Law of Kaihuang
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Kaihuang Code
In AD 581 after Emperor Suiwen took over the rule, aiming at the miscellaneous and ruthless criminal laws of the Western Zhou Dynasty, Emperor Wen ordered Gao Jiong, Zheng Yi, Yang Su and Pei Zheng to make the New Code based on codes of the Western Wei and Northern Zhou Dynasties. In the third year of Kaihuang (AD 583), he commanded Su Wei and Niu Hong to amend the New Code based on the principle of simplifying by cutting out superfluities, and generated the historically reputed Kaihuang Code. The Kaihuang Code includes 20 sections and 500 articles. The twelve sections are Ming Li, Military, Bureaucracy, Marriage, Preservation, Construction, Larceny, Lawsuit, Trickery, Civil affairs, Pursuit, and Adjudication. The Kaihuang Code establishes five penalties, namely death, exile, imprisonment, punishment of flogging with a stick and punishment of flogging with a split bamboo. Death penalty includes gallows and decapitation; imprisonment includes five categories of one-year, one-and-a-half-year, two-year, two-and-a-half-year, and three-year; punishment of flogging with a stick includes 60 to 150 beats; and punishment of flogging with a split bamboo includes 10 to 55 beats.
10 Major Achievements of the Sui Dynasty of China
Reigning for a period of only thirty-eight years from 581 to 619, Sui dynasty was one of the shortest lived dynasties in the history of China but it made several important contributions, most prominently their reunification of China after a lengthy period of fragmentation and internal warfare. The reign of Emperor Wen of Sui is considered a golden period in Chinese history with vast agricultural surplus and huge population growth. Several construction projects were carried out during the reign of Sui including the famous Grand Canal. The Sui also contributed greatly in governance and administration with their reforms being continued during the reign of the succeeding Tang dynasty. Here are the 10 major achievements of the Sui dynasty of China. #1 The Sui reunified China under the rule of a single dynasty after around 300 years After the fall of the Han dynasty in 220 AD, China entered an age of fragmentation which saw several centuries of warfare among rival kingdoms. Sui Dynasty was preceded by the Northern and Southern dynasties period (420 to 589) which was marked by civil war and political chaos. During the latter part of this period, Northern Zhou reunified Northern China. Yang Jian overthrew the Northern Zhou dynasty establishing the Sui dynasty in 581 and taking the title of Emperor Wen. He initiated a campaign to re-unify China which materialized after his conquest in 589 of Chen dynasty, which reigned over Southern China. Sui dynasty thus became the first dynasty to rule over entire China proper after around three centuries since the fall of Western Jin Dynasty in 316. #2 Re-unification of China by Sui led to major developments There were many developments which were initiated by the Sui dynasty but were consolidated and became more prominent during the succeeding Tang dynasty, which had a much longer reign. These include the political system which was adopted with little change by the Tang. Re-unification of north and south China by the Sui led to the standardization and re-unification of the coinage. It also led to a whole new poetic era during the Tang, considered the Golden Age of Chinese poetry. Major developments in porcelain production and its widespread manufacture can also be traced to the reigns of Sui and Tang dynasties. #3 The reign of Emperor Wen of Sui is considered a golden period in Chinese history Emperor Wen of Sui dynasty carried out several reforms, which among other things aimed at reducing economic inequality and improving agricultural productivity. The middle period of the Sui dynasty is considered a golden age of prosperity with vast agricultural surplus which supported rapid growth of population to historical peak. This population peak was surpassed more than a century later at the zenith of Tang Dynasty. The Reign of Kaihuang (era name of Emperor Wen) is considered by historians as one of the apexes in the two millennium imperial period of Chinese history. #4 The influential Kaihuang legal code was formulated One of the most important legal codes in the history of traditional Chinese law, the Kaihuang Code, was formulated during the rule of Emperor Wen of Sui dynasty. It consisted of 12 chapters with 500 provisions and served as a basis for the legal codes of succeeding dynasties. It was far simpler than earlier laws and considerable effort was put in making sure that local officials studied and enforced the new laws. The Kaihuang code was succeeded by the more famous Tang code, which is considered as the most influential body of law in the history of East Asia.
Sui Dynasty
In 590, Wendi, a former fubing general himself, decided that all military households should be registered and administered under local prefectures and counties. This reform initiated a gradual process of demilitarization, which brought military households under the control of civil officials, dissolved the concentration of military professionals in the north, and prevented generals from contriving revolts. A by-product of this reform was a significant integration of minorities into Han Chinese society. In economic affairs, in 582 Wendi redefined the juntianzhi (equal-field system) that the previous northern dynasties had created. According to his new system, at the age of twenty-one years a man was entitled to eighty mu (1 acre equals 6.07 mu) of cultivated land from the state, and a woman received half of that amount. A peasant, even if he or she did not actually own the property, had the right to pass it to his or her children and the freedom to sell it. Having received land for use, a peasant family had to pay rent (zu), the de facto land tax, fulfill corvèe labor for twenty days per year, and pay two bolts of cotton or silk cloth. By redistributing land to farmers and collecting tax in kind, the new dynasty intended to improve agricultural production and to establish a stable revenue resource. Although the taxation depended on whether the dynasty had effective control of the rural population, the equal-field system succeeded in fulfilling its objectives. Agricultural production recovered from the wartime disruptions of the previous era, and state granaries were filled with grain and cloth, an exception in Chinese history. Although Wendi was sometimes cruel and hotheaded, his law, the Kaihuang Code (emperor's new law), which was issued in 581 and amended in 583, reduced many cruel punishments in previous Chinese laws, such as the exposure of the severed head of a criminal and the dismemberment of the body. The Code's original 1,735 clauses were reduced to 500 in 583. It retained four main types of punishments, the death penalty, deportation, forced labor, and the bastinado (beating the soles of the feet with a stick). Officials who committed crimes could pay the fines from their salaries or could commute their sentence into official demotion. The succeeding Tang dynasty followed this Code as it was revised during the Sui dynasty.
Knowledge Graph
Examples
1 We can sum up a characteristic of China Law system's development from the drawing up and publishing of Tang Law which mainly inherited by Sui Dynasty's KaiHuang Law and other limitation such as rigid contents and a lot of legal provisions exist in name only.
2 The Decrees of Kaihuang Reign was a code adopted by the rulers of the Sui Dynasty on the basis of summarization of the legislative experiences of Wei, Jin, Northern and Southern dynasties. It established the systems of Twelve chapter Law Code, Five Chief Forms of Punishment, Ten Categories of Major Crimes, and expanded legal privileges of feudal nobles and bureaucrats
3 Once complete, these new laws were duly proclaimed as the Kaihuang Code.