Bamboo and wooden slips discovered at the Tuzishan site will enable a better understanding of the penal, judicial and recording system in the Han Dynasty (206 BC-AD 220), scholars said.

 

As progress is made in research on ancient legal documents, a specific discipline that deals with this aspect of history should be established, scholars said at a recent forum.

Li Xuemei, a professor from the Institute for Chinese Ancient Legal Classics at China University of Political Science and Law, said that traditionally, Chinese legal history studies have focused more on institutions and ancient classics, but ancient legal document research includes studies on literature that have been passed down as well as unearthed documents, including aspects of ancient society revealed in context. This is why the discipline appears to be more interdisciplinary, Li said.
 

In recent years, unearthed bamboo slips have not only usherd in a new understanding of laws and decrees in the Qin (221-206 BC) and Han (206 BC-AD 220) dynasties, but also provided abundant materials for an objective understanding of the construction and development of ancient China’s legal system.

Li Junming, a research fellow from the Unearthed Research and Protection Center at Tsinghua University, said that the Han bamboo slips excavated at Zhangjiashan, Hubei Province, offer a glimpse into how long a certain law or legal system existed at that time.
 

Xu Shihong, a professor from the Institute for Chinese Ancient Legal Classics at China University of Political Science and Law, said wooden slips discovered at the Tuzishan site in Hunan Province, help scholars to better understand the penal, judicial and recording system in the Han Dynasty.

In addition, scholars have expanded research beyond official history and political records to include folk documents, such as genealogy, inscriptions and contracts.
 

Xu Zhongming, a professor of law at Sun Yat-sen University, said: “The attitude ancient people took toward recording legal cases and stories within a certain institutional and cultural context hint at the social atmosphere at that time, so a variety of interactive historical materials will help to clarify the relationship between the legal system and culture.”

Xu said, a comparative depiction of ancient China’s legal system relative to that of Western culture will also be conducive to these studies.

“By comparing the structure, concepts and mechanisms of the legal system in the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1616-1911) dynasties and the European experience at a similar period in time, one can understand the difference in the distribution of power on the two sides,” Xu said.

Since the 1990s, one of the outstanding features of new legal history study in the United States is that it borrowed experiences from social sciences. You Chenjun, an associate professor from the Department of Law at Renmin University of China, said it is quite plausible to map out the evolution of laws drawing upon folk records in the Ming-Qing era.

Moreover, Xu suggested that scholars in history and law should further integrate studies. Their different focuses in the broad sense should not prevent them from working together to figure out the details together. 

Xu said the development and accumulation of knowledge in legal history, historical documents, bamboo slips studies, epigraphy, and archival sciences have laid a solid foundation for this discipline, so it is the right time to refine academic theories and construct a systematic framework.
 

The forum was co-hosted by the Institute for Chinese Ancient Legal Classics under the China University of Political Science and Law and the Ancient Legal Classics Committee under the China Institute of Legal History.

 

Sun Miaoning is a reporter at the Chinese Social Sciences Today.