Marriage and the Law in the Age of Khubilai Khan: Cases from the Yuan dianzhang by Bettine Birge (review)

Bettine Birge. Marriage and the Law in the Age of Khubilai Khan: Cases from the Yuan dianzhang. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2017. Pp. vii + 324. $56 (cloth). ISBN 978-0674975514.

The Yuan dianzhang 元典章, or Statutes and Precedents of the Yuan Dynasty, is not only a must-read source for Chinese legal history and the Mongol Empire, but also of unique value in the view of historiography. The long-developed Chinese tradition tended to compile systematic narratives by editing various materials that were, in turn, lost. The Yuan dianzhang is essentially a collection of original documents and preserves considerable first-hand materials, offering more vivid historical scenes than an official history such as the Yuan shi 元史 or an official code such as the Tongzhi tiaoge 通制條格. It is especially rich for preserving the voices of common people, which are rare and precious in traditional Chinese sources. The numerous documents in the Yuan dianzhang demonstrate the simultaneous operation of judicial processes and diachronic changes in the legal system, one of the main threads of the history of the Mongol Empire and the Yuan dynasty.

Marriage is the fundamental unit maintaining the social values of a culture, and marriage law has been an important part of civil law throughout history. Multicultural conflict and reconciliation in the Yuan dynasty's vast territory are vividly revealed in the marriage cases in Chapter 18 of the Yuan dianzhang. Bettine Birge's English translation and thorough interpretation of the whole chapter take the pulse of the age.

The Yuan dianzhang is notoriously difficult to read. As Birge tells the reader, the mixture of three types of languages, including literary Chinese, colloquial Chinese, and Sino-Mongolian or "Direct Translation from Mongolian" (67); abundant specialized legal terms and non-Chinese names (52); the flow of documents; and errors and lacunae in the text due to the hasty production of the original text (63–64), all combine to hinder a reader from understanding the text. Even with a century of tireless effort by Chinese and Japanese scholars, the first complete punctuated critical edition was not published until 2011 by the team of Chen Gaohua 陳高華, Zhang Fan 張帆, Liu Xiao 劉曉, and Dang Baohai 党寶海.¹ Birge's book is clearly based on the solid research of Chinese and Japanese scholars.

As the first translation of a whole chapter of the Yuan dianzhang into a Western language, Birge's book is groundbreaking. The book is divided into two parts. In my opinion, the first part is the best introduction so far to the Yuan dianzhang in a Western language, as well as the most up-to-date one in any language. This part consists of three chapters. Chapter 1, "The Historical and Social Context of the Yuan dianzhang," sorts out the administrative policies and legal developments of the Khitan-Liao, Jurchen-Jin, and Mongol-Yuan periods (17–27). One of the most valuable and inspiring insights is:

The Yuan emperors addressed whether to apply different laws to different ethnic groups or to try to impose unified laws on everyone within Yuan territory. They switched back and forth on this policy … but they also developed hybrid laws and new legislation unprecedented in Chinese history that exerted much influence on later Chinese law.

(28)

With Chapter 2, "Yuan Administration and the Legal System," Birge uses the cases in the Yuan dianzhang to reveal some important features of the legal system. For example, different branches of the administration had legal jurisdiction over the same area (36); a number of seemingly minor cases were sent to higher levels for review, all the way to the Central Secretariat or even the emperor (49); as many as five or six verdicts in a particular case were issued at various levels of government, often conflicting with each other (52). All inevitably caused inefficiencies in the legal system. As the codification of Yuan law took a...