The Great Qing Legal Code (or Great Ching Legal Code), also known as the Qing Code (Ching Code) or, in
Hong Kong law
The law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region has its foundation in the English common law system, inherited from being a former British colony and dependent territory. There are several sources of law, the primary ones being statute ...
, as the ''Ta Tsing Leu Lee'' (), was the
legal code
A code of law, also called a law code or legal code, is a systematic collection of statutes. It is a type of legislation that purports to exhaustively cover a complete system of laws or a particular area of law as it existed at the time the co ...
of the
Qing empire
The Qing dynasty ( ), officially the Great Qing, was a Manchu-led Dynasties of China, imperial dynasty of China and an early modern empire in East Asia. The last imperial dynasty in Chinese history, the Qing dynasty was preceded by the ...
(1644–1912). The code was based on the
Ming legal code, the , which was kept largely intact. Compared to the Ming Code, which had no more than several hundred
statutes
A statute is a law or formal written enactment of a legislature. Statutes typically declare, command or prohibit something. Statutes are distinguished from court law and unwritten law (also known as common law) in that they are the expressed wil ...
and sub-statutes, the Qing Code contained 1,907 statutes across over 30 revisions between 1644 and 1912. One of the earliest of these revisions was in 1660, completed by the Qing official
Wei Zhouzuo and the noble Bahana.
The Qing Code was the last legal code of
Imperial China
The history of China spans several millennia across a wide geographical area. Each region now considered part of the Chinese world has experienced periods of unity, fracture, prosperity, and strife. Chinese civilization first emerged in the Y ...
. By the end of the Qing dynasty, it had been the only legal code enforced in China for nearly 270 years. Even with the fall of the imperial Qing in 1912, the
Confucian philosophy of social control enshrined in the Qing Code remained influential in the subsequent
German law
The law of Germany (), that being the modern German legal system (), is a system of civil law which is founded on the principles laid out by the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany, though many of the most important laws, for example ...
-based legal system of the
Republic of China
Taiwan, officially the Republic of China (ROC), is a country in East Asia. The main geography of Taiwan, island of Taiwan, also known as ''Formosa'', lies between the East China Sea, East and South China Seas in the northwestern Pacific Ocea ...
, and later, the
Soviet
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...
-based system of the
People's Republic of China
China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. With population of China, a population exceeding 1.4 billion, it is the list of countries by population (United Nations), second-most populous country after ...
. Part of the Qing Code was also used in
British Hong Kong
Hong Kong was under British Empire, British rule from 1841 to 1997, except for a Japanese occupation of Hong Kong, brief period of Japanese occupation during World War II from 1941 to 1945. It was a crown colony of the United Kingdom from 1841 ...
until 1971.
The code resulted from a complex legal culture and occupied the central position of the Qing legal system. It showed a high level of continuity with the
Tang Legal Code, which indicated an active legal tradition at the highest level of Imperial Chinese bureaucracy that had existed for at least a thousand years.
Structure
The Great Qing Code comprises 436 articles divided into seven parts, further subdivided into chapters. The first part (Names and General Rules) is a General Part, similar to that of Germany's , which contains the general legal rules, principles, and concepts applied to the rest of the Code. The other six parts are named after the
Six Ministries of government, and each part contains laws that are perceived as applicable to each ministry.
# Names and General Rules, Articles 1–46 – includes laws on the Five Punishments (art. 1) and the Ten Great Wrongs (art. 2)
# Laws relating to the Board of Personnel, Articles 47–74 – includes laws on the System of Offices (ch. 1) and Official Rules for Carrying Public Administration (ch. 2)
# Laws relating to the Board of Revenue, Articles 75–156 – includes laws on Marriage (ch. 3–4; art. 101–107) and Taxes (ch.7; art. 141–148)
# Laws relating to the Board of Rites, Articles 157–182 – includes laws on Sacrifices (ch. 1) and Rules of Demeanor (ch. 2)
# Laws relating to the Board of War, Articles 183–253 – includes laws on Guarding the Palace (ch. 1; art. 183–198) and Military Affairs (ch. 2; art. 199–219)
# Laws relating to the Board of Punishments, Articles 254–423 – includes laws on Homicide (ch. 8–10; art. 282–301)
# Laws relating to the Board of Works, Articles 424–436 – includes laws pertaining to Construction (ch. 1) and Dikes (ch. 2)
Five Punishments
The
Five Punishments in the Code contained in Article 1 are:
# Punishment of beating with the light
bamboo
Bamboos are a diverse group of mostly evergreen perennial plant, perennial flowering plants making up the subfamily (biology), subfamily Bambusoideae of the grass family Poaceae. Giant bamboos are the largest members of the grass family, in th ...
