Divine Justice? Judicial Rituals and Official Legitimacy in Late Imperial China

This paper will explore the ways in which late imperial Chinese officials strove to utilize the ideology of justice (especially the belief in divine retribution) as well as judicial rituals to assert the legitimacy of both their own authority and the Mandate of Heaven. Numerous sources describe officials making oaths to judicial deities like the City God as a means of asserting their authority, or filing underworld indictments in order to capture wrongdoers and exorcise demonic forces. Moreover, a wealth of evidence indicates that officials would not hesitate to rely on dreams and other forms of divine intervention to deal with difficult legal cases. The overlap between legal and religious practice was so profound that it helped shape popular representations of the relationship between officials and judicial deities, with many late imperial texts portraying officials interacting with the City God. Other works record the souls of the dead appearing in court in order to correct miscarriages of justice. All this indicates that one fundamental aspect of Chinese legal culture is the belief that the judicial mechanisms of this world can interact with those of the underworld.
At the same time, however, there are numerous instances of oaths and indictment rites being performed as a public means of engaging in symbolic or real acts of resistance against authority. In such cases, the same judicial rituals normally used to support imperial power could become tools for challenging it, with such rites even being staged at state-sponsored sacred sites like City God temples.