)

These two lines do not contain much information in the narrative of the case as presented for central review; they communicate only when and to which superiors a case was reported, as well as confirming the date, deadline, and person responsible for arresting suspects who were at large. As underwhelming as this section of the final narrative seems, these two lines posed a serious dilemma for the county magistrate. Because the first report contained the preliminary narrative of the first facts of the case, any information in this initial communication to superior offices was bound to define the course of the investigation that would follow. Since the first report was the basis for follow-up instructions and scrutiny in supervising yamen higher up the chain, mistakes made at this stage were costly. The eighteenth-century manual Important Points for Handling Cases summarizes the situation: “The handling of a case rests entirely upon the quality of the initial report and [the rest of the file’s] accord with it (辦案全在初報妥協一俟)!”17 A serious dilemma presented itself at this early juncture, occupying a single sparse line in Pan’s model: given that the county magistrate had only a few days to report a crime, he had very little time in which to determine what evidence would later turn out to be either critical to establishing his narrative of the case or impossible to explain (making a final resolution extremely difficult).

17. Wang Youhuai, Important Points for Handling Cases, “Making a Deliberation (作看).”

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“Once the case has been fixed,” read one manual, “there is no room for further negotiation.”18 Magistrate manuals strenuously encouraged county officials to consider carefully what they put into initial reports about a crime. Any inconsistency between the final narrative and this first report would make room for suspicion and be considered cause for scrutiny on ­review. The fixing of the initial disposition of a case would, in this view, fix the fate of both the accused and the county official. The perfect case contained no room for uncertainty. It would be best, some manuals lamented, if the outcome of the investigation could be known before the first report. That not being the case, many manuals advised magistrates to hedge their bets. As Essentials on Homicides and Six Other Essays (henceforth Essentials on Homicides) suggested: In the first report . . . only select the testimony that is correct. Select what is important. Describe these facts in a few lines. As for all of the rest of the messy and confusing detail, it need not be included. It must only be neat. And tidy. [Short sentences of] six or seven words, or maybe around ten, should suffice. . . . For if, in the initial report that is sent to supervisors, one has not yet distinguished between the coarse and the refined, or the fair and the wicked, entering everything into the account, then when it comes time to craft the final narrative an inestimable amount of deliberation and worrying will have to be expended. [This is because] if the final account is different from the previous testimony in even the slightest detail, superior officials are sure to reject it. These things cannot be taken back. . . . No matter what kind of case, as soon as you report it you must have your own calculations about how it will eventually be resolved.19

18. From the “General Principles (總論)” section of Wan, Essentials of Private Secretary Learning: “The first report must not be too excited, for fear that it may contain unsubstantiated facts. And once the case has been fixed, there is no room for further negotiation. If there is any discrepancy [between the report and the resolution], then, in sticking with what one has reported before, the harm is great indeed. Instead of sticking with your initial judgment, it’s better to quickly change it. For that is a gentleman’s error (猶為君子之過也).” 19. Essentials on Homicides, “On Homicide Cases (命案論).”

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Thus what seemed to be a simple report became, in practice, a troubling threshold. Once crossed, the possibility of miscalculation and its consequences loomed. Where the first facts of the case were the burden against which later truths were measured, the first report of a crime was the basis of all later action—and reprimand. At this point, the careful magistrate had to consider how to provide enough—but not too much—information to lay the foundation for a solid case later. As the anonymous Qianlong-era Essentials on Homicides warned: Every time one sends an initial report full of pages and additional documents, it is bound to be sent back over and over again. . . . With an initial report like this, how can it stand up to the final narrative and additional review? If an initial report is complicated and riddled with errors, then when it comes time to write the general narrative it will not agree with the testimony. It cannot but be sent back. The case cannot be resolved. Who knows how much ink and paper will be wasted before it can be settled? Once a report is sent, it cannot be recalled!20

There had to be enough detail in a first report to later demonstrate coherence of proofs according to the unique circumstances of the reconstructed crime.21 But the more detail included in the initial report, 20. Essentials on Homicides, “On Homicide Cases (命案論).” Indeed, magistrates were encouraged to keep their reports simple to avoid complications down the line. As Wan Weihan’s Essentials of Private Secretary Learning frames the problem in the section “General Principles (總論)”: “The critical part of a case is the first report. It must always be clean and simple. Later, one can add more detail, or complexity. But it cannot be a sprawling jumble. If there is a mess of branches and offshoots, the summary report will be difficult to manage.” Similarly, under “Reports (申報)” in “First Section on Banditry (賊盜上),” in the “Administration of Justice (刑名部)” portion of Huang, Complete Book, Huang Liuhong warns that “in sending up reports, the initial communication is the basis [of later developments]—it is most fitting to exercise extreme caution!” 21. As the anonymously authored Important Points on Judicial Procedure remarks in the essay “On Homicide Cases (論命案),” “The reporting document is the hub from which the entire case emerges. If it is clear and simple, then the facts of the case will be solid and strong. If it is complicated and muddled then the assertions that spring up from it will form a tangled web, and it will be difficult to resolve.”

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the greater the likelihood that a problem could arise in making a final narrative account for every detail reported. From the time of the very first report, magistrates had to take ­informed risks based on their calculations about the most probable outcome of a case. The first critical defensive strategy for making a perfect case was to reveal only a select amount of information, depending on expectations for the outcome. As one manual declared, “One must always be on solid ground in handling a case. If a claim has no clear proof, then it does not go into a report! If there is doubt in your heart, do not put your brush to paper (辦案總要腳踏實地無憑據不入 詳有疑心不落筆)!”22 Ironically, this system designed to encourage truthfulness motivated officials to determine the resolution of a case from its very beginning and then conduct it subtly toward that end, no matter what obstacles surfaced. Any detail that could not be fully explained and any detail that later turned out to be critical but had not been reported earlier could constitute a serious threat to both the resolution of the case and the career of the magistrate. From the moment that a case was first translated from the original files in the county dossier into the opening of a narrative that would later be reviewed in Beijing, all attention had to be focused on the resolution of the narrative still being constructed. Resolution The next step in Pan’s model of a case narrative was the resolution of the investigation. All pertinent information bearing on the course of the case and its resolution was combined into a single narrative describing the crime, the handling of the case, and the proposed sentence.23 The resolutions summarized a small selection of materials from the local case file, including excerpts from all of the files that bore on details of the final reconstruction of the crime: the confessions of the suspects, the arrest and examination reports, the testimonies of witnesses and 22. Essentials for Legal Secretaries, “Handling Cases (辦案).” 23. For an example of a narrative for a resolved banditry case, see Gangyi, What Magistrates Must Know, “Formulae for Drafts and Dispatches: Punishments Department (刑房文移稿件式),” “Homicide and Banditry Cases (命盜案),” “Nar­ rative and Transfer for a Finalized Banditry Case (盜案定案招解).”

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victims, and the details from multiple examination reports all had to be quoted and narrated in perfect concert.24 The information in this section of the report was substantial, ­occupying lines fourteen to twenty-eight in the model, and it had two important tasks. First, it had to document major turning points in the investigation. Second, it had to offer an evidentiary explanation for the first facts of the case, as well as for any discrepancy between those facts and the initial report. Pan outlined the contents of this section, titled “Account of the Crime,” as follows:

Account of the Crime (produce one per criminal) The thief such-and-such a person Such-and-such a person testified, saying: such-and-such a person captured them. OR, the original arresting officer testifies: Testimony (on such-and such a day, or on such-andsuch occasion of interrogation) According to the testimony, etc., etc. Loot obtained Such-and-such an item (and whether or not it has already been sold, item by item) Such-and-such an item Weapons Such-and-such weapon (and whether or not it has been obtained, indicate clearly) Injured victims Such-and-such a person (how were they injured? indicate clearly)

24. For a brief but wonderful review of how the files that were eventually combined into a case narrative looked in their initial iterations at the county level, see Terada, “Qingdai zhouxian.”

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Account of the Crime (continued) Sexual assaults Such-and-such a person (how were they sullied? indicate clearly) Others involved Such-and-such a person testified, saying etc., etc. (was this person released or transported [for further interrogation]? specify clearly)

The completion of the final narrative meant that, from the perspective of the local yamen, the case was closed. The summary narrative of the crime would piece together the most important facts of the case in a complicated narrative that was sent, together with the associated criminal, through each supervising office in the province for review. The prisoner would be examined and the files for transport put in order.25 The suspect and the accompanying case file would then be sent to the prefect for the first round of in-province case review.26 The effort that went into hammering out a fixed narrative of a crime at the county level was, by the time of the resolution, documented in a wide array of sometimes conflicting files in the dossier of the county magistrate’s yamen. Multiple rounds of interrogation and follow-up investigations might be required before the right explanation for the pertinent evidence from the initial investigation was found. Much effort may have been spent in pursuit of theories of the crime that were later abandoned, and so those documents would be excluded from the narrative. 25. For a discussion on the processes of imprisonment, transfer, and prison audit, see Poling, “The Performance of Power,” 47–91. 26. For an example of the formal document sending a prisoner and the first draft of the sentencing proposal to the prefect for review (and then for review further up the chain), see Gangyi, What Magistrates Must Know, “Formulae for Drafts and Dis­ patches: Punishments Department (刑房文移稿件式),” “Homicide and Banditry Cases (命盜案),” “Reporting and Handling Homicide and Banditry Cases for the Autumn Assizes (詳辦命盜案秋審).”

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In the version of the case narrative submitted for review, only relevant discoveries were disclosed. Loose threads generated earlier in the investigation were omitted. Puzzling aspects of the case that had not been resolved were obscured. The final, clear case narrative was, therefore, an act of “creative genius” by the county-level yamen.27 The creative efforts exerted by the magistrate and his staff in rectifying and weaving together parts of the dossier to form a resolution were concealed in part by the very structure of the final narrative formula. Much of the evidence that had been collected at the time of the first report was, in this ordering, revealed to the reader only at a later stage in the narrative. The tension between the stages of investigation and the stages of narrative development provided critical opportunities for magistrates to see their way ahead to a final resolution from early on in the unfolding of a case. This slight advantage gave them critical purchase in the high-stakes challenge of writing a prefect case narrative. Crafting the Perfect Narrative The first facts and first report of a case would be presented at the beginning of a case narrative and then woven together with details of the later investigation to present a perfect continuity between what was initially known and what was later discovered about the crime. In a perfect narrative, the apparently random jumble of facts known at the beginning of the case would be resolved with discoveries from later stages of the narrated investigation. The most important aspect of the case narrative was its ability to explain how the crime unfolded at the same time that it explained how the case itself was resolved. This required a doubled chronology: the timetable of the crime as revealed through the unfolding narrative of the investigation. Incorporating these distinct but intertwined narratives required clarity, closed-loop construction, and the inclusion of sufficient but not extraneous detail in laying out the evidence, investigation, and reconstruction of the crime. A common trope likened the structure of these crime narratives to interwoven strands in a tapestry that tied all pertinent facts together. Take the following description from the late 27. On this notion, and for an expert discussion of the relationship between law and narrative in Qing cases, see Hegel, “The Art of Persuasion.”

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eighteenth-century manual Essentials on Homicides: “The ‘needlework’ of a case must be clear. What is needlework? It is the thing that connects the circumstances described before. . . . Every thread and every strand within those threads cannot, under any circumstances, contradict one another. It is as fine a craft as the needlework in embroidered clothing. No matter how much detail is in the embroidery, the stitching must be clear. There can be no messiness or confusion.”28 From the beginning to the end of the final case narrative, magistrates were warned to maintain the narrative thread. The case narrative had to weave testimony and fact together seamlessly to give the impression that any initial discrepancies were fully resolved and the only possible truthful explanation had been uncovered. To make things even more complicated, this absolute accord among the facts had to be presented as the outcome of discoveries made later, in the course of further investigation. The demand for coherence of proofs imposed a strict requirement of narrative harmony. This narrative harmony, furthermore, had to seem spontaneous. The demand for a perfect accord among evidence that unfolded only as new information was revealed meant that the narrative had to flow seamlessly but carefully between an account of the crime and an account of its reconstruction. Narratives of discovery therefore took precedence over direct explanations. As the Qianlong-era Important Points for Handling Cases concluded: Properly composing the movement of the brush is the secret of solving cases. One who is excellent at “composition” arranges all of the fixed and moving parts, the supporting and contradictory parts of all of the mass of threads, and connects them into one solid, connected body without undue delay. The result is tidy and leaves nothing out. As for excellent “movement of the brush,” it is writing that is fresh and flows without confusion. It is reliable and not indecisive. There is not a single wasted or contradictory character. The sentences are powerful. If this is not achieved, then there is room for picking it apart, throwing it into chaos, and casting it asunder, and it will not form a single neat whole.29 28. Essentials on Homicides, “General Principles (總論).” 29. Wang, Important Points for Handling Cases, “Narrating Testimony (敘供).”

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Great attention was paid to the proper ordering of facts and testimony, so that the narrative of a crime unfolded “from the branches to the roots.”30 Groundwork had to be laid early on for later narrative twists. Facts that were immediately apparent but seemed irrelevant had to be laid out at the beginning of the narrative to seem to flow effortlessly into the more complicated background facts about the crime that unfolded only through later investigation. These principles are summarized in the following passage from the mid-nineteenth-century manual Impor­ tant Points on Judicial Procedure: “Handling a case properly all depends on narrating the testimony in a way that goes from the shallow to the deep, and from the proximal to the immediate. Illuminate these things clearly and without undue flourish. In the proper way of narration, know what goes first and what comes after in the natural sequence.”31 The explanations for first facts—at first seemingly idiosyncratic and only later apparently critical—were to be embedded in the story of how the investigation unfolded. This required careful attention to laying out puzzling details with the expectation of their resolution in later revelations. In addition to making a highly artificial narrative seem to spontaneously reveal a series of underlying facts that became clear only over the course of the investigation, magistrates had to ensure that the entire story culminated in a flawless legal interpretation. The entire narrative 30. For this phrase and its explanation, see Wan, Essentials of Private Secretary Learning, “Banditry Cases (盗案).” As noted in “Examining a Case Is Not the Same as Solving a Case (審案與辦案不同辦案),” in Fang Dashi’s nineteenth-century Con­ siderations on an Ordinary Job, “Simplicity and neatness are appropriate for solving a case. If [the narrative of the case] is not simple and neat, the ‘branches’ of the circumstances [of the crime] will make it difficult to be clear and certain when it comes time to cite the appropriate substatute. Cases whose judgment did not seem to f low easily and naturally from the arrangement of facts and testimony were consistently sent back. In the essay “Narrating Testimony (敘供)” in Wang Youhuai’s Important Points for Handling Cases, Wang remarks, furthermore, that “excessive details” had to be tamed: “Do not be excessive in communicating testimony. Excessive details lead to a confusion of topics, and a veritable bramble of facts grows forth. The vines interweave and connect here and there, overlapping and going back and forth. There is no possibility that the case will not be sent back!” 31. Important Points on Judicial Procedure, “On Narrating Testimony (論敘供).”

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had to be organized around a central conclusion: the recommended sentence. As one handbook put it, “In writing prose, the topic is the organizing principle. In narrating testimony, the law is the organizing principle (作文以題目為主。敘供以律例為主).”32 As Huang Liuhong similarly advised, “Sentencing proposals must rely on [the facts as conveyed in] testimony, and the narrative of the crime must be fixed on the basis of the sentencing proposal. If the sentencing proposal has not been issued, one must not accidentally send out a narrative of the crime.”33 Although the legal interpretation came last in the county-level narrative of a crime, it was a primary consideration from the beginning. In the ideal case narrative, the streams of fact and testimony culminated in the natural conclusion of a perfectly reasoned sentencing recommendation. Every fact had to be arrayed in support of the ultimate sentencing proposal, but in a manner that seemed entirely beyond the control of the magistrate (who was supposed to operate as an instrument of justice, rather than its master): “If testimony and proposal match each other, then a case is easily solved. When narrating the testimony, one must already be setting the background for the proposal, and if this is done, then the proposal acts as a thread to tie the entire case together without any confusion.”34 The complexity of a “perfect case” seemed to rule out the possibility that it was an invention sprung from the minds of its multiple authors, regardless of the fact that it was, indeed, a highly artificial narrative. Handbooks and manuals of the Qing dedicated many pages to the dilemma of how to make such an artificial exercise seem natural.35 Huang Liuhong advised, in his Kangxi-era manual, that efforts to weave together evidence and outcome should begin in the course of the investigation: “Interrogate according to the statutes,” he suggested,

32. Wang, Important Points for Handling Cases, “Narrating Testimony (敘供).” 33. Huang, Complete Book, “The Administration of Justice (刑名部),” “Additional Considerations on Interrogation (問擬餘論).” 34. Wang, Important Points for Handling Cases, “Making a Deliberation (作看).” 35. On this point, with special attention to the importance of perfect case narratives for individual magistrates’ careers, see also Xu and Du, “Chaoyue heli huaiyi”; Xu, “Taiqian yu muhou”; Siemon, “Magistrates and the Law”; and Buoye, “Suddenly Murderous Intent Arose.”

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“and then nothing is difficult to resolve (按律問擬事無難結).”36 But no matter how assiduously a magistrate tried to usher a case toward a conclusion determined from early in its investigation, any hint of artificiality had to be concealed. Skillful case narrative authors foreshadowed important details to give the impression that they naturally gave rise to what followed later.37 Every “discovery” in the perfect case narrative was part of a carefully contrived plot: “What does it mean to ‘lay an ambush to call upon later (maifu zhaoying 埋伏照應)’? If a person has not been mentioned at all previously, but this person’s testimony reveals how it is that, say, the criminal was apprehended, then he must be ‘laid’ somewhere in the earlier testimony, so that [when the impor­ tant facts of his own testimony are referred to] he does not seem to appear suddenly out of nowhere.”38 The requirement of narrative harmony between facts and explanations could also rely heavily on existing legal narrative formulae. As Important Points on Judicial Procedure characterizes the problem, “The thread of the narrative of testimony must be clear, and constrained to recognizable patterns.”39 The trope—an enemy of truth—was an ally of verisimilitude in the world in which magistrates’ accounts had to ring true at the same time that they remained easily legible to officials versed in the laws of the dynasty.

The Work of Provincial Superiors Pan covered the role played by provincial superiors in the making of a case sent up for review in a section titled “The Case-Making Process,” which was dedicated to the case-handling responsibilities of provincial authorities:

36. Huang, Complete Book, “The Administration of Justice (刑名部),” “Homicide, First Section (人命上),” “Doubting Judgments (疑獄).” 37. This problem is discussed, for example, in the section titled “Examination and Judgment (審斷),” attributed to former Ministry of Punishments official Li Yumei, as collected and compiled by Xu Dong in The Book of Magistrates, under “The Administration of Justice, First Section (刑名上).” 38. Wang, Important Points for Handling Cases, “Narrating Testimony (敘供).” 39. Important Points on Judicial Procedure, “On Narrating Testimony (論敘供).”

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The Case-Making Process (write below separately and attach) On such-and-such a day of such-and-such a month this was reported to such-and-such yamen Such-and-such a yamen issued a rescript saying etc., etc.; it arrived on such-and-such a day (for every instance, fill in this information) On such-and-such a day, an interrogation was held; the interrogation was completed and the charge for the case was determined Such-and-such an offense was fixed (fill out for every single offense) The above offense was committed by such-andsuch offenders (summarize for each offense, and then summarize the whole) On such-and-such a day were transferred [to supervising officials for review] The rescript [of the supervising official] said etc., etc.

By the time a polished case narrative was sent to the prefectural yamen supervising the county magistrate, the offices would have long been in communication with one another about the case. The frequency of communication between provincial yamen during the investigation of a case is concealed in the narrative order set forth in Pan’s model and underplayed in case narratives, but it is critical to understanding how case narratives were manufactured. Much as the complicated relationships between investigation and report were obscured in the final draft, so was the sometimes-critical back and forth between the county office and other provincial yamen downplayed in the summary case. Three distinct processes—supervised investigation, review, and the drafting of the final case summary memorial—were collapsed into the space of seven lines in Pan’s model for the case summary. To illuminate the complicated role of provincial superiors, I will elaborate on their responsibilities in three sections. Pan outlines the first

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Slight reflow on this page.

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task, describing the supervised investigation, in the first two lines. The second, case review, spans lines three to seven in this section. The final process, crafting a memorial, comprises a single line after the text featured in the preceding box. Supervised Investigation The section describing the supervised investigation is remarkably short, belying the fact that a great deal of correspondence might have moved between the county and its superior offices while a magistrate was preparing a formal report for the prefect’s review. In the final narrative of a case, the county magistrate’s report to superiors and their response are comfortably distanced—they occupy lines thirteen and thirty-one of Pan’s formula, respectively. From the appearance of the final product, the facts of a case would have been more or less sorted out by the time other offices began to participate in the investigation. But in fact, although a narrative space separated the appearance of interaction among the officials, the supervised investigation began immediately after an initial report. By the time a criminal was sent with a case to superior offices for review, the county magistrate’s superiors might have already been deeply involved in the county-level construction of the case. When the first report of a case was received in superior yamen, all facets of the judicial administrative standard, such as the deadline ­requirements expanded by the Kangxi administration, fell under the oversight of the prefectural and provincial offices. Nominally, the main objective of supervising offices during the period of investigation before the local resolution of a case was to enforce dynastic regulations pertaining to case handling. In response to the reports from the county, the prefect, judicial commissioner, and governor would send rescripts (registered orders stamped with the seal of office) directing the county office to address any outstanding concerns about the case. The prefect, who occupied the office just above the county level, supervised the casehandling process. He was responsible for hastening delayed efforts and informing superiors of any infractions.40 40. If a deadline for arrest arrived without the capture of the criminal, the prefect was expected to notify provincial offices. On this see Gangyi, What Magistrates Must Know, “Formulae for Drafts and Dispatches: Punishments Department (刑房文移稿

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In the most perfunctory instances, rescripts from superior offices in response to county reports simply confirmed the next proposed step in the investigation and recorded the deadline for the resolution of the case. Permission for a cross-jurisdictional arrest warrant would be com­ municated if necessary. Arrests or interrogations involving multiple jurisdictions could also be coordinated in prefectural or provincial offices.41 In those instances, superior offices authorized the standard actions associated with an investigation and documented the behaviors reported to the province to ensure that the case was handled in accord with dynastic standards. At the same time, beyond perfunctory administrative coordination, supervisors had other stakes at this stage in the case-making process. As noted, any detail that later turned out to be related to a problem would have to be linked to a timely report in the final narrative, so it behooved the county magistrate to report the facts as they developed in case of later complications. Problems at the local level had to be reported to supervising officials immediately, lest the magistrate be accused, on later discovery, of covering up for his own deficiencies.42 Where a case could not be completed because of complicating factors, a governor might request a deadline extension (classifying the case as “difficult to resolve”) or allocate resources to assist the county. When the offender, the original victim, or additional victims had received injuries but were still living, the magistrate was required to assign a medical practitioner to examine any wounds, file a pledge about the injury and its probable

件式),” “Forms and Plaints (詞訟),” “Supervising Arrest for Homicide Cases (命‌案 參‌緝).” From 1667 forward, provincial governors were also expected to audit prefectural offices to ensure that they were keeping track of active case deadlines and not falling behind. For the text of this regulation, see the Kangxi-era work by Zheng Duan, Record of Learning, “Ministry of Punishments (刑部),” “Resolving Cases (‌ 結‌案).” 41. This problem is discussed in Gangyi, What Magistrates Must Know, “Formulae for Drafts and Dispatches: Punishments Department (刑房文移稿件式),” “Homicide and Banditry Cases (命盜案),” “Reports and Requests for Province-Wide Arrest (‌詳‌請 通‌緝)”; and in Essentials on Homicides, “Important Points on Banditry Cases (盜案 要略).” 42. Essentials on Homicides, for example, recommends in the “On Homicide Cases (命案論)” section that magistrates report problems with the arrest of suspects.

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causes, and begin treatment.43 Officials would monitor updates on injured suspects or victims to avoid sanctions for allowing the unnecessary death of a person or persons awaiting judgment. Rather than simply cataloging and scrutinizing problems as they developed, provincial officials could aid subordinate offices in quashing potential problems before they grew into serious faults. Concerns about the evolving theory of the crime, problems obtaining evidence, or bureaucratic mistakes were supposed to be spotted and resolved with the assistance of the superiors now overseeing the resolution of the case. The line between acting in the interests of the central court and act­ ing to protect the reputation of the provincial bureaucracy could become blurred in these instances. Because all provincial offices would be judged based on the final narrative and whatever it revealed about the crime and the offices handling the case, supervising yamen could play an important role in crafting the case narrative before it was formally reported up the bureaucratic chain. All the offices involved stood to benefit if any discrepancies between the first report and later conclusions about the crime were discovered and resolved before the case was officially sent up for review. Some magistrate manuals encouraged county officials to rely on collaboration with their superiors even before submitting the initial formal report of a crime. In particularly problematic cases where major details still seemed unclear, another possibility existed: a magistrate could send an informal interoffice memorandum (bing 稟) before filing a formal report. Through this channel, some initial communication between the county office and its superiors might direct the magistrate to determine what information was most useful to include in the formal report.44 As one manual suggested, using a memorandum rather than a formal report to notify supervising offices of a case could allow 43. On the recording, reporting, and treating of injuries, see Important Points on Judicial Procedure, “On Homicide Cases (論命案).” 44. For an example of the contrast between a formal report and an informal memorandum reporting a case, see Gangyi, What Magistrates Must Know, “Formulae for Drafts and Dispatches: Punishments Department (刑房文移稿件式),” “Homicide and Banditry Cases (命盜案),” “General Reports on Banditry Cases according to Deadlines (盜案依限通報),” and “Memorandum Reports of the General Outlines of a Homicide Case (稟報命案大概情形).” On the various forms and requirements for

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both the county office and its superiors a small margin of time within which to negotiate the terms of the first report: Every affair should be sent as a “memorandum” first and “reported” later, or first reported and then [extra details should be given in] a supplemental memorandum written later, or not reported at all but only communicated via memorandum. Many reports are rejected and later reported, largely because there are some suspicious or uncertain facts involved which are not yet clear, or else the case pertains to some grave affair that cannot but be analyzed finely in a memorandum.45

The seemingly banal and perfunctory nature of supervised investigation, and the small space afforded to it in Pan’s model case, thus decidedly underrepresents its importance in the development of a case narrative. This period might involve a good deal of collaboration between the county and superior offices. In a genre in which the construction of a case narrative followed closely from formal reports, the memorandum could be a useful tool for discussing the finer details of a case outside of formal channels. Supervising offices might, therefore, already be deeply involved in shaping the narrative of the crime before they were required to review the formal narrative submitted by the county office. Such collaboration between superior offices and the county magistrate was obscured in the arc of a final case narrative, however, which would separate investigation, report, and review. Much of this interaction would therefore be elided in the final case summary, which would touch only on communications that had to be explained based on the unfolding of the narrative. Review In the narrative of a case, the supervising offices’ major involvement began with their review of the resolution sent up by the county. This gave weight to the scrutinizing duties of superiors while glossing over the memoranda and other types of reporting, see Jueluo, Office Holder’s Daily SelfExamination, “Reports (申報),” “Model Phrases (格言).” 45. Important Points on Judicial Procedure, “A Concise Essay on Private Secretary Duties (幕務約編),” “On Making Memoranda (論作稟).”

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collaboration that often preceded it. The first stage of review occurred in the office of the prefect, the “throat” of subordinate jurisdictions and immediate supervisor of several county-level jurisdictions.46 Once the case narrative and the criminal arrived at the prefectural yamen, it was the responsibility of the prefect to examine the one and interrogate the other. If any inconsistencies were found that might indicate mishandling or misinterpretation, in spite of earlier intervention during the period of supervised investigation, these would be pointed out and the case would be sent back to the county yamen for reinvestigation and resolution. A case sent back for reinvestigation could be returned to the prefect with a new narrative accounting for the case’s rejection and details of the subsequent examination and resolution of the problems.47 If any problems noted with the case narrative seemed to indicate malfeasance, the prefect was responsible for notifying provincial supervising offices so that an investigation could be conducted into the handling of the case.48 Any problems that came to the attention of the supervising offices could also serve as the basis for in-province sanctions.49 Serious infractions in the case-handling process were supposed to be memorialized to the throne so that the Ministry of Personnel could deliberate on sanctions.50 All such proceedings would be documented 46. Important Points on Judicial Procedure, “Original Text on Important Points from Henan (豫省要略原文).” 47. Insight into this process can be found in the model of an explanation from a prefect to a judicial commissioner about a rejected case in Gangyi, What Magistrates Must Know, “Formulae for Drafts and Dispatches: Punishments Department (刑房 文移稿件式),” “Forms and Plaints (詞訟),” “Report in Response to a Rejected Inves­ ti­gation (駁審覆詳).” 48. For a summary of a prefect-level iteration of this report (including the summary of the county-level report) and its forms and features, see Gangyi, What Magistrates Must Know, “Formulae for Drafts and Dispatches: Punishments Depart­ ment (刑房文移稿件式),” “Forms and Plaints (詞訟),” “The Way of Reporting Con­ fessions (招詳法).” 49. For examples of governors mentioning the administrative sanction of subor­ dinate officials who failed to make deadlines in centrally reviewed cases, see the examples cited in Wang, “Judicial Reasoning and Political Legitimacy,” 133 n. 17. 50. For examples, see the Kangxi-era work by Li Yu, New Book, “Judgments ‌(判‌語),” “Imperially Fixed Cases (欽案),” “Impeachment for an Official Not Fulfilling

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in the files of supervising yamen and, furthermore, added to the developing case narrative. When the prefect was satisfied with the evidential accord in the county magistrate’s narrative, he would endorse the magistrate’s proposed sentence with his own proposal, attach it to a copy of the summary narrative, and send the original case, the narrative of the crime and case handling, and the prisoner up to the provincial capital.51 There the original case dossier, the criminal, and the county-level investigation would be reviewed in the office of the judicial commissioner before moving on to review by the governor. The same checks for factual accord, legal interpretation, case-handling performance, and documentary completeness would now be performed and confirmed by the highest provincial offices. At the conclusion of this phase of review, the original case dossier and the criminal who had proceeded from the county to the provincial capital temporarily halted their travels. The governor’s office or the judicial commissioner might determine to keep the file or the criminal for later review, but in most cases the pair would be sent back down to the prefectural or county office to await further handling. Since a single narrative of the facts had been determined, and since an infraction at any point in the chain could result in integrated sanctions for all supervising officials, the next remaining task was to craft the memorial reporting the crime to Beijing. From Dossier to Memorial When all questions had been settled, the judicial commissioner and the governor would craft a final narrative of the crime, concluding with their own sentencing proposal.52 A summary narrative was drawn up in accordance with the standard memorial format (with exceptions for His Duties (糾劾不職官員事),” and “Impeachment of an Acting Official Not Fulfilling His Duties (糾劾不職署印等事).” 51. For an example of a case after prefectural review, see Gangyi, What Magistrates Must Know, “Formulae for Drafts and Dispatches: Punishments Department (刑房 文移稿件式),” “Homicide and Banditry Cases (命盜案),” “Confession and Transfer of Fixed Homicide Cases (命案定案招解).” 52. For a beautifully clear breakdown of how all the components of the investigating and reporting processes leading up to the final sentencing proposal from

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the remarkable length of these particular documents) and sent to Beijing for central review.53 In Pan’s model, this stage is contained in a single line, number thirty-seven:

On such-and-such a day it was memorialized

By this point, all sources of confusion had to be resolved in a narrative leading to a single, inevitable conclusion: the most fitting legal punishment for the crime. This requirement was the product of what has been described by Terada Hiroaki as the “one correct answer” approach to legal decisions, otherwise characterized by Pierre-Étienne Will as the desire for “a perfect and unambiguous fit between the crime and the punishment, as prescribed in the relevant statutes of the Penal Code.”54 Since the Qing legal system operated on the presumption that there was a “one-to-one relation between a crime and a punishment,” a correctly interpreted case was expected to produce, in the phrasing of the Qianlong emperor, “a necessary accord between circumstance and punishment (自必情與罪協).”55 The fit between facts and the description of the investigation was so important that authors of case narratives were exhorted to “plot a clear path out” from the beginning of the narrative with an eye to ending with only one way forward: the sentence proposed at the

the provinces are reflected in the composition of the Routine Punishment Memorial, see Fan, “Qingdai sifa wenshu,” 35–37. 53. The regulations pertaining to the reporting of crimes destined for capital review are outlined at Na, Qingdai zhongyang sifa, 217–21. 54. Terada, “‘Hiruru tekina ho.’” I use Wang’s translation of “one correct answer”; see Wang, “Judicial Reasoning and Political Legitimacy,” 184; Will, “Adjudicating Grievances and Educating the Populace.” 55. Will, “Adjudicating Grievances and Educating the Populace,” and QLSL 10.11.10: 1.

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conclusion of the narrative.56 As Important Points on Judicial Procedure concluded, “The proposal of the sentence must be clear and thorough so that the reader can understand it perfectly at a glimpse (看語必明 白通曉使閱者一目了然).”57 The nineteenth-century handbook Essentials for Legal Secretaries described the same principle with a particularly lively analogy: “If a case is like a dragon, then the law is like the pearl it chases. The dragon may coil to the left and wind to the right, but he never leaves off from his pursuit of the pearl! This is how he captures it (蓋案猶龍也律猶珠也左盤右旋總不離珠斯得之矣)!”58 Only after initial facts, discovered facts, and interpretation had been made to fit a viable sentence proposal exactly could the narrative be considered resolved. Of course, the anxiety surrounding the perfect fit between law and fact was not reserved for this final drafting by the provincial offices; it existed from the very inception of a case. The complete coherence of all proofs would have been carefully established over the course of the supervised investigation. The description of the handling of the case during the review stage had to account for any errors that had been reported, or else it had to conceal such foibles. By the time the governor sent the composite case to Beijing, it would have already been subjected to the editorial, supervisory, and administrative interventions of several offices. And because the case would directly reflect on the governor’s office as well as on every coauthoring member of his administration, the narrative had to be perfect.

To the Capital Once the case narrative was crafted into a memorial, it was sent to Beijing for processing by the central ministries and review by the throne, where applicable (the following model mentions only the 56. Essentials for Legal Secretaries, “Handling Cases (辦案),” remarks: “In han­ dling a case, one must always plot a clear path outward [lit., “escape route”]. The holes and knots emerging from certain details must be deleted or amended to avoid forking the path (辦案要預先打算出路與結穴某某情節應刪某補庶免歧出之病).” 57. Important Points on Judicial Procedure, “A Concise Essay on Private Secretary Duties (幕務約編),” “Handling Cases (辦案).” 58. Essentials for Legal Secretaries, “Handling Cases (辦案).”

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deliberations of the ministries, but further content could be added if the approval of the throne was required). This entire process is covered in a single line in Pan’s model, the thirty-eighth of forty:

The deliberations of the ministries said etc., etc.

