The Case of Zeng, Shun and Others Accepting and Giving Bribes to Pervert the Law

In the seventh year of Emperor Gaozu of Han (200 BCE), the Beidi Commandery submitted a doubtful case to the imperial court for final adjudication. A woman named Zeng and a slave named Shun had absconded but later voluntarily registered their names and household status under an amnesty, maintaining that they had never fled. Local officials disputed whether this act amounted to fraudulent self-registration, which carried the penalty of tattooing and hard labor (qing chengdan), or whether it fell within the amnesty’s protection. The Commandery’s legal officers requested higher-level instruction. The original bamboo-slip title of the case is strikingly “Zeng, Shun and Others Accepting and Giving Bribes to Pervert the Law”; however, the surviving text exclusively details the abscondment and the dispute over fraudulent household registration, containing no narrative about bribery or perversion of justice. The imperial court’s final reply (tingbao) ultimately convicted them of fraudulent registration and sentenced them to qing chengdan. The notable mismatch between the slip title and the recorded facts has prompted extensive scholarly discussion concerning early Han legal archival practices and possible lost portions of the text.

The imperial court’s authoritative reply (tingbao) ruled that Zeng, Shun, and the others were guilty of fraudulent self-registration and condemned them to qing chengdan, a punishment combining facial tattooing with compulsory hard labor on wall-building and other construction projects.

The primary controversy centers on the conspicuous discrepancy between the bamboo-slip title “Accepting and Giving Bribes to Pervert the Law” and the actual content of the case, which deals solely with abscondment and falsified household registration. Scholars debate whether the title reflects a missing section, a clerical misattribution, or a broader legal category under which registration fraud was subsumed. Legally, the core dispute was whether the defendants’ actions constituted the crime of “fraudulent self-registration” (zha zi zhan shu ming shu) or were legitimized by the amnesty proclamation, directly affecting the severity of the punishment.

Preserved in the Book of Submitted Doubtful Cases (Zouyan shu) excavated at Zhangjiashan, this case illuminates the rigorous early Han procedure of submitting equivocal legal matters for higher review. It underscores the strict enforcement of household registration laws, the harsh treatment of fugitives, and the tension between formal legal requirements and imperial acts of clemency. The title-content inconsistency has been particularly influential, spurring significant philological and legal-historical research into how judicial records were compiled, titled, and archived during the Han dynasty, and offering a rare glimpse into the practical operation of criminal justice over two millennia ago.