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CHAPTER TWO A Vision of Sexual Order Definitions and Boundaries This chapter sketches a preliminary definition of jian, the basic term used for sex offenses in legal codes of the late imperial era. English has no exact equivalent of this word, which one finds used as a noun, a transitive verb, and a modifier. The closest approximations of the noun-"sexual intercourse out of place" or "illicit sexual intercourse"-are both awl{ward and imprecise. But also, the sexual dimension captures only part of the term's wider range of meaning, just as anxiety about intercourse out of place was only a subset of a more general fear of moral and political disorder.

The vast majority of litigation in county courts involved relatively minor offenses and concluded at the county level, without being sent up through the bureaucracy for review. In the records of such cases, magistrates usually did not bother explaining their decisions in terms of specific laws and meted out (or withheld) penalties on a case-by-case basis without direct reference to the code. This does not mean that local adjudication was arbitrary or unconnected with the principles embodied in codified law (see P.

For example, the early dictionary Xiao erya (which probably dates from the Han dynasty) states: "If a male and a female engage in intercourse without ritual, it is called 'yin' (nan nil bu yi li jiao, wei zhi yin)" (guang yi 4/4a). Some early texts (including Qin and Han statutes) use jian to mean offenses of a specifically sexual nature, but this term often carried a broader meaning of depravity, villainy, or criminality. Legal codes from the Tang dynasty on use jian in a more exclusive and exact way, to mean illicit sexual intercourse or political treachery.