The sparse nature of this line in Pan’s guide (and, indeed, in the fixed sentencing proposals that were sent back to the provinces) conceals a great deal of debate and review.59 In the capital, memorials from the provinces were first received by the Transmission Office (tongzheng shisi 通政使司), which processed all communications from the provinces.60 After being registered and checked for proper formatting, these memorials were forwarded to the Grand Secretariat. Within the Grand Secretariat, the Punishments Office (xingke 刑科) was responsible for registering, editing, and copying sentencing proposal memorials into a standard format.61 Officials in the Punishments Office would attach one or more draft rescripts to each memorial before forwarding it for imperial review. Owing to the office’s role in copying and registering punishment memorials from the provinces, the iterations of these documents that circulated in the capital are known as the “routine memorials of the Punishments Office (xingke tiben 刑科題本),” or “routine punishment memorials” for short.62

59. Detailed and authoritative accounts of the work of the capital ministries and the emperor in handling routine punishment memorials may be found at Na, Qingdai zhongyang sifa, and Sun, Qingdai de sixing jianhou. 60. On the processing of memorials in the Qing, see Fairbank and Têng, “Types and Uses of Ch’ing Documents.” 61. For information on the documentary activities of the Grand Secretariat (as well as other central state organs) see Park and Antony, “Archival Research.” 62. These routine punishment memorials are the sources on which most historians rely for the study of legal history in the Qing dynasty (although in the past decade more scholars have been unearthing cases in a wider range of local archives). Because punishment memorials circulated through so many offices and went through so many iterations, they can be found even in unexpected places. Various drafts or copies of

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When the emperor received routine punishment memorials, he would select or modify one of the draft rescript slips prepared by the Punishments Office. The default response from the throne was to refer the matter directly to the relevant capital offices for deliberation. For this reason, many of the routine punishment memorials preserved in the First Historical Archives are inscribed with the fixed phrase “The Three Legal Offices [shall] examine, draft, and memorialize [on the affair] (san fa si he ni ju zou 三法司核擬具奏).” The Three Legal Offices were the capital offices tasked with the review of sentencing proposals before their presentation to the emperor.63 The Ministry of Punishments (xingbu 刑部), one of the Six Ministries of the late imperial state, was the legal and bureaucratic authority on the Qing Code and its implementation; the Court of Judicial Review (dalisi 大理寺) was a forum for debating points of law that fell beyond existing statutes; and the Censorate (duchayuan 都察院) was responsible for the surveillance of all personnel and was specifically tasked with checking case narratives for any errors in the handling of the case. The Three Legal Offices thus processed information pertaining to legal interpretation, statutory modifications, and bureaucratic discipline, respectively. Much of the paperwork generated by the review of capital cases was a product of the debates and deliberations of the Three Legal ­Offices. As Wang Zhiqiang has remarked, only a “technically perfect dossier” was acceptable.64 Qing officials were insistent that a single character or a tiny detail that had not been properly accounted for should be treated as a matter of life and death. No problem or inconsistency could remain unresolved in the final document. A single error in a case could spin off into sanctions for specific officials, further these documents survive in the reference copy archives (lufu zouzhe 錄附奏折) of the Grand Council archives and in the Grand Secretariat registers, as well as in the First Historical Archives’ xingke tiben collection. They have also been made available for scholarly use at Academia Sinica and the Genealogical Society of Utah. For more on the distribution and collection of these memorials, see Park and Antony, “Archival Research.” 63. For a description of the official positions of the Three Legal Offices and the role that each played in reviewing sentencing proposals, see Zheng, Qingdai sifa shenpan zhidu, and Na, Qingdai zhongyang sifa, 81–106, 222–32. 64. Wang, “Judicial Reasoning and Political Legitimacy,” 71.

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investigations, ministerial regulations, or imperial precedent, as archival material in the capital ministries fed into other processes of codification and review outside of the judgment of the individual affair.65 Depending on the nature and severity of disagreements between the ministries in the course of their deliberations, a greater or lesser amount of paperwork pertaining to legal debates, matters of precedent, or bureaucratic sanctions might be generated before a case was decided.66 When the Three Legal Offices reached an agreement on all the points of law or administrative procedure and there was no need for further deliberation, it was time to “fix the draft (ding gao 定稿).”67 The Ministry of Punishments wrote a new composite version of the routine punishment memorial, appending the recommendation of the Three Legal Offices to a summary of the original narrative as sent up by the provinces and copied by the Punishments Office of the Grand Secretariat. This narrative and sentencing recommendation was then sent to the Grand Secretariat for imperial consideration and scrutiny by the ministers who advised the throne.68 The memorials produced after deliberations by the Three Legal Offices were masterpieces of bureaucratic collaboration, with quotes from reports all the way from the county level to the capital woven together in perfect harmony. The final product was drafted by several dozen credited authors among the Three Legal Offices (to say nothing of the provincial officials and the legion of unnamed clerks who had cooperated to shape the early narrative). It is not at all unusual for the 65. The most useful overview of the archival and bureaucratic processes attached to the functions of case review other than judgment itself is still Metzger’s Internal Organization of Ch’ing Bureaucracy. 66. For a detailed discussion of a “standard” central review procedure for a capital case, along with excerpts from several common documents drafted in the process, see Sun, Qingdai de sixing jianhou, 92–126. 67. The procedures for the fixing of the final sentencing memorial are outlined at DQHD: 刑部, 刑律斷獄, 辯明冤枉. 68. On the processes of case review by the emperor and his councilors after receiving a sentencing proposal from the Three Legal Offices, see Na, Qingdai zhong­ yang sifa, 252–62.

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historian to encounter memorials whose Chinese content (not counting the lengthy Manchu translations appended to them) exceeds one hundred pages for a single case. After processing by capital ministries and review in the Grand Secretariat, the administrative phase of a sentencing proposal from the provinces gave way to the sole deliberations of the emperor and the ritual aspects of late imperial justice. Each year during the Frost’s Descent solar period, the emperor would conduct the Autumn Assizes ritual of imperial sentencing and pardons.69 Criminals facing death for their crimes were, on this occasion, transported to Beijing for interrogation.70 The days leading up to the ritual were supposedly periods of serious consternation for the emperors who presided over the ritual of imperial judgment, as the lives of dozens or hundreds of suspects hung on the outcome of the upcoming event. Special narrative registers (zhaoce 招冊) summarizing the basic facts, testimony, and deliberations attached to each case were compiled for the throne, so that the details of all of the cases could be perused at a glance. Qing emperors spoke about how laboriously they pored over these final registers in the period leading up to the Autumn Assizes ritual, as both the lives of their subjects and the operation of justice hung in the balance. The Qianlong emperor himself once reported: “Every year that We face the time of circling [the names on the list of those con­demned to die], [We] keep the narrative registers at [Our] side, and repeatedly pore over them (朕每當勾到之年。置招冊於旁。反覆省 覽).”71 After several nights of deliberation before the ritual, the emperor presided over the assizes. In the final act of judgment staged each year, the emperor was presented with a list of the names of those condemned to die. Any whose names he circled with his vermillion brush would be 69. For descriptions of the assizes ritual, see Meijer, “The Autumn Assizes in Ch’ing Law”; Buoye, “Suddenly Murderous Intent Arose”; Sun, Qingdai de sixing jianhou, 92–126; and Poling, “The Performance of Power,” 30. 70. Several paperwork-intensive procedures were necessary to prepare prisoners for delivery to the central court for case review at the Autumn Assizes. For a brief sketch of some elements of the county-level archival preparations for case review and prisoner transfer for the assizes, see Poling, “The Performance of Power,” 32–37. 71. QLSL 14.9.15: 1.

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executed. All others were given a reprieve, as the cases were either dismissed or placed on the docket for review in the next assizes.72

And Back Again: The Return of the Case to the Provinces Confirmation of recommended sentences by the capital may be considered the final act of case review. Certainly this is the way that scholars tend to portray the function of “legal cases,” by which they usually mean the routine punishment memorials generated by the Three Legal Offices. But the life of the case did not end with the sentence. The provincial administration had to finalize and synchronize the reports on the prison, prisoner transfer, and other paperwork trails mandated by the central state. Moreover, the sentence itself had to be carried out and a final, all-encompassing case narrative had to be composed. In Pan’s model, these actions occupy the last two lines:

On such-and-such a day the communication [from the capital offices] arrived [at the governor’s office] On such-and-such year, month, day such-and-such a punishment/exile was executed (indicate in detail after each name)

Even after a governor had sent a sentencing proposal to the capital, the provincial life of the case did not cease, mostly as a result of the new Kangxi-era regulations. The paperwork associated with the case would continue to grow in the dossiers of the various provincial yamen while Beijing reviewed the sentence. The offices of the governor, judicial 72. When cases were sent back to the provinces, the territorial administration was expected to compile a new sentencing proposal case in response to the deliberations of capital officials for the next round of case review. For a seventeenthcentury description of this process, see Zheng Duan, Record of Learning, “Ministry of Punishments (刑部),” “Autumn Assizes (秋審).”

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commissioner, prefect, and county magistrate remained responsible for the transfer and maintenance of the prisoner or prisoners awaiting the judgment of the capital. Furthermore, in addition to the paperwork mandated by prison-supervising regulations, the governor’s ­office was responsible for delegating and forwarding responses to any inquiries made by the officials reviewing the case in Beijing. From the time that a case was thus “resolved” in the provincial yamen to the time that it was finally and conclusively reviewed—a period that could last for years—the territorial offices were responsible for continuing to generate information about the status of the case and the criminal awaiting justice. A death sentence or a pardon could end the paper trail, while a second round of review would trigger the cycle for ­another year. Either way, once the imperial decision arrived at the governor’s office, it had to be sent back down the administrative ladder. Cases slated for another round of review were sent back to the appropriate office for reinvestigation. Those for whom a final sentence was dictated, the final result—whether execution, exile, or release—had to be supervised and documented. This process of provincial accounting, communication, transfer, and the execution of sentences generated a host of new files in the case dossiers of yamen up and down the administrative ladder. Once a sentence was carried out, a final narrative detail­ ing the entire course of the crime, the case, and its handling would be composed.73 Seen in this light, the case narrative that traveled from county to capital and back was a remarkable feat of bureaucratic coordination and harmonization. Information from every yamen in a long hierarchical chain was synthesized to communicate exactly the necessary information about each case to all relevant offices. When these case dossiers, suspects, and case narratives were traveling through the still-living bureaucracy, the system of review and execution depended 73. It seems that each province had a different convention regarding the authoring and archiving of these final case narratives, which were likely stored at the provincial or prefectural level. Occasionally, however, scholars stumble across a complete case narrative in the archives. For one such example see Constant, “Xingke tiben de nicheng.”

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on the ability of each office to work locally (to document those efforts in the individual yamen archive) as well as cooperatively (by contributing to and interacting with the case narrative). The result of this massive effort was hundreds—sometimes thousands—of case narratives traveling from county to capital and back, moving one by one through myriad case dossiers in yamen throughout the empire.

The Problem of the Perfect Case The complicated bureaucratic protocols linking case dossiers in multiple yamen to a unified case narrative that traveled up and down the administrative ladder accomplished several important objectives for the Qing state. First, they required that detailed information about the local circumstances of crimes be presented to capital judicial organs in a format uniform and clear enough to support deliberation. Second, in demanding that the very structure of each case narrative remain oriented toward a conclusive legal analysis based on the Qing Code, the protocols forced provincial officials to take the strictures and norms of dynastic law seriously. Third, by requiring various offices within the provincial administration to coordinate in the crafting of a final narrative, they compelled the yamen in the territories to hold one another accountable for producing an ironclad case. And fourth, they required supervising officials to include explicit information about infractions by local officials in their own narrations of the progress and problems of supervising the investigation. To aid the central state’s efforts to control the legal apparatus and the officials responsible for operating it, the mechanisms of case creation and judgment had to be both synthetic and disjointed (exactly the traits that the authors of case narratives sought to downplay). The various offices that participated in creating one combined narrative had to maintain individual case archives, which documented facts that might later belie their representations, while also crafting a narrative in line with the story being told by other offices. Even when officials might have attempted to conceal errors or cut corners or to get away with more sinister forms of malfeasance, the demanding complexity of the synthetic narrative provided several opportunities for keen

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censors, supervisors, or court ministers to spot inconsistencies that might indicate a cover-up. Holes in the narrative could be as revealing as errors, and an unusual accord could be just as damning as an obvious discrepancy in facts. Bureaucrats in Beijing were reading these files against the grain long before Qing historians were. But no matter how eagerly emperors and central officials read case narratives, they understood that the original and local facts that first inspired the case narrative, and the actual decisions that went into compiling it, were irretrievably sacrificed to the constellation of processes that communicated sentencing proposals to the throne. The monumental bureaucratic coordination required to achieve these narratives ensured that lived facts were stylized and obscured. The cost of the highly concerted methods of bureaucratic collaboration that ­enabled the Qing to “watch the watchers watching the watchers watching local events” was that fidelity to an original was secondary to creating the heavily encoded narrative. The case narrative’s focus on capturing many details in high resolution at the cost of not being able to zoom in on the center—the original case dossier—made the county magistrates in charge of investigating cases both particularly vulnerable and remarkably powerful. They were vulnerable because they were both closest to the original crime and lowest on the bureaucratic totem pole. If something went wrong, they were the easiest for the provincial administration to dispose of and the least capable of setting the record straight, because of their distance from the emperor. These were the officials most heavily regulated in their handling of cases, and yet (in the Kangxi era, at least) they were not permitted to communicate directly with the throne. Strictures on local magistrates and the severity of consequences for their failure were such defining features of the operation of justice at the county level that several historians have proposed that it is inappropriate to think of county magistrates as judges in their own right, calling them instead “official-judges,” “judicial bureaucrat[s],” or “no more than an agent of the bureaucratic machine and an enforcer of the law.”74

74. See, respectively, Wang, “Judicial Reasoning and Political Legitimacy,” 131; Buoye, “Suddenly Murderous Intent Arose,” 91; and Will, “Everyday Justice.”

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However, only the most credulous officials of the Qing bureaucracy would suppose that infractions in the provinces were routinely reported to the central state. The decision to report a local official to the central state was a calculation in a tricky balancing act. Any superior found to be covering up for his underlings was subject to strict administrative punishments. But reporting infractions by local officials could result in sanctions for both the magistrate and his superiors as well. Thus the county official was not alone in having an incentive to conceal problems from the capital bureaucracy. Prefects, judicial commissioners, and governors might all share the consequences of a botched case or a flaw in the administration revealed through poor case handling. Even though local officials might be considered expendable by higher-level supervisors and, therefore, might be most likely to take the fall for the faults of others, they were also the farthest from the view of the central state. They were the first site of the translation of fact into narrative. It was the county magistrate who made the initial decisions about how to encode local realities into a narrative that conformed to the legal and bureaucratic language of the empire.75 The known technical mechanisms of matching fact to judgment led to an important implication: the magistrates attempting to influence the outcome of such cases or to cover up their own improper handling of them were actually in control of the facts of cases.76 Since all action was coded to fit legal constraints in the case review process, magistrates could skillfully make coding decisions that would alter the fate of the case. “In your reports . . . pertaining to crimes and punishments,” one magistrate manual advised, “those [cases] that ought to be given leniency should be narrated according to the most pitiable elements, and those that ought to be handled strictly should be described based on the manner

75. Eric T. Schluessel describes this process as “legal translation,” in a chapter that unpacks the remarkable scope of the editorial hand of provincial case compilers in Qing-era Xinjiang. See Schluessel, “Muslims at the Yamen Gate.” 76. This aspect of the magistrate’s role in the case-making process has been described in Buoye, “Suddenly Murderous Intent Arose,” 86, and Wang, “Judicial Reasoning and Political Legitimacy,” 61. It is the topic of a lengthier discussion at Siemon, “Magistrates and the Law,” 84–150.

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in which they can be afforded no mercy.”77 So long as the courts of the Qing Empire were scattered across thousands of miles and obscured from the central state by dense layers of a supervisory apparatus that could choose to either scrutinize or collaborate with the county office, it was virtually impossible to figure out exactly when and how local decisions about encoding cases controverted their reality. Because the crafting of a case narrative was an interpretive act, and one whose elements could be concealed from the composite narrative, any low-level magistrate, any clerk in any yamen or ministry, and any supervising official or court official involved in the process could sway the law, so long as they understood how to manipulate the narrative of fact.78 In essence, the routinized nature of review and the evidentiary stringency of the Qing judicial standard incentivized officials at every level to describe complicated, puzzling, or unusual facts on the ground in language riddled with legal and administrative tropes that were easily consumed but could not possibly portray local realities. For this reason, the “perfect case” was both the best possible case and the worst possible case. While case review was supposed to reveal local efforts to fudge the facts, it could also give officials the opportunity to work together to conceal them. By the end of the nineteenth century, even a review by superiors was no longer necessarily viewed as something for the magistrate to fear. Rather, magistrate manuals began to suggest that the profusion of reports and confusion of laws that might have been considered frightening obstacles to making a perfect case could be seen as opportunities for reexamination and scrutiny in collaboration with superiors, who could help their underlings pick the best path forward. “One need not fear the rejection of a case,” the anonymous Essentials on Homicides assured county-level officials: 77. Jueluo, Office Holder’s Daily Self-Examination, “Reports (申報),” “Model Phrases (格言).” 78. In magistrate manuals one can even find concrete advice on how to shape the description of the circumstances of a crime to effect the requisite punishment. See the essays “On the Meaning of the Laws (論律義),” about how to write a narrative to mitigate or increase a sentence, and “On the Circumstances of Cases (論案情),” which breaks down the specific facts that must be narrated for each crime, in Gangyi, Proposing Formulas for Investigating Cases.

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“There is no supervisor who does not reject cases. For at the stage of completing the case narrative, he must foresee all possibilities for rejection [by the ministries] and produce strategies for confronting them. For this purpose he has a larger plan. The more often a case is rejected, the more solid it becomes.”79 At its heart, then, rejection was not simply a condemnation of a job poorly done by the county magistrate. It was a sophisticated—if highly encoded—negotiation of the accord between actual fact, reported fact, and summarized fact. Even when a failing in the narrative endeavor was framed as the shortcoming of the county magistrate, it was often addressed collaboratively in the review process. The incentives of officials in the provinces all converged around this objective. Ironically, the very constraints introduced to allow the central state some modicum of information and control only multiplied the opportunities for sanction and error, thus incentivizing closer and closer collaboration in the provinces. The magistrate manuals of the Qing became increasingly technical over the course of the dynasty as centralstate efforts to regulate case handling generated more demanding ­standards.80 Pressed to satisfy the ever-growing list of demands, magistrates and their superiors scrambled to acquire the new forms of specialized knowledge and communication required to meet the standards of the central state. Handbooks for magistrates and the judicial secretaries hired by their offices offered conventions for an increasing number of forms involved in local investigation and case compilation.81 Any effort to construct a bigger documentary mousetrap for catching infractions by local officials resulted in a new set of obstacles in what must have already appeared to be a veritable minefield for the offices compiling reports. 79. Essentials on Homicides, “General Principles (總論).” 80. Will, “Late Imperial Chinese Official Handbooks.” 81. Some of these forms were conventions developed by clerks or officials themselves, in accordance with bureaucratic usage (and therefore widely recognizable but often not uniform except within a single office) that circulated for the edification of others. For one example of a manual that offered a couple dozen simple forms that clerks could use as models for drafting plaints (such as reports on injuries in homicide cases, reports on sexual assault, accusations of corruption, and plaints about robberies), see Zheng, Record of Learning, “Plaint Forms (狀式).”

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Conclusion The Qing state’s anxiety about collusion among provincial officials in their effort to escape bureaucratic discipline was rooted in a basic tension at the heart of the central review process: the combined pursuits of legal and bureaucratic discipline collapsed multiple state functions into a ­single, highly formalized information stream that elided the complexities of reality. As a result, the synthetic and aggregated nature of the data traveling from the provinces to Beijing made claims about case facts, on the one hand, and case handling, on the other, difficult to scrutinize separately; the narratives were necessarily collaborative. The problem of distinguishing between collaboration and collusion in the authoring of such composite narratives was integral to the nature of central review. Since the act of compiling and routinizing these representations required editorial intervention, how could the emperors of the Qing and their ministers get around the problem of the perfect narrative? Over the first fifty years of the Qing, several ministers proposed solutions to this problem that hinged on the central ministries’ ability to sniff out ineptitude and abuses by poring over supplementary material. Several times, court officials proposed that copies of original materials, especially testimony or transcripts from interrogations undertaken during case review, should be sent in toto to the central ministries for verification against claims in the summary case narratives.82 These solutions would have afforded the central administration the opportunity to scrutinize local officials to a much higher degree, but such inno­ vations were either abandoned shortly after their adoption or deemed futile from the outset because their information-intensive nature made them impossible to implement.83 The amount of paperwork produced 82. See, for example, KXSL 12.6.27: 3 and KXSL 27.10.18: 3. A Kangxi-era require­ ment that governors record and send testimony from interrogations to the ministries is recorded at LAQJ, “Judgement and Imprisonment (斷獄),” “Disputing the Testi­ mony of Prisoners (獄囚取服辯).” 83. Examples include a policy demanding that the Censorate examine the Ministry of Punishments archives each month for suspicious anomalies, an idea that was abandoned in 1683 when one member of the Censorate declared that the policy was an “empty letter (具文).” See the discussion in the Kangxi qiju zhu, at Kangxi 22.7.17.

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by the system of central review was so overwhelming, even in the ­earliest years of the Qing, and was constantly expanding so much, that the odds of exposing local abuses by combing through an even larger pile of paperwork were infinitesimal. Forms of scrutiny based on more and more detailed information ran counter to the advantages and function of central review. The Qing central government could always ­demand more information, but for the relatively small bureaucratic force in the capital to gain an advantage over officials in the territories, the fundamental parameters of the game would have to change.

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Chapter Three

Imperial Routines in the Local Archive Synchronization and Scrutiny in the Yongzheng Era

I

n the cycle of information to regulation established by Shunzhi- and Kangxi-era reforms, achievement registered as crisis. Reports began to arrive in Beijing about facets of case handling that had never before been scrutinized. But the same information that might enable the central state to discipline the bureaucracy also chipped away at the central court’s confidence as it learned more and more about how much it had not known about its own agents. An irony that would play out repeatedly began to unfold: success in gathering information led to the conclusion that the administration was a failure. The structure of central review made this problem particularly intractable. Combining the objectives of legal and bureaucratic discipline into a single stream of information for scrutiny in the capital incentivized collusion among officials in the provinces, making these synthetic narratives poor sources of insight into the precise nature of problems of administration. Scrutiny of cases could be applied at the highest levels of the state in Beijing only after the editorial hand of provincial officials had exploited plentiful opportunities to reconcile accounts of cases and case handling at the local level. The Yongzheng emperor addressed the issue of having too much information, on the one hand, and incomplete information, on the other,

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with an administrative stroke of genius: over the period of his reign, he began to insist that offices be held accountable for paperwork itself. Since a basic foundation of personnel standards and guidelines for making cases had been established by the time he ascended the throne in 1722, the Yongzheng emperor began simply to insist on a more consistent relationship between the activities of each of the empire’s yamen and the files that documented those activities. After enhanced reporting standards were implemented in the territories, provincial offices became responsible for ensuring an accord between document and action among their subordinates. This new responsibility required the development and standardization of multiple new documentary streams in the provinces. Central-state censorial standards and methods for scrutinizing reports were slowly exported to the provinces at the same time that reporting and documenting requirements at the local level were shored up. Archival integrity was the cornerstone of this strategy of bureaucratic centralization. The most fundamental achievement of these reforms was that the archive of each yamen could be expected to function as a record of the actions and responsibilities of the official in tenure. One regulation at a time, officials in every office of the Qing state were required to document an expanding list of quotidian administrative activities. Once archive-level responsibility for each office of the empire was in place, a breakthrough became possible: the synchronization of documentary processes according to imperial routines. Viewed singly, the reforms of this era are so subtle that they seem wholly mundane. But their implications were profound. The unification of documentary practices across the empire and the multiplication of data streams at every level of the administrative hierarchy ultimately laid the foundation for increased central-state access to the information maintained in local yamen throughout the empire. These reforms and the information they generated gradually transformed the gubernatorial offices of the empire. Provincial bureaucracies evolved into massive administrative hubs responsible for presiding over a whole new world of imperially mandated reports, audits, and archives. It was the last step in the creation of the empire of routine.

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Bureaucratic Custom as an Enemy for a New Era The Yongzheng emperor’s reforms addressed a concern that had become increasingly serious over the course of the Kangxi administration. Access to new forms of information about local administration came with the dawning of a troubling dilemma: that the provincial officials monitoring the local officials of the territorial bureaucracy were, themselves, bureaucrats. As men whose careers depended on the evaluation of their own performance as well as that of their subordinates, the provincial bureaucrats had clear incentives to govern with the rules of the game, rather than its objectives, in mind. Every official in the provinces had a compelling reason to conceal erratic, inconsistent, or troubling facts in the process of drafting a case for review. Furthermore, the very web of scrutiny constructed to catch errant officials relied on bureaucratic expertise that the officials being monitored also possessed. Converting problems of legal judgment into ­centrally dictated personnel standards for bureaucrats in the territories— one of the hallmarks of the Kangxi administration—inevitably inspired the development of more techniques by which the mice could outwit the mousetrap. As the Kangxi emperor himself discovered, the more refined the tools of documentary review became, the more carefully bureaucrats in the provinces cleaved to the formulaic demands of case handling. As administrative regulations continued to proliferate, the emperor and his advisers grew increasingly anxious about pro forma reporting and narrative collusion. The machinery of the “perfect case” might have been a remarkable bureaucratic achievement, but its technical demands were so high that they virtually required the very sort of tactical deployment of facts that the genre was meant to detect and prevent. In the 1680s, the Kangxi emperor determined that the only way to solve the problem of legal and bureaucratic discipline was to reform the administrations of the provinces themselves. No remote solutions based on documentary scrutiny in Beijing could succeed because of the dominance of what was known as “bureaucratic custom” ( ji xi 積習, literally “accumulated practice”)—the propensity to perform duties perfunctorily and in ways that would avoid punishment or scrutiny, rather

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than in the spirit of the regulations. Concern about bureaucratic custom suddenly proliferated from the middle of the Kangxi era forward. Consider the following statement by the Kangxi emperor in 1678 on how bureaucratic custom interfered with the execution of the law: When the dynasty establishes laws or fixes substatutes, it is with an aim to produce guidelines that are as full and excellent as possible, so that they may persist throughout all time and space. So that above they may aid in the defense of the state. So that below they may benefit the livelihood of the people. This enterprise necessarily relies upon the labor of officials both within the ministries and outside in the territories, the pureness of their hearts and minds, their respectful and careful execution in carrying them out with sincerity. Only under these circumstances can the laws and substatutes be forever obeyed and brook no occasion for malfeasance. But when new regulations are made known, some use them as an ­excuse for personal profit, which they carefully conceal. Others delay and equivocate, being careful only to avoid punishment. Yet others harbor disobedience from within their ranks, in order that they may cover up their own wrongdoings. When the implementation [of central commands] is undertaken, at every turn opportunities for malfeasance abound. Even to the extent that perfectly well-intentioned laws are never fully enacted, and it becomes a burden both to the office and to the subjects. Considering the initial intent of establishing these laws, they bear no mark of this outcome. Nay: in wrongdoing of this sort, although officers of the empire are aware of it, it is difficult to obtain proof, and therefore hard to bring anyone for discipline. Indeed, although We have a penetrating understanding of the causes, yet still if all those involved do not actively and aggressively seek to reform their ways and repent of their errors, they will follow one another into further error in the belief that it is the path to prosperity. Henceforth the officials in charge of the capital ministries as well as the governors of the various provinces shall all free their hearts from concern and clear their minds in order to radically reform bureaucratic customs [痛改積習] so that both the affairs of the dynasty and the lives of the commoners shall benefit, the plans of the empire shall be executed properly, and all shall avoid resentment or blame with an eye to implementing the law without harm, bestowing grace upon the villages throughout the land, aiding Us in establishing laws and fixing the institutions, and

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fulfilling Our intention of nourishing Our people. If any shall mistake this enterprise for matters as they were in the past, and continue down the trodden path, when they are discovered they will be strictly punished.1

In this classic example of an exhortative edict, the Kangxi emperor expresses consternation at the futility of fixing the bureaucracy with more bureaucracy. As the early Qing state devised new ways to police personnel behaviors in the provinces, the imperial imagination became haunted by the possibility that the solution was a part of the problem. As more problems were spotted, more reports were demanded. But as the number of reports grew, so did the pressure on beleaguered officials in the territories to map the information they generated onto empty models to avoid falling behind or standing out. Any attempt at additional bureaucratic scrutiny, in a frustrating twist, helped train the terri­ torial bureaucracies to produce what the central state was looking for (on paper). Before the complexity, mundanity, and venerability of bureaucratic custom—without which government would screech to a halt, and yet which the government could never fully know or countenance—even the emperor himself was prostrate. Concerns about the actions of local offices and facts on the ground could not be resolved so long as information remained inaccessible to Beijing. But the very nature of centrally reviewed memorials was synthetic and demanded technical accord, which meant that conflicts between accounts and interpretations had to be resolved before the scrutiny of the capital. Any solutions to the problem of bureaucratic custom had to be enacted in the territories, rather than conducted in Beijing. In 1683 the Kangxi emperor declared that problems had to be rectified further down the chain, for even when central ministries performed well, “the gubernatorial yamen in the provinces, because of their habit of acting reflexively in accord with bureaucratic custom [yinxun jixi 因循積習], delay and perform sloppily.”2 The evolution of requirements for a technically perfect case by the end of the Kangxi era had also given rise to a perfect understanding of the technical

1. KXSL 17.4.23: 1. 2. KXSL 22.10.26: 2.

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requirements of a case, which could then be produced artificially. 3 The information that the imperial throne needed to make sure that the perfect cases that were now piling into the capital ministries were not full of pure fabrications had to come from outside of the system of central review. It was to those alternate sources of information that the Kangxi emperor’s successor turned.

The Yongzheng Approach: Censorial Duties in the Provinces In the Qing system as adapted from the regulations of the late Ming, the two functions of reporting and auditing were split between the provincial bureaucracy and the censorial apparatus. As the heads of the territorial administration, governors compiled information reported by provincial officials and advised the throne on the routine affairs of the administration, according to the strictures of central review. Information about everyday functions of government at the local level could thus be taken in and processed in massive amounts at the center in Beijing. Censorial officials, in contrast, operated in the territories as imperial agents, independent of the provincial administration. As imperial informants, censors were responsible for secret, irregular, and broad inspection duties. In the Ming territorial administration as inherited by the Qing, then, the gubernatorial offices were responsible for representing facts about local administrative activities, while the censorial system was responsible for spot-checking the bureaucracy for hints that truths were being concealed by provincial officials. A purposeful tension—even an adversarial spirit—existed between the functions of reporting for central review and auditing for impeachment. In the early Qing, the censorial apparatus in the provinces, which had been dominated by independent, roaming inspectors in the Ming, was absorbed into the administrative hierarchy and assigned to circuits (the administrative level between the prefectural level and the 3. On the standardization of homicide narratives (especially in the eighteenth century), see Buoye, “Suddenly Murderous Intent Arose,” 66, 79, 91.

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provincial level).4 From this point forward, censorial duties were integrated into the provincial bureaucracy.5 Within each circuit, the Qing state established an intendant responsible for a specific subsection of province-wide audits (such as those relating to troops, or to grain, or to tribute shipments) and for traveling within the given jurisdiction to perform spot checks on local administrations or investigate complaints. Also, many of the local supervising functions of the prefectural government were duplicated at the circuit level. It was the circuit-level officials who shouldered the burden of censorial duties in the Qing provinces. The provincial governors, who had latitude to handle the shifting circumstances in newly conquered territories, were thus spared the careful and laborious duty of poring over reports and cross-checking facts from one office against another.6 But from the Kangxi reign forward, a new notion of the governor-as-­ bureaucrat slowly emerged as routine civil affairs began to make up more and more of the duties at the gubernatorial level. Officials in Beijing increasingly conceived of governors as the “outer (wai 外)” equivalent to Beijing’s “inner (nei 內)” ministries.7

The Work of Personnel Review in the Qing One of the most important civil administrative duties of Qing governors from early on—and an important source of innovation in the story that follows—was personnel review. As the head of the territorial 4. For an excellent summary of the Qing adaptation of Ming provincial administration, see Guy, “Governing the Provinces.” 5. Indeed, it was from this provincialization of censorial functions that the office of the judicial commissioner—the provincial post responsible for overseeing the justice system in each territorial administration—first arose, because the job of auditing judicial cases had been one of the duties of the roving censors who were eliminated. For a rough sketch of the evolution of this institution, see DQHD: 吏部, 官制各省道員. 6. For a more nuanced discussion of the conversion of the censorial appointments in the provinces in the early Qing, see Guy, Qing Governors and Their Provinces. 7. An early such mention can be found at KXSL 12.5.10: 3.

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bureaucracy and one of the few individuals in the civil administration empowered to memorialize the throne in the early Qing (although exceptions existed), a governor was directly responsible for gathering information about local officials and communicating problems to the throne. Governors had the right to send impeachment memorials (a cen­ sorial form of communication levying accusations against another official). From the fifteenth century forward, in recognition of their role as informants about local officials, they were routinely awarded joint appointments as censorial officials.8 From even before the Qing, then, governors were expected to both routinely report on the performance of their underlings and issue extra­ordinary impeachment charges whenever and wherever a problem was discovered in the territorial administration. The heads of provincial administrations were expected to use their access to locally circulating information not reported to the central state to flag potential problems in the territories. Because the personnel-related censorial functions of the territorial bureaucracy served as the model for later innovations, the next section lays out the basics of the reporting, auditing, and review of personnel, with special attention to the documentary forms and streams that these tasks relied on. Personnel review was, generally speaking, the administrative ­domain of the Ministry of Personnel, which was responsible for producing and executing or overseeing the regulation of every civil official’s routine duties, both in the territories and in the capital. Any and all sanctions or standards pertaining to the performance of regular administrative functions—including the regulations about case handling discussed chapter 2—were recorded in the ministry’s archive, published in its regulatory compendia, and codified in the Ministry of Personnel section of the Collected Institutions of the Great Qing.9 8. For a discussion of governors’ joint appointments as censorial officials, from 1453 forward (when they were known as grand coordinators), see Hucker, Dictionary of Official Titles, entry 2731 on the grand coordinator (hsün-fu). On the introduction of these joint censorial titles for provincial officials in the Ming, see Hucker, The Censorial System, 51–52. 9. As specified in the “Compilation Principles ( 凡例 )” of the DLQB, affairs pertaining to criminal offenses were the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Punishments, but those aspects of such cases that had to do with sanctions against officials were the

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In addition to producing and enforcing personnel regulations and appointments, the ministry was one of three central offices responsible for overseeing the regular personnel audits of the imperial bureaucracy. The Three Personnel Offices (analogous to the Three Legal Offices) were the Ministry of Personnel, which claimed authority over matters of regulation (much like the Ministry of Punishments ruled over matters of law); the Censorate, which audited, cross-checked, and scrutinized information from the provinces to spot problems and propose sanctions against wayward officials; and the Henan Circuit section of the Personnel Office of the Grand Secretariat.10

Summary Reports and Registers of Registers: Provincial Documents The central review of bureaucratic personnel relied on the triannual personnel review known as the great audit (da ji 大計). Where a review of sentencing proposals was conducted yearly at the Autumn Assizes, personnel review was generally conducted on a triennial scheme (although the timing and content of personnel review procedures changed considerably over the course of the first hundred years of the Qing).11 Like the review of sentence-proposing case narratives, the review of personnel evaluations was based on provincial superiors sending formal synthetic reports that summarized large quantities of information for further processing in Beijing. Also similar to the sentencing-proposal domain of the Ministry of Personnel. For more information about the precedentsetting regulatory and legal duties of the central ministries, see Metzger, Internal Organization of Ch’ing Bureaucracy, 167–232. 10. Censorial officials were appointed to each Office of Scrutiny in the Grand Secretariat to watch over the information being communicated via the memorial sys­ tem. In each Office of Scrutiny, affairs were divided up both topically and regionally; the Henan Circuit was the regional office that happened to have been given responsibility for participating on behalf of the Grand Secretariat in the personnel review process. For regulations governing the Henan Circuit’s role in personnel evaluation, see DQHD: 吏部, 處分例, 京察統例; 各衙門所屬官員筆帖式等京察; and 大計統例. 11. For a general discussion, in English, of the personnel review (“triennial evaluations”) and related forms of review, with accompanying analysis of their pro forma nature at the highest level, see Kuhn, Soulstealers, 193–96. For a much more detailed description of the process, see Chang, Qingdai kaoke zhidu, 176–272.

