Shen Jiaben

Shen Jiaben, also known by his literary name Jiyi, was a Late Qing Chinese official and jurist, born in 1840 in Huzhou, Zhejiang province, and died in 1913. He passed the jinshi examination, the highest degree of the imperial civil service system, in 1883, and served as Prefect of Tianjin from 1893 to 1897 before rising to Vice Minister of Justice. His central achievement was leading the legal reform of the collapsing Qing dynasty: working alongside the diplomat and jurist Wu Tingfang as Secretary of Enactment, he directed the 1905 revision of the Qing Code that abolished its most severe traditional punishments, including the execution method known as slow slicing. Shen and Wu also established the Imperial Law College in 1906 to train a new generation of Chinese legal professionals and translated foreign legal codes so that Qing law reform could draw directly on Western and Japanese legal models. He capped his career serving as Minister of Justice from 1911 to 1912 under Yuan Shikai's cabinet, at the moment of the dynasty's collapse, and his collected writings, published after his death as the Posthumous Works of Mr. Shen Jiyi, are regarded as a major scholarly monograph on the history of Chinese law, cementing his reputation as the chief architect of China's transition from imperial to modern law.