The First Emperor
Dr Roel Sterckx, lecturer in Chinese studies, University of Cambridge, on Qin legal texts ...
Until a few decades ago, our main evidence for understanding the Qin consisted of archaeological remains and accounts in a history written centuries later, which was biased to say the least. That has changed, because, since the mid-1970s, Chinese archaeologists have started to dig up tombs, and what they found was truly astonishing.
Not only did they find implements, but they also found texts written on bamboo slips. The advantage of these texts is that they are direct evidence of the period; the disadvantage is the medium that they were fabricated in. Each text was effectively a rolled-up set of bamboo slips, and when the string that tied these slips together disintegrated, the text would be scattered all over the tomb and they needed to be pieced back together.
Culturally diverse
The content of the texts varies from region to region. We have found philosophical texts, snippets of literary texts and, in the case of Qin, administrative texts, population registers and legal texts. So what we’re faced with on the eve of unification is a China that is culturally very diverse, with regions that all have their own script, mythology, religion and, probably, oral tradition.
If you were to compare texts from Qin with those from the slightly more culturally diverse Chu in the south, which was the last state to be conquered by Qin, you would notice two things. The Chu materials contain many more non-practical texts, ones that deal with moral debates, mythology, even a little bit of storytelling. The evidence we get from Qin tombs seems to be mostly focused on the practical organisation of daily life: legal texts, administrative texts, agricultural calendars that stipulated exactly when certain activities needed to be conducted. There are few remnants of cultural and literary traditions. This can be explained by looking at the political circumstances and ideology in which the state of Qin was formed in the centuries preceding unification.
Running an empire
It’s one thing to conquer an empire; it’s quite another to make it run smoothly and effectively. The majority of the Qin legal documents that have been found deal with administrative concerns – reporting your population and collecting taxes accurately, making sure that the transport system is running smoothly, guaranteeing that the postal horses are being reported correctly and so on.
However, they also deal with criminal law and punishments. If we are to believe Sima Qian and later historians, Qin Shi Huang came to power through implementing one of the harshest, most inhumane legal regimes that one can imagine. And, to be sure, there was a great deal of that. However, these legal documents also tell us that the judicial system was fairly sophisticated.
The minutiae of daily life
Among them are case studies that the local administrator could consult. There were a number of situations in which he might have to pass judgement, and these case studies provide valid scenarios. For example, if Person A steals from Person B and the value of the stolen goods amounts to such and such, what do I do? What does the legal procedure allow me to do? Do I send them away, caution them, execute them, punish them? These legal documents also illustrate, as nothing has done before, the detail with which a local Qin administrator observed local life and how he could intervene in even quite minor aspects of the lives of the people under his jurisdiction.
We have a good example of that detail in the rules that applied to how the harvest was monitored in a particular locality. Someone asks: What is the punishment for having rat holes in your granary? The law says that, if you have three or more rat holes in your granary, you will be fined one shield, but if you have fewer than three, you will simply be told off. It ends by saying that three mouse holes are equivalent to one rat hole – in other words, it is not just the number of holes that rodents make into your granary that counts but also the particular rodent that has committed the offence.
What you have here is a system in which officials are invited, or forced, to make careful observations in their localities and report them to the centre. Of course, some of the information will get lost on the way back to the capital. But surely the fact that you can enforce laws and regulations that affect aspects of human life as trivial as picking up dead carcasses in the meadows on your way home, as well as not paying your taxes, shows that a sense of Qin authority must have invaded the private household. And once you get the rule of law into the sphere of the home, you probably have more chance of controlling human behaviour than ever before.
Physical punishments
There is another case study that deals with personal injury. If, during a fight, someone bites off part of someone’s lip, nose or ear or a finger, what is the punishment for each of these actions? The punishment for each is for the beard to be shaved off – one of the standard punishments, together with shaving off the hair knot that men in China wore.
That may seem remarkably mild, but the Qin legal system also had a variety of physical punishments, including mutilation, tattooing the body and the face, cutting off parts of limbs – these were traditionally among the most severe punishments. A second category consisted of enforced labour – for example, for men, working on the Great Wall, and for women, becoming grain pounders to supply the troops.
This is not civil law in the Roman sense of the word – this is not a legal system that places the individual at the centre of legal revision. The Qin laws sanction the idea that you can move people around as if they are pieces on a chess board, and you can manipulate them in many ways, to force them to serve your military or administrative purposes.