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cases discussed in chapter 2, personnel review files—known as Registers of Five Superiors because they contained the summary evaluations of the five supervising offices that had processed the review (the prefect, the circuit intendant, the judicial commissioner, the fiscal commissioner, and the governor)—were heavily edited composite documents whose nitty-gritty details rarely passed through the documentary bottle­ neck of the provincial yamen. The Registers of Five Superiors that were sent up to Beijing for review contained a summary of the basic facts of an official’s tenure, a grading of the official’s performance in prescribed categories of evaluation, and notes or remarks from each supervising office.12 Governors submitted these reports in triplicate to the Three Personnel Offices, which compared the evaluations of the various provincial officials and prepared a summary ranking of each local official, together with a recommendation about whether each official being evaluated should be retained in their current post or moved to another. In their summary quality, the Registers of Five Superiors obscured many local details, much like the routine punishment memorials discussed in the last chapter. Where the narrative of a crime was a synthesis of facts pertaining to a single event, the handling of an investigation, and the proposal of a sentence, the Registers of Five Superiors purported to represent the summary conclusion of multiple offices’ audits of the routine administrative duties performed by local officials. As a result, each Register of Five Superiors was accompanied by several “registers of registers.” These documents summarized the information on which the evaluations of the supervising officials were based. One Kangxi-era manual lists more than four dozen registers that should accompany a Register of Five Superiors on its journey to Beijing.13 Information about the revenues collected by each office, the content of the coffers of each yamen, the bandits captured by each jurisdiction, the registered population of each locale, the costs and achievements of local public works or water conservancy projects, and similar summary glances at the work 12. For a detailed examination of the Register of Five Superiors, see Chang, Qingdai kaoke zhidu, 183–94. 13. See Pan, An Unbelievable Treatise, “Various Duties, Second Section (幾務下),” “Register of Five Superiors (五花冊).”

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of each official were appended to the bird’s-eye evaluations presented in the Registers of Five Superiors. I refer to the registers summarizing local administrative work that were sent along with the Registers of Five Superiors as “registers of registers” because they were, in fact, higher-level summaries of local summaries (or registers summarizing the contents of other registers). The registers sent along with summary evaluations of personnel were supposed to attest to the fact that—in theory if not in reality—all aspects of the function of every office in the empire were being thoroughly assessed in the course of grading the performance of each official. Furthermore, even though the information conveyed to the capital was summarized and aggregated, it could serve as a point of reference for ministerial review of the general evaluations in the Registers of Five Superiors. When these registers of registers arrived in Beijing, their contents were copied or broken up and distributed among the various capital ministries, each of which would cross-check the information on file in their own archive against the claims in the register. A list of the officials who had occupied a particular office, as well as the register of local departmental responsibilities, collective responsibility registers, and registers of local exam candidates, soldiers, and clerks would be sent to the Censorate, among other offices. The Ministry of Revenue received accounts of stockpiled grains, salt certificates, and various taxes. Registers of fled households were sent to the Ministry of Revenue as well as the Ministry of Punishments and the Office of Arrests, and so on. The combination of these two genres—the overall evaluations in the Registers of Five Superiors and the summary accounts in accompanying registers—constituted distinct information streams that the central state could use to scrutinize the evaluations of territorial personnel.

Personnel Review in Multiple Documentary Streams As the amount of information compiled in these dozens of registers of registers suggests, the triennial review process relied on an intensive bureaucratic effort to collect and summarize a great deal of

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paperwork.14 To achieve this feat, documents and reports that would eventually be summarized for review were compiled on a regular basis. Since every official had to be evaluated, information was collected and reviewed on a massive scale at regular intervals. This type of review encompassed a much larger range of materials than a case pertaining to a single crime, so the reporting processes linked to the review of personnel were broken down into two stages. First, information about a wide array of regular administrative duties was compiled and reviewed by the provincial bureaucracy at fixed intervals. The county yamen was required to send summary reports of its performance of various administrative duties, such as the collection of taxes, the management of registered households, the registration of collective responsibility units, the maintenance of public works, and so on.15 Prefects would audit the claims made in routine personnel activity reports, and circuit officials were responsible for personally traveling to each jurisdiction to gather information about resident officials that might not appear in the office’s own report. These routine local reports and associated processes of review served as the basis for the later, distilled registers sent to Beijing. Second, when the time of review neared, the most immediate supervising offices (the prefectural and circuit yamen) would summarize the information already compiled and audited and then issue their own judgments on the performance of the official in question, forwarding their decisions together with relevant registers to the ­provincial capital. It then fell to the fiscal commissioner, judicial commissioner, and governor to review the files compiled on all local offices. The fiscal commissioner would check all claims about revenue against the files in his own yamen. The judicial commissioner was expected to bring his familiarity with how cases in the province had been handled to make a judgment about each official’s ability to 14. Many facets of the personnel review procedure have yet to be documented in actual yamen archives at the local level. Most of the information presented here, therefore, is based on the regulations at DQHD: 吏部, 處分例, 大計統例. Future work in as-yet-undiscovered or unexploited archives will have to qualify the claims presented in this section. 15. See the discussion at Pan, An Unreliable Treatise, “Various Duties, Second Section (幾務下),” “Register of Five Superiors (五花冊).”

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provide justice in the jurisdiction. Each personnel file was to be discussed together with the governor. This process of in-province personnel review—involving the scrutiny of original files and reports before judging and summarizing their merit for offices higher up the chain—closely resembled the creation of a crime narrative. But the additional element of compiling and forwarding registers to Beijing to present an overview of the performance of the local office distinguished the processes of personnel review from the review of cases pertaining to punishment. Unlike the central review of criminal case narratives, which relied on the single stream of information contained in routine punishment memorials as gleaned from local yamen case dossiers, there was enough paperwork leading up to the regular review of provincial officials to allow the Ministry of Personnel and the censorial mechanism in the capital to compare formal reports against the local documentary chain and central court archives. This sort of triangulation between claims in a document that moved up the hierarchy and original files at the local level had long been a staple of censorial audits. But where censors would previously have had to go to the locale to begin such an investiga­ tion, the availability of multiple streams of information in personnel review allowed more opportunities for verifying the information contained in these summary narratives. This catch-all approach to documentary summary and scrutiny was difficult, administratively demanding, and furthermore, by the Yongzheng era, still was not undergirded by empire-wide regulations. Each province had distinct practices, varying reports, and even different naming conventions for the registers sent up to Beijing. But in their complexity and their exploitation and summary of multiple forms and levels of information gathering, they served as an inspiration for a new perspective on bureaucratic discipline in the Yongzheng era.

The Archival Turn of the Yongzheng Era The Yongzheng emperor’s reforms to the imperial information regime laid the foundation for multiple-stream reporting and scrutiny in administrative realms beyond those covered in existing personnel review

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processes. The archival synchronization of the Yongzheng era required documentary fidelity in two senses: first, action and documentation had to be synchronized in each yamen archive; second, archival practices and rhythms at the local level had to be synchronized with ­empire-​ wide standards and processes. The foundation of this approach was a set of documentary practices that linked the archives of the empire according to mutually intelligible standards. Materials that were previously scrutinized only after they had been crafted into a narrative by the territorial administration were made uniform and accessible in both their quotidian and their polished forms across multiple yamen archives. This innovation built on existing processes of communi­ cation to demand a far greater level of responsibility for day-to-day activities.

Demanding Documentary Accountability in the Metropolitan Ministries The Yongzheng emperor’s archival conquest was first achieved in the capital bureaucracy. In the third month of his first year on the throne, the emperor laid the first stone in the foundation of this new approach to bureaucratic discipline through documentary fidelity. He began with the following edict to all of the yamen of Beijing, establishing each official’s responsibility for the archival materials generated, used, altered, and stored during his tenure: An edict to the yamen of every metropolitan ministry and office regarding every single dossier and every single case in every one of the [capital] yamen. . . . Stored dossiers must not only be sealed—when opened up for examination and review they cannot leave the hands of the responsible scribe. Any theft, any misplaced document, any changed characters might give rise to manifold malfeasances. And furthermore [in case of such actions] there is no basis for discovering [the malfeasance] and punishing it! Henceforth upon the occasion of the transfer of any administrators working in the ministries, all of the case dossiers for which he was responsible (both those he inherited and those he created) will be audited and transferred. Each individual [the outgoing

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and the incoming officials] will sign a pledge, read it aloud before his superiors, and append it to a dossier in the archive.16

The introduction of a pledge to be made on the transfer of office made each individual responsible for the actions documented in the archive compiled under his tenure. The outgoing official confirmed his responsibility for any mistakes or problems contained within the archive he handed off, and the incoming official pledged to handle any problems that had been overlooked in the process (and, therefore, inherited).17 Once this simple move toward yamen-level documentary responsibility was achieved, the Yongzheng emperor made another series of critical advances: he began to insist on a closer connection between the day-to-day operation of each office and its documentary record in the office’s archive. This innovation was not the result of a single explicit policy change; rather, it emerged from the Yongzheng emperor’s consistent insistence on documentary fidelity in every office. Across the board, the Yongzheng emperor demanded increased documentation of administrative tasks and responsibility for archival integrity. The import of reforms demanding closer fidelity between archive and action can be hard to appreciate when considered singly, but in their aggregate these new policies began to create a documentary basis for holding bureaucrats responsible for facets of everyday administration that had previously been difficult to supervise. Take, for example, the Yongzheng emperor’s 1723 reforms to the process of review by the Three Legal Offices. In his first year on the throne the Yongzheng emperor remarked that, although indeed “the Ministry of Punishments is responsible for the primary drafts” of judgments on routine punishment memorials, somehow it was also taking the lead on proposing sanctions for provincial officials whose errors had led to problems in 16. YZSL 1.3.6: 2. 17. Later regulations introduced further safeguards, such as a 1725 statute commanding that officials working in all ministries were responsible for inspecting, registering, and maintaining all of the files in their office to ensure that, upon transfer of their post, the archive would be turned over intact, together with a pledge attesting to their completeness. See DQHD: 刑部, 吏律, 公式, 棄毀制書印信.

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the case-handling process.18 This directly undermined the authority of the Censorate and the Court of Review, which were responsible for this part of the review process. In following up on this aberrant practice, the Yongzheng emperor learned that communications about sanctions for officials in the provinces were taking place directly between the Ministry of Punishments and provincial governors without any notification whatsoever to the other ministries. Because memorials and decisions about administrative sanctions were being communicated via the Ministry of Punishments and not the offices responsible for supervising and remonstrating with the bureaucracy itself, the Yongzheng emperor remarked with dismay that “the treacherous and wicked clerks in the Ministry of Punishments have been allowed to monopolize control over these affairs, and influence them secretly,” so that “those who submit a ‘ministry fee’ are given lenience and a light precedent is cited, or in some cases the files are even buried, never to be resolved,” whereas “those who pay no ‘ministry fee,’ even if their governor declares that their offense can be forgiven, are not pardoned under any circumstance.”19 This failure to adhere to documentary procedures meant that a critical mechanism of bureaucratic discipline had been rendered meaningless (or even perverted). The result was a violation of the basic principles of information exchange, personnel auditing, and the rules-based application of sanctions in Beijing. The lack of formal and consistent communication among the Three Legal Offices and between Beijing ministries and the provincial administrations had allowed an entire field of bureaucratic discipline to fall directly under the control of metropolitan clerks who had no official jurisdiction over personnel sanctions. The increasingly refined regulations of previous administrations were not only useless in the face of such laxity: they became instruments of profit for the clerks under whose influence they were wielded. The Yongzheng emperor’s solution to this problem was a paperwork one. He demanded that the procedures for examining the files pertaining to administrative sanction be synchronized across the 18. The edict is recorded at YZSL 1.5.12: 1. Its statutory form can be found at QLDQHD: 都察院, 稽察直省補參事件. 19. YZSL 1.5.12.

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Three Legal Offices to ensure proper handling and jurisdictional allotment. Any time that a communication from a governor mentioning a personnel sanction arrived at the Ministry of Punishments, the Yongzheng emperor decreed, the Three Legal Offices were thenceforth ­required to “meet together and compare files” before drafting a proposal. “In this manner,” the Yongzheng emperor concluded, “the clerks will not be permitted the opportunity to ply their trade, and their hands will be bound.”20 The malfeasance of Ministry of Punishments clerks had depended on the incomplete circulation of information. The Censorate and Court of Review could not exercise their prerogative over judging administrative sanctions that were not reported to them in the first place. A simple failure of communication had created an administrative gap in which savvy clerks could exercise unilateral and illegitimate authority for their own profit. But by simply commanding that the ministries meet to verify each case as soon as such communications arrived, the Yongzheng emperor closed that gap. Other ways of implementing greater accord between documentary processes and administrative procedures were even subtler. Take, for example, the Yongzheng emperor’s 1724 requirement that the Ministry of Punishments stamp and append a summary to each document that it drafted in the case review process before sending it to the other legal offices.21 On its face, the requirement simply mandated that two additional forms of information be added to existing communications. But immediately after mandating these new additions, the Yongzheng emperor added a further administrative requirement: that ministries process all paperwork sent by the Ministry of Punishments within ten days of the date it was received. By requiring more forms of information in each document, the throne was able to demand that administrative processes play out according to stricter standards. The basic outlines of that process—requiring new forms of action in tandem with new forms of documentation—were repeated in several fields over the course of the Yongzheng era. By piggybacking new administrative demands on top of multiplying documentary standards, the net was 20. YZSL 1.5.12. 21. This regulation can be found at DQHD: 都察院, 各道, 讞獄.

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drawn in, slowly but surely. Even the everyday activities of officials in the ministries were covered by a growing host of meticulous procedural and informational demands. In a pattern that was repeated several times and in multiple fields over the Yongzheng era, the emperor would propose a solution to a bureaucratic problem by first commanding that the relevant paperwork should more closely mirror the procedure itself, in an effort to peg accountability to case dossiers. Sometimes administrative actions— such as meeting to review files—were mandated at particular stages of the documentary process so that administrative practices kept pace with reporting. Other times, extra information or requirements were introduced to documentary processes with the expectation that new administrative standards would follow. Every advance in linking action to archive turned out to be a new way of holding offices accountable both for administrative procedure and for reporting on it.

Synchronizing Action and Archive in the Provinces The same principles of archival accountability and fidelity introduced in the central ministries in the Yongzheng era were subsequently applied in the provinces. From the first year of the Yongzheng administration, the central court required that provincial officials record certain types of information, that supervisors demand accord between action and document in subordinate offices, and furthermore that supervisors and censorial officials in the provinces check claims about local action against reports sent up the administrative hierarchy. One of the most important innovations in the Yongzheng-era reformula­tion of the relationship between the local and central bureaucracies was simply commanding local officials to document, report, and be held accountable for more of the day-to-day functions of the county yamen. Early regulations in this new vein were varied and seemed unrelated, since they were scattered across the spectrum of administrative action, but a pattern develops when the seemingly unrelated policies are viewed in the aggregate. First: some realm of administrative activity that had either been unregulated or whose regulations foundered on a

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lack of disciplinary traction would be singled out; yamen would be required to document a certain procedure in that realm. Second: once documentary standards had been introduced for a previously unregulated administrative activity, supervising yamen would be required to ensure that subordinates were properly following through; this stage usually required the supervising yamen to institute a demand for regular reports from their subordinates. Third: after regular reports on previously unregulated administrative activities were established, the central state could then demand that even more forms of regulation or supervision be implemented on top of the new reporting streams. In this manner, actions in cases were increasingly linked not only to central review and Ministry of Personnel regulations but also to the territorial administration’s maintenance and supervision of the case file itself. In a kind of “archival creep,” simple documentary demands exposed realms of supervised activity that eventually lent themselves to further scrutiny and regulation. The subtle steps in each cycle concealed the momentous achievements of this form of regulation by documentary proliferation. Some new policies simply demanded documentation of personnel or the quotidian functions of territorial yamen. A 1723 regulation, for example, required that personnel hired in gubernatorial yamen be documented with pledges from their superior officials.22 On the face of it, this was a straightforward rule that something that already existed (the endorsement of an official who hired an assistant) be put on paper. No sanctions, regulations, or further requirements were added. But merely requiring documentation meant that any problems that might emerge later in the tenure of such subaltern employees could be linked to the official who had hired them. Simply demanding that an administrative action be recorded and archived produced the possibility of later accountability. Many innovations from this period required the documentation or formalization of local standards for administrative processes that were not determined or supervised by the central state, but for which the territorial administration should be held accountable. An example of this was the 1728 command that every province set yamen-specific 22. YZSL 1.3.6: 3.

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deadlines for cases being sent out and supervised by the central ministries.23 All “ministerially issued cases” had summary deadlines set by dynastic regulations, as well as the standard Kangxi-era office-level deadlines, but this new command required that deadlines within that total period be set for each yamen based on its distance from the provincial capital. These deadlines were set at the discretion of each province, depending on local knowledge and practice, but they had to be reported to the ministries and kept on file so that every yamen at the local and central level shared uniform expectations about the speed of resolution at every step of the way. In these and similar mandates, infor­ mation that was not standardized, processes that fell below imperial review, and quotidian functions that led up to central review but were not directly scrutinized were slowly brought into the realm of accountability by being made explicit and documented. After insisting that territorial officials document a particular action or command, the Yongzheng administration could then demand a closer correlation between case-handling procedures and the documentation that followed from them. These regulations were often not very ambitious on the surface, but together they constituted a powerful new impetus to record a host of never-before-scrutinized quotidian affairs in local archives. Take, for example, the 1725 regulation that “every time a banditry case is encountered, on the one hand it should be reported to the supervising official, and on the other, notice should be sent to the neighboring jurisdiction and the patrolling officers.”24 While a simple requirement in and of itself, the fact that it generated a documentary link to a previously undocumented (or not always documented) action meant that new sanctions or administrative expectations could be attached to it. The regulation continued: if a bandit escaped from one jurisdiction but was caught within the first month by an official in the neighboring jurisdiction, then the triumphant banditcatching official was awarded a promotion and merit, and the official whose responsibility it had initially been to capture the offender was compelled to give an award of twenty taels to the arresting officer. The ability of the provincial bureaucracy to track such actions, and 23. DQHD: 吏部, 處分例, 直省承辦欽部事件限期. 24. DQHD: 刑部, 刑律, 捕亡, 盜賊捕限.

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furthermore to reward and punish such behaviors, was predicated on the greater articulation of documentary standards. The archival creep into local administrations across the empire created a new basis not only for actions by provincial supervisors but also for empire-wide regulations about local administrative behavior. This approach was distinct from the regulatory expansions of the Shunzhi and Kangxi eras. Rather than first regulating action and then worrying about how to enforce behaviors that were not directly supervised, the new Yongzheng-era approach first regulated the documentation of administrative processes and then compelled provincial supervisors to demand and scrutinize reports based on those new forms of information. It was a short and not very costly step for Beijing to shift from demanding documentation to requiring that every supervising ­official in the provinces scrutinize a new series of reports. Consider the following 1733 Ministry of Personnel regulation, which was formulated in response to a memorial from Hubei governor Deling (1688–1770): There are deadlines for the handling of all criminal cases at the county level. If they are not resolved by the specified deadline, the responsible prefect (or magistrate of the independent department [in cases of special jurisdictions]) who fails to report it should be sanctioned in accordance with the statutes on Harboring Subordinates. Sanctions shall be administered by analogy against any circuit-level official who fails to report on any prefectural (or independent department) magistrate [who similarly fails to handle within the deadlines any] case that falls directly under his own jurisdiction. In cases in which the presiding prefectural official falsely reports a case as “difficult to resolve” (in spite of its not being so) in order to gain an extension by muddling the facts, the judicial commissioner is commanded to find them out and report them for discipline. If the judicial commissioner fails to discover and report such instances, then he too will be sanctioned according to the statutes on Harboring Subordinates.25

All of the sanctions pertaining to the delay of centrally reviewed cases mentioned in this new regulation had existed from previous administrations. In this Yongzheng-era regulation, however, the reporting 25. YZSL 11.6.16: 1.

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expectations underpinning the regime of scrutiny and review were made clear. No prefectural, circuit, or provincial official could excuse his responsibility by claiming that appropriate information about a delayed case had not been delivered to his office. It became the responsibility of supervising offices not only to audit actions but also to ensure that the requisite information for audit was being delivered. The ambition of archival synchronization from county to capital was an unprecedented bid by the Yongzheng administration for state oversight over local administrative processes, and it was staked on a new relationship between process and paper. By closing the documentary net, the central state removed the possibility of lax discipline under the pretext of ignorance. Information laid the foundation for action and accountability.

Transfer of Post: Securing the Local Archive As a documentary approach to discipline, the Yongzheng reforms were predicated on the possibility of holding officials accountable for their own archives. Schemes for auditing local offices already existed, and some had been carried over from previous dynasties (such as the Ming censorial audit). But these practices were idiosyncratic and local and had never been integrated into daily administration or routine reporting channels. Such a feat would require the articulation of personnel procedures and documentary expectations all the way up and down the administrative hierarchy, and no such chain of accountability had ever been realized at the level of detail now presumed by the archivebased forms of discipline proposed by the Yongzheng administration. To ensure the archival integrity on which the new approach was based, the Yongzheng emperor expanded a routine procedure originally intended to balance county coffers at the end of a magistrate’s tenure and turned it into a node of accountability for all office decisions and actions. This procedure was the transfer of office. Any official in the late imperial era leaving or taking up a post was required to perform an audit known simply as “transfer (jiaodai 交‌代).” The procedures for this audit varied from office to office in the early Qing, as they had in the Ming. However, although different locales and different offices had compiled their own standards for conducting the

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transfer audit, all transfers involved a reckoning of the office accounts and a pledge by the incoming and outgoing officials that no problems had been discovered (ensuring that, if any were later uncovered, they would be the responsibility of the current officeholder). These protocols were an integral part of the transfer of authority from one seal-holding official to another. No official could be relieved of his post without the incoming bureaucrat having audited and taken responsibility for the office. Regulation of the transfer process began in the Shunzhi period. Early statutes on the transfer of office centered on the problem of clearing accounts related to local finance. The earliest regulations required outgoing officials to reckon all taxes owed under their tenure and pay all arrears in full before moving to a new assignment.26 In the early Kangxi era, the central state began to use the juncture of transfer as a node for multiple forms of accountability. Gradually, those leaving and entering office were required to report on other important affairs beyond the field of revenue. In 1663, for example, the Kangxi emperor approved a regulation requiring that all banditry cases in a jurisdiction be reported to the throne before the outgoing official could move on to his next assignment.27 A 1664 regulation expanded on that requirement by demanding that all affairs with ministerial deadlines— anything from the review of sentencing cases to the payment of revenue or the completion of public works projects—be completed before an outgoing official could be released from his post.28 Item by item, early Qing emperors made the transfer and audit of local offices more comprehensive. Once the requirements for auditing accounts and open cases were instituted, regulations for transfer could also include demands that sanctions be attached to any problems discovered on transfer. Punishments for both guilty officials and the supervisors who had concealed any wrongdoing by subordinates—classic Kangxi-era integrated 26. See the Shunzhi-era regulations at DQHD: 戶部, 田賦, 錢糧交代. 27. DQHD: 吏部, 處分例, 州縣交代. 28. It was later required that any official vacating his post even temporarily, owing to illness, for example, or to fulfill mourning duties, first had to complete these tasks. See KXSL 3.12.19: 2.

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administrative sanctions—were slowly added to the statutes on the transfer of office.29 Much as deadlines were given for the payment of arrears, requirements dictating the timeline for transfers themselves as well as the affairs being audited were introduced.30 Punishments for supervisors who delayed the transfer of office were also added to dynastic regulations.31 What had begun in earlier eras as an audit of funds in the local coffers grew into other forms of accounting and accountability as the central state tacked additional demands onto the reckoning process. The Yongzheng administration heightened this new field of discipline by making the documentary protocols surrounding transfer more demanding at the county level. According to a regulation from the thirteenth year of the Yongzheng era, local magistrates were required to sign a pledge vouching for the archival integrity of any office that they entered or exited. On transferring a county-level office, the imperial regulation read, even cases that were not subject to review by superior offices should be “bound into dossiers, stamped with the seal of office, and entered into the registers for transfer.”32 Furthermore, a summary description of the files was to be entered into an account book, with the contents registered and assigned serial numbers. These registers could be used by the incoming official to quickly audit the archive he was inheriting. On completing his audit, the incoming official was required to file a pledge stating that “nothing had been omitted or concealed or modified,” thus accepting responsibility for the archive. What this meant in the day-to-day was that officials had to keep track of anything that would eventually be audited. The magistrate’s archive had to represent his tenure and all of the quotidian operations 29. One early regulation from 1668 on the reporting of local revenue, for example, stipulated that punishment for malfeasance be added to the regular sanctions for any problems discovered “only upon transfer” of office. See the Kangxi year seven regulation at DQHD: 戶部, 田賦, 起運錢糧. Integrated sanctions specifying punishment for both guilty officials and the superiors who failed to report them can be found in the Kangxi year fifteen regulation at DQHD: 吏部, 處分例, 州縣交代 and the Kangxi year twentyseven regulation at DQHD: 刑部, 刑律, 賊盜, 常人盜倉庫錢糧. 30. See the Kangxi year five and year fifteen regulations at DQHD: 吏部, 處分例, 州縣交代. 31. See the Kangxi year thirty-eight regulation at DQHD: 吏部, 處分例, 州縣交‌代. 32. See the Yongzheng year thirteen regulation at DQHD: 吏部, 處分例, 州縣交‌代.

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of his administration, with every action for which he would later be evaluated properly and formally documented in accord with imperial standards (which multiplied over the years).33 Entire realms of local administrative activity that had never been reported up the administrative ladder (or that had been audited only at the prefectural level) became available for review by provincial superiors and, by extension, officials in Beijing.

The Transfer of a County Archive after the Yongzheng Reforms By the end of the Yongzheng era, the process of transfer entailed a much broader examination and reckoning of the office than ever before. The auditing and reporting requirements even for the transfer of a county office presented a dizzying challenge to both incoming and outgoing magistrates. The following description of the reckoning from Instructions for Magistrates Published by Imperial Order, written by Li Wei and Tian Wenjing—personal favorites of the Yongzheng emperor— gives a sense of what was required of the incoming official. It begins with a daunting description of the importance of reckoning the fiscal assets and obligations of the office, as well as the proofs and documents associated with all accounts: Upon arriving at one’s post, the transfer is the most important duty of all. . . . All affairs [in the transfer process]—from the largest to the smallest and most complicated—must be carefully handled. One cannot be ignorant of the methods of reckoning and examination. Like population, grain, and taxes: one must examine the Complete [Tax Levy] Book for the numbers compiled therein to compare against the actually levied amounts. They must be calculated according to the day that the current official arrived at his post and the date that he is assigned to leave. How much was collected during his tenure? How much was paid out during his tenure? How much is left in the coffers? How much is still owed by 33. See, for example, the Qianlong year nine and Qianlong year twenty-nine regu­ lations at DQHD: 吏部, 處分例, 外官案卷交代, which give extraordinarily specific instructions for how to prepare cases for transfer.

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the subjects? Divide it up by year, by type. Get all of the details absolutely clear. Compare all of the stored amounts in the coffers against each indi­ vidual account. And check the levied totals number by number against a careful examination of the daily collection and payment receipts. Compare all of this against the general summary registers. If there is any forgery or mistake in the daily receipt book, or signs of reporting less than was collected, then all of the payment receipts must be examined one by one against the shipment receipts. Examine all of the receipts from all of the times that individuals collected money from the yamen. And if there are signs that the collection receipts have been washed and the dates altered, or the amounts changed, then examine them even more carefully. If there are claims that something has been received but it has not actually been handed over, and the current official claims that some amount has been sent to some other place, then go and inquire carefully at that other yamen. Examine the employee who is supposed to have taken out the funds. Only if there is no proof from any of these corners of any fraud can you trust the claims.34

Every source and type of revenue had to be matched with the relevant quotas, and every payment either properly recorded or physically located in the yamen storehouses. The source of every deficit had to be determined. Even revenue that had simply passed through the jurisdiction from another source had to be documented from its entrance into the county to its departure. No promotions or transfers would be allowed until the outgoing official had settled all accounts.35 Only after paying back taxes owed could officials clear themselves of wrongdoing and once again qualify for a post.36 34. Tian and Li, Instructions for Magistrates, “Transfer of Accounts (交盤).” 35. On penalties, promotion delays, and repayment regulations related to the exchange of office, see DQHD: 吏部, 處分例, 州縣交代. The first regulation on the subject of not allowing an official to take up his new post without first clearing the amounts owed in his last post dates from Shunzhi year eighteen. 36. For regulations on the reinstatement of cashiered officials after they had repaid the amounts owed from their previous posts, see DLQB, “Office of Evaluation (考功 清吏司),” “Evaluation (考功),” “Transfer (交代),” “Reinstatement of Officials Demoted While Remaining at Their Posts (開復降級留任).” Later compilations of imperial regulations divide these substatutes into different sections or combine them into simpler procedures, so this early collection is the best source for studying the stepby-step implementation of these policies.

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Instructions for Magistrates Published by Imperial Order goes on to describe additional forms of required accounting: If there are ships belonging to the jurisdiction, make sure that they are whole and functioning. Ensure that none of the horses belonging to the yamen are too thin or exhausted. Look for any signs of decay among the altars, memorials, granaries, and walls of the city. And be sure to check the accounts of any public works project undertaken by the current office. You may not allow a single detail to go unexamined! These are the things that bear on affairs of revenue and funds. As for those affairs mandated by imperial command or the ministries, such as homicide and banditry and other such grave affairs, if there is any delay or neglect or attempt to conceal the handling of such affairs, then there are penalties [even for] the incoming officer. How could one, therefore, not account for criminal affairs as part of the transfer process? Having been at the post for only a short while does not mitigate the punishment [for an infraction overlooked during the transfer of office]. When all is said and done, all of the affairs conducted by the previous official, once they are handed over to the incoming official, fall on the shoulders of the official who takes up the post. If one wants to avoid later troubles and perform one’s own duty to the fullest, then one cannot but be extremely attentive at the threshold of the office!37

Transfer was no longer only about reckoning revenue. It was about accepting responsibility for the whole office and accounting for all of the affairs conducted under the tenure of the outgoing official. By the second half of the eighteenth century, the complexity of transfer reports reflected the piling up of expectations on the occasion of the transfer audit. Take, for example, the 1786 transfer audit conducted on the death of Ba County magistrate Wei.38 Magistrate Wei— we have only his surname—had served in office for just over six months before he fell ill and died. The audit sent to supervising yamen—conducted by Acting Magistrate Gao in the stead of the deceased Magistrate Wei—contained the following reports: 37. Tian and Li, Instructions for Magistrates, “Transfer of Accounts (交盤).” 38. The original file can be found at SPABX 清 006-01-00023.

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• • • • • • •

•

•

• • • • • • •

Building the Empire of routine A full account of the dimensions and conditions of the entire city wall and every gate. An account of all of the confiscated funds awaiting dispersal in pending cases. An overview of the offices and furniture of the county yamen, ­including a summary of the repairs that had been undertaken and the funds spent. An account of the money left over from a 1784 loan from the fiscal commissioner to repair the yamen, together with a com­plete file detailing the expenses and amounts to date. A file containing a list of items currently being used in the yamen. An inspection of the temples and charitable institutions maintained by the yamen. Write-ups of the shipments of tributary lead from Guizhou via various routes that had passed through Ba County and sum­ maries of how each shipment was processed or handled (some ­being sent on to Huguang, some already shipped, some already melted down, some currently in the coffers, and so on). A dossier detailing the current state of attempts to recover copper that had sunk to the bottom of the river after shipwrecks (a not infrequent phenomenon encountered with tribute shipments passing through the treacherous Three Gorges). An account of the amount of copper retrieved from the wreckage of a ship transporting tribute items that had recently sunk, with notes about the individuals to whom the goods had been entrusted. Notes about amounts borrowed from local coffers by the Guizhou officials who had lost the aforementioned shipment, loans that would later be collected by the incoming magistrate. A note about the appeals currently being handled at the request of superior offices. An account of all confiscated funds awaiting dispersal in pending cases. A note about a standing order to compel the guilty party in one dispute to pay a certain amount to the yamen. An account of promissory notes currently stored in the yamen. An account of the timber taxes levied in the previous year. A breakdown of the timber taxes collected by Acting Magistrate Gao in the period between Wei’s death and the audit.

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The list of types of cases and administrative matters being evaluated on the transfer of office only grew over time. By the middle of the eighteenth century, there were transfer audit regulations pertaining to records on the identities of all prisoners in the jurisdiction, the maintenance of city walls, the maintenance of barracks, the condition of state-financed school libraries, the status of salt gabelle permits and accounts, the condition of roads and bridges, the inventories of ritual items, and many other responsibilities linked directly to yamen at every level and position within the territories.39 By the second half of the nineteenth century, transfer dossiers had expanded to include all manner of reports. One can find a reckoning of the buildings of every postal station in a jurisdiction (both land and water routes), as well as the age and color of every horse stabled at the stations and the names of every soldier posted in them.40 These same transfer reports also contain accounts of the location of every lifeboat maintained by the county and the names of the men responsible for patrolling the rivers in them. The details in these reports can even be specific enough to include the amounts paid to support locally garrisoned troops, records of payments indexed against current market prices, and the cost of the labor of each individual designated to work with the horses maintained in the county stables.41 Descriptions of prison buildings, prisoners, the individuals employed in prisons, and their wages can be found, as well as reports on other individuals in the employ of the yamen—everyone from clerks posted at the city gate to ironworkers and doctors. Finally, of course, all manner of information pertaining to the disposition of criminal cases, such as the names of 39. For an example of a register of prisoners and the expenses paid out for maintaining the prisons at the county level, see SPABX 清 006-01-00021. For the regulations requiring all of these new transfer audits, see DQHD: 工部, 城垣, 直省 城垣修葺移建; DQHD: 工部, 營房, 各省營房; the Qianlong year six regulation at DQHD: 吏部, 處分例, 教官交代; the two regulations from the third year of the Kangxi era at DQHD: 戶部, 鹽法, 考成; the regulation from the second year of Qianlong at DQHD: 戶部, 田賦, 錢糧交代; and DQHD: 戶部, 田賦, 錢糧交代. 40. For examples of such reports, see SPABX 清 006-07-00059, 清 006-07-00051, and 清 006-07-00057. 41. For one such example, see SPABX 清 006-07-00051.

