Great Qing Legal Code

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The Great Qing Legal Code (or Great Ching Legal Code),^[a] also known as the Qing Code (Ching Code) or, in Hong Kong law, as the Ta Tsing Leu Lee (大清律例), was the legal code of the Qing empire (1644–1912). The code was based on the Ming legal code, the Great Ming Legal Code [zh], which was kept largely intact. Compared to the Ming Code, which had no more than several hundred statutes and sub-statutes, the Qing Code contained 1,907 statutes across over 30 revisions between 1644 and 1912. One of the earliest of these revisions was in 1660, completed by the Qing official Wei Zhouzuo and the noble Bahana.^[1]

The Qing Code was the last legal code of Imperial China. By the end of the Qing dynasty, it had been the only legal code enforced in China for nearly 270 years. Even with the fall of the imperial Qing in 1912, the Confucian philosophy of social control enshrined in the Qing Code remained influential in the subsequent German law-based legal system of the Republic of China, and later, the Soviet-based system of the People's Republic of China. Part of the Qing Code was also used in British Hong Kong until 1971.

The code resulted from a complex legal culture and occupied the central position of the Qing legal system. It showed a high level of continuity with the Tang Legal Code, which indicated an active legal tradition at the highest level of Imperial Chinese bureaucracy that had existed for at least a thousand years.^[2]

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