The Deeds of the Dead in the Courts of the Living:Graves in Qing Law Tristan G. Brown (bio) I. Introduction In late imperial China, graves, in addition to serving as the resting places of the dead, served as a powerful mechanism for claiming land, securing and hiding wealth, and expressing social status. They were particularly effective because of several compounding factors. Ming Taizu's ban on cremation in 1370 essentially mandated the creation of graves, while the spread of the lineage institution across China in the subsequent centuries disseminated burial practices associated with Neo-Confucian ritual.1 The imperial state recognized the power of graves and the dead buried in them through its law code and its administration. The legal code prescribed harsh punishments for those who violated gravesites.2 For those who had failed to receive a proper burial or had passed away unpropitiously, the [End Page 109] state held triannual litan rituals in counties across the empire to appease their unrequited spirits.3 Graves were a central avenue for engaging the law and accessing the courts in late imperial China. Drawing on the work of Yonglin Jiang, who has discussed the religious frameworks of late imperial law codes, this article makes use of Paul Katz's concept of the "judicial continuum," which he defines as "the belief that the judicial mechanisms of this world can interact and even overlap with those of the underworld."4 For the administration and maintenance of gravesites in late imperial China, this "judicial continuum" was not just a cultural framework, but was also put into practice through a variety of Daoist rituals and geomantic practices.5 While these did not have a formal place in the late imperial Chinese law code, this study demonstrates that the Qing legal system readily endorsed judicial rituals of the underworld and geomantic interpretations of land to resolve county-level disputes. Qing courts recognized the dead as having distinct interests and the capacity to aid and harm their living relations. This recognition in turn had social effects. Just as the imperial state delegated responsibility for administering the commercial property regime to rural agents such as contractual middlemen, the state also recognized ritual intermediaries, such as geomancers, as necessary agents in administering the property regime of the dead.6 County archives in Sichuan suggest that sepulchral litigation was both common and complex during the Qing. Officials in the province observed that local residents were sometimes "deluded" (huo) by fengshui and commented on the high rate of grave lawsuits over the nineteenth century.7 Wei Shunguang has disaggregated 1,000 territorial property [End Page 110] disputes in Sichuan's Ba county between 1821 and 1838 and discovered that over 26 percent of all lawsuits concerning land rights involved graves and fengshui.8 Nanbu county's archive contains a similar proportion of grave disputes for that period, and a number of lawsuits analyzed below from the span of a few months in 1890 reveal their frequent appearance in court. In Nanbu, yamen runners frequently composed maps of contested auspicious sites during grave litigation, and such maps occupy at least 70 percent of the entire surviving cartographic collection from the county's legal archive.9 Fengshui lawsuits proliferated during and after the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644), even as the practice of Chinese geomancy dates back to antiquity. A transformation appears to have occurred during the Ming—one perhaps linked to the imperial ban on cremation and the resultant need to create graves—which elevated the importance of fengshui in Chinese law.10 By the nineteenth century, people across the empire made fengshui-related claims—from Manchuria down to the borders of Southeast Asia.11 It is challenging to determine the exact degree to which the frequency of such cases increased over the Qing, as Nanbu's archive has a larger number of lawsuits from the second half of the dynasty than the first. Nonetheless, the well-known population increase in Sichuan over the period, with the accompanying rise in land reclamation, suggests that grave litigation increased in frequency, at least in terms of the absolute number of cases, as Weiting Guo has shown to have been the case in Taiwan during...