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exiled criminals in the jurisdiction and the status of cases with outstanding warrants, was also included. Whether by the command of the central state or the prerogative of the provincial administration, a growing number of affairs were added to the list of cases reckoned on transfer of office. By the end of the Qing, transfer reports could be extremely long and detailed even in summary, not to mention the dozens of attached registers that documented the reckoning itself. One outline from the nineteenth-century manual What Magistrates Must Know spans approximately ten pages, more than three times the length of Pan’s outline for a sentencing proposal.42 The procedures involved were demanding and could have high stakes for those involved. The handing over of the registers, accounts, and property of the yamen entailed an opportunity and a responsibility to pore over every facet of the administration. Every debt, every kernel of grain stored, every purchase or sale of grain, every expense passed down by the provincial offices, every type of fund passed up by subordinate yamen, every surcharge, every tax scheme, every conversion rate, every physical office, every street, every bridge, every horse, and every postal station were subject to scrutiny. The deadlines related to cases slated for central review were inherited and had to be accounted for, lest the incom­ ing magistrate begin his tenure by taking the fall for wrongdoings committed by the previous occupant of his office.43 To make the transition as simple as possible, by the nineteenth century, manuals encouraged outgoing magistrates to refrain from permitting too many new cases, to wrap up open files, to clear out their jails, and to destroy everything that did not have to be preserved.44

42. See the model outlined at Gangyi, What Magistrates Must Know, “Formulae for Drafts and Dispatches: Revenue Department (戶房文移稿件式 ),” “Transfer (‌ 交‌代).” 43. Fang, Considerations on an Ordinary Job, “Thoroughly Examine Each of the Homicide and Banditry Cases of the Previous Tenure (清查前任命盜各案).” 44. See Pan, An Unreliable Treatise, “Various Duties, Second Section (幾務下),” “Promotion to Another Post (陞遷),” “Incinerating Informal Registers and Documents ( 焚毀簿書)”; note: this last section is sometimes reproduced in compendia as “Burning Informal Registers and Documents (焚簿書).”

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This level of documentary accountability opened a new door: the opportunity to govern dimensions of local state activity that were not commonly subjected to central review but suddenly became discernible through summary reports on local archives. Careful attention to problems or inconsistencies in later reports about the same practices could flag local administrative problems for officials higher up in the provincial administration, and supervising officials could be required to review these summary reports to keep tabs on local administrations. Censorial officials could also be required, during their roaming investigations, to audit the claims in these reports against original archival information. From the eighteenth century forward, the archival reckoning associated with transfer thus reduced the complicated problem of overseeing local officials to a question of archival integrity and consistency between summary reports and thorough audits upon transfer of office.

Provincial Governance in the Proper Register This shift to comprehensive documentation and archival accountability solved a fundamental problem: rather than relying on improbable schemes to directly oversee all case-handling processes in the territories at the ministerial level in Beijing, the censorial functions of the central ministries were duplicated in the provinces themselves. With the introduction of ministerial archival and reporting standards, the entire faraway and complicated world of local governance not dictated directly by central policy was folded into existing personnel audit procedures and linked to the administrative records of individual officials. The governor’s office became responsible overseeing, sanctioning, and reporting inconsistencies in the summary claims about cases that arrived in provincial yamen. In other words, over the course of the eighteenth century, the censorial functions of the ministries were shifted into the provinces. This fundamentally transformed the way that information was treated within the provincial bureaucracy. It was the final step in the eighteenth-century administrative revolution, which was a century in the making. We will see in the following pages how this cycle of documentation, scrutiny, and regulation played out in a range of fields through the Yongzheng and Qianlong eras.

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Fig. 2.  Cover (front and back) of an 1874 account book recording judgments on cases heard in the Ba County magistrate’s yamen (SPABX 清 006-23-1368).

The Register as a Documentary Link Where centrally reviewed affairs relied on the memorial format and its case narrative structure to communicate and scrutinize information, the Yongzheng administration’s innovations in the provincial information regime brought the account (bu 簿) and the register (ce 冊) to the fore. These two documentary forms were used in every conceivable type of office: not just the seat of a county magistrate or a ministerial official, but also in a pharmacy, a currency exchange shop, a bookstore, or any operation that needed to record everyday events or compile lists and then summarize them later. The account book was the workaday tool for those who needed to prepare large amounts of information for other purposes. Accounts were a common format in the county-level yamen long before the Qing. Individual clerks and secretaries would maintain various running lists to keep track of affairs under their responsibility, be they sums paid out or coming into the coffers, individuals detained or

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Fig. 3.  Two pages from an 1874 account book (see fig. 2) (SPABX 清 006-23-1368).

released, census tallies, or any other information that might later be checked or summarized in formal reports or files. Account books were pieces of ephemera. They tended to be constructed from several blank sheets of poor-quality paper bound into small volumes, with minimal identifying information on the cover. They stayed in the custody of the individual responsible for whatever business the account book documented until, once completed, they were handed over to the office for processing into reports. After being checked, summarized, and incorporated into formal records, account books might be discarded, destroyed, recycled, returned to a compiler, or lost in a stack of papers and accidentally preserved for historians. The materials with which account books were made were usually so flimsy that it is uncommon to find a fully intact example in the archives. Figure 2 shows a rare example of the full front and back cover of a register recording a subset of the Ba County magistrate’s rulings for trials held between the fifth lunar months of 1874 and 1875. As indicated by the wear on both the cover and the inside pages of the account book (fig. 3), the book’s construction was fairly straightforward: a bundle of papers were

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Fig. 4.  Four pages from an 1817 account book registering incoming and outgoing documents from the Ba County yamen (SPABX 清 006-6-8671).

folded in half and bound together. The front cover (see fig. 2) presents basic designating information (the cover in the figure records simply that it is an “Account of Trial Rulings” and that it was kept by the Department of Punishments in the county yamen). The back cover records the date that the document was created. A tattered slip recording the honorable title and surname of the magistrate (now missing) was pasted on the back of the register, under which the character for “approved (xing 行)” was written—a common single-character sign of approval from a magistrate after he had read over and verified the contents of any document. The contents of this particular nineteen-page register proceed to ­record, day by day, the judgments of each session. Figure 3 is an image of two representative pages. Each set of entries is organized by date. The different script of the characters recording the numbers of the dates was written in the red ink reserved for the magistrate’s brush, perhaps as a quick and easy way of requiring the magistrate’s approval before beginning the record of the day. For the date fully reported on these two pages, eight judgments are recorded. The writing is neither as neat and legible as that in formal reports nor so sloppy or artful that later readers drafting reports from it might be confused about what was written. The absence of official seals and stamps indicates that this account book was for

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internal record keeping only, although the brackets at the beginning and end of each entry provided a simple safeguard against tampering. Other account books, such as an 1817 example used to document incoming and outgoing forms (ci 詞) pertaining to petitions filed by subjects, bore official seals because the account book was linked to official documents sent out from the yamen (fig. 4). Several important features in this account book illustrate the critical but ephemeral role that these items played in the daily operations of yamen throughout the empire. In this case, after each date (again, written in the brush of the magistrate and not in a careful clerical hand) the titles of documents received or issued are recorded. As a part of each description, the names of individuals linked to these petitions and responses are fully recorded. The partial official seal of the county office, visible in seven places on these four pages, was a feature intended to reduce malfeasance: here we see one half of the seal that would have been simultaneously stamped on the corresponding warrants to bring people to the yamen for testimony, on official judgments, and on the formal drafts of rescripts issued after hearings. The seal would have been applied by placing the final draft of an official warrant, placard, rescript, proclamation, notice, or order directly on top of the account book, so that official documents bearing the authority of the magistrate could be checked against the partial imprint in the account book to see if the edges of the stamps

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lined up precisely. These account books, then, were critical both for keeping track of which documents had been issued or received and for preventing individuals inside and outside of the yamen from forging official communiqués. Although this particular example and others like it could be very important to an active case when individuals might attempt to alter records or forge documents, the account book was still an essentially ephemeral format. It could be discarded or destroyed once all of the cases it documented were no longer active, since the information it held was recorded elsewhere. Account books contained daily (often redundant) accounts of information that would later be summarized in a register. Registers, on the other hand, represented the formal, final, complete, and properly edited distillation of information contained in original cases and account books. They were usually filled out in the bland but legible script of a copyist and written on high-quality paper, with page rules for delineating entries. Registers were distinguished from the often sloppy account books by a number of other features meant to render them both more legible and tamper-proof. Numbers were often written in long form to prevent forgery, unlike in account books, which often ­recorded amounts in the less formal Suzhou merchants’ numerical script or in the straightforward, simple clerical script. Ending lines, summary lines, or summarizing totals might be stamped and sealed with the chop appropriate to the clerk or official, to verify the contents and arrange them conveniently for the eye of the skimming reader. Often communicating information identical or analogous to that in the account book, the register was the formal account submitted for preservation and review. Registers were not new to the Yongzheng era. In fact, the personnel review files discussed earlier were submitted in register format. The critical difference introduced by the Yongzheng emperor’s innovations was the regulated uniformity of the streams of information out of which register reports could be extracted. As a result of these reforms, an increasing number of provincial registers began to conform to the conventions and standards established in Beijing. This made provincial documentary (and administrative) practices legible and accessible to the central state en masse for the first time. Previous emperors had tried and failed to require provincial officials to compile registers of local case-handling activities. In 1654, for

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example, the Shunzhi emperor approved a memorial from the Ministry of Punishments commanding judicial commissioners in the provinces to require circuit intendants to compile yearly registers of cases that should have been resolved but were still pending. These registers were to be sent to Beijing so the ministries and the throne could review them. Because of the dearth of archival sources for the Shunzhi era in Beijing’s First Historical Archives, it is impossible to estimate how many such registers were received and what was contained in them—if, indeed, there were any. But by the end of the Kangxi era the regulation was dismissed as a dead letter and voided.45 Reporting and auditing schemes that were impractical in earlier eras suddenly, after the documentary coup of the Yongzheng administration, became imminently feasible. From the Yongzheng era forward, the communication of summary reports based on myriad local archival data streams introduced the possibility of synchronizing information in offices from the county to the capital. New forms of scrutiny and new realms of regulation were exposed to the intervention of the central state. Each claim in each regis­ ter was—by statute and definition—traceable to some original account. Thus every line item represented an opportunity to demand that some provincial official review and take responsibility for the actions of a subordinate; every new opportunity for documentation was an opportunity for control and discipline.

The Information Cycle After the Yongzheng-era reforms insisted on a means of accounting for county-level archival integrity and the reporting required to scrutinize claims about cases and their handling, a new foundation for regulation existed. The phenomenon of regulation by “archival creep” took on a distinct pattern. First, local yamen were required to document an activity. Second, on the basis of those registers, provincial offices were required to conduct audits and overviews similar to those conducted by censors in the ministries of the central state. Provincial superiors were held accountable for reporting or sanctioning any erratic behavior that was detected. Third, summaries or specific data generated from these 45. DLQB, “Ministry of Punishments (刑部),” “Reports (詳據).”

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processes (both the initial county reports and the summaries from the provinces) could then be sent to Beijing at regular intervals. By keeping province-level registers on file in the ministries, officials in Beijing could then cross-reference claims from the provinces against their own summary records. The Prison Problem The cycle from demands for information to yamen audits can be traced in several realms of provincial administration from the Yongzheng era forward. Take, for example, the problem of prison governance. Between the ascent of the Shunzhi emperor in 1644 and the Yongzheng emperor in 1722, a host of regulations and reports had been instituted by the central state in an attempt to forestall the types of delays and malfeasances that led to prisoners languishing in custody. However, as the early Qing emperors had learned over and over again, creating regulations was not the same as enforcing them. Even when some regulations were enforced some of the time, without a large-scale plan for auditing the entire prison system it was impossible to guarantee compliance across the empire. The achievements in reporting and archival control allowed the Yongzheng emperor’s central court to take a new approach to the problem of “death by prison.” The emperor’s insistence on archival accountability altered the ­information-to-regulation cycle discussed in chapter 1 by introducing documentation and auditing requirements. The first iteration of this altered cycle began in 1727, when the Yongzheng emperor proclaimed that any official handling criminal cases had to keep registers recording the identities of prisoners being held, the dates of their incarceration, and the reasons why their cases were not yet resolved. These regularly compiled registers could then be audited to ensure that any judicial official not properly handling cases was reported for discipline.46 This proclamation introduced the mandatory prison register to the empire’s provincial administrations. Registers and accounts of prisoners already existed in yamen throughout the empire for internal administrative and accounting 46. See the Yongzheng year five regulation at DQHD: 刑部, 吏律, 公式, 官文書 稽‌程, 照刷文卷.

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Fig. 5.  The back cover and first two pages of a prisoner account book from the Ba County yamen (SPABX 清 006-01-03674).

purposes. For centuries before the Qing, these tools had been impor­ tant to county magistrates’ efforts to discipline their own offices, but before the Yongzheng emperor’s reforms the value of an account book was directly related to its contemporaneity. The information recorded in any instance was only valuable so long as it was being used or referenced. The account books rarely traveled outside the walls of the yamen in which they were created, they did not adhere to any codified standards, and no guidelines mandated their preservation. Once their local purpose had been served, they were essentially wastepaper. The institution of regular reporting guidelines converted these ephemeral accounting tools into mandated forms of data collection. Therefore, although often the documents themselves were still not preserved for long periods, examples of county-level account books documenting prisoners can be found in local archives from immediately after the Yongzheng era when their wide-scale use was required, attesting to their sudden proliferation.47 See, for example, the back cover and first two pages of a 1769 Ba County account book for keeping track of prisoners held in the county yamen (fig. 5). Since the front cover is missing, the title of the register is unknown, but like the example in 47. For examples of the prisoner registers maintained by the Ba County yamen in the Qianlong era, see SPABX 清 006-01-03654, 清 006-01-03640, and 清‌006-​01-03674.

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Fig. 6.  Draft of a 1771 prisoner register produced by the Ba County magistrate ­(SPABX 清 006-01-03710).

figure 2, this back cover records the date that it was created (li 立) and the name of the magistrate under whose authority the prisoners were held. The cursive character for “approved” (xing) below the county magistrate’s name and title indicates that this account book was later reviewed by the magistrate or one of his secretaries. The two pages from the inside of the account book contain daily tallies of the prisoners in custody. Each entry begins with the date (again, written with the magistrate’s brush) and the total number of prisoners in custody. The second line reports “Criminals Already in Custody,” giving the total and their individual names. The third line reports which prisoners were “Newly Detained Criminals,” and the fourth line lists “Newly Released Criminals.” Each of the three entries on these two pages—made only a few days apart from one another— contains the same information: the three prisoners already in custody and no new detainees or releases. The recording of this redundant ­information and the county magistrate’s approval on the cover suggest that such information about prisoners was recorded at mandated inter­ vals for auditing and accountability within the yamen. This document bears no official markings, neither seals nor ­tamper-​proof marks. We merely see the “approved” mark on the back cover indicating that the account book had been checked. One also finds the occasional brush stroke associated with review and note taking; see, for example, the “hook (gou 勾)” at the bottom of the third line from the left.

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After the Yongzheng-era command mandating that every county report on prison capacity to supervising offices on a monthly basis, accounts such as these (formerly used only for daily administration and internal yamen audits) would be compiled into registers stamped with the seals of office. These reports included lists of prisoners already reported in the previous month but still detained, newly detained prisoners, released prisoners, and offenders who had not yet been detained, with information about their arrest, their crimes, and their cases.48 An example of a draft report and prisoner register from 1771 (fig. 6) contains the same type of information recorded in the account book in figure 5. It begins with the standard bureaucratic prologue, proclaiming to superiors that the report is being filed in accordance with regulations. The contents of the register begin at the end of the second page, with the list titled “Criminals Already in Custody.” Unlike the prisoner account book in figure 5, below the name of each prisoner in this ­account (marked with a vertical line where the magistrate or a secretary has confirmed the information) is a brief summary of the case for which

48. For a model of such a report, see Gangyi, What Magistrates Must Know, “Formulae for Drafts and Dispatches: Punishments Department (刑房文移稿件式),” “Forms and Plaints (詞訟),” “Monthly Reports on Prisoners in Custody of Runners or in Prison (關押監禁人犯月報).”

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Fig. 7.  A late nineteenth-century report from the Turpan prefectural yamen detailing a list of current prisoners (Qingdai Xinjiang dang’an xuanji, vol. 53, pp. 115–16).

the suspect is being detained. This information would have been compiled for this register from multiple account books, including the one recording daily tallies and names of prisoners and the one containing information about the cases being processed by the yamen. Lists of “Newly Detained Criminals” and “Newly Released Criminals” follow in the prescribed order, with the magistrate’s or secretary’s corrections and annotations. The total number of prisoners is then listed at the end, with the stamp of the office placed directly over the number to prevent forgery. The magistrate’s seal has also been impressed across the seams of all of the pages where they are pasted together, to prevent tampering. After the total, the date of the report is stamped with both the magistrate’s seal and the small chop of the ­secretary who drafted the report. The document ends with the name of the magistrate and the customary mark of approval. Copies of these reports can also be found in prefectural archives. See, for example, a document from the Turpan prefectural yamen (fig. 7). This report, sent by the Turpan subprefect to his supervising prefectural office, outlines information about current prisoners in a manner quite similar to the Ba County example just described, even though the two records were produced in offices almost two thousand

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miles and more than a century apart. The list of previously reported prisoners is followed by a list of newly received prisoners (none reported) and those newly released (none reported). The list ends with a summary list of the names of prisoners and their total number. The date that the report was received by the prefectural department overseeing punishments is recorded, and the prefect’s signature of approval concludes the document. As the durability of this form over temporal and spatial distance suggests, prison registers became a fixed feature in accounting for prisons in the Qing. Over time, further requirements accrued, including reports on at-large criminals and the illnesses of prisoners.49 This 49. For a discussion of the regulations dictating what information was included in seasonal county reports on the at-large bandits whose crimes did not qualify for central review, see Wan, Essentials of Private Secretary Learning, “Banditry Cases (‌ 盗‌案).” For a model of such a report being forwarded from the prefectural level, see Gangyi, What Magistrates Must Know, “Formulae for Drafts and Dispatches: Punishments Department (刑房文移稿件式),” “Forms and Plaints (詞訟),” “Monthly Report on Criminals Already and Not Yet Captured (已未獲犯月報).” For protocols on the treatment and reporting of disease in prisoners being held for cases not slated for central review, see Gangyi, What Magistrates Must Know, “Formulae for Drafts and Dispatches: Punishments Department (刑房文移稿件式),” “Forms and Plaints Spread ends as before. (‌ 詞訟),” “Reports on Illness [for Prisoners Guilty of Crimes Bearing Sentences of]

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information, when sent up to superior yamen, was compiled, reviewed, and integrated into reports sent higher up the administrative ladder. The new streams of data arriving at supervising provincial offices linked daily accounts—information about the quotidian affairs of ­local administration—to summarizing registers. Superiors could easily skim these registers and apprehend patterns over time or across jurisdictions. On the basis of these new information streams generated by each yamen in the territories, provincial superiors could be held ­accountable for keeping their administration on track beyond a caseby-case approach.

A Forest of Registers and Reports The introduction of archival registers, monthly reports, and regular audits created a paper trail that could be used to oversee administrative processes for which regulations had long existed but no grounds for consistent and large-scale oversight had yet been conceived. Many of the Kangxi-era regulations had presumed some sort of auditing mechanism existed in the provinces, but there could be no concrete expectations about the reporting cycles on which censorial functions relied until the Yongzheng emperor’s documentary reforms. The implementation of ministerial auditing procedures in the provinces led to an articulation of the supervising duties of the provincial bureaucracy in several areas of administration. Perhaps even more important, synchronizing the archival processes and standards required to replicate censorial functions out in the provinces initiated a process of documentary standardization that made paperwork in the empire’s yamen increasingly legible across the empire of routine. In addition to the above-mentioned regulations on prison audits, the eighteenth-century Qing state issued guidelines to refine the supervision Exile and Below (徒流以下患病詳).” For a sample county-level report on prisoner illness, see “Report on Prisoner Illness (詳報監犯患病)” in the same section. For a sample report on a casualty due to the illness of a prisoner being held pending the Autumn Assizes, see “Examination Report and Request for a Delegated Official to Examine and Re-report on the Death of a Prisoner in Custody, Pending a Death or Strangulation Sentence, for the Autumn Assizes (秋審斬絞犯人在監病故驗報并請 委員覆驗詳)” in the same section.

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of other aspects of case handling. Regulations requiring new reports multiplied rapidly over the course of the Qianlong era (1735–96). Provincial officials were commanded to produce new reports recording the use of judicial torture.50 New audits to detect wrongfully imprisoned suspects were introduced.51 In 1756, the Ministry of Punishments imposed new requirements on reporting illness among prisoners.52 By the middle of the eighteenth century, local officials were responsible for keeping a profusion of registers on subjects such as the capture of at-large criminals, discrepancies in testimony at the local level, prison escapes, extraordinary case investigations, and pending deadlines.53 Remnants of county-level archives contain draft reports for registers on all manner of affairs that had been previously regulated but diffi­ cult to enforce. Formal lists of current prisoners, fled prisoners, captured criminals, exiled criminals, resolved and unresolved homicide cases, captured and uncaptured bandits, and even items like collected fines and loot were recorded, compiled into registers, and sent up to super­ vising yamen on a regular basis.54 In each of these fields, a similar cycle led to the accretion of paperwork, higher-level scrutiny, and disciplinary action. Regulations from earlier eras were, after the Yongzheng era, linked to regular reporting requirements in multiple yamen. Consistent summary information connecting active and archived accounts and documents in subordinate offices with registers and reports in supervisory ones allowed the provincial administration to perform basic auditing functions that would have been impossible in previous eras. Tasks that had never been scrutinized before could now be audited in the territories by the provin­ cial administration itself. The provincial bureaucracies duplicated a 50. The original Yongzheng-era statute does not survive in later laws, since it was replaced by a later, more comprehensive Qianlong-era statute. For the original text, see QLDQHD: 吏部, 考功清吏司, 斷獄, 用刑違式. 51. For more on these regulations see the discussion of the sixth substatute, at DLCY: 刑律, 斷獄, 故禁故勘平人. 52. QLSL 21.5.27: 2. According to Xue Yunsheng, this new regulation combined elements of the previous two and therefore replaced them. See Xue’s commentary on the seventh substatute, at DLCY: 刑律, 斷獄, 囚應禁而不禁. 53. DQHD: 吏部, 刑律, 捕亡, 盜賊捕限. 54. For two such examples, see SPABX 清 006-01-03710 and 清 006-01-03750.

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host of censorial audits that were previously conducted only in Beijing and without routine access to county-level archives.

Conclusion: Synchronizing the Distributed Archive The Yongzheng-era demand that officials at every level of the imperial bureaucracy be held directly responsible for documenting a wider range of daily tasks, and at a finer level of detail, led the state deeper into the business of local administrations across the empire. Previous solutions for disciplining local officials were limited by the constraints of central review. Furthermore, although regulations against tampering with archives had existed, any information that was not included in memorials sent up for central review was essentially invisible to the capital’s censorial apparatus.55 The Ming regulations adopted by the Qing held officials with censorial appointments in the territories ­responsible for examining the archives of every office to ensure their integrity and for performing both random and regular reviews of the yamen in the territories. These methods were undoubtedly capable of flagging serious problems. Censors were often the ones who brought news of administrative problems to the throne, as demonstrated in the narrative thus far. The reforms of the Yongzheng era buttressed independent censorial investigations by creating analogous and redundant processes of audit and review within the territorial bureaucracy. To lay the informational foundation required to achieve this innovation, a wholly new relationship between the official and his archive was created. Requiring officials to maintain archives that reflected their entire tenure reinforced the link between documentation and administration. Such ­documents had been maintained for individual or local administrative purposes for centuries. However, requiring that such draft-copy accounts and registers be entered into an official record allowed the 55. The Ming Code contained several statutes pertaining to archival integrity and audit. See, for example, laws and substatutes at DLCY: 吏律, 公式, 磨勘卷宗 and DLCY: 吏律, 公式, 増減官文書, as well as the statutes at DLCY: 名例, 公事失錯.

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Yongzheng administration to hold superior offices—now able to ­demand regular reports on these newly mandated documentary streams—responsible for auditing the everyday actions of their subordinates in more and more fields of governance. With a uniform set of documentary standards established across the empire, the yamen archive itself became a site of discipline. The central court was able to communicate its standards and authority across what had been an impassable divide between locale and center. Unlike the information-intensive and often unenforceable regulations based on scrutiny of the composite narratives submitted for central review, many aspects of local administration could now be supervised by compelling each level of supervision in the imperial bureaucracy to scan the summary reports of their subordinates for inconsistencies, while also spot-checking original reports against other independent data streams. Local auditing regimes were integrated into an ever-­ expanding and interlocking network of reports, reports on reports, and archives. The registration, archival checking, and censorial scrutiny of local case-handling procedures gave the central Qing state more traction in the struggle to exert its authority over offices in the territories. Unlike central review, whose documentary forms and review processes could not help but generate concern about pro forma, or “empty-letter,” repetition and the use of bureaucratic custom to generate documents that appeared to conform to imperial standards without reflecting local realities, the Yongzheng administration’s archival solution relied on increasingly complex methods of cross-referencing information to tie together offices throughout the empire in a web of interwoven claims. The result of this innovation, by the Qianlong era, was a fundamental transformation of the relationship between central review and bureaucratic discipline.

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Part Two

After the Unexpected Administrative Revolution

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Chapter Four

Ruling the Empire of Routine The Case-ification of the Imperial Bureaucracy

T

he synchronization of the Qing distributed archive in the middle of the eighteenth century revolutionized the administration of the empire. Officials in the territories began to produce, share, and take responsibility for more and more information. Whole realms of administrative activity outside the purview of central review could be monitored within the provincial administrations. The burden of reporting and scrutiny in provincial offices multiplied rapidly over the Qianlong era. Summaries of information checked and collated in the provinces were forwarded to Beijing in succinct reports that vouched directly for archive and action in local offices. And this flow of information could be reviewed in aggregate in the capital and checked in detail if and when problems became apparent, because each document was tied to specific nodes in the archive that connected all offices in the administrative network. The expansion of the empire of routine fundamentally altered both the everyday work of provincial offices and the stakes of central review. Outlining how new reporting mechanisms proliferated in ways that tightened the net of scrutiny binding the yamen of the empire, this chapter examines the expansion of reporting requirements at the local level and looks at how those new forms of data altered reporting standards further up the administrative chain, ultimately transforming Beijing’s analysis of information from the provinces. We

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will then reconsider the ritual of the Autumn Assizes (discussed in chapter 2) in the context of this new regime of information sharing and accountability. The new data ecology of the eighteenth century altered incentives for sharing or concealing information within and beyond the provinces. New methods of measuring administrative efficiency pushed officials in the territories to share more information about their administrations with Beijing. This led not only to a spate of accusations among provincial officials trying to shift the blame for delay or other errors but also, more meaningfully, to more detailed policy suggestions from provincial superiors who were earnestly trying to account for and overcome administrative bottlenecks in their jurisdictions. All of these practices contributed to what I call the “case-ification” of the Qing bureaucracy. The widespread routinization of activities beyond the realm of central review fundamentally changed how officials in Beijing monitored and evaluated activities in the provinces by making case tallies a proxy for administrative competence. In the chapter’s final sections we look at how the case-ification of the entire Qing bureaucracy transformed a host of diverse and previously unobservable problems into easily apprehended units of action that could be evaluated and tracked.

New Information, New Possibilities: The Proliferation and Aggregation of Data The mid-eighteenth-century Qing state eagerly took advantage of the in-province processes of reporting and scrutiny instituted after the Yongzheng emperor synchronized the distributed imperial archive. In the decades leading up to the 1750s the central state demanded all manner of new information about local administrative activities that had recently become accessible. As before, each new wave of information arriving in capital offices led to more demands for information. By the middle of the eighteenth century Qing central officials had so much information about local activities that new reporting formats were required to aggregate the data being reported from the provinces.

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Reports Before, Below, and Beyond Central Review The proliferation of in-province archival audits and case reports that emerged from the Yongzheng-era transfer protocols created a legible field of information from which to glean knowledge about local administrative activities. Before long, Beijing began to demand reports on affairs beyond the channels already involved in central review. Any sort of problem that might flag a flaw in the provincial administration or the social order could, by the middle of the eighteenth century, be tacked onto the growing list of monthly, quarterly, or yearly reports on local cases. Unlike the cases sent to Beijing for central review, the reports on affairs that fell below central-state purview often took the form of tallies or lists, without extensive detail, giving Beijing at-a-glance summaries on a range of issues. The eighteenth century saw a boom in such reports. Provinces were required to compile information about crimes resulting in exile and other “externally resolved” sentences that were still considered worth reporting, such as kidnapping by enticement, banditry involving amounts too small to warrant central review, manslaughter, false allegations, cases of elders beating to death junior members of the family, the theft of horses or draft animals, and rape or kidnapping below the level of severity warranting the death sentence.1 And new reporting requirements were not constrained to criminal affairs. By the 1750s the central bureaucracy had begun to demand summary reports about issues related to potential fields of official malfeasance as well. In the administration of justice alone, the Qianlong court demanded reports on such activities as the collection of fines, the tracking down of loot in pending cases, the reporting of prisoners who had died of illness, the sale of salt confiscated in smuggling cases, the amounts paid over in redemption for crimes below the level of central review, and 1. These reports could be required in an ad hoc manner by imperial command, so an exhaustive list of topics is infeasible. However, certain items that were reported based on codified statutes are listed in Xue Yunsheng’s comments under the third substatute, at DLCY: 吏律, 公式, 照刷文卷, and in the regulations at DQHD: 內閣, 職掌, 進本. On the distinction between “externally resolved” cases handled in the provinces and “internally resolved” cases reviewed by the capital, see Xu, “Neijie yu waijie.”

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expenses related to the transport of prisoners and maintenance of jails.2 Any topic bearing on the administrative functions of the territorial bureaucracies as they related to the potential interests of the central state could be subjected to reporting demands. The scale and scope of information thus amassed got closer and closer to giving the central state a snapshot of local administrative actions in aggregate. The central court’s ability to demand reports on the number and status of cases not submitted to the capital for review also solved a vexing problem in the central review system itself: in-province reporting streams on local caseloads informed Beijing about the current status of as-yet-unresolved cases that were slated for central review. This was a problem that had stymied the central ministries’ earlier attempts to enforce deadlines and standards, since the central state could not discipline bureaucracies for mishandling cases that had not yet been reported to Beijing. Now, cases at the local level were reported at multiple junctures along their journey to resolution and review. Even cases that previously never would have been submitted for central review could be added to the list of mandated reports. The primary stream of information flowing into Beijing for imperial review and approval was supplemented by a host of reports documenting affairs before, beyond, and below the formal requirements for central review.

Routine Reporting from the Provinces The sheer volume of reports demanded by the Beijing ministries soon grew so large that a new genre of reports began to proliferate: reports on reports. These documents were known as “summary memorials (huiti 彙題).” The idea of requiring provinces to submit a summary memorial about their cases from each year was first suggested in 1744 by Henan Office Investigating Censor Peng Zhaozhu (b. 1699). He reasoned that “every provincial administration affects the lives and customs of the people. Although affairs of serious import are reported [to the throne] and resolved via memorial, it would be fitting to produce 2. For an example of a report on redemption for cases under independent jurisdiction, see the report on fines collected from local cases in the province of Guangdong from 1745, at FHA 02-01-07-13739-007.

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a summary memorial of them at each year’s end.”3 Peng proposed to make provincial offices responsible for compiling information about the yearly tallies for certain cases in their administration, for ease of perusal in Beijing.4 The routinization of reporting schemes within the provinces allowed the central court to treat gubernatorial yamen in the provinces like clearinghouses for all manner of information. The provinces could now compile information with relative ease, compared with preceding eras when reporting and audits had not been widely established. The requirement to assemble bird’s-eye summaries each year could also compel them to reflect on the trends in their jurisdictions. These reports would be further aggregated by the ministries in Beijing. Eventually, all reporting practices were combined in a single timeline, resulting in a massive end-of-year reporting ritual: by the second half of the eighteenth century, governors were required to submit a dozen summary reports in a single mega-memorial as part of the sealing up of the yamen and its archive at the end of each year. Unfortunately, the packets of summary memorials submitted by each province to the throne have been compromised by recent reorganization and digitization efforts by the First Historical Archives in Beijing, which separated all of the summary memorials appended to the yearly reports of governors from their original packages and entered them into the database as separate documents. As a result, when summary memorials lack information (about province, author, dates, etc.), critical information about which reports these data were appended to has been lost forever to historians. For this reason it is now impossible to say how large the average yearly summary report from a province might have been or what it might have included at different times. Individually, a single item from a summary memorial—say, the tally of homicide cases from a single year—appears rather underwhelming. However, when considered en masse—as reports on a wide range of affairs compiled and reported regularly by every province— they represent an accomplishment of a new order. Not only were some 3. QLSL 9.12.1: 4. 4. A 1758 command later instituted specific deadlines for these summaries. QLSL 23.12.11: 4.

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of the tallies and categorizations for affairs well before, below, and ­beyond central review, but the tallies also constituted a distinct stream of accounting for specific types of affairs and their handling, which could be cross-referenced against other claims from the provinces. Take, for example, the ministerial summary memorial aggregating information based on a subset of summary memorials from the provinces for a single year. To the historian examining these materials in the Beijing archives, documents such as these have a very sparse aspect that belies the complexity of administrative efforts required to produce them. They come across as almost boring. The “Summary Memorial on the Total Number of Homicide and Banditry Cases from Each of the Provinces in the Ninth Year of the Daoguang Emperor [1859],” a typical example, simply reads: Resolved banditry cases from each province: 250 Salt smuggling: 0 Sexual assault: 48 Intentional homicide: 143 Death after an affray: 1,536 Violating status and offending against righteousness: 79 Total: 2,0565

The entire report summary contains a mere seven lines. But as brief as the description of each single item appears at first glance, it attests to a whole network of information gathering linking capital and provincial offices. Each line represents a reporting requirement extending all the way from the county to the capital. Information from throughout the year that was compiled in each province was then combined for a summary, like this one, at the empire-wide level. Furthermore, this ministerial summary memorial is an account of only one field of summary reporting. Multiple summaries existed, depending on the affairs that piqued the interest of Beijing. Within two decades of the beginning of the Qianlong era, Beijing required so many “reports of reports” that it began to combine some of them into single 5. FHA 02-01-07-12132-022.

