Bureaucracy and Judicial Truth in Qing Dynasty Homicide Cases

In the past several decades, historians of late imperial Chinese law have moved well beyond previous generations’ reliance on Western-derived conceptual categories and normative standards as benchmarks for analysis and comparison. With archival sources increasingly available, new scholarship has undermined previous assumptions as to the universality of Western social and legal theory by holding such theory against the light of new empirical findings.¹ The result has been a quantum leap in our understanding of the complexity and sophistication of the late imperial Chinese legal system.

A number of these contemporary scholars have revisited several basic features of the late imperial Chinese judiciary: that it functioned not as an independent organ of government but as an element of the bureaucratic administrative system; that judicial affairs were but one of the many administrative duties for which a county magistrate was held accountable; and that despite the fact that the county magistrate’s yamen served as the court of first instance in all legal cases, magistrates themselves had no specialized training in law other than that gained by field experience or the advisement of private legal secretaries and widely available administrative handbooks. These features were, of course, recognized as well by foreign observers even in the nineteenth century. Current scholarship, however, has for the most part rid itself of earlier Anglo-American suppositions, such as that the lack of judicial independence inevitably resulted in late imperial Chinese law being arbitrarily applied, despotic in nature, and fundamentally irrational. As Jerome Bourgon has eloquently pointed out, late imperial Chinese principles of legality and legal rules yielded a judicial system that compares favorably with modern Euro-American systems in the extent to which it was rational, predictable, and widely publicized.²

But as yet, we still know surprisingly little of how the bureaucratic elements of the judicial system might have influenced criminal investigation and prosecution during the Qing dynasty (1644–1911). In an earlier study of county yamen clerks and runners, I argued that the informal fees collected by yamen employees in the processing of legal cases served as a critical element of county government financing.³ I also suggested that pecuniary interests and consequent jurisdictional litigation among various offices and divisions of yamen employees might have influenced the judicial process by highlighting specific features of a given case as being more or less relevant than others.⁴ Here, I want to turn attention to how the bureaucratic concerns of the magistrate himself may have had a similar influence on the statutory classification of offenses and the consequent determination of appropriate punishments.

Judicial proceedings were, along with tax collection and bandit suppression, among a magistrate’s most important responsibilities and remained a primary target of periodic review by superior officials. Particularly in serious criminal cases, the gravity of which warranted mandatory review by courts at the prefectural, provincial and central levels, the magistrate’s role was dictated by a large number of regulations and laws covering nearly every step of prosecution (see below). Magistrates were, naturally, regularly enjoined to seek the truth and to exercise due diligence, caution, and moral rectitude in the pursuit of justice.⁵ Yet at the same time, a chief concern of any career-minded magistrate in regard to legal proceedings had to be the efficient disposal of cases and the avoidance of disciplinary sanction.

This essay engages the bureaucratic aspect of Qing law by examining two similar homicide cases from the middle of the Qianlong emperor’s sixty-year reign (1736–1796), a period during which the Qing judiciary might be said to have functioned as close to intended as it ever did. Both cases are drawn from the collection of Routine Memorials processed by the Board of Punishments (xingke tiben) held by the Number One Historical Archives in Beijing. These memorials were a central component of the mandatory review system referred to above. As such, they include nearly every aspect of a given case: the reporting of a crime, the magistrate’s initial report on preliminary investigation, autopsy and depositions of witnesses, the trial, the magistrate’s findings and...