Research Of Steles To Show Prohibition In Suzhou During Qing Dynasty

Since the very ancient times,the traditionally autocratic monarchic china has had the legal traditional practice of “engraving laws on stales”.In the Qing dynasty,in order to maintain local legal order in a more comprehensive way,local communities and governments at various levels usually engraved laws and regulations on stales.According to the identity of the regulator,the commandments on stones in the Qing Dynasty could be divided into official decrees and non-official decrees regulating rich and colorful regulatory objects,touching all aspects of the entire civil society.Among these stone tablets,official decrees could be issued by official governments voluntarily.while the non-official decrees were issued passively by responding to applications of local populace,or generally enacted by public organizations of clans,guilds and many other varieties of civil organizations.In the general progress of promulgating official decrees,governments normally strictly followed the administrative operation mechanisms between different levels of local authorities.As far as the objects of standardization were concerned,the decrees were often promulgated to address such various social governance issues as clan management,business orders,temple management,tax,environment,public security and municipal administration.As for the punishment methods of these decrees,the penalties recorded in the inscriptions were primarily based on national codes as well as folk statutes,including such manners characteristic of ancient China as property penalties,and identity penalties.The features of the system of prohibitions on tablets during Qing Dynasty is that,in terms of the maintenance and governance of the local legal order,a set of benign interactions between the government and the public has formed;and as for the the regulatory objects,the decrees had penetrated into every corners of social life.So,when the official law could not effectively and seasonably regulate,manage,and rectify various types of local issues,different levels of authorities and regional citizens could figure out these problems by engraving targeted decrees.At the meantime,due to the backwardness of dissemination and preservation of laws,recording local ordinances and commendations on stones could spread local norms in greater geographical areas in longer time,ensuring the effectiveness of regulations and the authority of multifarious civil organizations.At the same time,however,the cumbersome procedure led to the hysteresis of the implementation of the ban,and the unequivocal punishment of the decrees impaired the enforceability of the ban.The practice of recording laws on stones in the Qing Dynasty maintained the regional order in an extremely effectively way,which is worthy of learning until today.