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reports to streamline the flow of information. In 1755, for example, the separate reports on manslaughter and murders committed during fits of madness were combined into a single summary memorial.6 Eventually, even reports not clearly thematically related were combined, according to the deadlines assigned to them on the routine administrative calendar, into larger and larger summary memorials from the provinces. This level of reporting collected in the capital has been obscured for some time by both the digitization choices of the First Historical Archives and the sheer volume of these materials and their redundancy. The summary reports, after all, contained information that, by definition, was available elsewhere. But the habits of summary accounting and reporting, and the aggregation of these reports in Beijing, formed the basis for a more robust summary analysis of case patterns in the capital.

Routinization and Summary Analysis The leaps and bounds by which the scope of cases reported to the central state grew over the course of the eighteenth century meant that the ministries of the capital were able to generate reports on patterns in cases and case handling throughout the empire. This would not have been possible before. Information that had previously been unknown or consumed serially and only in the prescribed formats for central review could now be examined both at scale and in great detail. Opportunities to intervene in provincial problems now might present themselves well before an issue was formally submitted to the throne— or in fields where previously information never would have been submitted at all. Signs of this trend toward the aggregation and summary analysis of provincial data can be seen from early on. Under the Kangxi emperor, as the machinery of central review became more routinized and communication across ministries about cases became more common, rough tallies and trends of provincial cases began to factor into administrative 6. For this particular command and several others like it, see DQHD: 內閣, 職‌掌, 進‌本.

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policy toward the provinces. In the late seventeenth century, the central review apparatus was already sufficiently sophisticated and systematic to produce information about large and important trends in crime in the territories. The sentence-proposing case narratives submitted to the throne could finally be considered representative enough of the cases being handled in the provinces to assume that patterns appearing in Beijing reflected some part of the reality in the provinces. By the Qianlong era, summary analysis finally extended well ­beyond the Autumn Assizes. The Qing court began to use the novel forms of information available to Beijing to develop new scales of analysis. As the proposal from Henan Office Investigating Censor Peng Zhaozhu suggested, summary reports from the provinces lent themselves readily to analysis by the ministries. For example . . . the Ministry of Punishments could calculate for a given year: How many cases of violent robbery occurred in each province, and how many cases of sexual assault, and how many cases of illegal salt trafficking, and how many cases of murder, and how many cases of affray ending in death, and how many cases of violating status and offending against righteousness? On the day that the seal is affixed to the report, a simple and clear [description can be added to] a summary memorial. . . . Each year it could be consulted and compared. At a glance, one could apprehend whether or not the everyday efforts of governors-general and governors to tend to the education and nourishment of their people were producing the proper results. Merit and mistake, reward and censure— never would the grounds for either be unclear.7

The summary reports sent to the ministries could be compiled into empire-wide statistics for perusal by the heads of state. Summaries of all of the summary reports submitted to Beijing were organized by province and compiled into a “yellow register (huangce 黃冊)” presented for imperial review in the Grand Secretariat and a “blue register (qingce 青‌冊)” presented to the Grand Council for deliberation.8 7. QLSL 9.12.1: 4. 8. On these registers and their location in the First Historical Archives, see Park and Antony, “Archival Research,” 100 and 107.

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With these summaries of summary reports, the throne could request special statistical analysis by the ministries on topics of particular interest. Capital officials were able to provide detailed, tabulated information about case frequency and status over growing units of time and space. Such summaries would be compiled when the throne requested information on a specific type of case, as in 1750 when the Qianlong emperor ordered the Ministry of Punishments to issue a report on cases of embezzlement.9 Receiving regular reports on case statistics allowed the throne and its ministers to track patterns throughout the empire. This information could be used to keep track of issues of concern (homi­ cide, family violence, heterodox activities, and so on), and it provided background information when possibly connected problems arose. By the last decades of the eighteenth century, the Qianlong administration was employing these new sources of data to speculate about patterns in centrally reviewed cases. Take, for example, the following 1782 edict by the Qianlong emperor: The Grand Council has taken the “Execution Warranted” cases from this year’s Autumn Assizes for Yunnan, Guizhou, Sichuan, Guangxi, and ­Fujian, compared them with the previous year’s lists, and submitted them via memorial. They reported that the number of cases has slightly declined since last year. But two years previous, the assizes were stayed. So the lists from last year of all the criminals executed from those provinces is actually the combined total number from two years. If you compare them with this year, there was a reduction of only ten to fifty-some individuals. This is a nominal decrease, but in fact it is an increase. The various governors handling these cases have all drafted verdicts in accordance with the law—it is not necessarily the case that they have been overly strict in their sentencing. But what, then, can be the reason that such an increase in the number of “Execution Warranted” criminals has occurred? Is it because of the population growth? Is it that, in places such as these where the moral and the wicked are mixed together, crime has increased? Is it that the Ministry of Punishments and Nine Dignitaries have begun correcting verdicts more strictly than previously? We command the officials of the Ministry of Punishments to conduct a detailed analysis of the 9. The command for this summary report is recorded at QLSL 15.9.21: 5.

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“Execution Warranted” criminals from this round of the assizes and the reasons why they have increased in number since the last year.10

The increased scale and breadth of data now available to the central state could be used in tandem with substantive information about ­individual cases to discern and study administrative patterns at a new, granular level. The state now had access not only to a mechanism for collecting timely and legible data about single centrally reviewed cases, but also to a whole apparatus for reporting information pertaining to the processes generating those data. The creation of these reporting regimes was a stunning achievement, especially when considered in tandem with the reports on case handling that were being compiled and communicated to the throne since the early eighteenth century. In a hundred years, the central state in Beijing had gone from not even knowing how many criminals were in detention to generating detailed reports not only about the identities of those detained and the status of their cases, but also how much it cost to clothe and feed them, which individuals had fallen ill, how much it cost to transport them, and how the tasks related to the capture, trial, and execution of criminals were currently being handled. The central state had gained access to both summary and detailed information on a previously unthinkable number of cases.

The Ritual of Praise and Blame in the Assizes The possibility of discovery, the heightened accountability, and the existence of a great deal more information outside of central review subtly altered the implications of the routine scrutiny of sentencing proposals at the Autumn Assizes. By the end of the Qianlong reign, the Autumn Assizes had become more than a time for the ritual condemnation and pardon of criminals. They also provided an opportunity for the praise and blame of provincial officials themselves. As the Qianlong emperor noted in a 1752 edict: “We deliberate on how well the Governors of the territories are performing their jobs according to how many of the 10. QLSL 47.9.2: 2.

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cases their province reported had to be changed.”11 Troubling patterns in yearly case submissions were an occasion for summary analysis and, where warranted, admonitions for errant provincial officials who might be called to account for their foibles. Over the course of the Qianlong administration, the ritualized praise and blame of provincial officials during the Autumn Assizes took on a highly structured form. The edicts in which this drama played out open with platitudes about law and its relationship to bureaucratic discipline. Following this prefacing commentary, the mistakes made by the provincial administrations with the most problems would be enumerated. Warnings followed to the heads of the provincial adminis­ tration, exhorting them to root out the problems that had led to the errors, so that the judicial apparatus could perform its intended function correctly. In one example from 1749, the Qianlong emperor began his edict with several ruminations on the function of punishment and review: The Autumn Assizes are a critical institution of the justice system. Errors in the heaviness or lightness of a sentence bear directly on the life or death of an individual. The governors of the provinces must measure and deliberate upon the circumstances and the law of each case with great care in order to modulate the handling of the case in accord with the principles of the cosmos and with utmost fairness. Only then can there be neither cruelty inflicted by the law nor wantonness under its cover. This is how all things obtain their proper balance. When We examine the case narrative registers [in contemplation of issuing capital ­punishment], they are pored over and reviewed multiple times. Thrice the circumstances [of the crime] have been examined [in the process of review], so that there is no room whatsoever for differing opinions about the possibility for additional leniency or severity. Those whose names are circled [for punishment by death] must clearly present circumstances that afford no room for forgiveness. Those who are offered lenience must demonstrate circumstances that warrant it. They must be judged according to a pervasive standard.12 11. QLSL 17.9.16: 3. 12. QLSL 14.10.19: 3.

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The Qianlong emperor thus prefaced his dressing down of provincial officials with a meditation on the importance of the precision and ­exhaustiveness of legal judgment. He then went on to list the problems that caught the attention of the Grand Council: “This year the case narrative registers from each province required many alterations. . . . Among those which had to be changed from ‘Delayed Execution’ to ‘Execution Warranted,’ there were eight from Sichuan, four from Hubei, eight from Jiangsu, five each from Henan and Shandong, six from Shanxi, and seven from Zhili.” Driving home the severity of these mistakes, the Qianlong emperor then detailed the egregious nature of the crimes under consideration and the errors committed in proposing sentences for them: Among the crimes in these cases, there were premeditated murder, homicide, resisting arrest, lodging false accusations against an innocent in a manner that resulted in their death, threatening another person to death, death following sexual assault, and all manner of criminal behavior, such as enticing innocents to join heterodox sects, raping young girls, humiliating women who were forced to commit suicide as a result, murderous rampages, and even beating senior relatives to death. All of these crimes are extremely serious, and cannot be forgiven under any circumstances. Even though among the “Execution Warranted” cases from each province there are some times, at the moment of circling the names, when there might be some small margin suggesting the possibility of forgiveness, criminals of this type simply cannot be allowed delayed execution.

The edict then turned to the hypothetical. In proposing what would have happened if these mistakes had not been corrected in the process of central review, the Qianlong emperor painted a gruesome picture of the stakes of sentence proposals and review: Imagine: if the Nine Dignitaries had not corrected these cases in consultation with Us, then our venerable legal institutions would have been discarded and these wicked men would have escaped from punishment!

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The humiliations and pains endured by their victims—how would they have been addressed? What would have become of the duty of a proper legal system to punish the wicked, if its balance had been thwarted by such error and imprecision? This duty to legal discipline, to maintaining upright human relationships, and to moral education is the grave responsibility of a governor overseeing an entire territory. How can you turn away from your obligation to illuminate the consequences of crime and uphold the law of the dynasty?

He followed his lengthy discussion of the nature and import of the errors made in the provinces with a terse warning to the specific individuals whose performance had been called into question. This edict was an explicit and practical assertion of the ruler’s duty to demand bureaucratic discipline in the provinces in line with the legal strictures of the dynasty.13 By the last few decades of the Qianlong reign, this regular calling out of the flaws of provincial administrations seems to have become a part of the assizes ritual itself: the historian who directs her attention to the months surrounding the Autumn Assizes in the Veritable Records from the late Qianlong years can easily locate edicts criticizing officials whose performance did not hold up to scrutiny in that particular year. Over time, the threshold for scrutiny was lowered. By the second half of the eighteenth century, governors whose provinces had submitted as few as five or even three cases requiring revision received a warning with no sanction attached to it, as a reminder to maintain bureaucratic discipline.14 The ritual of praising and blaming provincial officials during the assizes offered the emperor in Beijing an important opportunity to establish expectations about acceptable and impermissible types of ­errors. The Qianlong emperor commented specifically on individual cases, explaining how one governor, who had only recently been 13. Indeed, the relationship between legal duties and bureaucratic discipline as spelled out in this edict was considered so representative that it was reproduced at QLDQHD: 刑部, 秋朝審 and in DQHD: 刑部, 刑律, 斷獄, 有司決囚等第. 14. See, for example, QLSL 31.9.23: 3; QLSL 35.9.24: 3; QLSL 54.9.6: 3; QLSL 56.8.30: 2; and QLSL 34.9.13: 1.

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appointed, might be forgiven for an unusually large number of errors, or how another governor who was away from the provincial offices while overseeing a military campaign might be forgiven, whereas others who had more experience or who had previously held posts in the Ministry of Punishments received immediate sanctions.15 The fact that many admonishments were issued without punishment suggests that the most critical part of this exercise was not the technical application of the right punishment for errant officials but the chance for feedback, scrutiny, and correction that each error provided. Imperial favorites— such as Governor Chen Hongmou—might be forgiven for their foibles on the basis of their otherwise excellent performance, but they were not immune from being called out for problems with the cases from their provinces.16 Even as the cycle and scope of admonishment intensified over the course of the eighteenth century, it remained mainly ritualistic and prophylactic in nature. The review and feedback process was not primarily an opportunity to punish but to educate, particularly on the matter of judicial interpretation.17 In records from the end of the Qianlong era, one can even find instances of the same official being praised and admonished in the same year for different aspects of the case-­ handling process.18 This information was not just a factor in the emperor’s relationship with individual governors or judicial commissioners— 15. In 1765 the governor of Huguang was forgiven for a rather large number of mistakes—thirteen in total—on the grounds that he had only recently arrived at his post and it was his first time submitting cases for review. See QLSL 30.9.16: 3. See also the example of the 1785 edict in which the governor of Zhejiang was admonished for having mishandled ten cases and forgiven because of his lack of experience. QLSL 50.10.8: 4. For an example of an official being excused for errors because he was away on a campaign, see QL 58.10.11: 2. For examples of governors who were punished because their errors were considered excessive, in light of their considerable experience, see QLSL 33.9.12: 2; QLSL 47.10.11: 3; QLSL 50.10.6: 2; and QLSL 57.9.10: 4. 16. QLSL 17.9.13: 3. 17. In fact, the Qianlong emperor rejected proposals to reduce the “praise and blame” ritual of the assizes to a straightforward sanctioning exercise. QLSL 46.9.13: 2. 18. See the commendation granted to Sichuan governor-general Ohbi, at QLSL 56.6.9: 3, and the warning, two months later, that he needed to straighten up his administration, at QLSL 56.8.30: 2.

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it was also the basis for expectations and discussions about bureaucratic discipline in general. In 1767, for example, the Qianlong emperor approved a proposal from the Ministry of Punishments to circulate printed registers throughout the empire’s yamen of cases whose proposed sentences had to be changed during central review, to educate the territorial officials who would be drafting such cases in the future.19 In extreme cases, such as when thirty-one sentences from Shanxi had to be corrected during the review process in 1783, the Qianlong emperor might directly punish a governor for his failings (the governor responsible in this case was stripped of the peacock feathers that adorned his hat as a sign of imperial favor and had his salary withheld for three years).20 But the majority of admonishments in this annual ritual of discipline were perfunctory and did not entail immediate sanctions. Nevertheless, they implied the threat of imperial action and offered an opportunity for rectification. Governors and judicial commissioners called out by name were put on notice: clean up your territorial administration or bear the consequences of further scrutiny in the future. Although such warnings may have been toothless exhortations, these terse admonitions to high-level officials in the territories had bite once the empire of routine made investigation and accountabil­ity more feasible. Even a forgiving tone in an edict noting that a new governor had submitted several cases with errors that year was a credible threat in an era when governors knew that such problems might signal that a provincial shake-up was not far down the road. The intimate informational ties between center and locale—and the multiple data streams that could be used to triangulate office-level involvement in central reporting processes—had changed the stakes of routine reporting duties in the provinces. The incentives to share and obscure information had been radically altered by the administrative revolution.

19. QLSL 32.11.6: 1. 20. The next year, the governor was awarded his feathers again after his successful military campaigns in Gansu. See QLSL 48.10.28: 3 and QLSL 49.7.17: 1.

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New Game, New Stakes: Sharing Information after the Administrative Revolution Early in the Qing, even when emperors and central government bureaucrats expressed profound consternation or dismay at conditions in the provinces—such as when the Shunzhi emperor was shocked to learn how widespread “death by prison” might have become—disciplinary action for such problems was uncommon. Governors could not be blamed for every mistake in their provincial administration. The relative impossibility of finding out exactly how and when some aberration had been introduced into the data stream meant that central state officials could reprimand governors only for a general lack of discipline when problems were discovered.21 Protests of ignorance were an effective shield against accountability before the expansion of the empire of routine. This changed in the Qianlong era. Yamen-level archival accountability, aggregate case data compiled from multiple reporting streams, and individual case scrutiny in central review all combined to form an entirely new data ecology. The margin for fudging reports and con­ cealing errors had shrunk considerably. Central officials worked assiduously to plug holes in the regulatory framework as soon as they appeared, and new holes appeared with increasing frequency as Beijing’s knowledge of the territories increased. Governors of provinces that sent up shoddy, error-riddled, or late cases for review, or even a higherthan-average number of cases, could be not only warned or castigated but also actually held accountable for producing better results. Not every aberration could be investigated—the cost to the empire would have been overwhelming. But if a consistent problem warranting serious attention and resources was suspected, accountability could now be assigned. In these circumstances, provincial officials could feasibly be ordered to fix even large-scale errors at the local level. More and more facets of local administration were documented in cases linked to the expanding empire of routine. Extending the language 21. An example from the Yongzheng era was the warning sent to Jiangnan-Jiangsu Governor-General Cabina, who, in one month in 1725, reported more than 100 banditry cases. See YZSL 3.7.20: 2.

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and the technology of case handling, reporting, and review into new fields of local state activity opened up entire fields of knowledge about the local administration for officials and emperors in Beijing. The expanding collection of data about cases and their handling in the provinces changed the incentives for officials in the territories. Expectations for accountability were higher. The incentives to either cover up problems or inform on fellow provincial officials were heightened. And the tighter the net drew, the harder it was to invest enough effort to continue concealing problems from watchful eyes in Beijing. The administrative policies following from Qianlong-era information gains tackled problems of administration in the provinces that could be evaluated and resolved only in light of a great deal more knowledge about local administrations than had previously been available to the central state. Furthermore, the very fact that provincial superiors were expected to preside over these massive data-gathering projects gave high-level bureaucrats in the territories a great deal more traction to tackle administrative issues. The Qianlong era became the golden age of activist provincial officials who responded to central demands for more in-province accountability with unprecedentedly detailed administrative reforms.

Counting Cases The entire world of administrative action and responsibility, once only vaguely grasped through the concept of bureaucratic custom, had been partially tamed through the institution of multiple case-reporting streams. Details on the problems of the provincial bureaucracies were partial, often reported only in aggregate, but new reporting technologies gave the ministries in Beijing a new way of holding provincial administrations accountable for a host of quotidian responsibilities. Any government function that was documented and reported could be added to the list of issues that the central ministries now tracked, tallied, and summarized. Backlogs, delays, and errors made in the provinces could be analyzed at varying scales. Administrative backlogs, newly observable, also functioned as red flags for other potential i­ ssues in territorial administrations. With this new perspective on accounting for and tracking down administrative issues in the territories,

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brought one word from next page, ok?

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an entire host of problems began to show up on the imperial radar as an “accumulation of cases (ji’an 積案).” While in the capital the emperor and his officials were closing loopholes and shoring up reporting regimes to ensure that cases did not slip through the cracks, in the provinces, governors were struggling with a mounting problem: piles and piles of cases. Provincial administrators from the middle of the eighteenth century forward had to grapple with an irony of the unexpected administrative revolution: the more administrative scrutiny Beijing could muster, the tighter the net of regulations became that constrained local administrations; the more regulations there were, the more reports had to be filed, and the more reports to be filed, the more hopelessly behind the average office fell. A wide array of affairs—everything from the hearing of court cases to the collection and shipment of taxes in the provinces—began to be spoken of as problems of discipline vis-à-vis case clearing.22 Provincial officials, in their memorials on arriving at a new post, increasingly began to frame their assessment of and approach to the administrative problems in each jurisdiction in terms of how to “clean up (qingli 清釐or 清理)” accumulated cases. Officials at the provincial level began to discover at their own peril that glossing over the problem of administrative backlog was no longer a feasible strategy. Consider, for example, how the dilemma of Gansu fiscal commissioner Xu Qi (1685–1765) unfolded. When Fiscal Commissioner Xu came to Beijing for an imperial audience on retiring from his post, he reported that the cases in his office were fully cleared. This sort of report was—in all likelihood—considered a perfunctory formality by the average provincial official at the time. However, when the replacement commissioner, Asha (1707–76), arrived in 1747, he quickly reported to Beijing that there were “several hundred” unfinished cases piled up in the yamen.23 The Qianlong emperor instructed each of the 22. See, for example, the Jiaqing emperor’s 1800 edict on settling self-handled litigation in the provinces to reduce opportunities for extortion and suffering among commoners, at JQSL 5.R4.8: 2; a memorial specifically focusing on tax collection as a problem of the accumulation of cases, at QLSL 15.7.20: 2; and a complaint that there were more than 600 unresolved cases in the office of the director-general of grain transport, at JQSL 5.3.4: 5. 23. QLSL 12.4.23: 3.

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capital ministries to check their own records. An account of the open cases assigned to each of the two men was drafted, and both were admonished for factual errors in their representations. In a familiar routine, a wave of frustration with the “fixed practices” associated with so-called bureaucratic custom emerged soon after new information about administrative patterns was made avail­able to the throne. Without realizing the incredible bureaucratic accomplishment that these problems reflected, the Qianlong emperor pressed high officials in the territories to enforce even more bureaucratic discipline among their rank and file. On October 22, 1749, the Qianlong emperor, in response to a suggestion from the Grand Council, decreed that the deadlines for handling affairs in the ministries were too loose and ordered them shortened.24 In the same edict he also declared that the governors of the provinces should similarly reduce their internal deadlines for handling cases. Some governors responded that deadlines could not possibly be reduced any further, to which the Qianlong emperor countered with the accusation that those governors were guilty of perfunctory performance of their duties and an inability to turn their administrations around. The protesters were referred to the Ministry of Personnel for administrative sanction.25 The pressure was felt most keenly at the gubernatorial level, where many of the cases being counted were linked to unresolved cases in subordinate offices. A simple report on the number of unresolved or delayed cases in the provincial yamen was a rough but compelling snapshot of the administrative competence of the entire provincial bureaucracy. A high number would place the entire administration of a province under scrutiny. Voluntary reports on caseloads began arriving in Beijing with increasing frequency from the late 1740s forward, often from provincial-level officials preemptively defending themselves against later critique. On November 8, 1749, for example, recently appointed ­governor-­​ general of Liangjiang Huang Tinggui (1691–1759) sent a memorial complaining about the case backlog he discovered in his new administration.26 24. QLSL 14.9.12: 2. 25. QLSL 15.8.7: 2. 26. QLSL 14.9.29: 7.

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He accused the previous officeholder, Governor-General Yengišan (1694–​ 1771), of having left a mess that could not be straightened out. Huang reported that the “perfunctory performance of administrators” in the region had led to delays amounting to years or even decades in their handling of imperially mandated cases and protested that the preexist­ ing lack of discipline in the administration made his job as ­governor-​ general impossible. Yengišan was allowed to retain his current post as governor-general of Gansu and Shaanxi, but he received a warning that he should “not tread his former path,” and the Qianlong emperor vowed to keep tabs on him. In that case and other such reports, including a strikingly similar complaint from Huang on his assumption of another new post in 1753 as acting governor-general of Sichuan, newly appointed territorial ­supervisors could file a protest about a preexisting case backlog as a prophylactic against later accusations of a lack of discipline under their own administrations.27 Many of the reports about cases piling up in the provinces from this early period, therefore, led to no particular repercussions except for the occasional exhortative command to outgoing officials to change their ways. Nevertheless, information about case backlogs could have repercussions for those involved. In 1758, recently appointed acting governor of Hubei Zhuang Yougong (1713–67) reported that the arrests of wanted criminals in the province were habitually late and therefore piling up— and that indeed there were unresolved cases from more than five years before, as well as homicide and banditry cases from previous administrations. He complained that his commands to finish up these affairs were taken by local officials as an “empty letter” and accused them of habitually delaying for four to five years the resolution of cases slated

27. In his 1753 complaint, Huang claimed that there were “more than two hundred” homicide and banditry cases—some dating back as much as five years— sitting unresolved in his new office. Furthermore, he noted, all manner of cases— pertaining both to punishment and to revenue—had been granted deadline exemptions under his predecessor whenever military campaigns led to exigent circumstances. There were several thousand affairs, he reckoned, that had yet to be reported back to the ministries. QLSL 18.11.16: 3.

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for central review.28 Zhuang charged, further, that large numbers of prisoners were dying from sickness while waiting for trial. The Qianlong emperor insisted that all of the officials named in these accusations be given sanctions. The report of a superior official concerned about taking the fall for uncooperative subordinates could, therefore, result in discipline by the central state. But the problems raised in Acting Governor-General Zhuang’s memorial could not be resolved with a slap on the wrist for a few delinquent local officials. As the Qianlong emperor opined in his rescript on Governor-General Zhang’s memorial, “If one province is like this, the [situation in] other provinces may be easy to discern [from this example] (一省如此。他省可知).” He ordered that the Ministry of Punishments thoroughly examine all of the summary reports pertaining to cases submitted for central review in recent years. The ministry found that two provinces, Jiangxi and Gansu, had “supplemented” their reports a year after the fact. Several others—Zhili, Anhui, Guangxi, and Shaanxi—had filed late reports; Hunan stood out as consistently late. The Qianlong emperor ordered that all of the governors-general, governors, and judicial commissioners who had served in these administrations, and all of the officials of the Ministry of Punishments who had failed to report the problem, be referred to the Ministry of Personnel for administrative sanctions. By the nineteenth century, an entire world of administrative activity previously concealed from the view of the central state began to appear on the imperial radar as a “piling up” of cases in the provinces. Beijing received more and more reports of cases accumulating in yamen throughout the territories. By the end of the eighteenth century, reports of case backlogs reached sometimes shocking proportions.29 In

28. QLSL 23.11.12: 5. 29. One can find examples, by the nineteenth century, of not only case backlogs but also backlogs of transfer procedures in the provinces, meaning that even the accounting of archival and fiscal integrity for each office could not be resolved. Governor of Guangxi Zou Minghe (1793–1853), for example, reported in 1851 that there were more than 200 incomplete transfers still active in the province when he reported to his office. XFSL 1.8.29: 4.

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1788, Hubei Province was singled out for having more than 600 unresolved cases, some dating back almost a decade.30 The pressure of mounting caseloads and the inevitability that someone, eventually, would have to take the fall for backlogs in the provinces fundamentally shifted the incentives of officials in the provinces. For more than a century it had generally been in the interest of officials from the county to the provincial capital to conceal as many administrative foibles as possible from watchful eyes in Beijing. But the expanding net of information began to erode the solidarity of provincial officials. They began to cast about for someone—anyone— to take the blame for the problems that were eventually going to come to light.

Sharing Information to Avoid Blame: The Provincial “Prisoner’s Dilemma” Unfortunately for territorial officials, the slow but steady expansion of the empire of routine into provincial yamen led to a vicious cycle. The command to clear up caseloads could be answered superficially, in part by hastily resolving cases using some of the few administrative tricks that the central ministries did not actively monitor. However, any such stopgap effort led to a dilemma for incoming officials: should a new magistrate or governor accept these expedient measures in hopes of successfully covering up the truth? Or would it be safer, in the long run, to write a report and expose the administration, thus avoiding individual responsibility for perhaps generations of mistakes? Increasingly, officials decided to blow the whistle on their subordinates, their predecessors, and sometimes even their superiors. By incentivizing whistleblowers, as more people came forward about backlogs in a given office, more officials in adjacent offices were pressured to come clean as well about the actual conditions on the ground in their own administrations. The now-enhanced link between accountability and discipline meant that provincial officials increasingly decided to report problems before they were detected by the central state—especially if those problems could be blamed on others. In 30. QLSL 53.5.19: 4.

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the era when Beijing could threaten entire provincial administrations with yamen-level audits to explain case-handling errors and cover-ups, the stakes involved in accounting for problems in the provincial administration heightened dramatically. Growing numbers of governors decided to simply reveal the problems of their administrations rather than take the fall for them if they were later discovered by Beijing. Scrutiny and the threat to a promising career could turn provincial officials against one another with surprising rapidity. Once the Qianlong administration started threatening governors with sanctions for the behavior of their subordinates, for example, reports on judicial commissioners who failed to properly perform their duties started filtering into Beijing from governors for the first time. See, for example, the 1751 memorial from Jiangxi governor Šulu (d. 1752) complaining that Judicial Commissioner Xu Yisheng (b. 1694) was “unable to resolve and complete the homicide and banditry cases under his administration, and even in bringing them for interrogation proved himself both confused and incapable [茫無一對]. Truly, he is unable to fulfill his duties as judicial commissioner.”31 On reading this report, the Qianlong emperor expressed his disappointment for the lack of gratitude that Xu demonstrated for his post (which had been given to him as a steep promotion) and his lack of familiarity with the law, as he had previously served in the Censorate. Xu was cashiered on the grounds of “ingratitude toward imperial grace and ineptitude in performing his duties (負恩溺職).” For the first time in the Qing, provincial governors started providing information about the failings of their own judicial commissioners, to prevent being later charged themselves with failing to observe and report such issues.32 More and more, high-level officials began to decide that a cover-up might not be worth the risk.

31. QLSL 16.8.3: 5. 32. For another example, see the memorial on judicial commissioner of Hubei Xu Lin by Huguang governor-general Selengge, at QLSL 12.4.7: 2. In yet another example—from 1747—a governor’s reports on the discovery of suspicious case-making practices at the local level in Jiangxi resulted in not only a sanction for the county magistrate and prefect involved but also a stern warning to the judicial commissioner by the Qianlong emperor. See QLSL 12.4.14: 4.

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Information Sharing and Policy Proliferation In addition to sharing information about bureaucratic backlogs in other offices under their administration, officials in the territories also began, in the Qianlong era, to propose detailed administrative reforms based on the now-constant demand that the heads of provincial administrations take stock of problems in their own administrative pipeline. The Qianlong era saw a boom in policies designed to tackle problems of delay that had been revealed through new reporting channels. Many of these policies were put forth by provincial officials, who were increasingly incentivized to reveal their own observations about causes of delay in their explanations for administrative issues that were now subject to scrutiny by the central state.33 Any local experiment or proposal to streamline administration could be reported to Beijing as a sign of good faith and immediately sent out to be implemented in other provinces. As with the information-to-regulation cycle discussed in chapter 2, the reporting on previously unreported cases made it possible to explore even more forms of reporting and accountability. In 1765, for example, Anhui judicial commissioner Min Eyuan (d. 1797) pointed out a common pitfall for provincial officials attempting to hold their subordinates accountable for the arrest of suspects in banditry cases. Since administrative sanctions were demanded only for cases that had already entered the path toward central review, some provincial officials had been able to avoid punishment for long-delayed cases because arrests that had not yet occurred were not being monitored. Min proposed that this problem of pre-reporting delays might be resolved if each judicial commissioner’s office had to prepare a list of open and unresolved banditry cases at the end of each calendar year: “None of the officials responsible for handling the investigations would dare to delay past the deadline, and governors, furthermore, would not delay investigating [cases being handled below them]—in this manner,

33. It is no coincidence, I would argue, that many famous reformers among provincial administrators, such as Chen Hongmou, came to the fore in this era. On Chen’s career, see Rowe, Saving the World.

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criminals can avoid unnecessary suffering (庶承審官不敢遲延逾限。 督撫亦不敢怠於稽查。人犯可免拖累。).”34 Another example is the 1766 proposal of Jiangsu governor Mingde (d. 1806), who tackled one of the most commonly delayed categories of cases: cross-jurisdictional banditry.35 Governor Mingde began his proposal by remarking on why such cases often led to delays: “Every province has experienced the problem of capturing a bandit in one jurisdiction who confesses during his deposition to having partners in another town. Sometimes such cases even involve multiple provinces. The criminal must be sent from one location to another to provide a deposition.”36 This situation created a problem, for when a criminal was sent back and forth, the time required to resolve the case grew longer. Governor Mingde proposed a solution: “The cases should be handled separately [in each province].” This could be accomplished by requiring jurisdictions across provincial boundaries to communicate at important points in each investigation. “If the partners have not been apprehended,” Governor Mingde proposed, “then the victim of the crime should be sought out to testify about the facts of the previous case [in the other jurisdiction in which they had just testified], and a copy should be sent to the arresting jurisdiction, which will take responsibility for handling the combined cases.” This policy split the responsibility for handling cross-jurisdictional banditry cases based on which jurisdictions captured which members of the roaming gangs. Maintaining separate-but-related cases in distinct jurisdictions greatly reduced the possibility that cases would ­remain open for years, since a case involving multiple suspects and multiple victims in multiple jurisdictions required that every loose end be tied before the resulting “perfect case” was sent to Beijing. Simply articulating responsibility for each section within a larger overarching case and buttressing the ties between jurisdictions with reporting requirements allowed provincial administrations to pursue the sections of each case for which they could be most directly responsible. Breaking down the administrative processes for cases with complicated 34. QLSL 30.8.8: 2. 35. FHA 04-01-01-0265-020. 36. QLSL 31.9.13: 1.

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jurisdictional dimensions allowed officials to standardize the handling of smaller steps and avoid common delays. By providing more information about cases mid-processing, procedural bottlenecks could be confronted and particular components broken down for handling by smaller units of administrative responsibility. The collection of information about cases before, beyond, and ­below central review introduced a new dynamic to the relationship between the central state and the heads of provincial administrations. As inefficiencies, errors, and delays in everyday provincial operations became increasingly difficult to conceal from the central state, highplaced officials in the territories were incentivized to share their administrative experience with Beijing. The two examples just discussed represent a small sample from the flood of recommendations for basic administrative reforms that began to arrive in Beijing in the middle of the eighteenth century from governors and commissioners in the provinces. As the central state began to access and respond to provincial reporting networks, territorial officials were encouraged to make policy suggestions to improve technical administrative procedures whose flaws might have long been known at the local level but had been only recently exposed to the central administration.

The Case-ification of the Qing Bureaucracy Most of the new types of cases piling up on the desks of the supervising territorial officials and Beijing ministers were not unfiltered copies of original information. They were the summaries of information now being generated and processed at lower levels of the bureaucracy. Every new type of case in a supervising yamen entailed a demand for informa­ tion from a lower level of the bureaucracy and a requirement that both the supervisory and the supervised offices synchronize their information about the processes under review. The case became a generic unit for tracking and describing the mass of affairs being handled and scrutinized in each local administration. The rise of summary case dossiers on a growing list of supervised administrative affairs, then, represented the spread of interlocking routines connecting the Qing distributed archive. Instead of simply

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funneling more unfiltered information from the provinces into the capital to replicate the labor of provincial supervising offices, the real coup of the Qing administrative revolution was the proliferation of interlocking cases across the distributed imperial archive. At every node of the provincial bureaucracies, cases linking superior and subordinate yamen both demanded and reflected forms of administrative accountability that tightly bound offices in the territories in a web of accountability. The heads of state—governors in the provinces and the emperor and his advisers in the center—could now focus on looking for aberrations not just in single cases but in system-wide patterns. This was all made possible by the case-ification of the entire Qing administration.

