Concepción de Realidad Compleja y su relación con el sujeto.

The mention of army commanders (chih-hui shih) implies that in emergency the resources of the Imperial army were called on by the city's police officers.

One other facet of the organization of the police troops is worth note. Disciplinary checks on the behaviour of the troops in

as well as being the name of a low rank in the Imperial army, was also the title given to the servicemen who acted as guards at the prefectural offices. In this case, however, the title must refer to officers

concerned with military discipline, analogous to the chiang yii-hou

the hsiang were provided . Yii-hou,

serving in the military unit Like these, the hsiang yii-hou were subject to the orders of the three commands

(san-ssu ) of the Imperial army. As in other areas of police

44

work, the army shared this control with K'ai-feng prefecture.

Firefighting was clearly a major task for the soldiers involved in the police system. This remained true throughout the dynasty. The government repeatedly acted to improve the way this job was done. A late and thorough reform is described by Wang Ko J21. , Governor

(yin ^ ) of K'ai-feng, who had undertaken to repair the dilapidated patrol-post system. Ropes, hooks and water-storage equipment were supplied in these posts, and a book-keeping system established for them. They were to be regularly inspected and deficiencies were to be

, 45

made u p .

Though the report does not say so, this equipment was supplementary to the elaborate tools provided for K'ai-feng's fire-watch towers

(wang-huo lota described in the Tung-ching meng-hua lu. These tiled towers had at their foot large offices with a hundred or

so troops from the Imperial army, equipped with such standard equipment as buckets, ropes, axes and so on, as well as some alarming pieces of seige equipment, like the iron kitten (t * ieh-mao-erh a bunch of grappling hooks swung at the end of an iron chain. Whenever a

fire spread, mounted messengers went to get help from the army

46

commanders. It is most reasonable, I think, to suppose that these watchtowers were linked with the patrol system described above, some being under the authority of the patrolmen, as they were later to be

of the same network as the police posts. Fire, too, meant that special action had to be taken to stop looters, including the troops

47 who were supposed to be fighting the fire.

The functions of the troops in the patrol-posts are not spelt out in detail. In general, "Each post had five soldiers, who went on the beat (hsiin-ching at night and handled cases involving

48

public order". They stopped fights and tried to settle arguments between parties who were not prepared to go to litigation. They were certainly meant to police a wide range of regulations, and not merely to stop obvious crimes like burglary. An edict of 1077 lays down the punishments to be given to policemen who failed to detect cases of smuggling or breaking the coinage laws in their areas. The pao-chia system was in force at the time, and different penalties were specified in cases where the pao-chia groups did, or did not, know what was going

49 on.

The hsiang patrol troops were also responsible for tracking down and arresting those responsible for discovered crimes. Organizing this detective work seems to have been partly the responsibility of the so-yu, who were subject,like the patrol troops,to penalties if the criminals were not caught within a specified period of time.^ Other patrol troops existed in K ’ai-feng - an edict of 1030 refers to patrolmen under the control of the prefecture acting as guards for palaces, temples and offices'^ - but the patrol posts in the hsiang provided the routine machinery for keeping order.

D. THE HSIANG AS COURTS

A most important feature of the function of K'ai-feng’s hsiang was their place in the administration of justice. In the early part

of the dynasty, the formal rule was that none of the institutions concerned with police work were to involve themselves with the

interrogation by flogging, or the sentencing, of prisoners. This is made clear for the sheriffs by an edict of 998, "the sheriffs are not to set up gaols for interrogation

I have found no such clear-cut edict defining the patrolmen’s place. They were certainly not to pass judgement on the criminal cases they were involved with, but to take them to the prefectural offices, and

they were forbidden to deal with disputes which the parties wanted 54

taken to the prefect. There was also an order dating from 995-998 which ran, "It is forbidden for those in command of c h e n and hsiang illegally to hear courtcases, and it is forbidden for them to

flog people This

prohibition on flogging is repeated in an edict of 1025 which laid down the procedure to be followed when a suspected criminal was arrested. The patrolman was to set out the accusation against the prisoner, according to the facts of the case, in a written document to be taken to the commander. The latter was to question (shen-wen ) the prisoner again, but the original accusation was not to be changed. It had to be sent on to the authorities who were to try

the case. Unless they resisted arrest, no violence was to be done 5 6

illegally to prisoners in an attempt to get money. The rule was, then, that the patrolmen were to arrest criminals and report their alleged crimes, but to take no further part in the administration of j ustice.

It is worth noting, however, that the patrol officers of the left and right armies had under their command officials in charge of

interrogation. These officials in the capitals, in fact, filled the place occupied by the ssu-li yuan in provincial prefectures in their responsibility for processing prisoners for trial by interrogating them, if necessary by torture, though there is no suggestion that the officials of the ssu-li yuan were responsible for the organization of patrol

t r o o p s . A t this comparatively high level of the city administration, then, a single office handled not only the quasi-military job of

patrolling the capital and arresting criminals, but also their

interrogation, essentially the preliminary (and, given the character of the procedure, often the crucial) phase of the judicial process. This dual function, of course, corresponds to our understanding of the phrase "police work" in western society. With two qualifications - firstly that the office conerned was not the only interrogating agency, and secondly that the use of torture was part of routine procedure - the patrol's officers corresponded to police commissioners.

During the first part of the dynasty, the actual judging of cases remained the responsibility of the prefect and subprefects. Given that

hsiang and their troops provided the police system for the city itself, it was the prefecture which must have handled the great bulk of cases, since those they arrested were to be taken directly

there and not to the subprefectures. The city’s growth and the increasing intensity, complexity and freedom of its activities must have made this a considerable burden. A small part of the load was taken off the prefecture in 1033. Two Han-lin academicians and two auxiliary academicians of the bureau of military affairs (shu-mi chih hsiieh-shih ^1?” ^ ) were ordered to recommend one man each, living in or near the capital, as registrar (shou-shih p ’an-kuan

Y%

) to "the left and right hsiang inside and outside the wall". The request for this edict, made by a palace censor, had

criticised the way in which "many of the cases which daily arise in K'ai-feng prefecture are just decided superficially as they come up

^ 53^ i % " * 58 The pressure of numbers was thus pushing the authorities to expand the provision of judicial personnel to deal with routine cases, taking the hsiang as units.

Some fifty years later, the hsiang themselves became minor judicial institutions. In 1070 on the request of Han Wei > at that time prefect of K'ai-feng, four officials of court and

capital rank, who had had experience as prefectural vice-administrators (t ’ ung-p' an ) or subprefects, were appointed "to divide between them the administration of the left and right hsiang of the old and

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