# Punishment of beating with the heavy bamboo
# Penal servitude
# Punishment of exile
# Penalty of death
Nature of the Code
A traditional Chinese legal system was largely in place during the
Qin dynasty
The Qin dynasty ( ) was the first Dynasties of China, imperial dynasty of China. It is named for its progenitor state of Qin, a fief of the confederal Zhou dynasty (256 BC). Beginning in 230 BC, the Qin under King Ying Zheng enga ...
. Amalgamation of a
Confucian
Confucianism, also known as Ruism or Ru classicism, is a system of thought and behavior originating in ancient China, and is variously described as a tradition, philosophy, religion, theory of government, or way of life. Founded by Confucius ...
worldview and a legal code was considered complete by the
Tang Code
The ''Tang Code'' () was a penal code that was established and used during the Tang dynasty in China. Supplemented by civil statutes and regulations, it became the basis for later dynastic codes not only in China but elsewhere in East Asia. The Cod ...
(624 CE), which was regarded as a model of precision and clarity in terms of drafting and structure.
Neo-Confucianism
Neo-Confucianism (, often shortened to ''lǐxué'' 理學, literally "School of Principle") is a moral, ethical, and metaphysical Chinese philosophy influenced by Confucianism, which originated with Han Yu (768–824) and Li Ao (772–841) i ...
continued to be the state orthodoxy under the
Song
A song is a musical composition performed by the human voice. The voice often carries the melody (a series of distinct and fixed pitches) using patterns of sound and silence. Songs have a structure, such as the common ABA form, and are usu ...
,
Ming, and
Qing
The Qing dynasty ( ), officially the Great Qing, was a Manchu-led Dynasties of China, imperial dynasty of China and an early modern empire in East Asia. The last imperial dynasty in Chinese history, the Qing dynasty was preceded by the ...
dynasties. The Confucian foundations of the Tang Code were retained throughout the centuries, with some aspects strengthened.
During the Qing dynasty, criminal justice was based on a highly detailed criminal code. One element of the traditional Chinese criminal justice system is the notion that criminal law has a moral purpose: to get the convicted to repent and see the error of his ways. In the traditional Chinese legal system, a person could not be convicted of a crime unless confessed. This often led to using
torture
Torture is the deliberate infliction of severe pain or suffering on a person for reasons including corporal punishment, punishment, forced confession, extracting a confession, interrogational torture, interrogation for information, or intimid ...
, to extract the necessary confession. An example of the use of torture and the risk of false confession was seen in
The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768. These elements still influence modern Chinese views toward law. All
death sentences were reported to the capital and required the personal approval of the
emperor
The word ''emperor'' (from , via ) can mean the male ruler of an empire. ''Empress'', the female equivalent, may indicate an emperor's wife (empress consort), mother/grandmother (empress dowager/grand empress dowager), or a woman who rules ...
.
There was no
civil code
A civil code is a codification of private law relating to property law, property, family law, family, and law of obligations, obligations.
A jurisdiction that has a civil code generally also has a code of civil procedure. In some jurisdiction ...
separate from the
criminal code
A criminal code or penal code is a document that compiles all, or a significant amount of, a particular jurisdiction's criminal law. Typically a criminal code will contain offences that are recognised in the jurisdiction, penalties that might ...
, which led to the now discredited belief that traditional Chinese law had no
civil law. More recent studies have demonstrated that most of the magistrates' legal work was in civil disputes and that there was an elaborate system of civil law which used the Qing Code to establish
torts
A tort is a civil wrong, other than breach of contract, that causes a claimant to suffer loss or harm, resulting in legal liability for the person who commits the tortious act. Tort law can be contrasted with criminal law, which deals with c ...
.
The Qing Code was in the form of exclusively a criminal code. Its statutes throughout stated prohibitions and restrictions, violations of which were subject to a range of punishments by a
legalist state. In practice, however, large sections of the code and its sub-statutes dealt with matters that would properly be characterized as civil law. The populace made extensive use (perhaps a third of all cases) of the local magistrate courts to bring suits or threaten to sue on a whole range of civil disputes, characterized as "minor matters" in the Qing Code. Moreover, in practice, magistrates frequently tempered the application of the code by taking prevalent local customs into account in their decisions. Filed complaints were often settled among the parties before they received a formal court hearing, sometimes under the influence of probable action by the court.
Qing Code and the West
The Great Qing Legal Code was the first written Chinese work directly translated into
English. The translation, known as ''Fundamental Laws of China'' was completed by English traveller
Sir George Staunton in 1810. It was the first time the Qing Code had been translated into a European language. The French translation was published in 1812.