A Case for Everything: Routinization beyond Punishment This study has documented the extent to which the Qing dynasty’s unexpected administrative revolution in the eighteenth century reconceptualized the local archive and synchronized processes in the provinces according to a uniform logic centered on the highly routinized tasks underlying the central review of cases pertaining to punishment. Historians might, then, conceive of this form of centralization as the routinization of a legal system. But it was much more than that, for this routinization and all that it entailed did not occur in the realm of punishment cases alone. Indeed, the documentary reforms and regulatory expansion discussed in the preceding chapters bore on the processing of affairs under the governance of all six imperial ministries: revenue, war, rites, personnel, and works, in addition to punishment. The expansion of the reporting apparatus to tasks tangential to the review of punishment cases was, therefore, only one strand in a much larger story of the synchronization of the entire Qing administration. The “legal case” format—embedding direct quotes from the reports of multiple yamen in summary memorials, which were then evaluated by the ministries for both the resolution of an administrative duty and the scrutiny of those who handled it—was not novel to sentencing proposals. In fact, the conventions in the administration of justice were analogous to, connected to, and borrowed from the conventions of case

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review in the other central ministries. The scholar well versed in the routine punishment memorials used for the study of Qing legal history, for example, might be surprised to know that Helen Dunstan’s description of “long, concertina-like documents . . . [containing] exten­ sive, meticulous transcription[s] of previous correspondence on the issue . . . and repetition . . . [resulting from] obsessive copying and ­recopying” is actually based on her examination of routine revenue memorials, whose basic features recall in every way the “legal cases” processed by the Ministry of Punishments.37 The existence of a single overarching technology for handling cases meant that innovations in one field could easily be translated to reforms in another. Reforms in the realm of criminal case review inspired modifications in the reporting methods of other ministries. And innovations in other ministries—especially in the field of revenue reporting—were often the inspiration for changes to reports pertaining to punishment. The critical observation of this chapter is that the under­ lying framework within which all these innovations unfolded—the case itself—was the same. By procedural necessity, in the empire of routine where every action had to be documented in the appropriate yamen archive, every single task of local administration reviewed and ruled upon by the central administration was documented as a case in a ministerial yamen linked to a case in a provincial yamen.38 Outside of those affairs decided via extraordinary petitions to the throne, any proposal or request to c­ entral-​ state authorities could travel up to the capital for a decision and back down to the provinces for implementation only through a series of inter­ locking cases recorded in the yamen involved. This basic tenet was a defining feature of the late imperial distributed archive. Historians of China tend to regard the case as a category of legal history. One reason is that cases dealing with punishment did, indeed, 37. Dunstan, “About as Interesting as the Telephone Directory,” 643. 38. For a very detailed illustration of this principle, see the explanation of the memorializing and decision-making process in Fairbank and Têng, “Types and Uses of Ch’ing Documents.” This generalization also holds true—although according to a slightly different administrative logic—for the metropolitan and military jurisdictions, whose lines of communication and decision making were distinct from but analogous to those for civil affairs.

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represent a vast amount of the total caseload of the central bureaucracy. According to one estimate, more than 600,000 routine memorials pertaining to punishment are currently preserved in the First Historical Archives of Beijing: a number almost equal to the total of all other types of routine memorials combined.39 Moreover, documents concerning disputes, especially those involving violence, have proven ­appealing to scholars of social and comparative history. However, this has led to the study of “legal cases” as something related to law, outside of the all-encompassing logic of the case.40 This misapprehension has hobbled our understanding of how the expansion of the case-­centered regime of routine transformed the entire field of Qing administration over the course of the eighteenth century. In spite of the wide range of subjects and jurisdictional boundaries that separated cases across administrative domains, the basic logic of their handling was the same. Even the terms used to describe the case-​ handling process were employed across the various administrative functions being reported in centrally reviewed cases. The language associated with “legal cases,” then, was not a legal language; it was the language of routine. One can find the central ministries discussing military-expense cases as being “handled (ban 辦)” and considered “unresolved (wei jie 未結)” if they had not yet been approved by the central ministries.41 Corruption cases were “handled,” “investigated (shen 審),” and then “reviewed (核 he),” “deliberated (yi 議),” and “resolved ( jue or jie 決 or 結)” in the ministries, just as capital punishment cases were.42 These cases, furthermore, could contain “testimony (kougong 口供)” and “deliberations (kanyu 看語).”43 These words are often 39. For this number and the totals for other types of cases, see Park and Antony, “Archival Research.” 40. An earlier effort to think about the genre of the case was made in Furth, Zeitlin, and Hsiung, Thinking with Cases, but the impact of this volume was not pronounced in the legal field, where the discussion of the case seems to have been little changed by the intervention. 41. For just one such example, see QLSL 7.6.24: 1. 42. See QLSL 13.3.23: 3 and QLSL 18.5.13: 2. 43. For an example of these terms being used to describe a case other than a sentencing proposal, see Important Points on Judicial Procedure, “On Impeachment Cases (論參案).”

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translated differently by historians, depending on whether they are perceived as legal terms. However, their uniformity in original documents across the legal/nonlegal divide attests to the fact that the language of case handling covered the administrative spectrum from law to grain prices and court rituals. A “case” was the basis for every routine bureaucratic action. In other words, the documents scholars have been studying for more than a century as the “legal cases” of the Qing dynasty have the exact same format and function as centrally reviewed affairs in every ministry of the Qing state. The technology of the “legal case,” long studied primarily as evidence of the existence or absence of certain features of a Qing legal system, was in fact an administrative technology that, by the end of the eighteenth century, united an empire of routine whose function revolutionized the relationship between central and local state processes. Only when we understand the centralization of the administration of justice in the first hundred years of the Qing dynasty as part of an exponentially larger centralization of all cases and their administrative processes, in both the capital and the territorial bureaucracies, can we fully appreciate the dramatic achievements and dilemmas of the middle of the eighteenth century.

The Rise of a Case-Centered Approach to Governance The synchronization of archives and the standardization of reporting practices made expanding the scope of oversight and response easier than ever before imagined. New realms of administrative regulation could be added to the expanding network of routine that connected yamen throughout the empire to the capital. Regulations about case handling could be applied to any section or to all “imperially mandated affairs (欽件 qin jian)” or “ministerial affairs (部件 bu jian)” throughout the empire. Those designed to ease the burden and reduce redundancies in one area of administrative oversight were increasingly applied across the administrative spectrum. The creation of standards for producing data destined for the throne and the ministries meant that—by the eighteenth century—ever more realms of administration could be added into the information stream from the provinces to the capital.

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Table 1. Instances of the character for “case (案)” in the Veritable Records Reign

Total no. of characters

Shunzhi

1,057,840

261

0.02

Kangxi

2,386,811

652

0.03

Yongzheng

1,407,321

745

0.05

14,422,285

18,877

0.13

Qianlong

Instances of “case (案)”

Percent of total

Source: Corpus tallies of the character for “case” in the Shunzhi, Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong Veritable Records, calculated using the AntConc corpus analysis toolkit, with extrapolated percentages.

Over the course of the Qing, the types and numbers of cases being reported to and tracked in Beijing increased exponentially. The preceding century of reforms allowed the central state to “case-ify” entire swaths of administrative action in the territories. A simple demand that an administrative action be documented and reported meant that the rules of the case could be applied. All cases reported through routine administrative channels to the Six Ministries could, by virtue of their common documentary procedures, be governed by the case-handling process set forth in Qing regulations.44 Defining an affair as a “case” entailed a whole host of expectations and documentary requirements that linked the local handling of some issue to various central processes. By the Qianlong era, the language of the case had completely colonized the administration. Table 1 ­records the total number of characters in the Veritable Records for the first four Qing emperors and the total instances of the character for “case (案),” as well as the percentage of all characters the word “case” represents in each reign period. Use of the word “case” increased more than fivefold over the period, from two times per 1,000 characters in the Shunzhi-era Veritable Records to thirteen instances per 1,000 characters in the Qianlong-era Veritable Records. The visual results from a summary created with concordance software are even more striking. In figure 8, the four lines in the histogram

[C ab

44. See the regulations on the deadlines for “all memorialized affairs in every yamen and office,” at DQHD: 都察院, 各道, 註銷限期.

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Fig. 8.  A concordance plot illustrating instances of the character for “case” in the Shunzhi, Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong Veritable Records. Generated with the AntConc corpus analysis toolkit.

illustrate the frequency of the term in the Veritable Records of each court in chronological order (the Shunzhi period being on top, followed by the Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong periods). Instances of the term comprised a relatively stable and low proportion of the characters in the Veritable Records of the Shunzhi and Kangxi eras but increased sharply at the end of that period. The rate of use almost doubled during the Yongzheng era, rising from a frequency of 0.03 percent (652 of the 2,386,811 characters in the Kangxi Veritable Records) to 0.05 percent (745 of the 1,407,231 characters in the Yongzheng Veritable Records). The frequency then more than doubled in the Qianlong era, to 0.13 percent (18,877 instances among the 14,422,285 characters in the Qianlong Veritable Records), as the language and routines of case handling ­expanded throughout the realm. By the Qianlong era, the word “case” appeared once in roughly every 100 characters, compared with twice per 1,000 characters during the first two reign periods. Fields of

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governance that had never before been known or regulated were “case-ified” as regulations on their documentation, reporting, and handling connected them to the empire of routine. By the second half of the eighteenth century a remarkable range of affairs—previously handled according to local administrative ­practice—were being documented and reported according to imperial case-handling procedures. The collecting, reporting, and auditing of taxes were handled as cases. So were requests for tax forgiveness after a natural disaster and plans for famine relief, as well as reports on the price of rice in the provinces. Requests to issue degrees and titles in exchange for donations were treated as cases, as were licenses for Buddhist and Daoist monks. Reports on the requisition of and payment for military supplies were handled as cases, along with those pertaining to the construction of bureaucratic offices and the maintenance of canals and bridges, work relief schemes, the appointment and rewarding of native chieftaincy officials, and reports on harvests. Payments for transit costs were cases, as well as seed loans for the reclamation of land or recovery after a natural disaster, labor requisitions, information on settlement and migration, and impeachment proceedings, to name just a few examples. Any routine affair memorialized to the throne or forwarded to the ministries for handling was a case in the capital as well as the original yamen and in several supervising territorial offices between the two. The proliferation of these interlocking cases and the empire-wide standards for creating and reporting on them represented nothing short of an administrative revolution. The rise of the discourse of the case and the expansion of documentary and archival standards associated with case handling and reporting meant that large fields of bureaucratic regulation could be overseen by the central ministries without demanding the time and participation of an imperial council. Affairs that had previously required deliberation of the emperor and the Grand Council before handling in the ministries routinely became routine matters. Information that adhered to predictable standards could be analyzed by the ministries before being presented to the throne—and when presented, it might be reported in aggregate rather than serially. As case routines expanded and became more predictable, a large proportion of the affairs previously presided over by the emperor were moved onto ministerial dockets. In 1787, even

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personnel review was switched to the routine track: provinces were told to communicate their evaluations directly to the ministries rather than in memorials to the throne.45 These gains in standardization not only increased the amount of information arriving in Beijing but also changed the way that information was processed, consumed, and understood.

Conclusion The achievement of the Kangxi era had been a victory in the struggle simply to demand information about centrally reviewed cases from the provinces in a uniform and timely fashion. The host of administrative regulations designed to win this battle had led to a proliferation of affairs for which provincial and metropolitan officials were held responsible: applying for and tracking case-handling deadlines, reporting case resolutions or delays, finding and proposing sanctions for officials who broke regulations, and so on. The Yongzheng emperor turned the possibility of creating interlocking systems of review and audit into a reality by insisting that case dossiers themselves overlap and be interwoven in reporting cycles that were synchronized with the ministries and therefore became available for scrutiny at the level of each office. By the Qianlong era, these innovations had so thoroughly communicated the central state’s language of routine to the provinces that massive fields of administrative action in the territories—the majority of which had never before been reported to the central state—could be swiftly integrated with the routines of the central bureaucracy. The new reports from the provinces and the novel ways of aggregating data featured in this chapter are simply a few examples of the multitude of new methods that appeared in the Qianlong era for reporting on and measuring provincial administrations. Evidence of the processes that combined to both expand and tighten the net of centralized supervision over local administrative activities is as abundant as it is banal. Documents like those discussed in this chapter have 45. See this regulation from the fifty-second year of the Qianlong reign, at DQHD: 吏部, 處分例, 大計統例.

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probably popped up in the search results and the casual browsing of hundreds if not thousands of Qing historians working in the archives. Given their underwhelming, sparse appearance, lacking salacious anec­dotes and containing only mute tallies, they have rarely been used or cited. But no matter how minuscule an individual report may seem, by the end of the eighteenth century the routinization of the bureaucracy exposed the territorial administrations in even the farthest reaches of the empire to the scrutiny of the central state. New reports, new routines, and new information could be demanded in every facet of administration. The work of provincial bureaucracies could be measured. Individual offices were accountable for the scrutiny of interlocking streams of case reports. Both the piling up and the handling of cases became easy, if rough, indicators of a host of potential problems in the territorial administrations. And any official in the imperial bureaucracy could get caught in the net.

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Chapter Five

When the Problem Is the Solution The Extraordinary Trouble with Pursuing Certainty

B

y the middle of the eighteenth century the archival and reporting technologies that linked provincial offices to the central court made it possible to peer beyond administrative thresholds that had been impassable in previous eras. Each succeeding generation of emperors and officials in Beijing knew more about affairs in the empire than their predecessors had. But the expansion of the Qing empire of routine did not simply make more information available to Beijing for supervising a broader array of administrative tasks in the territories. The proliferation of reporting standards, the synchronization of the distributed archive, and the spread of case-based accounting for a growing number of administrative tasks fundamentally altered the data ecology of the Qing state. As a result, the stakes and dimensions of central review shifted radically. This chapter explores how two achievements in the informationgathering campaigns of the Qing led to a mounting sense of crisis by the end of the eighteenth century. These two phenomena were straightforward outcomes of the administrative reforms that had built the empire of routine. First, the eighteenth-century central administration finally began to receive constant streams of up-to-date information, in unprecedented amounts, about activities in every yamen of the empire. Second, using these new information streams as points of reference in

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the constellation of data about activities throughout the empire, the ministries in the capital began to employ techniques of archival triangulation (previously possible only on-site and only when documentation existed) to pinpoint the origin, spread, and nature of anomalies spotted in the central review process. Although these two achievements may be, on their own, considered the obvious outcomes of earlier policies, their culmination and combination in the middle of the eighteenth century had novel implications. In essence, enhanced reporting and the possibility of archival triangulation formed an “information trap” for central officials. The Qianlong emperor and his court were now able to learn so much about the administrations in their empire that everything was thrown into doubt. Constant and prolonged waves of suspicion, despair, and scandal dominated the age.

Discipline across the Provincial Divide in the Eighteenth Century An interlocking network of responsibility for the management of provincial affairs now reached all the way from the highest offices of the empire to the county level. As more and more processes in the provinces were documented and reported according to central standards, the tricks once used to delay or cover up local administrative problems were exposed to the scrutiny of officials in Beijing and could be dealt with as personnel issues. The synchronization of documentary processes from county to capital meant that responsibility for even minuscule and everyday problems—missed deadlines, lost reports, late arrivals—was documented more predictably, in greater detail, and in ways that were known (or knowable) to the central administration.

Punishing Reports For more than a century Qing emperors had worried about the intractable problem of delay in the provinces. Regulations condemning delay in the handling of cases were—as discussed in chapter 1—one of the

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earliest components of Qing reform.1 However, although delay was a common and persistent concern for Qing emperors and officials ­worried about provincial administrative problems, the level of oversight required to tighten up administrative standards in local yamen throughout the territories had remained unattainable. The enormous amount of information required to ensure that every official was doing his job in the empire’s thousands of yamen seemed impossible to summon and review at the central-government level. It was only with the spread of archival accountability, in-province audits, summary reports, and imperial routines that the eighteenth-century state was eventually able to gather and process the mass of details pertaining to problems of delay at the local level. According to early Qing regulations, local officials who failed to meet deadlines were to be sanctioned at the discretion of the presiding governor. The notion that the central state might supervise or approve such a common disciplinary problem was unthinkable, in the absence of structures capable of delivering and processing a great deal more information about offices in the provinces than Beijing could claim at the time. Over the course of the Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong reigns, the central court began to require that the provinces report especially egregious deadline infractions. The processing of these reports on sanctions against local officials began to fall under the routine purview of the ministries as early as the late Kangxi era. In 1718, for example, some forms of memorial-based reporting on local officials’ infractions (late arrival at one’s post or failure to complete an arrest in time, for example) were deemed redundant and unnecessary because they were already “fixed to a specific punishment and may be directly referred to the appropriate ministry for sanction, and then followed up by that ministry and reported summarily via memorial (各照定例、咨 明各部處分。該部彙題完結).”2 Reports that had recently fallen under imperial purview were, after their sanctions were fixed, and following a period of direct oversight by the throne, directed first to the ministries for processing and only then to the throne for summary review. 1. Many of the regulations pertaining to deadlines—including those discussed here—can be found at DQHD: 吏部, 處分例, 直省衙門事件限期. 2. KXSL 57.8.19: 2.

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In this manner several new reports on provincial disciplinary measures were first demanded, then routinized, and then handed over to the ministries for processing before presentation to the throne. Slowly but surely, once a few types of infractions fell under reporting requirements, the net was spread.3 By the turn of the Qianlong era, reports from the provinces on sanctions handed down to even the lowest-level officials in the territories were arriving in Beijing from every corner of the empire. At this time, the processing of information about delay was integrated into the daily administrative function of the central ministries. Any capital office receiving information pertaining to delay or error in the territories—whether mentioned incidentally in a case proposing a sentence to the Ministry of Punishments or in a report on infrastructural spending sent to the Ministry of Works or in a campaign narrative sent to the Ministry of War—routinely forwarded the relevant narratives to the Ministry of Personnel for review. The Ministry of Personnel was then responsible for evaluating each infraction and proposing a punishment. Every ten days, the names, ranks, and narratives of the infractions of bureaucrats throughout the empire were summarized in memorials presented to the throne, with recommended sanctions. The types of sanctions that the central administration reviewed in the Qianlong era would have been inconceivable even a decade before. Consider the tally from one report by the Ministry of Personnel for sanctions from one period of ten days in the seventh lunar month of 1735: Fines for delayed handling and investigation: 9 Fines and withheld salary for failure to arrest criminals: 4 Fines for delayed transfer of post: 3 Fines for delayed registers: 4 3. Previously unsupervised disciplining behaviors in the provinces could be brought under imperial supervision. The first demand that delays in the transfer of office be reported to the central state, for example, was from 1698. For the original edict, see KXSL 37.11.23: 2. Sometimes existing sanctions for delay or error were incrementally expanded to new or related areas of concern. For example, the punishment and reporting requirements for “delay in investigating cases” were expanded in 1732 to include instances of “delay in investigating cases” in educational offices at the county level. See YZSL 10.6.1: 3.

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Fines for delayed investigations: 3 Fines for escaped exiled prisoners: 2 Fines for careless delegation: 1 Fines for delayed procurement: 1 Deferred demotion related to failure to prevent the theft of stored vestments: 1 Reports on illness or leave of officials: 1 Total: 304

Local officials were being reported for infractions that had previously gone unpunished or unknown to Beijing. All manner of behaviors ­related to the larger issue of delay were now being tracked, sanctioned, and reported to the ministries. For a sense of the granularity of these reports and the extent to which they represented an unprecedented level of central-state penetration into the local territorial administrations of the empire, two excerpts from a representative report compiled in the fifth lunar month of 1742 serve as examples. One infraction included in the Ministry of Personnel’s report was forwarded by the Ministry of Punishments, as it pertained to a case involving a death. The text of the Ministry of Personnel’s summary follows: The Ministry of Punishments has communicated a report from Zhu Dingyuan, formerly governor of Shandong, to the effect that in the case of Wei County native Chang Jin trampling Liu Chengxiang’s wife, Liu née Wu, to death, the deadline passed without an investigation or transfer of the prisoner. The Wei County magistrate responsible for the delayed investigation, Lai Guangbiao, has been reported to the Ministry of Personnel for sanction. In response to the case, Wei County magistrate Lai Guangbiao, who has delayed investigation for less than one month, should be fined three months’ salary in accord with the relevant statute.5

4. FHA 02-01-03-03326-010. 5. All of the excerpts in this section are translated from the case file at FHA 02-01-03-04029-006.

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The investigation into the death of the wife of Liu Chengxiang was not yet complete. Indeed, the summary deadline for handling the case might not even have arrived. But now that procedures for reporting and monitoring case status at every level had been instituted, if the prefect, circuit intendant, judicial commissioner, and governor responsible for supervising the county office where the case occurred wanted to avoid punishment for any delay that might have resulted from Magistrate Lai’s failure to move the investigation forward, they were incentivized to report the errant local official for his delay. Before even a month had passed, the county officer was fined and reported to the central ministries for failing to act. This was a far cry from the world in which the Shunzhi emperor had struggled to resolve the problems of delay and imprisonment in the early Qing. The next example was forwarded to the Ministry of Personnel by colleagues in the Ministry of Revenue, who had received a report that the transfer of office for a county-level jurisdiction had not been completed on time: The Ministry of Revenue has communicated a report from Gansu governor Huang Tinggui to the effect that acting magistrate of Yongchang County Zhou Shiqing should have completed the registers and pledge for the transfer of office, but had not done so by the conclusion of the deadline. As a result, Zhou Shiqing and Zhang Ye, who is currently serving as acting district magistrate of Yongchang County, delayed transfer protocols and were recommended for impeachment to the Ministry of Personnel. Upon deliberation of the case, it was decided that the acting magistrate of Yongchang County, Zhou Shiqing, who delayed transfer protocols, and the Liangzhou Prefecture prefect, Mie Chengsheng, who failed to properly supervise and hasten [the transfer], should both be fined six months’ salary in accord with the relevant statute. Upon examination, it was further discovered that Mie Chengsheng was already ­cashiered in a previous embezzlement case. The salary fine and sanction should be recorded in his personnel register.

In this case, even an acting official (who had not been formally appointed and was working in the stead of the statutorily appointed officials who occupied the office before and would do so after him) could

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be sanctioned for delaying standard paperwork. Furthermore, when the prefect in charge of supervising the transfer was found to have not sufficiently hastened the process, he too was brought up for charges. When the sanctions against Prefect Mie were brought to the Ministry of Personnel for review, the ministry was able to locate the files on an embezzlement case for which Prefect Mie had already been sanctioned and modify their proposal accordingly. Any project related to a “case” that might be linked to a centrally reviewed affair was likely to be reported by provincial administrators eager not to take the fall for others’ slipups. So much information about local infractions was gathered in Beijing that the ministries could even cross-reference these mentions across ministerial divides. Administrative foibles that would never before have been known to the central state were now not only being reported to Beijing regularly but were also being processed en masse by a Ministry of Personnel that had more information than ever about the state of bureaucratic discipline in the provinces. The central ministries had become involved in the routine discipline of even minor infractions in the territories. The integration and expansion of provincial reporting on personnel infractions for processing by the central ministries was a watershed achievement in the routinization of administrative affairs. The multiplying of links between the central administration and the provinces— once established—was rapid. Reports about the wrongdoings of officials of every rank started to flood offices in Beijing. There were so many ways to lose merit that in 1783 the Qianlong administration had to create a new precedent for negative ranking.6 In the later decades of the eighteenth century, summary reports on delays and errors in the provinces (with occasional cases regarding illness, leave, and the conferral of awards as well) regularly exceeded a hundred pages in length, in spite of their being compiled every ten days. The following table of contents from the report for one ten-day period in the eighth lunar month of 1793 shows how such reporting procedures had expanded over the course of the eighteenth century:

6. QLSL 48.10.2: 1.

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Fines and demotions while remaining in office for delayed handling of affairs: 31 Fines and demotions while remaining in office for failure to arrest criminals: 49 Fines for escaped prisoners sentenced to military exile: 16 Fines for delayed transfer of post: 6 Fines and demotions while remaining in office for delayed registers and registers with mistakes: 20 Fines for failure to protect tax shipments: 3 Fines for failure to pay the balance of miscellaneous revenue categories and the balance of shipment fees: 6 Fines for failure to prevent gambling: 3 Fines for failure to prevent illicit entry into walled areas: 1 Fines for failure to capture a lead bandit: 1 Fines for newly detained criminals dying in custody: 1 Demotions converted into cancellation of honors for failure to protect ferry operations: 1 Fines for incorrectly submitting documents upon arrival at post: 1 Demotions for failure monitor yamen employees handling loot: 1 Fines for failure to discover existing illicit sex and homicide cases upon taking up a post: 1 Fines for insufficient collection of surplus revenue: 1 Demotions while remaining in office for failure to prevent yamen runners from framing commoners as thieves: 1 Fines for failure to find and detain: 1 Fines for interrogating prisoners without due caution: 1 Demotions while remaining in office for not confirming the truth of testimony: 1 Fines for failure to report affairs that ought to be reported: 1 Requests for cancellation of honors: 1 Recovery of office for full payment [of owed sums]: 2 Conferment of honors in recognition of the capture of bandits and the capture of escaped exiled criminals: 3 Total: 1537

In the course of less than two decades, the number of infractions being reported to Beijing had grown by several factors. The sheer numbers of categories of error and delays being reported had also increased 7. FHA 02-01-03-08026-001.

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After the Revolution Table 2. Average number of sanctions reported per ten-day period, 1735–1799 Years 1735–1744

Avg. no. of sanctions in 10 days 65

No. of reports surveyed 120

1745–1754

86

76

1755–1764

102

113

1765–1774

137

91

1775–1784

148

109

1785–1799

166

29

Source: Tallies of administrative sanctions recorded in 538 ten-day summary reports on local officials handling cases, First Historical Archives. Note: The relatively low number of reports surveyed in the period from 1785 to 1799 suggests the final average might be skewed, but the trend of increasing reported sanctions persists.

severalfold. Failing to submit the correct paperwork on arrival at one’s post was by 1793 a reportable offense. Even errors like “failure to prevent illicit entry into walled areas” and “not confirming the truth of testimony,” which could have easily been elided from official reports in the seventeenth century, were now being reported to Beijing. Failures to fully discover open cases during transfer procedures were punished and reported. Even something like a “failure to protect ferry operations” was an infraction that central ministers in Beijing would hear about. This is not to say that all such infractions were reported. Surely many were not. Nevertheless, the incentive to report everyday problems increased along with archival synchronization and reporting schemes. Both the total number and types of infractions reported to Beijing grew by leaps and bounds. Table 2 presents a rough overview of trends in the total number of sanctions assigned for county-level officials between the first year of the Qianlong reign (1735) and the fourth year of the Jiaqing (1799). The infor­mation available to historians today about these processes is incomplete and can be difficult to track down. In spite of the fact that the First Historical Archives in Beijing is awash with such reports, attempts to digitize and catalog these sorts of administrative documents have

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not been carried out systematically. These reports, and many like them, have not been assigned a standard name or classification, in spite of the fact that they were highly consistent from the eighteenth century forward. As a result, many reports have been lost or misclassified. Over the course of a week in the First Historical Archives in Beijing, I was able to locate and extract data from 538 reports covering ten-day periods between the years 1735 and 1799.8 Table 2 records both the number of reports preserved and collected per decade and the average number of sanctions for delay recorded in them. The most obvious and important trend apparent from this snapshot is that reporting of local infractions increased over time. Any given report from the later decades is likely to record a substantially higher number of infractions than were reported for the same period in an earlier year. By the end of the period, the number of infractions reported had grown dramatically. Totals in excess of 400 or even 500 are documented in some reports.9 One summary from the early Jiaqing era reported a remarkable 611 infractions for a single ten-day period at the end of the year.10 8. With apologies to my colleagues: I was informed at the end of that week that my account had been flagged for “overuse,” and that there is apparently a limit to the number of files from which a scholar may transcribe notes in the course of a single day, so this information may not be as easy to compile in the future. 9. Examples include: 436 infractions in the report for the middle third of the twelfth month of the fifty-fourth year of the Qianlong era, at FHA 02-01-03-07830003; 527 infractions reported for the middle third of the twelfth month of the fiftythird year of the Qianlong era, at FHA 02-01-03-07830-001; 531 for the middle third of the twelfth month of the fiftieth year of the Qianlong era, at FHA 02-01-03-07675009; 404 infractions for the middle third of the twelfth month of the fifty-fourth year of the Qianlong era, at FHA 02-01-03-07404-001; 452 infractions in the middle third of the twelfth month of the forty-fourth year of the Qianlong era, at FHA 02-01-0307373-013; 403 infractions in the middle third of the twelfth month of the fortieth year of the Qianlong era, at FHA 02-01-03-07071-001; 527 infractions for the middle third of the twelfth month of the fifty-third year of the Qianlong era, at FHA 02-01-03-07830001; and 535 infractions for the second third of the twelfth month of the fifty-ninth year of the Qianlong era, at FHA 02-01-03-08185-018. It is no coincidence that these high numbers come from the middle part of the last month of the calendar year, as yamen throughout the empire were expected to clear all of their business from the previous twelve months by the new year. 10. See the report of infractions from the middle third of the twelfth month of the sixth year of the Jiaqing era at FHA 02-01-03-08525-002.

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The combined Chinese-Manchu drafts of such summaries could exceed a thousand pages. The Qing state had gone from not knowing how many centrally reviewed cases were not even being reported to Beijing, at the beginning of the dynasty, to gathering information about the most minor mistakes made by administrators at the local level. An official who misplaced a budget report and, consequently, passed a regulated deadline by a month, was now likely to be reported to the ministries. But even this unprecedented level of reporting was not the height of bureaucratic discipline achieved in the eighteenth century. Each new report exposing a deeper layer, or a smaller task, or a more minor incident to Beijing was followed by others, pushing the horizon of visible administrative activity further toward the quotidian and the minuscule.

Knowledge of the Minuscule By the Qianlong era, even reports about the “minuscule officials (weiyuan 微員)” in the provincial bureaucracies were collected in Beijing. These reports included the details of sanctions for officials at the rank of subprefectural magistrate (zhoutong 州同) and below, down to the level of the clerk (li 吏 or dian 典). Consider, in Table 3, the increase in the average number of sanctions recorded from 1735 to 1799 in these monthly reports—culled from 216 records in the First Historical ­A rchive. Nearly every year, the numbers of reported cases climbed (the slight downturn in the last five years of the period possibly being an aberration in the long-term trend or a result of the small number of reports sampled). Rising from reports of sanctions in the single digits in the second year of the Qianlong era, numbers in excess of 100 ­infractions per month were normal by the middle of the period. On occasion, the total exceeded even 200 reported infractions for a single monthly period, an incredible number when one considers that in previous generations none of these infractions would have been reported at all.11 11. See the report on minuscule officials for the twelfth month of the fiftieth year of the Qianlong era, at FHA 02-01-03-07659-002.

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Table 3. Average number of sanctions processed each month for “minuscule officials,” 1735–1799 Years

Average no. of sanctions per month

No. of reports recorded

1735–1744

24

56

1745–1754

46

26

1755–1764

55

55

1765–1774

115

30

1775–1784

122

34

1785–1799

91

15

Source: Data compiled from a set of 216 reports on issuing sanctions for minuscule officials (officials from the level of subprefectural magistrate down to clerk), First Historical Archives. note: The decline in the average number of sanctions in the last five years of the eighteenth century, while curious, and possibly the result of the smaller number of reports sampled, still reflects an average several times higher than in earlier periods.

The categories of sanctions were analogous to those found in the thrice-monthly reports on infractions by county officials. While such reports may appear unremarkable, even dull, their existence signified that the regime of reporting and discipline had crept down the administrative ladder to the lowest levels of the bureaucracy. Even individuals whose appointments were not controlled by Beijing could now be ­perceived, murkily, through the informational infrastructure of the bureaucracy. Like the reports on error and delay discussed in the previous section, the reports to Beijing on sanctions against so-called minuscule officials likely reflect only a tiny portion of the infractions actually occurring on the ground. This information should not be taken as representative of any local reality. The result of this reporting coup was not a sudden and complete knowledge of local administrative happenings. Rather, like all reporting gains, it served as a foundation for later demands and a point of reference for all other claims. The emerging constellation of data points about even mundane administrative facts formed the background against which a critical new type of information gathering emerged.

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Archival Triangulation By the Qianlong era, the central state was capable of acting on aberrations observed in materials submitted for central review by triangulating claims in cases submitted to the capital with the summary information reported up to the ministries from the now-synchronized local archives. The existence of multiple, independent, localized reporting streams and aggregate data in the summaries to Beijing made this possible. Unlike his predecessors, the Qianlong emperor could demand that even small discrepancies noticed during central review—a single illness, for example—be evaluated against information about the handling of cases in the local bureaucracy. One error in a single case could trigger a summary investigation of an entire provincial administration. Small details became important points of entry into a world of information about local practice.

Triangulation and Discipline: Zhili’s Jail Problem Take, for example, the 1757 prison scandal in Zhili, the provincial ­jurisdiction abutting the capital. It began with the death of Fushan, a member of the Bordered Red Banner forces in Tianjin. Fushan had allegedly killed another man in a drunken affray, and he subsequently fell ill while in detention at the county yamen. His illness was first recorded in 1752 and then was reportedly cured three years later, in 1755. This three-year illness was not revealed to the Ministry of Punishments, however, until 1756, when Fushan, still in detention, reportedly fell ill once again and died. His death was reported the next year. On receiving the report of Fushan’s two bouts of illness and eventual death, the Ministry of Punishments reported the case to the emperor, suggesting that the affair be handed over to the Ministry of Personnel for sanctions against the responsible official. The emperor responded with dismay, commenting, “Clearly this is a case in which all of the officials responsible for examining the case responded with their customary delay. They passed several deadlines, and when they finally reported [on the case], they submitted false

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information.”12 In response to the emperor’s suspicions, the Ministry of Punishments investigated the summary statistics on delay and illness among prisoners in all provinces. They found that of the eighty-six cases of prisoner illness reported in delayed cases that year, more than sixty were from Zhili.13 Reflecting on the lack of bureaucratic discipline that had allowed such egregious errors, the Qianlong emperor commanded a careful audit and sanctions for every official in the province responsible for such a miscarriage of justice: “Delay and laziness such as this is an extreme perversion of the way of ‘carefully matching punishment to crime.’ Send the name of every county, supervisory, and provincial official involved in the delay of this case to the Ministry of Personnel, so that they may be sanctioned severely.” This was not just a case of punishment for an administrative infraction but rather a problem of discipline. As the Qianlong emperor stated, “It seems that, if in Zhili a delay of this extent is considered acceptable [lit., is a ‘standing custom’], then truly it cannot be a problem of one case and one alone.” The Qianlong emperor warned the chiefs of all the capital ministries to pay special attention to discrepancies that might alert them to similar reporting errors in future capital review sessions. The governor of Zhili was sternly commanded to clean up these kinds of “substandard old customs (闒茸故習)” in his administration.14 Four months after the initial report of Fushan’s death, the Ministry of Personnel had drafted its full recommendation on delayed reports of prisoner illnesses in Zhili. The Ministry of Personnel’s report detailed the cases of every prisoner who had contracted an illness while detained in Zhili. The bulk of the report spelled out the exact dates on which each prisoner had purportedly fallen ill, in which yamen jails they were housed and under whose tenure, and for how long they were ill. The earliest case discussed went as far back as 1743 (fourteen years before), and the lowest-level officials named in the report were clerks. In one case from Xinhe County, even a clerk who had temporarily stood in as acting magistrate for one month and two days while waiting 12. QLSL 22.11.1: 1. 13. QLSL 22.11.19: 2. 14. QLSL 22.11.19: 3.

