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The Case in the Vase: What Can a Ming Novel Tell Us about Traditional Chinese Legal Culture?

The Case in the Vase: What Can a Ming Novel Tell Us about Traditional Chinese Legal Culture? The more than thirty legal disputes and cases mentioned in The Plum in the Golden Vase (Jinpingmei) make this late Ming novel an invaluable source for the study of law and legal culture in premodern China. This lecture illustrates that the cases in the novel describe in considerable detail each of the formal steps in the Ming process of legal adjudication. But the work also conveys the message that despite the formal process, the legal system does not deliver justice. However, an alternative system of justice that is mostly implicit in the text, the justice of a disinterested and moral Heaven, ultimately prevails. Finally, the contemporary implications of this traditional understanding of law and justice are explored. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Frontiers of History in China Brill

The Case in the Vase: What Can a Ming Novel Tell Us about Traditional Chinese Legal Culture?

Frontiers of History in China , Volume 12 (04): 5 – Feb 7, 2017

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Publisher
Brill
Copyright
Copyright © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands
ISSN
1673-3401
eISSN
1673-3525
DOI
10.3868/s020-006-017-0029-1
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

The more than thirty legal disputes and cases mentioned in The Plum in the Golden Vase (Jinpingmei) make this late Ming novel an invaluable source for the study of law and legal culture in premodern China. This lecture illustrates that the cases in the novel describe in considerable detail each of the formal steps in the Ming process of legal adjudication. But the work also conveys the message that despite the formal process, the legal system does not deliver justice. However, an alternative system of justice that is mostly implicit in the text, the justice of a disinterested and moral Heaven, ultimately prevails. Finally, the contemporary implications of this traditional understanding of law and justice are explored.

Journal

Frontiers of History in ChinaBrill

Published: Feb 7, 2017

There are no references for this article.