Bibliographic Essay

For an overview of early modern China's legal history see Matthew H. Sommer, ‘The Field of Qing Legal History', in Zhang Haihui et al. (eds.), A Scholarly Review of Chinese Studies in North America, open access ebook (Ann Arbor, MI: Association for Asian Studies, 2013), pp.

For the regulation of sexual behaviour and gender relations in Qing law, we are indebted to the pioneering scholarship of Marinus Meijer; the work of American historian Vivien Ng is similar. In the absence of legal archives, both scholars relied heavily on a nineteenth­century casebook, Xing’an huilan (Conspectus of Penal Cases), which contains summaries of tricky cases (Bodde and Morris, Law in Imperial China, describes the casebook and translates 190 of its cases). Their work was superseded by later scholarship based on Qing legal case records.

For ‘illicit sex' (jian) in imperial law and change over time in how sexual relations were regulated, see Matthew H. Sommer, Sex, Law, and Society in Late Imperial China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000). For rape in Ming-Qing law see Sommer, Sex, Law, and Society, ch. 3; Matthew H. Sommer, ‘Dangerous Males, Vulnerable Males, and Polluted Males', in S.

The classic study on legal status distinctions in imperial law remains T'ung-tsu Ch'ü, Law and Society in Traditional China (Paris: Mouton, 1961). For the cult of female chastity in the Ming-Qing era, see Mark Elvin, ‘Female Virtue and the State in China', Past & Present 104 (1984), 111-52; Sommer, Sex, Law, and Society; Janet Theiss, Disgraceful Matters (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); and Weijing Lu, True to her Word: The Faithful Maiden Cult in Late Imperial China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008).