Horses and Legislation in the Qing Inner Asian Frontiers during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

• In Event: 147. Power, People, and Animals in Asia, Part 3 of 3

Abstract

Animals were minor objects of legislation in sedentary Chinese societies, where crimes related to animals were little noticed by the government. In contrast, in nomadic societies, animals, especially horses, were important in legal customs because of their centrality in nomadic daily lives, nomadic culture and religions, trade—including tea-horses and silk-horses—in sedentary societies, and battle. Thus, horses were most often stolen in nomadic societies, and the nomadic regimes correspondingly treated horse theft as a serious crime. The Manchu-established Qing even considered horse theft a capital crime in its Inner Asian frontiers during its first decades of rule there. Using horse theft in Xinjiang and Mongolia as an example, this paper will analyse the influence of animals in Qing legislation and the pluralistic legal cultures that resulted from Qing colonization in Inner Asian frontiers. After the Qing stabilized its rule across the empire, the Qing court gradually standardized the nomadic legal cultures to the Chinese one. As a result, regulations and punishment of horse theft in Inner Asian frontiers converged towards that in Chinese legislation, and horse theft experienced a shift from major crime to minor crime, which illustrates Qing efforts to decrease the disparity between state law—Chinese law—and the Inner Asian legal customs. Finally, the state law had gained ascendancy in competition with the latter. Therefore, the author argues that the importance of animals in Qing legislation varied according to the importance of the Inner Asian frontiers and peoples to the Qing Empire.

Author

• Jianfei Jia, Indiana University-Bloomington