The
First and
Second Opium War
The Second Opium War (), also known as the Second Anglo-Chinese War or ''Arrow'' War, was fought between the United Kingdom, France, Russia, and the United States against the Qing dynasty of China between 1856 and 1860. It was the second major ...
s between the Qing dynasty and several
Western powers led to the forced signing of several
unequal treaties by the Chinese government, which granted subjects of the foreign nations in question
extraterritoriality
In international law, extraterritoriality or exterritoriality is the state of being exempted from the jurisdiction of local law, usually as the result of diplomatic negotiations.
Historically, this primarily applied to individuals, as jurisdict ...
in China, which included being exempted from the Great Qing Legal Code. According to historian Ronald C. Po, foreign exemption from Chinese laws resulted from the unequal treaties "substantially challenged" Chinese control over its maritime border.
In the late Qing dynasty, there was a concerted effort to establish legal codes based on European models as a part of the
Self-Strengthening Movement
The Self-Strengthening Movement, also known as the Westernization or Western Affairs Movement (–1895), was a period of reforms initiated during the late Qing dynasty following the military disasters of the Opium Wars and Taiping Rebellion.
The ...
. Due to the German victory in the
Franco-Prussian War
The Franco-Prussian War or Franco-German War, often referred to in France as the War of 1870, was a conflict between the Second French Empire and the North German Confederation led by the Kingdom of Prussia. Lasting from 19 July 1870 to 28 Janua ...
and because
Imperial Japan
The Empire of Japan, also known as the Japanese Empire or Imperial Japan, was the Japanese nation state that existed from the Meiji Restoration on January 3, 1868, until the Constitution of Japan took effect on May 3, 1947. From Japan–Kor ...
was used as the model for political and legal reform, the adopted legal code was modeled closely on that of
Germany
Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It lies between the Baltic Sea and the North Sea to the north and the Alps to the south. Its sixteen States of Germany, constituent states have a total popu ...
.
End of the Qing Code and its legacy
In the early 20th century, with the advent of the "Constitutional Movement", the imperial government was forced by various pressures to modernize its legal system quickly. While the Qing Code remained law, it was qualified and supplemented in quick succession by the
Outline of the Imperial Constitution (1908) and the Nineteen Important Constitutional Covenants (1911), as well as various specialist laws, such as the Great Qing Copyright Code (1910).
In 1912, the collapse of the Qing dynasty ended their 268 years of imperial rule over China, along with 2,000 years of Chinese imperial history. The Qing court was replaced by the Republic of China government. While some parts of the Qing Code and other late Qing statutes were adopted for "temporary application" by the
Beiyang Government
The Beiyang government was the internationally recognized government of the Republic of China (1912–1949), Republic of China between 1912 and 1928, based in Beijing. It was dominated by the generals of the Beiyang Army, giving it its name.
B ...
of the Republic of China, as a general legal position, the Qing Code ceased to have effect ''de jure'' due to the dissolution of the Qing state.
Republic of China
The newly founded
Republic of China
Taiwan, officially the Republic of China (ROC), is a country in East Asia. The main geography of Taiwan, island of Taiwan, also known as ''Formosa'', lies between the East China Sea, East and South China Seas in the northwestern Pacific Ocea ...
adopted the existing German-based legal codes from the Qing era, but these codes were not immediately put into practice. Following the overthrow of the Qing dynasty in 1912, China came under the control of rival warlords and had no government strong enough to establish a legal code to replace the Qing Code. Finally, in 1927,
Chiang Kai-shek's
Kuomintang
The Kuomintang (KMT) is a major political party in the Republic of China (Taiwan). It was the one party state, sole ruling party of the country Republic of China (1912-1949), during its rule from 1927 to 1949 in Mainland China until Retreat ...
government attempted to develop Western-style legal and penal systems. Few of the Kuomintang codes, however, were implemented nationwide. Although government leaders strove for a Western-inspired codified law system, the traditional Chinese preference for collective social sanctions over impersonal legalism hindered constitutional and legal development. The spirit of the new rules never penetrated to the grass-roots level or provided hoped-for stability. Ideally, individuals were to be equal before the law, but this premise proved more rhetorical than substantive.
Law in the Republic of China on
Taiwan
Taiwan, officially the Republic of China (ROC), is a country in East Asia. The main geography of Taiwan, island of Taiwan, also known as ''Formosa'', lies between the East China Sea, East and South China Seas in the northwestern Pacific Ocea ...
today is based on the German-based legal system brought by the Kuomintang. The influence of the Qing Code manifests itself in the form of an exceptionally detailed penal code, with many offenses punishable by
death
Death is the end of life; the irreversible cessation of all biological functions that sustain a living organism. Death eventually and inevitably occurs in all organisms. The remains of a former organism normally begin to decompose sh ...