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for the arrival of the newly assigned magistrate was cited. The memorial detailing the infractions and recommended sanctions was more than 200 pages long (52 pages of Chinese and 167 pages of translation into Manchu). After this extensive accounting, sanctions were proposed for every individual who presided over a yamen in which a prisoner ailed in detention for longer than the allowed window before a report was required. Of those who had been caught in the dragnet, more than a dozen officials were pardoned because the amount of time prisoners in their jurisdiction were ill did not exceed the statutory limit. ­Twenty-​ three officials who had been in charge of jurisdictions in which a prisoner was sick for more than six months (but less than two years) were cashiered but allowed to remain at their posts. Nine local officials were cashiered because a prisoner in the jurisdiction they presided over was ill for more than two years. Even after sanctions were carefully meted out to each individual official guilty of failing to report or respond to a prisoner’s illness, the number of officials deemed responsible demanded a more systemic response. In their comments on the file, Ministry of Personnel officials remarked that “it is, indeed, the ‘bureaucratic custom’ of Zhili to delay—this is not a problem of one case alone. This, furthermore, is something that happens in every province, and not in small numbers (直隸既有此迨緩積習必不至一案而各省似此者亦復不少).”15 The egregious nature of Zhili’s problem, in particular, and the fact that it stemmed from a common administrative disease, made it an especially appealing case with which to set an example for others. Therefore, in addition to a post-by-post, tenure-by-tenure reckoning for every local official responsible for leaving sick prisoners languishing in jail, the report also detailed the failures of supervisory officials. The prefectural official involved in the Fushan case was accused of “purposeful foot-dragging” for failing to demand a resolution earlier and was ­removed from his new post in the Ministry of Revenue. Three supervising prefectural officials were fined one year’s salary each for failing to review the cases of ailing prisoners in a timely fashion. Finally, in a dramatic gesture, Zhili’s previous governor-general and judicial 15. FHA 02-01-03-05511-003.

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commissioner were punished for multiple instances of “not vigorously supervising and hastening [the resolution of a case]”—twenty-six ­infractions in all, resulting in a suspension of salary for a grand total of eleven years each. The Ministry of Personnel’s ability to rely on a network of archived files and reporting trails to reconstruct office-level accountability for each claim in a memorial would have been unthinkable a century before. In many ways, the Qianlong-era administration’s power to track problems down to the office level was exactly the sort of outcome that the preceding century of Qing reporting policies had aimed to deliver. By the Qianlong era, every claim and every character in every document arriving in Beijing could in theory—with some effort—be traced back to a particular office and a particular moment in time by navigating back through the network of interlocking reports and archives. Any part of a memorial could be located as a precise moment in the interaction of multiple data streams. Irregularities, anomalies, and lacunae in memorials to the throne that would have previously been irreconcilable sources of consternation for Beijing now presented concrete opportunities for investigation. Compared with Ming-era and early Qing audits conducted by roaming censors in the provinces, which also continued in this time and which could pinpoint problems using local interviews and archives, the central state’s use of aggregate data reported from the provinces not only gave these investigations traction in the capital but also presented the central administration with the opportunity to catch the officials involved when reported information did not match local records. What previously could be perceived at the center only as the specter of “bureaucratic custom” was now revealed in high-fidelity archival resolution. The portraits of provincial administrations that emerged out of these new sources of information seemed far more sinister and foreboding than the bogeyman of the wicked clerk, the caricature of the overwhelmed governor, or the imagination of offices pushing out piles of paperwork in a rote manner that had pervaded in earlier eras. Small anomalies could be unraveled to reveal exactly the sort of largescale efforts to conceal inconvenient facts that had been suspected—but could not be confirmed—in earlier eras. As the central state dug deeper into local archives in its search for the truth, it unearthed information

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about local administrations that only pushed the central court into a more desperate search for certainty.

Homophones, Homicide, and Revelation via Triangulation The first clue that something was afoot in Hubei made its way to the emperor’s desk in 1761. In the spring of that year, Sungcun (1724–95), a member of the Bordered Blue Banner serving as the general of Jingzhou, reported to the Qianlong emperor via memorial that Hubei governor Zhou Wan (b. 1698) was not a trustworthy official. “His words and his actions are in conflict with one another (言行予盾),” Sungcun reported.16 “He makes a false show of traits that he does not possess. He is equipped with some minor intelligence. But he always depends on what talent he has to think up little tricks to advance. He has become infected with the wicked customs of officials in the provinces (矯飾外 貌。小有聰慧。往往恃才用巧。漸染外任陋習).” Zhou Wan already had a particular profile. He had narrowly avoided several scandals on his rise to the governorship. While serving in the Ministry of Punishments in the 1730s, Zhou had been implicated in a bribery case but was later exonerated.17 He eventually went on to hold several high-level provincial appointments in the southwest.18 While serving as judicial commissioner of Sichuan he was reprimanded, in one of the post-assizes ritual castigations, for his sloppy handling of that year’s cases.19 In spite of that fumble, by 1757 he had worked his way up to his first governorship, in Guizhou. In 1759 a scandal shook the provincial administration during his tenure, but Zhou Wan remained unscathed.20 By the time the affair came to light, he had 16. QLSL 26.3.27: 4. 17. See QLSL 1.6.12: 1 and 2.2.13: 2. 18. Zhou had been a circuit intendant in northern Sichuan before being promoted to judicial commissioner of Yunnan in 1751 (QLSL 16.7.17: 1). Protesting that his ill mother required his attention, Zhou turned down the post and was instead promoted to the position of judicial commissioner in Sichuan (QLSL 16.10.11: 3). 19. QLSL 18.10.14: 2. 20. For a summary of the incident—involving a misappropriation of public funds by members of the province’s military administration—see QLSL 24.11.21: 2.

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already been transferred to a new position as governor of Hubei. He had been in that post for two years when Sungcun filed his complaint to the Qianlong emperor. In response, the emperor remarked that he, too, had noted the checkered past of Governor Zhou. “We have had mild suspicions,” the Qianlong emperor remarked in a rescript.21 “If, this time, he has truly committed malfeasance out of selfish interest, then send an impeachment memorial. If there is no major scandal,” however, the emperor added, “wait for Us to sanction him gently for each offense.” The Qianlong emperor concluded: “Memorialize [on the affair] secretly.” Sungcun’s allegations were lodged at a crucial moment in the provincial administration: the eve of the transfer of the province’s highest post, the governor-generalship of “Huguang,” the combined provinces of Hunan and Hubei. Indeed, just as Governor-General Suchang (d. 1768) vacated his office in the month following Sungcun’s report, the outgoing governor-general sent a secret memorial to the throne condemning Governor Zhou for his treachery and poor character.22 The Qianlong emperor explicitly instructed Aibida (1748–88), the Mongol bannerman appointed to Suchang’s former post, to look into the allegations when he arrived in the provincial capital of Wuchang. Shortly after arriving at his new post, Governor-General Aibida filed his report. In addition to confirming his predecessor’s suspicions about Governor Zhou’s character, Aibida revealed that Governor Zhou was responsible for some discrepancies in the provincial accounts, having failed to report several crop failures that should have been memorialized to the throne. Furthermore, Governor Zhou’s tendency to “conceal information from his superiors” had spread to his subordinates: Governor-General Aibida had discovered that two officials, Gui County magistrate Zhao Taijiao and his supervising prefect, Fobaozhu, had abused their authority in handling cases at the local level and had tried to cover it up.23 As a result of their actions, two innocent men had been put on trial. 21. QLSL 26.3.27: 4. 22. QLSL 26.8.12: 3. 23. Confusingly for those reading in English and transliterated Chinese, the jurisdiction in question is named Guizhou (歸州), which is a homophone with the

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Governor Zhou was removed from his post and exiled to Xinjiang. On the damning report about Governor Zhou, the Qianlong emperor commented: “From his position as an official in the Ministry of Punishments, because he had some talent, he was promoted in spite of his minimal experience. He should have applied all of his efforts to the post out of a feeling of gratitude [for this extraordinary appointment].”24 But the Qianlong emperor’s grace had not been treated with the reverence it deserved. “Instead,” the emperor continued, “in handling the affairs of the territory, he proved incapable of empathy and aid, he acted with wanton abandon, and he harbored wicked subordinates. He witnessed the suffering of the people with indifference. Truly,” the Qianlong emperor concluded, “this is an example of utterly failing to shoulder the responsibilities of an assignment.” Tang Pin (1706–1769), then serving as the fiscal commissioner of Jiangxi, was ordered to take up the post of governor of Hubei in Zhou Wan’s stead. Zhao Taijiao and Fobaozhu were impeached. From a personnel perspective, the matter was resolved in accordance with the findings of the provincial investigation. But in his rescript the Qianlong emperor noted several inconsistencies in the account of what, precisely, had gone wrong in the Gui County case.25 Discrepancies existed between Aibida’s accusations, on the one hand, and Governor Zhou’s original memorial impeaching the behaviors of Magistrate Zhao and Prefect Fobaozhu that the emperor had summoned from capital archives, in order to examine it alongside the more recent summary of the affair. Details about how the mishandling of the Gui County case had been uncovered and resolved were unclear, the Qianlong emperor remarked. He further noted that the Gui County case had begun before Zhou Wan’s tenure as governor. Was there not more to the story than what had come to light? Although sanctions had already been decreed, the Qianlong emperor demanded that Aibida province name Guizhou (貴州). And although the name suggests that the jurisdiction is the “Department of Gui,” in fact in the Yongzheng era it had been ranked as a xianlevel jurisdiction. To simplify and clarify, then, I refer to the locale here as Gui County. 24. QLSL 26.8.12: 3. 25. QLSL 26.8.21: 8.

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clear up the conflicting details in a supplemental report. Having been delegated for further investigation, the case soon disappeared from the fore. The Hubei scuffle appeared to be over. Just over two years after Sungcun’s secret memorial, the pesky case of Gui County—a small detail in the impeachment of Zhou Wan, Zhao Taijiao, and Fobaozhu—reared its head once more. In early June of 1763, the Ministry of Punishments submitted a memorial to the throne about a sentencing proposal slated for that year’s Autumn Assizes. The case in question involved a proposal to sentence one Lady Zhang, née Wu, to death by strangulation after the assizes for participating in a plot to murder Cao Weiliang, the father of a woman who was involved in an affair with Lady Zhang’s lover, a man by the name of Li Shanrong. In the collection of accounts documenting this case involving two illicit sexual partnerships and a murder plot, a small detail in the testimony of Lady Zhang caught the attention of ministry officials. “When we ministers were examining the testimony of Lady Zhang née Wu,” several officers of the Ministry of Punishments memorialized, they noted she had testified that “she had a husband mentioned by the name of Zhang Hongshun (張洪舜) and a brother-in-law by the name of Zhang Honggui (張洪貴).”26 These names came up in the context of the murder when Lady Zhang happened to mention that her plot with Li had begun eleven months earlier, in the summer of 1762, when her husband had been arrested on robbery charges. According to Lady Zhang’s narrative, Zhang Hongshun was not released until December of 1762, at which point she and her lover had absconded. Although this small detail was mere background in the narrative of the murder of Cao Weiliang and did not bear on the facts of the crime itself, the Qing demand for coherence of proofs dictated further investigation. The mention of a case within a case gave the officials from the Ministry of Punishments an opportunity to corroborate or overturn the narrative of the crime as it appeared in the memorial. They checked the ministerial records for mention of this robbery case from the previous year.

26. NGDK 403014761.

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When the records were consulted, however, no robbery case i­ nvolving a Zhang Hongshun (张洪舜) or a Zhang Honggui (张洪贵) could be found. Delving into the matter further, they found a sentencing proposal memorial from two years earlier, accusing four brothers, Zhang Hongshun (张红顺), Zhang Honggui (张红贵), Zhang Chubi (‌张楚壁), and Zhang Yutang (张玉堂), of committing a robbery with several accomplices. But that memorial had been submitted almost half a year before the robbery in Lady Zhang’s testimony was allegedly discovered and investigated. The characters for the given names of the “Zhang Hongshun” and “Zhang Honggui” mentioned in the case on file at the ministry were different from those in the testimony of Lady Zhang, and the two ­robberies had allegedly occurred in different years, but the coincidence of two robberies in the same county being committed by two pairs of brothers with homophonous names was too spectacular to not urge further inquiry. What the officials from the Ministry of Punishments discovered when they looked into this earlier case only multiplied their suspicions: the case that contained the homophonous brothers Zhang just so happened to be the very case that Magistrate Zhao, Prefect Fobao­zhu, and a county clerk named Xia Nianzu had been accused of grossly mishandling—the case at the center of the Zhou Wan impeachment. This single instance of bureaucratic cross-checking was about to become the basis for a full-blown investigation of the events that had occurred two years previous. First, the Ministry of Punishments reported in a brief memorial the rough outline of the case as it currently stood. In the original report as documented in ministry records, jiansheng (“degree-holder”) Li Zuocai and the baojia (“collective responsibility”) official Yuan Zhifang, from his home village, lodged a petition in June 1760. The two men claimed that the home of Li Zuocai’s brother, Li Zuoju, had been robbed by a group of men in disguise. Li Zuoju had been injured so seriously that he was incapable of bringing the complaint himself. When Li Zuocai and Yuan Zhifang went to the yamen to report the crime, Magistrate Zhao was in Changyang County looking for a site to establish a new inspector’s outpost.27 In the magistrate’s absence, 27. NGDK 403015076.

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the clerk Xia Nianzu went with two other yamen employees to arrest the suspects, under Yuan’s direction. All of the Zhang brothers except Zhang Hongshun, who had allegedly left for the neighboring province of Sichuan to sell the loot from the crime, were detained. When Magistrate Zhao returned, the investigation began. The Zhang family home was searched, and some key pieces of physical evi­ dence were uncovered. The suspects confessed to the crime during interrogation. An accord of proofs had been established. The case was forwarded to the prefect Fobaozhu, who approved Magistrate Zhao’s investigation. Up to this point, the case against the Zhang brothers and their accomplices seemed open-and-shut. It was forwarded to Judicial Commissioner Shen Zuopeng for the next round of review. At the time of the Zhang brothers’ arrest, Judicial Commissioner Shen had been in his position for three and a half years. He had previously been implicated in a bribery scandal but had been cleared without investigation because his accuser was a disgraced official.28 Shen’s name had come up alongside the accusations against former governor Zhou in Governor-General Suchang’s reports. Suchang had accused Judicial Commissioner Shen of being so careful about avoiding sanction that he failed to handle the affairs of his office promptly, sacrificing capable administration for cautious self-preservation. In response, the Qianlong emperor had said that Judicial Commissioner Shen was “not ­incapable of handling affairs,” recalling his studious work in the capital, but must be seeking more leisure now that he had been appointed to the provinces.29 “If he does not change his ways,” the Qianlong emperor declared in response to Suchang’s memorial, “impeach him via memorial.” However, because no further allegations had arrived at the capital, it fell to Shen to review the Zhang brothers’ case. By the time the case reached the provincial capital for review, roughly a year had passed since the commission of the crime. During Judicial Commissioner Shen’s interrogation, the Zhang brothers insisted that Yuan and Li were framing them with false accusations. They claimed that Magistrate Zhao’s report on the investigation was full of lies. Such desperate attempts to overturn a case were not uncommon, 28. QLSL 24.12.13: 2 and 24.12.13: 3. 29. QLSL 26.2.29: 15.

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but the eldest of the Zhang brothers produced a shocking piece of ­evidence: a page torn right out of the prison account book ( jianbu 監簿) of Magistrate Zhao’s yamen. This internal document—one of the new forms of interlocking archival tracking required for in-province reporting streams after the Yongzheng emperor’s “reforms”—clearly stated that Zhang Hongshun (who had allegedly fled to Sichuan) had already been arrested for the robbery more than a month before the crime was reported by Magistrate Zhao. According to the log, Zhang Hongshun had inexplicably been released right before the case was tried. In light of these accusations, and faced with highly credible evidence torn right out of Magistrate Zhao’s own archive, Judicial Commissioner Shen sent a delegate to apprehend the alleged victims of the crime for interrogation. Li Zuocai and the baojia head Yuan were brought to the provincial capital, where they confessed that they had hatched a plot to bring false accusations against the Zhangs because of their resentment over some land purchases that the Zhang brothers had made. In addition to filing a false plaint, Yuan admitted that he and Li had further conspired to plant evidence to support their spurious accusations. Judicial Commissioner Shen determined that the allegations filed by Li and Yuan were entirely fabricated and that no robbery had occurred. In the wake of this scandal, Judicial Commissioner Shen found Li and Yuan guilty of filing false accusations. Magistrate Zhao and his clerk were, furthermore, charged with wrongful arrest, illegal use of torture, and using threats to force suspects to testify to falsehoods. However, at the conclusion of this investigation, when Judicial Commissioner Shen submitted his new narrative of the cover-up, Governor Zhou rejected the case. A new investigation was demanded. It was shortly after this that Sungcun’s memorial to the throne about Governor Zhou arrived on the imperial desk. The reins of provincial administration were handed over to another official, and the case moved forward. When Governor-General Aibida arrived at his post shortly after the impeachment case was initiated, he looked over all of the evidence that had been compiled, as well as the confession that had been ­extracted from disgraced Magistrate Zhao. Governor-General Aibida sentenced Zhao to exile and Xia to penal servitude. The prefect Fobao­zhu was cashiered. The original filers of the plaint—Li Zuocai, the brother of

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the false victim Li Zuoju, and the baojia head Yuan Zhifang—were sentenced to exile in a military colony. The case of judicial abuse then became a key piece of anecdotal evidence in the impeachment of Zhou Wan. Looking back at this affair from the standpoint of Lady Zhang’s perplexing testimony, Ministry of Punishments officials prepared a new report for the Qianlong emperor’s consideration, noting several inconsistencies in the case file. First, allegations about disputes over multiple land purchases, the authors of the memorial noted, were incon­ sistent with previous characterizations of the Zhangs as poor commoners. Second, although the case had resulted in the impeachment of several officials, it had still remained unresolved—no final report of the investigation into the original case had been filed in the capital. To clear up the facts of the first case and to establish whether—as Ministry of Punishments officials suspected—the two sets of Zhang brothers were, in fact, one and the same, the officials prepared a list of several concrete questions about the two cases and those involved in them and beseeched the emperor to open an investigation. The Qianlong emperor remarked that the circumstances were, indeed, quite suspicious. Surely, he concluded, something was afoot: “We consider that this case has carried on for several years now, and there are many doubtful points within it. It is difficult to know currently whether the governor-general, the governor, or the other officials of the province responsible for supervision have been covering up for their administration.”30 But who was involved? How high did the cover-up go? How had it persisted over the tenure of several officials without being flagged? In the years between the first case and Lady Zhang’s testimony, officeholders in the upper levels of the provincial administration had completely turned over; none of the top officials associated with the case remained in their original posts. Former judicial commissioner Shen Zuopeng was now the fiscal commissioner of Hubei. The new judicial commissioner was the former provincial grain intendant, Gao Cheng. Governor Zhou had been replaced by Governor Tang Pin, who in turn had been replaced by Governor Song Bangsui (1737 30. QLSL 28.4.22: 1.

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jinshi), formerly the fiscal commissioner of Shanxi. So how had the truth not already been uncovered and reported? The Qianlong emperor demanded that Governor-General Aibida and Governor Song examine their files and submit a detailed memorial clearing up the factual inconsistencies in the case. Remarking that the two men had not been in charge during the events in question, the emperor reasoned, “If, in the previous handling, there was some error, there is no reason why they should not communicate it truthfully in a memorial. If they were unable to learn the truth and correct it, still it is not an error of intent—there would be no need to punish them heavily.”31 Hubei Judicial Commissioner Gao was commanded to independently prepare a secret report on the case in advance of an imperial investigative commission.32 To make sure that all bases were covered, the Qianlong emperor also dispatched the right vice president of the Ministry of Punishments Ayonga (dates unknown) to investigate the case on behalf of the throne. Henan Governor Ye Cunren (1710–64) was commanded to leave his post in the neighboring province to aid Ayonga in the investigation. One month later the joint memorial from Governor-General Aibida and Governor Song arrived at the capital. Instead of clarifying what might have been considered—before this point—an understandable oversight on their part, the governor-general and his subordinate launched into a strange and confused tale of multiple overlapping inves­tigations into a problem that still seemed to have no answer. Their account of the alleged robbery of the Li family, the malfeasance of ex-magistrate Zhao, and Shen’s discovery of the plot remained suspiciously consistent with the unsatisfactory reports that had already been filed in Beijing. The more they tried to explain, the less credible their account seemed. As to the question of the multiple Zhang Hongshuns and Zhang Hongguis, the two officials gave that only a sparse mention. They noted that someone by the name of Zhang Hongshun—as written in Lady Zhang’s testimony—had been found, but that that person could not have been the actual Zhang Hongshun, since he was a young man of 31. QLSL 28.4.22: 2. 32. QLSL 28.4.22: 3.

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slight stature.33 With that awkward and unsatisfactory dismissal, they offered no further explanation for the disturbing coincidence.34 The remainder of their report was dedicated to the question of the second robbery mentioned in Lady Zhang’s testimony, which the province had failed to report to Beijing. The governors related that, on the dates mentioned in Lady Zhang’s testimony, one Gui County commoner by the name of Zhao Qixian had been tied up, beaten, and robbed by a group of men in red clothing and ash smeared on their faces to disguise their identities. A witness swore that he recognized the voice of a man named Zhang Hongshun (as written in the previous case). He and his three brothers, as well as several accomplices, were arrested and tried for the robbery. In the course of that investigation, Gui County magistrate Qin Rong had concluded that the Zhang brothers who had been held as suspects in the robbery of the Li family two years before were, in fact, guilty of the crimes committed at the Zhao family residence (as capital officials had suspected). In an investigation immediately following the allegations, Magistrate Qin had found corroborating evidence: loot from the Zhao home in the Zhangs’ residence. A confession was secured from the Zhang brothers who were detained. Magistrate Qin then filed a memorandum with his superiors laying out his conviction—and the evidence supporting his theory—that the Zhang brothers were guilty of both this crime and the previous invasion of the Li home, in spite of the fact that the previous case had been dismissed. Judicial Commissioner Gao, on receiving this report, dispatched a delegate from the provincial capital to investigate these new allegations. By the time of this investigation, Magistrate Qin had left his post to fulfill mourning obligations. When the delegate sent by Judicial Commissioner Gao reported back, he ­a lleged that Magistrate Qin had used excessive torture in securing the confession of the Zhang brothers and their accomplices. One of the suspects—a man by the name of Ma Xiang—had subsequently died from injuries sustained during interrogation. Although the coincidence that two cases against the Zhang brothers had now been initiated and dismissed was disturbing, Aibida and Song 33. NGDK 403014838. 34. QLSL 28.5.9: 5.

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argued that accusations of wrongdoing by both former magistrates of Gui County had clouded the ability of the provincial administration to solve the original cases. The affair had expanded beyond manageable proportions. Delegates’ reports had cast doubt on local investigations into each of the two alleged robberies, and the various reports of the multiple delegates’ investigations sometimes overlapped and sometimes conflicted. By this point, the investigations into the alleged crimes of the Zhang brothers had dragged on for two and a half years. No allegations against the Zhang family or their alleged accomplices had stuck. The case hung in the balance. Meanwhile, Li Zuoju had filed multiple complaints in the provincial capital claiming that his brother Li Zuocai—who had been sent into exile as a punishment for his false allegations against the Zhangs— had been framed. Disgraced ex-magistrate Zhao had also filed an appeal protesting his innocence. In a blanket order to the small army of delegates now involved in the case (at least one of whom had died in the course of the two-year investigation, and many of whom had long since returned to their original posts, unable to remain in the field sorting through the confusion of evidence that had proliferated), Judicial Commissioner Gao insisted that a final report be issued soon. A supreme committee of delegate investigators—the magistrates of two prefectures and two counties—was appointed to write a final summary of the two banditry cases and the multiple misconduct cases that had stemmed from them. All of the evidence, documents, and suspects were to be handed over to them for review. Governor Song and Governor-General Aibida protested that, with so many delegates and reviews and reports, the case could not yet be resolved. They promised that they would continue to pour all of their efforts into clarifying the situation. The Qianlong emperor concluded that the entire mix-up was the result of “rote performance of duty without recognizing [the circumstances at hand] (因循不悟).”35 Commenting at greater length in an imperial edict on the case, the emperor sneered at the fumbling efforts of his trusted officials:

35. QLSL 28.5.9: 5.

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The memorial has arrived, but it is nothing more than a rambling ­description of the shuffling of documents back and forth. There is every manner of detail, embellishment, and description of the two cases in question, but not a single word of truth about the facts of them. . . . When a governor-general and a governor fail to intervene when local officials send memos and reports in contradiction with one another, and when they respond [to such communications] only with rescripts and commands determined by fixed precedent (祇知按例批飭), they have ­a lready become incapable of handling their responsibilities. Furthermore, according to their memorial, cases have piled up to an extraordinary degree, with rescripts and orders flying back and forth. Why is it that, of all of these documents, the only conceivable one that’s missing is the file reporting the case to the Ministry [of Punishments]? There’s no need to inquire—the answer is already obvious.36

The origin of this problem seemed clear: “Tracing [the problem] back [to its roots], it is a reflection of the state of discipline of the bureaucracy at the local level.” On the memorial itself, the emperor commented: “It cannot even be expressed in words! Who can fathom what sorts of hearts you must have, or how strong your nerves must be, to dare to submit a memorial such as this (竟不成語矣不知爾等具何心腸何膽量仍敢如此奏)!”37 The fact that none of the governors or governors-general in office had exposed this flagrant error indicated a cover-up; their muddled responses to the Qianlong emperor’s demand for a clear account seemed to confirm it. Eight days after the Qianlong emperor read the scandalously convoluted report, notice arrived in Beijing that a prisoner had escaped from Hubei’s provincial jail. As a consequence, Judicial Commissioner Gao was removed from his post immediately.38 The day after the Qianlong emperor announced Gao’s dismissal, that disgraced official’s report arrived on the imperial desk. The former judicial commissioner’s report was an even more muddled collection of jumbled facts and ­incredible accusations than the previous memorial. Focusing on the 36. QLSL 28.5.9: 5. 37. NGDK 403014838. 38. QLSL 28.5.17: 2.

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death of Ma Xiang, the alleged accomplice of the Zhang family who had died under interrogation, Gao insisted that Magistrate Qin must have colluded with his uncle Qin Huitian (1702–64), the president of the Ministry of Punishments, to frame the innocent Zhang brothers. In his attempt to explain the mess of facts in provincial accounts of the crimes and their convoluted investigations into administrative foibles, Gao proposed a conspiracy engineered by a county magistrate in cahoots with a relative in one of the highest officers of the state. Receiving this secret report, the Qianlong emperor remarked that the only possible explanation was that “the entire provincial ­administration—from the governor-general and the governor to the judicial commissioner and fiscal commissioner [the former judicial commissioner Shen]—is acting in concert to deliberately cover for one another and confuse the facts (通省督撫藩臬上下扶同一氣有心 朦混).”39 Remarking on what now seemed like the fantastic failure of Governor Song and Governor-General Aibida to sniff out large-scale collusion in the administration they had inherited, the Qianlong emperor began to wonder if the head officials of the province were extra­ ordinarily incom­petent or—worse—had become involved in the affair itself. Both of them were removed from office and summoned to Beijing to await the emperor’s judgment. The very next day, the emperor received Ayonga and Ye’s report.40 There could be no doubt, the imperial delegates remarked, that Magistrate Zhao had improperly conducted the initial investigation into the alleged robbery of the Li home.41 Mistakes had been made. But the far more serious problem at the heart of this confusion was exactly what the Qianlong emperor had feared: a large-scale conspiracy. The architect of this disaster was none other than Shen Zuopeng—formal judicial commissioner, now serving as fiscal commissioner, who had somehow escaped scrutiny or sanction after multiple allegations, spared each time by imperial grace.

rejustified to correct bad break, ok? aw

39. QLSL 28.5.18: 3. 40. QLSL 28.5.19: 2. 41. NGDK 403014923.

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After Ayonga and Governor Ye had arrived in Hubei’s provincial capital, they had availed themselves of local resources to reconstruct the events in question. Since Li Zuocai, Xia the clerk, and the baojia head Yuan Zhifang had been sentenced to exile but were still being held in the capital, they had been made available for questioning. In addition to interrogating the suspects at hand, Ayonga and Ye also examined all of the original case files, as well as the monthly registers reporting the capture of criminals. The original narrative of the robbery of the Li household was, the imperial delegates concluded, more or less correct. The problem was inconsistencies among various accounts of the timing of these events. Examining local reports and interrogating the clerk who had been present at the time of the original handling, Ayonga and Ye had concluded that the robbery had, in fact, occurred three months before it was first reported by Magistrate Zhao. The prison register page so dramatically stolen, secreted away, and then produced by the eldest Zhang brother during former judicial commissioner Shen’s interrogation clearly indicated that Zhang Hongshun had been arrested with the other brothers shortly following the crime. The imperial delegates also discovered that the arrest had been conducted improperly. During the struggle when the Zhangs were being captured, Zhang Hongshun had been injured. According to the testimony of the clerk Xia and disgraced Magistrate Zhao, the original cover-up was carried out to conceal the amount of time it had taken their office to handle the investigation and to avoid responsibility for injuring Zhang Hongshun during his arrest. Xia confessed to trying to compel the testimony of the Zhangs, but swore that it was only to change the date of the narrative and not the substantive facts. These findings suggested that, if the Zhangs had been arrested for a crime they had actually committed, former judicial commissioner Shen had allowed them free on a technicality that had not been thoroughly investigated. As for the subsequent robbery of the Zhao household, there was witness testimony accusing the same Zhangs who had been apprehended and then released in the earlier case of committing this second crime. Unlike the previous case, the investigation of the attack on the

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Zhao family—conducted by Magistrate Qin—was solid. Damning ­evidence from the robbery had been found in the perpetrators’ possession. There were witnesses to the discovery of the stolen goods. The suspects confessed during interrogation both to the Zhao robbery and to the robbery of the Li household. After what seemed to be a flawless investigation by Magistrate Qin, Judicial Commissioner Gao commanded several delegates—led by Wuchang prefect Xi Zhan—to sort out the conflicting facts in the two robberies. This subsequent investigation raised several problems. First, Acting Magistrate Song—who had inherited Magistrate Qin’s post— accused his predecessor of using excessive torture in the interrogation of Ma Xiang. Second, the delegates insisted that three of the several men being held as accomplices in the Zhao Qixian robbery were, in fact, demonstrably innocent. These claims not only cast doubt on Magistrate Qin’s narrative; they also failed to answer any of the questions that had been raised. A second team of delegates was appointed to reinvestigate the case. Investigations led to more investigations, and investigations of those investigations, as had already been outlined in earlier memorials. The imperial delegates remarked that even though the provincial administration still could not produce a coherent narrative of the alleged robbery of the Li home and its handling (or, conversely, the framing of the Zhang brothers by Li and Yuan), the case had been reported to the Ministry of Punishments as resolved, in spite of the fact that the delegates’ reports were not yet filed or sorted. Obvious errors and inconsistencies had not been resolved. Every new investigation seemed to turn up a new theory about the problems of the case that pointed in an entirely new direction. Throughout these documents, Ayonga and Ye noted, multiple ways of writing the names Zhang Hongshun and Zhang Honggui were used inconsistently. The guilt or innocence of the Zhangs had drifted farther and farther from the center of provincial investigations. Ayonga and Ye concluded that this was no mistake and that the problem was not bungling and incompetence. In the course of their investigation, the details of a conspiracy had started to surface. The imperial delegates had heard that former judicial commissioner Shen had forced Li Zuocai and Yuan Zhifang to kneel on chains until their

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knees were worn down to the bone before they falsely confessed to framing the Zhangs. This forced confession suggested that, by the time Shen sent his own delegates to investigate, the superior offices of the province were fully invested in the plot cooked up by the Zhang brothers. No theories involving the guilt of the Zhang brothers were pursued in subsequent investigations. Loopholes were sloppily covered over by forcing false confessions from victims testifying under duress. On hearing, when the robbery of the Zhao family was reported, that the criminals he had released had struck again, instead of admitting and rectifying his mistake, former judicial commissioner Shen had poured all his energies into orchestrating a cover-up among provincial offices at nearly every level. Shen’s main accomplice, Ayonga and Ye concluded, was Prefect Xi, who had been assigned to lead the team of delegated investigators appointed by Judicial Commissioner Gao. One of the delegates under Xi’s command had already admitted that both he and Xi had known from the beginning of their investigation that the Zhangs were guilty and that they had been purposely muddling the facts of the case. After the imperial delegates interviewed Prefect Xi, they remarked that “he was sullen and expressed no emotion, showing no signs of remorse or guilt. Truly his cruelty is beyond the norm ‌(猶‌漠不動心毫無愧怍人心害理實出常情).”42 The details of the conspiracy were still unclear, but in their first summary memorial on the case the imperial delegates concluded that “in handling the case, Xi Zhan framed innocents without care and aided his superiors in a cover-up, delaying the case with external details and making a mess of the actual case and true facts, to the extent that the wicked and the good exchanged places and injustice became so entrenched that no rectification was possible (以案外枝節混亂正案正情及至奸良倒置沉 冤莫白).” When the Qianlong emperor read this shocking report, he concluded that “clearly, there was a plot to destroy [the case].”43 He immediately issued a few initial commands: the members of the Zhang family who had committed these crimes and then tried to capitalize on the mistake of the provincial administration should be apprehended 42. NGDK 403014923. 43. QLSL 29.5.23: 2.

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and punished beyond statutory norms to chastise them for their wickedness. Furthermore, the upright Magistrate Qin, who had conducted a full investigation and reported the facts only to be framed by his superiors, would be immediately promoted to a prefectural post. He also directed the imperial delegates to dive deeper into the investigation: “You truly must,” the emperor commanded his delegates, “pursue the matter down to the smallest details.”44 The scope of investigation was expanded. Ayonga and Ye were ­permitted to use judicial torture in the interrogation of Shen and his accomplice Xi. Former governor Tang (under whose tenure the robbery of the Zhao household had occurred) was removed from his current post and handed over to Ayonga for questioning with the others.45 Former governor Song was also subjected to interrogation. All of the delegated local officials were stripped of their offices and held by Ayonga for further interrogation.46 Several of the exiled officials from the initial impeachment campaign were rounded up and sent to Beijing for interrogation. Zhou Wan was brought from exile in Xinjiang to the Ministry of Punishments in shackles. Fobaozhu, the prefect who had been implicated in the affair, was also called from the banner lands, where he was serving his sentence, to come to the capital and testify.47 Even if the major players had already been exposed, the true depth and scope of the cover-up had to be uncovered. A full reckoning was in order. By the conclusion of their investigation, Ayonga and Ye had discovered that Zhou and Shen had interrogated the criminals before the case had ever been reported to the ministry, and thus they determined that the former governor and judicial commissioner had decided before the case was ever formally written up to frame innocents in order to cover up the incompetence of their administration. The robbers were left to run free. And because evidence existed that could have upended the case, they had to concoct a whole scheme, colluding on a regular basis.48 By the time the plot was discovered it had reached ridiculous 44. QLSL 29.5.24: 2. 45. QLSL 28.5.23: 2. 46. QLSL 28.5.25: 1. 47. QLSL 28.5.25: 2. 48. QLSL 28.5.25: 2.

