Automatic Integration of Historical Chinese Codices and Their Explanatory Books: A Case Study of Records of Laws and Systems of The Qing Dynasty During The Reign of Qianlong

Daqing Huidian (大清會典, the Records of Laws and Systems of the Qing Dynasty) is an important record produced by the government of Qing. It contains two parts, the statutes, which are the set of laws and rules of governance, and the precedents, which indicate how the laws were carried out in actual governance. Both the statutes and the precedents recorded in these books are important materials for research on the laws and governance of the Qing dynasty. In the earlier compilations, the statutes and precedents were kept in the same book. As the reign of Qing progressed, however, they were divided into two different books due both to the increase in size and to the differences in their purposes and nature.
In this thesis we try to use information technologies to rebuild the relationships between statutes and precedents. We take the third edition of the Daqing Huidian, compiled during the reign of Qianlong, as a case study. It includes two books: QinDingDaQingHuiDian (欽定大清會典) and QinDingDaQingHuiDianZeLi (欽定大清會典則例). While the former one is a collection of the statutes, the latter documents all the precedents.
We first analyze the structures and the compiling principles of these two books and reorganize the digital text into a format that is more suitable for research use. This includes itemizing the contents, classifying them by organizations and duties, and retrieving the time information of each precedent. We also discover a compiling principle that can help to divide the records into several clusters. Each of them has its own topic.
We then compare the two books from different aspects and discover that the differences between them are not only at the record level. Even the classes that were already clearly defined in the books may have several variations. To analyze the reasons for the differences, we design a method to explore the corresponding relations between statutes and precedents. Through this method, we have discovered 13,890 relations between 3,695 statute records and 25,150 precedent records.