Though the system was a thorough and complex one, with a number of rules and procedures meant to check malpractice, the vulnerability of the prisoners to ill-treatment and manipulation by the clerks, combined with the use of torture, the weak position of the accused in court and the lack of adversary procedure and defence counsel, made people reluctant to be involved with the law. Hang-chou, that city of
canals, even had, in its own style, a bridge of sighs; "The bridge in front of the government office of Lin-an fu is called 'Prefecture bridge', but its popular name is 'the bridge of regret'. This is because when people coming to plead cases in court arrive here, in
182 their hearts they already repent of having come".
For in many cases which might be considered in the west to be civil in character, the sanctions of the penal law were invoked. In property disputes, for example, it was often presumed that one of the parties must be guilty of breaking the law, even if only by making a false claim. A litigant was likely to find himself being interrogated as a criminal. It is clear that in these circumstances, the people of the city had much less incentive to use the legal and judicial
institutions of the state to protect their own position than they would have had in the west. To the extent that impartial, efficient and
reliable machinery for the settlement of disputes was lacking, property and the stability of mercantile life were left vulnerable to both
private and official pressure. Nevertheless, there were enough
law-cases in Hang-chou to keep the courts busy. The space in front of the prefectural office was lined with salesmen's stalls and thronged with litigants. The circumstances of life in the city, in fact, may have contributed to a greater willingness there to use the state judicial institutions. The expense involved in recourse to the court, and the unfamiliarity of the institutions and procedures, were less for the townsmen than the villagers. Neighbourhood and clan ties were more
difficult to preserve in the city, and by Sung times the hang had not developed an effective organization or powers comparable to
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those of the C h ’ing guilds. There were thus fewer ways of
avoiding the involvement of the yamen in the settlement of disputes. In Hang-chou, even the chiefs of the bands of nightsoil collectors were prepared to go to the prefectural court if they could not keep
18 3ci
rivals away from their established beat by other means. Perhaps, then, the yamen court was not altogether the dreaded experience it had become by the C h 'ing dynasty. All in all, justice in Hang-chou was possibly no more repressive than that offered in many pre-industrial
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western cities.
3 Public Works, Relief, Charity
Hang-chou was obviously a hydraulic city, to coin a phrase. Wittfogel lists for types of public works involving water-control: productive works (canals, reservoirs, irrigation dikes), protective works (drainage canals, flood dikes), aqueducts for drinking water,
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and navigable canals. Hang-chou, or its immediate hinterland, relied on all of these, and indeed one could add to the list not only the famous bridges (records of whose building seem to be very s p a rse^^a) but also reservoirs against fire. I have already given some account of the main stages in the development of these works, and it is clear that the city would have been much less viable without them. One detail worth noticing is the absence of any system of sewers in the
city. At least rudimentary forms of sewerage were provided for some early European cities - notably Rome - by public authority. In Hang-chou, the collection of night-soil was entirely a private trade. Its practitioners, who were called ' emptier s «Ji 'formed
themselves into bands, and if another band strayed onto their territory were even ready, as I have said above, to take them to court. Wealthier
families had cesspits, and there were streetsweepers and rubbishmen also plying their private trade. Scavengers were out every morning after the less noisome refuse, and every year in spring the government sent out boatmen to clear the smaller canals, to load the rubbish from streets and alleys and to dump it in waste country away from the city. Hang-chou was far too big a city for the traditional symbiosis between town and country to be effective. Efforts repeatedly had to be made to stop people - including officials, clerks, and court eunuchs - encroaching on the shores of the lake and the canals and thus making the task of
keeping the water clear almost impossible. Orders, to be policed by the standard city patrols, were put out to stop people - again including officials - throwing excrement and household rubbish of all kinds into
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the water.187 It was recognised that the people of the whole city
depended on lake water. If they all drank contaminated water the result 188
could only be the epidemics which frequently recurred.
It is clear from the constant complaints about the abuse of the city's water-works that the government, far from deriving its strength from the need for organizing them, often failed even to defend them against
the self-interest of the population at large. (It provided only the most cursory facilities for most of the population, who could not afford
to buy service.) No special department of the local government existed to control them: the service of works must have included them in its duties. When the city became capital, permanent squads of soldiers were again assigned to their maintenance, but they were not particularly
effective. Their numbers were often depleted. Before the court
arrived, special authorization had to be obtained for work to be carried out. Even in southern Sung action resulted only from the initiative of an energetic official.