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proportions, as each official was dragged into the conspiracy to conceal the errors of those above, below, or before him. The cover-up had extended to multiple governors and judicial commissioners. A governorgeneral who had not even been in office was pulled into its orbit. Several prefectural and county magistrates serving as delegate judges had colluded in some stage of the cover-up. The efforts required to orchestrate the affair were massive. Clerks had been compelled to sign affidavits swearing that false evidence was true.49 Even the legal secretaries in the high provincial offices were found to have colluded with one another to coordinate reports and case narratives.50 The outlines of a travesty of justice were now clear: Magistrate Zhao’s efforts to conceal a missed deadline and a botched arrest had spiraled out of control. After the initial cover-up was discovered by the former judicial commissioner, a second cover-up, much larger than the first, was already in motion. A magistrate’s attempt to conceal his error had led to a new error in a superior’s office and another campaign to cover the subsequent slipup. “When Shen Zuopeng handled the robbery case,” the Qianlong emperor opined, “it was at first in error, and without intent [to frame innocents and let the guilty go free]. But from the beginning to the end he covered up [the truth] to protect [himself]. Eventually the treacherous and the innocent were reversed.”51 The cover-up was accomplished at great cost. In the first round of machinations, Magistrate Zhao (who was, indeed, guilty of false reporting but not of supporting a spurious accusation) was cashiered and sentenced to life in exile. Prefect Fobaozhu was banished to the remote banner lands. Three members of the yamen staff—including Xia Nianzu—were sentenced to penal servitude. Li Zuocai was stripped of his jiansheng degree and condemned to exile in a military penal colony, together with Yuan Zhifang. Li Zuoju—who had been beaten in the original robbery—had gone bankrupt filing appeals on his brother’s behalf. Two runners from Gui County had been falsely accused of 49. QLSL 28.5.25: 1. 50. The involvement of clerks in the cover-up is mentioned in Chen, “Regulating Private Legal Specialists.” For some of the primary sources documenting their involvement, see QLSL 28.7.7: 2 and 28.9.9: 2. The Ministry of Punishments’ decision on the exile of the secretaries can be found at ASMQSL 151457-001. 51. QLSL 28.2.29: 1.

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planting evidence in the Li case, and one of them had already died in custody. Other alleged accomplices in the plot had been subjected to judicial torture. Emboldened, the Zhang brothers had continued with their criminal career, committing the robbery of the Zhao household. And they almost got away with it because the superiors in the provincial administration (many of whom had not even been in the province at the time of the first robbery) were participants in Shen’s prolonged subterfuge. Prefect Xi colluded with Fiscal Commissioner Shen to stymie a reopening of the original case and bury Magistrate Qin’s initial report, which laid out the facts and threatened to bring attention back to the mistakes of years past under a host of new allegations. Comfortably operating under the protection of Fiscal Commissioner Shen’s coverup, the Zhang brothers baselessly implicated their personal enemies in the crime. The two runners who had discovered the loot in the Zhang home during the original investigation had been forced to confess to planting evidence, and later the Zhang family was so bold as to demand repayment for silver that they alleged the runners had stolen during their “sham” investigation. The longer the cover-up went on, the wider the web of lies became, and the more innocents were caught up in the scandal. Now that the truth had come out, several of the men who had been framed were released from exile and detention. Yuan Zhifang, the baojia head, and Li Zuocai were let free. Li was given back his jiansheng degree. The runner accused of stealing from the Zhangs was also pardoned. Xia Nianzu was released from exile but was barred from ever again working in a yamen, on account of his complicity in Magistrate Zhao’s initial cover-up. Zhao was released from exile but remained expelled from office as a result of his incompetence and malfeasance. The remaining Zhang brothers who had been apprehended (three out of four) were sentenced to public execution in the market. Ayonga and Ye personally witnessed the public execution of the three Zhang brothers and reported to the throne: “On that day, the commoners and the military residents of Hubei lined the streets, crowding the way. Shouts of joy filled the roads. None present did not earnestly praise the imperial brilliance, bowing their heads into their

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upraised hands to salute with joy.”52 The following day they interrogated Shen and Xi, using judicial torture. After their interrogation, they reported, rains that had been eagerly anticipated for weeks finally fell from the sky. “Among the commoners,” they reported, “none did not rejoice and prostrate themselves with joy seeing the downpour of the falling rain that night and the wilds soaked with sweet dew the next day. All concluded: this was the result of the joy in the hearts of the commoners, relieved by the rescue of innocents and the condemnation of the fearful robbers.” Meanwhile, back in the capital the Qianlong emperor sentenced Shen Zuopeng to immediate beheading.53 But this had not been the wrongdoing of one man alone. For the Qianlong emperor and the offi­ cials in Beijing who had joined him in investigating the affair, the discovery of this conspiracy led to a grim conclusion: every single individual who had been complicit in the cover-up, from the lowest rank to the highest, regardless of intention, had to be found out and brought to account. The magnitude of this task was momentous, owing to the overwhelming cast of characters who had been involved in the scheme. Truly this scandal had resulted in a massive miscarriage of justice. Anyone who had stood in the way of the plot had been sacrificed. The conspiracy had been both cruel and shockingly mundane. It suggested that the achievements of the Qing in the realm of bureaucratic discipline were nothing more than a façade. The incident (and others like it that surfaced by the dozens in the Qianlong era) forced the Qing administration to face a critical problem. Behind what had been only vaguely understood as bureaucratic custom in an era of less information now appeared increasingly complicated plots to actively deceive the central state about the real nature of provincial administration. The net of information increasingly dredged up accounts of large-scale ­collusion when snags were detected by the capital in central review. Everywhere the net trembled, new horrors surfaced.

52. NGDK 403015079. 53. QLSL 28.7.8: 3.

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After the Revolution

Conclusion The historically unprecedented amount of knowledge and control that the Qing state had amassed by the second half of the eighteenth century was predicated on a long-term and large-scale synchronization and standardization of administrative processes in the distributed imperial archive. Once the procedural foundation had been laid by the end of the Yongzheng era, adding new structures on top of it was relatively trivial. Unceasing cycles of information gathering and processing easily elaborated on one another as soon as the routines of reporting and review were in place. As new problems were discovered, new information was demanded. But whenever new information arrived, new problems were discovered. The scale of the problems revealed by the multiplying reporting streams grew exponentially in the Qianlong era—a period that became known for its numerous corruption scandals. Beneath the anxiety of a state that was more capable than ever of finding “certain” facts was an incredible irony. The collaborative reports and the performance of routines on which the process of central review was based had always required a certain level of fiction to operate. As soon as the central court was capable of determining the extent of the coordination necessary in provincial efforts that had ­a lways been required to make the fundamental process of central ­review function, it had to reckon with new depths of uncertainty. Much of what passed between local administrations and the central bureaucracies was a façade. Such fictions were useful currency in an empire as large and diverse as the Qing, but once the distance between representation and reality was closed by the possibility of being observed and measured, the emperor and his officials struggled to find a new sense of certainty. With the terror of this new level of scrutiny posing a potential threat to every official in the empire, even the fairly rough-grain processes of central review could be used to inspire fearful governors to file reports on the inadequacies of subordinates, in case of later discovery, and to cultivate humility, fear, or gratitude in light of imperial scrutiny. More information demanded more accountability, and more accountability revealed more problems. Any effort to conceal infractions in the provinces had to be on such a large scale that its discovery

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would be catastrophic. The Yongzheng and Qianlong emperors did, after all, win their historical reputation as autocrats on some basis: their access to knowledge transformed the throne’s relationship to officialdom by vastly narrowing the information gulf that separated the imperial center and the locales. As the Qing empire of routine proliferated, there were fewer places to hide. The problem with this unprecedented achievement was that it cut both ways. Beijing’s unrivaled access to information about territorial administrators led to constant, cascading realizations about the fragility of the façade of normalcy. Behind every report existed the possibility of collusion. New crises emerged as the central state looked for, and found, scandal after scandal. The Qianlong court uncovered more forms of corruption than previous administrations could have even imagined, let alone detected. The scale of this drama grew apace with the expansion of the empire of routine. The resulting “information trap” only drove the Qing deeper into local administrations, all the while eroding the central state’s confidence in its ability to exert the change that, in reality, it was effecting. The value of information, after all, was predicated on its ability to help the central court find faults in the grinding, unceasing machinery of the imperial administration. Dismayed by the collusion and inep­ titude that seemed to be everywhere, the ministries required new sources of insight to find fault with business as usual. Once emperors and high-level officials grew accustomed to receiving extraordinary reports, any absence of scandal raised the suspicion that affairs in a particular province had reverted to bureaucratic custom and the truth of the administration was being concealed from the throne. When, for example, the Qianlong emperor went for a three-day period without receiving a memorial from the provinces, he worried that the governors had already “sunk into lax customs, failing to report the things that they ought to!”54 All news was bad news. Even no news was bad news. Business as usual was bad business; no business was also bad business. The routinization of administration fed on crisis to right the machinery of the state.

54. QLSL 8.4.1: 5.

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Conclusion The Anxious State

A

lthough this study does not wholly undermine existing arguments about various spikes in local social or administrative problems in Qing territories during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it does suggest that all historical narratives remarking an increase of reported issues after the eighteenth-century administrative revolution must account for the possibility that a rise in reporting is being detected, rather than an increased occurrence of some issue on the ground. Historians must overcome the problem that the Qing could not: distinguishing between problems and information about problems.1 The eighteenth-century Qing state knew more about its territories and its own administration than any of its predecessors ever had. As Beijing was pulled deeper into the world of local archives and administrative processes, the growing empire of routine wove local and central yamen together in an expanding web of information exchange. Policy in the capital became more sensitive to up-to-date information about caseloads and problems in the territories. Scrutiny of officials at every level of the bureaucracy became more pronounced. Massive amounts of information could be scanned for patterns and intervention where, previously, no information at all had existed. The result of this 1. For a lengthier description of this historiographical distinction, see Dykstra, “A Crisis of Competence.”

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informational coup was a rapidly expanding routinization of state functions from the county to the capital. This transformation was entirely predicated on the “routine” (or “normal [xunchang 尋常]”) nature of a growing number of affairs.

The New Normal Each generation of Qing rulers collected more information than their predecessors, in spite of persistent struggles to process all of the new cases arriving in the capital.2 The constant desire for more information and the never-ending struggle to handle increasing amounts of it both required and facilitated the expansion of the Qing empire of routine. One sign of this expansion was the rise of “normal” affairs in the Qianlong era. Already by the Yongzheng period, so much information was arriving in Beijing about local administrations across the empire that the ministries were acting as clearinghouses, processing information for summary imperial review. Several tasks that had been carried out by the emperor’s Grand Secretariat before cases were sent to the ministries were shifted to a new model in the Yongzheng era: cases were first sent to the ministries and only later reported summarily to the throne. By the time the Qianlong emperor ascended the throne, so many affairs were being communicated directly to and processed by the ministries before reaching the throne that a whole new taxonomy— the “normal case (xunchang an 尋常案)”—had appeared.3 “Normal” affairs were communicated directly (zi 咨) to the ministries rather than being memorialized. They were still destined for imperial oversight, but only in summary presentations and deliberations. 2. Even before the eighteenth century, the Kangxi court had begun to struggle with the problem of how to handle so much information. Outcries in Beijing over the impossibility of processing the amount of information required for the Autumn Assizes alone can be documented all the way back to the late seventeenth century. See, for example, the regulation from the twelfth year of the Kangxi era, at QLDQHD: 刑部, 秋朝審, 秋審. 3. The idea of an affair or a communication being “normal” appears in the Kangxi and Yongzheng periods, but the phrase “normal case” does not appear in the Veritable Records or the DQHD before the Qianlong era.

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228 Conclusion

Whole sections of routine reports sent up from the provinces were presented to the throne only in this format, so that the emperor could “know everything at a glance, and eliminate unnecessary detail while yet still apprehending the broad strokes (一覽而知。庶刪其煩複。而仍 綜其大綱).”4 The mass collection of such routinized reports meant that a growing number of centrally reviewed cases were consumed by the upper echelons of the Qing state less as individual narratives requiring intense scrutiny by the highest authorities in the land and more as single data points in a world of patterns and aberrations. The more “normal” cases were funneled through the ministries for mass processing, the more routines for handling such affairs multiplied. Ministries continued to develop new regulations for administering the range of cases that filtered through their yamen, some of which were eventually compiled into dynastic regulatory compendia.5 The result was an exponential regulatory expansion in procedures dictating the handling of routine affairs. As Kent Guy notes, the Jiaqing administration of the early nineteenth century enlarged and reissued “all of the state collections of regulations on governing,” resulting in a staggering increase in the number of administrative regulations.6 Over the course of the nineteenth century, even the functions of the Grand Council, the emperor’s personal deliberative council, were codified in the Collected Institutions of the Great Qing, and the council’s work integrated with the operations of the Six Ministries.7 This dimension of the notion of routine—the idea that both the content and the procedures for handling an entire classification of ­a ffairs could be cordoned off as “normal” cases not requiring direct imperial attention—was new to the eighteenth century. Cases in every facet of the administration—including sentencing proposals—began 4. QLSL 60.6.26: 1. 5. On this process, see Metzger, Internal Organization of Ch’ing Bureaucracy, 196–206. 6. Guy points out that the huidian went from 250 volumes to 280 in the Yongzheng era, before expanding to more than 1,000 volumes in the Jiaqing era. Guy, Qing Governors and Their Provinces, 142. 7. On the formalization of Grand Council functions, see Bartlett, Monarchs and Ministers, 231–32, 252–53.

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to be distinguished as “normal” versus “extraordinary” to indicate whether they should be preprocessed by the ministries or memorialized directly to the throne.8 Over time, more and more responsibilities fell under a growing body of regulations, precedents, and routines presided over by the ministries. But even before the end of the Qianlong era, a tension emerged between the extraordinary and the routine. By the second half of the eighteenth century, routine demands for information were so high that the data sent up by the provinces often seemed flimsy or perfunctory. As soon as the collection and communication of information was routinized, those consuming it began to worry that it had lost its value. In the words of one 1764 command to convert a batch of yearly memorial reports into “normal” cases sent straight to the capital ministries, “As [the report’s use] has continued with time, it has become a fixed custom, and there is no use for it as a basis of action (相沿日久。習為故 套。並無可辦理之處).”9 Such affairs were increasingly shuttled off to the ministries. But even as reports were combined into ministerial communications to lighten the burden of central review by the throne, new reports would be demanded. The amount of information sent to Beijing continued to grow. Concern about perfunctory reports rose with the same tide that brought the flood of routine affairs to the desks of Beijing. As more information was processed via routine, greater importance was ­attached to the forms of information that stood out in contrast to “normal” sources. In Qing parlance, the type of report being communicated through the empire of routine was often dismissed as an “empty letter”—following the required form but devoid of valuable content. The growing conviction that routine was incapable of producing useful information or results marked the discourse of the age. Reformers, governors, and emperors complained that the routines that had 8. In the second half of the Qianlong era, a distinction between “routine” and “extraordinary” homicide cases emerged after “routine homicide and banditry” cases were made the direct domain of the Three Legal Offices, which then reported on them for summary review. DQHD: 內閣, 職掌, 進本. 9. See an excerpt of the text of this edict in the regulations at DQHD: 內閣, 職‌掌, 進本.

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230 Conclusion

actually united the administrations of the empire had made the bureaucracy . . . well, more bureaucratic. As the Daoguang emperor complained in an 1822 command to the capital ministries to eradicate some of their reporting requirements: “The registers sent by each province in summary batches to the Six Ministries pile up day by day. And what they say never matches the truth. They are all ‘empty letter’ [reports]. None of them concerns serious affairs of state—they are merely opportunities for the conniving ‘dancing brushes’ of clerks (各直省彙送六 部冊籍。日積日多。往往名實不符。俱成具文。無關政要。而胥吏等秉 機舞弊).”10 Indeed, the proliferation of reports and reports on reports took on absurd dimensions. A historian will not work at a desk in the First Historical Archives for long before coming across an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century report specifying that there is nothing to report.11 Calls to simplify reports and reduce paperwork became common. Even the system of triple review for capital sentences was retired, denounced as a redundant “empty letter” exercise.12 Because the overwhelming majority of routine communications could be redirected to the ministries, emperors and high officials increasingly sought out forms of information beyond the routine.

The Desire for the Extraordinary By the latter half of the eighteenth century, the tension between routine and extraordinary generated considerable consternation in the Qing court. The supervisory roles of men at positions high on the administrative ladder came to be defined in ways that distinguished their concerns from the humdrum and the bureaucratic. Routine itself seemed to be the lifeless material out of which more important and urgent information had to be gleaned. Governors and emperors alike 10. DGSL 2.3.19: 1. 11. See, for example, the summary memorial from the fifty-seventh year of the Qianlong era submitted by Lebao, the governor-general of Shaanxi, at FHA 04-01-01-0444-001. 12. QLSL 14.9.15: 1.

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struggled to find aberrations, inefficiencies, and patterns by reading between the lines. Increasingly, among these men the cure for routine seemed to be its opposite. Emperors became skeptics; supervisors became scrutinizers; bureaucracy became the enemy of the empire.

The Campaign Cure and the Campaign Disease Whether they were governors worrying about their subordinates in the provinces or emperors worrying about governors, the men overseeing the empire of routine began to worry that their subordinates’ responses to administrative demands were fictions invented within the constraints of routine, while problems were extraordinary. Any time a new problem appeared, special reports, proposals, or enhanced enforcement of regulations could be demanded. Campaigns to tighten discipline, eradicate malfeasance, search out sources of social disorder, and streamline administration became de rigeur. Ultimately, though, every campaign initiated to rid the empire of another bureaucratic ill or local form of malfeasance was—by the ­nature of the reporting and regulating processes that followed on its heels—destined to become a routine affair. No campaign could last forever. Indeed, the more common such campaigns became, the less satisfaction they seemed to produce. The very intimacy of the administrative ties that had developed by the middle of the eighteenth century became a source of discontent for the Qianlong emperor. The very speed and efficiency with which governors responded to the host of administrative campaigns in the era led the throne to doubt the sincerity of the work being done in the provinces. Rescripts from the Qianlong emperor declaiming this dilemma are not difficult to find. Take the following example from 1740, written in response to the replies of governors from the provinces to a call from the emperor himself to improve the social order and suppress banditry: Men like these [governors responding to the throne with proposals] ­simply—​considering their position as important officers of the bureaucracy—want to display their abilities by making a show of improving

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232 Conclusion things. If their programs are a success, they can request merits. And if they fail, they won’t encounter any serious reprimand. Meanwhile, all of the various duties of their office—such as encouraging agriculture, demanding overdue taxes, storing provisions, providing aid to the needy, and so on, are neglected.13

Even proposals responding to the direct request of the throne to solve a particular problem were a source of discontent in this age when too much information seemed like too little. Suspicions abounded that the provinces were hiding behind hollow truisms. What might have been earnest proposals delivered at the demand of the emperor became fodder for derision and fuel for disbelief. The edict just quoted proceeds with the Qianlong emperor castigating his officials: A command to all governors and governors-general of the provinces: There is no cause to boast about your unusual efforts in order to demonstrate your cleverness. Do not quest for the celebration of your great merits. Do not hope for extraordinary rewards. We examine the entire empire from Our throne. We stick to the appropriate path by examining the interaction of myriad processes. You great ministers announce your plans for the dynasty, but only when your efforts all combine in harmony can you avoid fault or ineptitude.

Cleverly publicized programs—even including those that addressed specific imperial concerns—ignored the larger picture. Like the mystic dao, good administration could not be set forth in an unchanging policy. The Qianlong emperor continued: For several years now, We have observed that among the governors and governors-general a certain kind—like Shuo Se, Shi Lin, Yue Jun, and Yin Huiyi—are marked by ineptitude, disinterestedness, carelessness, and perfunctory performance. Truly there has not been one who is sincere and without flourish. In the day-to-day this doesn’t seem to amount

One word flowed back to this page.

13. QLSL 5.7.22: 2.

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to much, but on aggregate this behavior builds up into a problem. . . . If there are those who claim that We have of late been loath to rely heavily on governors and governors-general, the reason is this. For among them, although they may wish to aid Us in realizing the imperial plan, yet they entirely fail to understand Our heart and mind!

The result of strict obedience to imperial commands was an allegation of faithless pretense. Neither obeying nor failing to heed the call would suffice. The Qianlong emperor’s frustration highlighted a fundamental problem with governance via bureaucracy: no matter what incentives you set, you skew the game. The particular character of any given regulation could skew local officials’ performance of their duties even when the local administration was not actively misrepresenting itself. A conundrum unfolded: any effort to align the incentives of territorial officials with the priorities of the central court through reporting and regulation seemed to tilt the focus of the provincial bureaucracy toward the paper game itself.

Bureaucracy: The Enemy Within The shocking revelations from the information flood that continued to rise over the course of the eighteenth century produced both a feeling of overload and a sense that something was lacking. Increased attempts to monitor the local state by creating more regulations led to a concomitant increase in the attention paid by local officials to satisfying the formal requirements of monitored tasks. Any desire to interfere in local administration or to motivate new behaviors ultimately had to be translated into regulations. But mere compliance with procedures came to be understood as begrudging, legalistic, or missing the point. Even though the central state became more capable of demanding procedural compliance, high-level officials and emperors despaired of the overly technical nature of local officials’ responses to those ­demands. In the age of administrative technology, Qing actors began to yearn for a seemingly forgotten age of administrative art. As the Qianlong emperor opined in 1746:

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234 Conclusion As Du Yu of Jin said, “The more complicated paperwork becomes, the more duplicitous the bureaucracy will become.”14 This stems from not handling things at the root, but rather grasping at all the branches. The more one tries, the more is lost. As demands and regulations multiply, those officials operating under them have no ability to even remember them all. And it becomes impossible to implement the standards for supervising and evaluating them. In the confusion, none knows what to obey or follow. 15

Regulation exposed local habits to central scrutiny at the same time that it altered the handling and reporting of local affairs in ways that seemed only to increase the distance between center and locale. As the technology of routine connected yamen throughout the empire, the very craft that wove the net of documentary discipline became widely despised.16 The tools of the state became associated with the forces working against state interest.

Empire, Know Thyself: Information, Corruption, and the Politics of Decline As the central state penetrated deeper into the provinces, ministers in Beijing despaired of ever being able to achieve the bureaucratic discipline that had seemed like a straightforward goal before so much infor­ mation about local administration had been accessible. Consider, in this light, the estimation of Qing historian Philip Kuhn about the last decade of the eighteenth century: The crisis of the 1790s . . . [to] some seemed to have a deeper menace: the decline of a polity that was increasingly unequal to its tasks. Perhaps it took the many-sided crisis of the 1790s to make men aware of what lay 14. See the “Du Jin (杜預)” entry in the “Biographies (列傳)” section of Fang, Jin shu. 15. QLSL 11.7.27: 1. 16. For a discussion of animosity toward bureaucracy as personified in the figure of the clerk, see Reed, Talons and Teeth.

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beneath particular events. What once had seemed accidental (a corrupt official, an ill-maintained dike, a senile emperor) was seen to be systemic; what had seemed local (a misgoverned county, an inter-ethnic clash) was perceived as national in scope.17

Qing historians have taken the cue from the Qianlong emperor and those who followed him in noting a crisis of discipline and order throughout the empire, starting sometime in the second half of the eighteenth century and culminating in the ruinous White Lotus Rebellion at the turn of the nineteenth century.18 The forms of incompetence and malfeasance decried by the emperor, his bureaucrats, and Qing subjects in this era were sources of serious concern to the Qing state. But their outcry might not be straightforward evidence of the emergence or rise of such behaviors: in many ways, it might instead be understood as a by-product of the routines designed to solve problems that had already existed.19 By the end of the Qianlong era, this new way of measuring and monitoring the provincial bureaucracy had not only become more integrated but had also filled the provincial archives with more and more problems as increasingly banal affairs were recorded in the imperial registers. As the rapidly multiplying cycles of detecting problems, proposing solutions, and generating the information required to enforce them began to overlap with one another, it became impossible to see the forest for the trees. The large-scale pattern may have been vaguely visible, as suggested by the cries of emperors and officials to reduce the amount of reporting, but the implications of solving problems with 17. Kuhn, Origins of the Modern Chinese State, 8. 18. Articles and monographs exploiting the massive caches of data produced by the central government to track large-scale and long-term trends in several areas— homicides, manslaughter cases, and appointment ranking (as a proxy for administra­ tive priorities and difficulty), to name just a few—consistently document a spike in observations peaking or beginning around the middle of the eighteenth century. See, for example, Buoye, Manslaughter, Markets, and Moral Economy; Koss, “Political Geography of Empire”; and Chen, Peng, and Zhu, “Social-Economic Change and Its Impact on Violence.” 19. For a more detailed discussion of this overlap between the growth in the amount of information available to the state and the emergence of a discourse of crisis, see Dykstra, “A Crisis of Competence.”

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236 Conclusion

information that led to the discovery of more problems could not be discerned so long as the expanding net of information constantly brought more problems to light. The scale of the information onslaught overwhelmed those navigating it. By the turn of the nineteenth century the summary registers presented to the emperor were so numerous that out-of-date registers in certain categories were systematically sold off as wastepaper to prevent a storage crisis.20 One source has estimated that the “yellow registers” presented to the Grand Secretariat—bound boxes swathed in the yellow cloth appropriate for books and printed matter made available for imperial perusal—numbered as many as 2,000 per year by the end of the dynasty.21 These overflowing troves of new information not only reported previously unreported problems and created problems that had never before existed; they also linked entire realms of administrative action that had been inaccessible from the center. And once those documentary links were forged, it seemed impossible for anyone—a county magistrate worried about being exposed, a governor trying to “tighten up” his administration, an emperor wondering about the root of a particular problem—to slow the momentum toward amassing newer and ever more numerous forms of information. In this light, the era of supposed dynastic decline, constitutional crisis, and empire-wide corruption that stretched from the middle of the eighteenth century to the Xinhai Revolution of 1911 must be seen as only the beginning of a new era of history defined by effects of the unexpected administrative revolution. Throughout this period the empire of routine connected the center to the locale in new ways. The question that now falls to historians of this era is: How did the pursuit of certainty continue to drive the Qing into ever more uncertain waters after the net had spread?

20. The Ministry of Punishments report from the fifty-eighth year of the Qianlong era, updating the Grand Council on the current status of the ministry’s archives, offers evidence of this practice; see FHA 03-1214-017. 21. Park and Antony, “Archival Research,” 110.

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Abbreviations

The following abbreviations are used in reference to sources cited in the notes. ASMQSL Academia Sinica Institute of History and Philology Collection of Ming and Qing Historical Sources 中央研究院歷史語言所 研究所藏明清史料 DGSL Veritable Records of the Daoguang Emperor (part of the Qing Shilu) DLCY Remaining Doubts When Reading Substatutes 讀例存‌疑, Xue Yunsheng DLQB Full Compilation of Established Regulations 定例全編, comp. Li Zhen DQHD Qinding da Qing huidian shili 欽定大清會典事例 FHA First Historical Archives 中国历史第一档案馆, Beijing KXSL Veritable Records of the Kangxi Emperor (part of the Qing Shilu) LAQJ A Complete Collection of Precedents 例案全集, comp. Zhang Guangyue NGDK Archives of the Grand Secretariat 內閣大庫檔案, Taipei QLDQHD Qinding da Qing huidian zeli 欽定大清會典則例 QLSL Veritable Records of the Qianlong Emperor (part of the Qing Shilu) SPABX Sichuan Provincial Archive, Ba Xian Collection 四川省档案局 巴县文件, Chengdu SZSL Veritable Records of the Shunzhi Emperor (part of the Qing Shilu) XFSL Veritable Records of the Xianfeng Emperor (part of the Qing Shilu) YZSL Veritable Records of the Yongzheng Emperor (part of the Qing Shilu)

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Works Cited

Archival Collections

It was smaller.

Academia Sinica Institute of History and Philology Collection of Ming and Qing Historical Sources 中央研究院歷史語言所研究所藏明清 史料. Taipei, Taiwan. Accessed March 6, 2021. https://catalog.digital archives.tw/. Archives of the Grand Secretariat 內閣大庫檔案. Taipei, Taiwan. Accessed March 6, 2021. http://archive.ihp.sinica.edu.tw/mctkm2/index.html. Chongqing Municipal Archives 重庆市档案馆. Chongqing, China. First Historical Archives 中国第一历史档案馆. Beijing, China. Sichuan Provincial Archives, Ba County Collection 四川省档案局巴县 文件. Chengdu, China.

State Compilations from the Imperial Era Da Qing lü jijie fuli 大清律集解附例. 1646 imperial edition. Accessed March 6, 2021. http://lsc.chineselegalculture.org/eC/DQLJJFL_1646/all. Kangxi qiju zhu 康熙起居注. Modern transcription by the First Historical Archives. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. 1984. Qinding da Qing huidian shili 欽定大清會典事例. 1899 imperial edition. Qinding da Qing huidian zeli 欽定大清會典則例. 1764 imperial edition. Qing shilu 清實錄. Accessed March 6, 2021. http://sillok.history.go.kr/mc /main.do.

State Compilations from the Post-Imperial Era Supreme People’s Court of the People’s Republic of China 最高人民法院. “Zhonghua renmin gongheguo dang’an fa 中华人民共和国档案法 ­(Archives Law of the People’s Republic of China).” Official translation.

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Accessed March 6, 2021. http://english.court.gov.cn/2016-04/15/content​ _24565261​.htm. Zhao Erxun 趙爾巽 et al. Qing shi gao 清史稿. 1927 preface.

Twentieth-Century Printed Reproductions or Translations of Archival Materials Chang Wejen 張偉仁, ed. Ming Qing dang’an 明清檔案. 324 vols. Taipei: Zhongyang yanjiuyuan lishi shiyu yanjiusuo, 1986–95. China’s First Historical Archives, ed. Kangxi chao manwen zhupi zouzhe quanyi 康熙朝满文朱批奏折全译. Translated by Wang Xiaohong 王小虹 et al. Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 1996. National Academia Sinica Institute of History and Philology 國立中央研究 院歷史語言研究所, ed. Ming Qing shiliao 明清史料. 100 vols. Taipei: Zhongyang yanjiuyuan lishi shiyu yanjiusuo, 1953–96. Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Zone Archival Bureau 新疆维吾尔自治区档 案局 and Chinese Border History Research Center 中国边疆史地研究 中‌心, eds. Qingdai Xinjiang dang’an xuanji 清代新疆档案选辑. 91 vols. Guilin, Guangxi: Guangxi shifan daxue chubanshe, 2012.

Single-Author, Multiauthor, and Privately Compiled Materials from the Imperial Era Chu Ying 褚瑛. Zhouxian chushi xiaobu 州縣初仕小補 [Some help for ­beginning magistrates]. 1837 preface. Item 237 in Will’s Bibliography. Fang Dashi 方大湜. Pingping yan 平平言 [Considerations on an ordinary job]. 1838 fanli. Item 238 in Will’s Bibliography. Fang Xuanling 房玄齡, ed. Jin shu 晉書. 648 imperial edition. Gangyi 剛毅. Shenkan nishi 審看擬式 [Proposing formulas for investigating cases]. 1887 preface. Item 580 in Will’s Bibliography. ———. Muling xuzhi 牧令須知 [What magistrates must know]. 1888 preface. Item 243 in Will’s Bibliography. Huang Liuhong 黃六鴻. Fuhui quanshu 福惠全書 [The complete book of happiness and benevolence]. 1694 preface. Item 193 in Will’s Bibliography. Jueluo Wuertong’a 覺羅烏爾通阿. Juguan rixing lu 居官日省錄 [On the ­office holder’s daily self-examination]. 1854 preface. Item 61 in Will’s Bibliography.

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Li Yu 李漁, comp. Zizhi xinshu 資治新書 [A new book to help in government]. 1663 preface. Item 1133 in Will’s Bibliography. Li Zhen 李珍, comp. Dingli quanbian 定例全編 [Compendium of established regulations]. 1715 preface. Item 407 in Will’s Bibliography. Ming’an yaolüe deng qizhong 命案要略等七種 [Essentials on homicides and six other essays]. Undated. Item 459 in Will’s Bibliography. Pan Biaocan 潘杓燦. Weixin bian 未信編 [An unreliable treatise]. 1684 preface. Item 192 in Will’s Bibliography. Qiu Jun 丘濬. Daxue yanyi bu 大學衍義補. Presented to the throne in 1487. Song Ci 宋慈. Xiyuan jilu 洗冤集錄 [Collected writings on the washing away of wrongs]. 1247 preface. Item 630 in Will’s Bibliography. Tian Wenjing 田文鏡 and Li Wei 李衛. Qinban Zhouxian shiyi 欽頒州縣 事‌宜 [Instructions for magistrates published by imperial order]. 1730 ­imperial edition. Item 205 in Will’s Bibliography. Wan Weihan 萬維翰. Muxue juyao 幕學舉要 [Essentials of private secretary learning]. Undated. Item 265 in Will’s Bibliography. Wang Youhuai 王又槐. Ban’an yaolüe 辦案要略 [Important points for handling cases]. Undated. Item 457 in Will’s Bibliography. Wei Xiangshu 魏象枢. Hansongtang quanji 寒松堂全集. 1708 preface. Wei Yijie 魏裔介. Jianjitang wenji 兼济堂文集. 1779 preface. Xingmu yaolüe 刑幕要略 [Essentials for legal secretaries]. Undated. Item 299 in Will’s Bibliography. Xu Dong 徐棟, comp. Muling shu 牧令書 [The book of magistrates]. 1838 preface. Item 79 in Will’s Bibliography. Xue Yunsheng 薛允升. Duli cunyi 讀例存疑 [Remaining doubts when ­reading substatutes]. 1905 edition transcribed and digitized by Terada Hiroaki (寺田浩明). Accessed March 6, 2021. http://www.terada.law .kyoto-u.ac.jp/dlcy/index.htm. Item 421 in Will’s Bibliography. Yuanshu lunyao 爰書論要 [Important points on judicial procedure]. Undated. Item 465 in Will’s Bibliography. Zhang Guangyue 張光月, comp. Li’an quanji 例案全集 [A complete collection of precedents]. 1722 preface. Item 409 in Will’s Bibliography. Zheng Duan 鄭端, comp. Zhengxue lu 政學錄 [A record of learning about government]. Undated. Item 102 in Will’s Bibliography.

Materials Published after the Qing Dynasty Akçetin, Elif. “Corruption at the Frontier: The Gansu Fraud Case.” PhD diss., University of Washington, 2007.

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