A New Perspective on the Han Legal System: Research into the Han Wooden Slips Excavated from the Yiyang Tuzishan Site

Abstract Since the early Han dynasty, the Chinese legal system already contained an internal division between prison statutes and peripheral statutes. Statutes with penal provisions were generally regarded as prison statutes, while those lacking such provisions were regarded as peripheral statutes. Peripheral statutes could include laws of an administrative or institutional nature—including military law—as well as statutes of a ritual nature. By the early Han at the latest, all the individual chapters that would later constitute the “Statutes in Nine Chapters” were already in existence, some classified under prison statutes and others under peripheral statutes. The prominence of these nine chapters relates both to the openness of the Han legal system and to a reassessment of the value of individual statute chapters. This development was likely a product of the evolution of legal scholarship. Han statutes were applied uniformly throughout the commanderies and kingdoms. Although kingdoms in the early Han enjoyed considerable autonomy, they did not possess the power to create statutes and ordinances of their own, which is to say, independent kingdom law did not exist. Re-examining the records reveals that although accounts of primary statutes and peripheral chapters appeared relatively late, they have a documentary basis and cannot be dismissed as fabrications. From this perspective, the credibility of official historical records should not be denied. This conclusion also provides insight into reassessing the “doubting antiquity movement” and research on historical writing.