Bibliographic Essay
The best place to start on Chinese legal history is Geoffrey MacCormack's The Spirit of Traditional Chinese Law (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), which should be read along with his Traditional Chinese Penal Law (London: Wildy, Simmonds & Hill, 2013).
To understand the ‘legislative turn' in Qing governance see, Zheng Qin, Zhou Guangyan, trans., ‘Pursuing Perfection: Formation of the Qing Code', Modern China 21.3 (1995), 310-44. Essential for understanding crime and punishment is Jerome Bourgon, ‘The Principle of Legality and Legal Rules in the Chinese Legal Tradition', in Mirelle Delmas-Marty, Pierre-Etienne Will and Naomi Norberg (eds.), China, Democracy, and Law: A Historical and Contemporary Approach (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 169-88. On specific punishments see Marinus Meijer, ‘The Autumn Assizes in Ch'ing Law', Toung Pao 70 (1984), 1-17; Joanna Waley-Cohen, Exile in Mid-Qing China: Banishment to Xinjiang 1758-1820 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991); and Timothy Brook, Jerome Bourgon and Gregory Blue, Death by a Thousand Cuts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). For social and economic changes in eighteenth-century China see Ramon Myers and Yeh-chien Wang, ‘Economic Developments, 1644-1800', and William Rowe, ‘Social Stability and Social Change', both in Willard J. Peterson (ed.), The Cambridge History of China, vol. ix, The Chi'ing Dynasty to 1800, part 1 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 563-646 and 473-562 respectively.An early study examining law and violent crime is Marinus J. Meijer, Murder and Adultery in Late imperial China: A Study of Law and Morality (Leiden: Brill, 1991). For an excellent case study of the politics of criminal justice and pioneering use of archival sources see Philip Kuhn, Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). For studies based on homicide case records see Thomas Buoye, Manslaughter, Markets, and Moral Economy: Violent Disputes over Property Rights in Eighteenth-Century China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), Janet Theiss Disgraceful Matters: The Politics of Chastity in Eighteenth-Century China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), J.
Neighbors, A Question of Intent: Homicide Law and Criminal Justice in Qing and Republican China (Leiden: Brill, 2018), and Matthew Sommer, Sex, Law, and Society in Late Imperial China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000). On the issue of ‘bare sticks' see Thomas Buoye, ‘Bare Sticks and Naked Pity: Rhetoric and Representation in Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) Capital Case Records', Crime, History and Societies 18.2 (2014), 27-47. For translations of capital crime records see Robert Hegel, True Crimes in Eighteenth-Century China: Twenty Case Histories (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009).The first effort to statistically analyse homicide based on the archival resources is Zhiwu Chen, Kaixiang Peng and Lijun Zhu, ‘Social-Economic Change and its Impact on Violence: Homicide History of Qing China', Explorations in Economic History 63 (2017), 8-25. Finally, an invaluable website for Qing law is Legalising Space in China, http://lsc.chineselegalculture.org/, the nexus of an ongoing project to translate the substatutes of the Qing Code, which has hundreds of historical works on Qing law, documents and other resources.