. For example, in addition to the offense of
piracy
Piracy is an act of robbery or criminal violence by ship or boat-borne attackers upon another ship or a coastal area, typically with the goal of stealing cargo and valuable goods, or taking hostages. Those who conduct acts of piracy are call ...
, there are also "piracy causing grievous bodily harm" (punishable by death or life imprisonment under Section 3 of Article 333 of the ''Criminal Code of the Republic of China'' (
中華民國刑法)), as well as "piracy causing death" and "piracy with arson, rape, kidnapping or murder" (both entail mandatory death penalty under Section 3 of Article 333 and Article 334 of the ''Criminal Code''). One legacy from that bygone era is the offense of "murder of a family member" (e.g.
patricide
Patricide (or paternal homicide) is the act of killing one's own father. The word ''patricide'' derives from the Latin language, Latin word ''pater'' (father) and the suffix ''-cida'' (cutter or killer). Patricide is a sub-form of parricide, wh ...
and
matricide), which entails life imprisonment or death under Section 1 of Article 272 of the ''Criminal Code''. This applied even to minors under 18 years old, until the abolition of Section 2 of Article 63 of the ''Criminal Code''—which allowed for life imprisonment or the death penalty against minors committing crimes under Section 1 of Article 272—on July 1, 2006.
People's Republic of China
While the legal system in the
People's Republic of China
China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. With population of China, a population exceeding 1.4 billion, it is the list of countries by population (United Nations), second-most populous country after ...
was, and to some extent still is, based on
socialist law, it incorporates certain aspects of the Qing Code, most notably the notion that offenders should be shamed into repentance. This took the form of the practice of parading condemned criminals in public from 1927 (the beginning of the Agrarian Revolutionary War) to 1988, when "the declaration of the
Supreme People's Court
The Supreme People's Court of the People's Republic of China (SPC) is the highest court of the People's Republic of China. It hears appeals of cases from the high people's courts and is the trial court for cases about matters of national ...
, the
Supreme People's Procuratorate and the Ministry of Public Security on resolutely stopping the street display of convicted and unconvicted criminals" was issued.
Hong Kong
In Hong Kong, after the establishment of
British rule
The British Raj ( ; from Hindustani , 'reign', 'rule' or 'government') was the colonial rule of the British Crown on the Indian subcontinent,
*
* lasting from 1858 to 1947.
*
* It is also called Crown rule in India,
*
*
*
* or dire ...
in 1841, the Great Qing Legal Code remained in force for the local Chinese population. Until the end of the 19th century, Chinese offenders were still executed by
decapitation
Decapitation is the total separation of the head from the body. Such an injury is invariably fatal to humans and all vertebrate animals, since it deprives the brain of oxygenated blood by way of severing through the jugular vein and common c ...
, whereas British offenders would be put to death by
hanging
Hanging is killing a person by suspending them from the neck with a noose or ligature strangulation, ligature. Hanging has been a standard method of capital punishment since the Middle Ages, and has been the primary execution method in numerou ...
. Even long into the 20th century and well after the fall of the Qing dynasty in China, Chinese men in Hong Kong could still practice
concubinage
Concubinage is an interpersonal relationship, interpersonal and Intimate relationship, sexual relationship between two people in which the couple does not want to, or cannot, enter into a full marriage. Concubinage and marriage are often regarde ...
and
polygamous kim-t'iu marriages permitted by the Qing Code, a situation that ended only with the passing of the Marriage Reform Ordinance 1970 (Cap. 178), which came into force on 7 October 1971. Until that point, the Great Qing Legal Code had been enforced in some form for 327 years (from 1644 to 1971).
Because there are still living
concubines married before the Marriage Reform Ordinance (Cap. 178), and their rights (of inheritance, and the inheritance rights of their sons and daughters) are respected by the Hong Kong legal system (even after the 1997
handover
In cellular telecommunications, handover, or handoff, is the process of transferring an ongoing call or data session from one channel connected to the core network to another channel. In satellite communications it is the process of transf ...
), the Great Qing Legal Code is still admissible in evidence when handling legal cases relating to events that occurred before 1971.
See also
*
Chinese law
*
Traditional Chinese law
*
Law of the People's Republic of China
The Law of the People's Republic of China, officially referred to as the socialist rule of law with Chinese characteristics, is the legal regime of China, with the separate legal traditions and systems of mainland China, Hong Kong, and Macau.
C ...
*
Law of Taiwan
*
Five Punishments
*
Ten Abominations
Notes
References
Works cited
*
Further reading
*Bodde, Derk, and Clarence Morris, eds. ''Law in Imperial China: Exemplified by 190 Ch'ing dynasty Cases.'' Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967.
External links
The Qing Code Wallace Johnson, ed.
*
*
*
{{Qing dynasty topics
Legal codes
Legal history of China
Law in Qing dynasty
Law of Hong Kong