Studies of China's past have tended to dichotomize state and society, depicting either a state virtually without subjects or a peasant society to which government was predatory or irrelevant. Such a disjunction is mostly the result of an inability to approach very closely the loci of interaction between Chinese government and its people. Law case records from a country-level court in nineteenth-century northern Taiwan provide a remarkable opportunity to view social reality in this particular late traditional Chinese locality.;The case files allow us to witness these and other disputes with unusual immediacy. Local inhabitants viewed the legal system warily but were not slow to appeal to it for dispute resolution or for redress of perceived wrongs. Litigants included men of both low and high status. Nor were women completely denied access to the legal system. Moreover, a wide variety of legal specialists evolved to meet the need of litigants.;To enhance law enforcement, local government extended its reach into the countryside by incorporating and legitimating a network or town and village leaders. To cope with the demands of a changing socioeconomic context, local courts procedure accepted the validity of a variety of collective or corporate bodies in litigation. To encourage and consolidate stability in a society still showing its frontier heritage, the court actively promoted the growth and authority of such social institutions as the extended lineage. By both reacting to and initiating social change the legal system served as an crucial mechanism for societal integration.;The Tan-Hsin archives, the major source for this study, are case records from the court serving first Tan-shui subprefecture and later Hsin-chu county. The origins of disputes adjudicated by this court included: (1) Friction between Chinese immigrants and the autochthonous tribal peoples and feuding among the various Hakka and Hokkienese immigrant groups themselves. (2) The multi-tiered system of land rights that had developed in Taiwan and a slow devolution of control over the land from primary to secondary landlords. (3) The social and economic dislocations accompanying growing demand for tea and camphor, two local crops with international markets.
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