he
emperor in the past, all this was reintroduced. Obviously much of it was
spurious: much of the old texts had been lost, and when fragments were
found they were arbitrarily completed. Moreover, the old writing was
difficult to read and difficult to understand; thus various things were
read into the texts without justification. The new Confucians who came
forward as experts in the moral code were very different men from their
predecessors; above all, like all their contemporaries, they were
strongly influenced by the shamanistic magic that had developed in the
Ch'in period.

Wen Ti's reign had brought economic advance and prosperity;
intellectually it had been a period of renaissance, but like every such
period it did not simply resuscitate what was old, but filled the
ancient moulds with an entirely new content. Socially the period had
witnessed the consolidation of the new upper class, the gentry, who
copied the mode of life of the old nobility. This is seen most clearly
in the field of law. In the time of the Legalists the first steps had
been taken in the codification of the criminal law. They clearly
intended these laws to serve equally for all classes of the people. The
Ch'in code which was supposedly Li K'uei's code, was used in the Han
period, and was extensively elaborated by Siao Ho (died 193 B.C.) and
others. This code consisted of two volumes of the chief laws for grave
cases, one of mixed laws for the less serious cases, and six volumes on
the imposition of penalties. In the Han period "decisions" were added,
so that about A.D. 200 the code had grown to 26,272 paragraphs with over
17,000,000 words. The collection then consisted of 960 volumes. This
colossal code has been continually revised, abbreviated, or expanded,
and under its last name of "Collected Statues of the Manchu Dynasty" it
retained its validity down to the present century.

Alongside this collection there was another book that came to be
regarded and used as a book of precedences. The great Confucianist
philosopher Tung Chung-shu (179-104 B.C.), a firm supporter of the
ideology of the new gentry class, declared that the classic Confucianist
writings, and especially the book _Ch'un-ch'iu_, "Annals of Spring and
Autumn", attributed to Confucius himself, were essentially books of
legal decisions. They contained "cases" and Confucius's decisions of
them. Consequently any case at law that might arise could be decided by
analogy with the cases c