Folk Law Existing In Huizhou Region In Ming And Qing Dynasty

“Huizhou is the place where I most want to go to, I absolutely stay away from him in the rest of my life ”. This expressed in the tour Huang Shan Bai Yue mandatory self-censorship with a complex feeling of tang xianzu who is a playwright in Ming dynasty.With the discovering of huizhou documents in the 1950 s, scholars began to focus on huizhou which is a very prosperous place in the past.There are abundant files related to culture in Huizhou region with great complicated content right now. People in Huizhou region treated books with respect and cherishing and believed in that both knowledge and farmland should be handed down from generation to generation in their family, which contributed to high legal awareness in each generations. In social lives, civilians in Huizhou region used to sign contracts on almost every conditions such as solving disputes between neighbors, dividing property within families and partnership in business. These led to local documents spread in large amount in Huizhou region. This thesis will discuss the ancient folk low system existing in Huizhou region based on those local documents handed down among Huizhou nongovernmental records.Compared to national low system at that time, pragmatism was a salient feature of ancient folk low system because it was created to cater needs to solve conflicts, which means it could be revised and also be abandoned after solving conflicts. There are other features of folk low system that should be mentioned in this thesis, combining of all lows together, showing apparent patriarchal clan affected, being different between regions, punishing with indefiniteness and that it is experience characteristic. All of these features indicate that ancient civilians in Huizhou were full of survival wisdom and were eager to lead a rich and peaceful life.Folk low system existing in Huizhou region consisted of four important parts: domestic discipline exercised by the head of a feudal household, stipulations within township, stipulations within the group of literati union and industrial criterion. Domestic disciplines exercised by the head of a feudal household, which acted as a criterion to judge behavior of clansmen, was the most important part of folk low system. Since people in Huizhou region were inclined to live together with their clansmen, the inveteracy of the patriarchal clan idea helped patriarchal clan become the most effective and fundamental organization to local autonomous society. Despite of stipulations within township and within the group of literati union, which acted as the other parts of folk low system validated by geographical relationship and literati organizational relationship, had a certain validity to restrain local behavior, they were still affected by the domestic disciplines due to the administrative pattern of one clan owning their own village. Industrial criterion was a series of lex personalis which acted as a role of low between businessmen from Huizhou region.Though folk low system was highly executed, national low system still had significant effects and interacted with folk low system in Huizhou region. This thesis will mainly focus on these four topic: folk low system should be firstly defined as Low relative to national low system; and there are solid embodiments from local documents existing now in Huizhou region; beyond that, national low system had a great deterrence on civilians under certain conditions; to keep the social order under control, folk low system had both positive and negative effects in the process of cooperating with national low system.To popularize the rule of lows, acknowledging folk low system and its positive effects on regulating the behavior of civilians will leave it with living space and respect for cooperating with enforced national lows. This is the realistic meaning to research the interaction between folk low system and national low system in Huizhou region.