Great Qing Legal Code

The Great Qing Legal Code, also known as the Qing Code, was the legal code of the Qing empire from 1644 to 1912. It was based on the Great Ming Legal Code, which it kept largely intact, but grew far larger, containing 1,907 statutes across more than 30 revisions between 1644 and 1912 compared with the Ming Code's few hundred statutes and sub-statutes; one of the earliest revisions, in 1660, was completed by the Qing official Wei Zhouzuo and the noble Bahana. It was the last legal code of Imperial China and, by the end of the Qing dynasty, had been the only legal code enforced in China for nearly 270 years, and the Confucian philosophy of social control it enshrined remained influential in the German-law-based system of the Republic of China and later the Soviet-based system of the People's Republic of China; part of the code also remained in use in British Hong Kong until 1971. It showed a high level of continuity with the earlier Tang Legal Code, reflecting an active Chinese legal tradition at the highest level of imperial bureaucracy that had existed for at least a thousand years.