Given more urgent attention was the maintenance of the sea-dike. The repeated violence of storms made this imperative, and there are many records of large-scale repairs being undertaken both to the dike
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itself and to the shores of the river. Most of these undertakings involved the use of soldiers, but labour was sometimes conscripted, being excused other service or its equivalent tax, or hired, with finance as well as materials provided by the central government. Public works other than water-control were not easily paid for. Su Shih, writing in 1089, records that though a few new buildings had been put up recently for official use, the halls built by the C h 'ien kings were in a ruinous state. Much of these old works, which were still the city’s main public buildings, had been abandoned, and the
offices had thus shrunk in size. Two months before, a building had collapsed, injuring twenty scribes. Recently, the circuit officials
had been very parsimonious; expenditure on building could not go above ten strings without their approval. Su, protesting his concern for financial stringency, asks for two hundred monk certificates, or failing this, whatever the court's generosity can provide. The kung-
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shih k'u was to provide five hundred strings. The increased number of projects undertaken under southern Sung, including paving, reflects the easing of the constraints which made such requests necessary.
The arrival of the court and the central government agencies, however,threw a heavy strain on local resources. Much of the building undertaken over the first few years was handled by the prefect in
association with the palace construction agency, hsiu-nei ssu , and sometimes with the fiscal intendant as well. Labour for public works in general was taken not only from Lin-an prefecture,
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but also from others in this general area. Financing was similarly shared. Toward the end of the Shao-hsing period (1131-1163) the
responsibility for maintenance of court buildings was taken from the local authorities and given entirely to the palace construction agency. This was given a budget, provided by annual levy of 200,000 strings of cash, eventually reduced to 50,000. Lin-an at first contributed 36,000
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to this. Money was once again in short supply for the prefecture. In 1161 the prefect complains that the material and labour required for the recent repairs to walls have led the prefecture to lay out 2,000 strings and 7,000 tou of grain. Now more work is required on the ming-t1 ang )^ P , and the finances of the prefecture are
overstrained. He asks for, and gets, a grant of labour from the Imperial army, rarely thus used, and extra money.
Much of the labour used for such works seems to have been paid - reference is frequently made to its cost - and this together with the demand for materials contributed much to the inflation already caused by the influx of population. Building remained a very important
industry in the city. With the constant fires, wood was a large item 194
in its imports.
Public works as a whole were restricted to large-scale enterprises or those involving state interest. Housing, for example, where it was built by the state, seems to have been regarded as a source of revenue rather than a service.
The main way in which relief was granted to the inhabitants of the city and the prefecture in hard times was remission of taxes. Flood, fire, failure of crops, epidemics, locusts and earthquakes were all recognized as legitimate reasons for such remission to be
granted. There was a stiff formality about the official treatment of such disasters. It is recorded that in 1089 several thousand
to call a hurricane by the name ’disaster' and did nothing. Eleven people in Hsiu-chou reported ) a 'hurricane disaster
stuck to the letter of the law in refusing
deaths resulted.195 It seems then that it was standard procedure for those affected to petition for relief, and also that such petitions
could be stifled by government inertia. As far as the people of the city were concerned, the remission of the standard taxes had the indirect effect of holding down prices, the object also of the remission of trade taxes and the operation of the ever-normal
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granary. But in time of disaster neither these administrative measures nor the charity offered by Buddhist temples - who might house and feed the numerous victims - was enough. Direct grants of cash, and especially grain, were made. As a provincial city, Hang chou received such grants only on the comparatively rare occasions - like the great flood and famine of 1089 - when the dimensions of suffering constituted a problem too large to ignore with safety. On becoming capital, however, the city had wide privileges, Both
remissions of taxes, and grants of grain and cash, became more frequent, and were given not only as relief, but also on ceremonial occasions like the accession of an emperor. When taxes were remitted for such reasons the local authorities would 'replace' (t ^ai-shu ) the
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prefecture's quota by paper money. The trade taxes were often remitted, and if we are to believe Wu Tzu-mu, they were regularly
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in abeyance for five months of each year. Private and state
199 tenants were exempted from rent for ceremonies or in time of need. The scale of fuel below market rate seems to have been a permanent affair, with twenty-one regular sales-posts (ch'ang ), though the mention of the market rates’ being much higher than theirs suggests that the quantities actually sold may not have been
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