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Facts
Notable Acquisitions
East Asians Studies
 
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Introduction |
The Bernhardt-Huang Collection of Chinese Legal Documents.
36,696 pages/sheets; 135 microfilm reels.
Partial gift of Kathryn Bernhardt and Philip C. C. Huang.
Over their twenty-five years of research and teaching, Kathryn Bernhardt and Philip C. C. Huang, both of whom are professors of Chinese history at UCLA, have amassed a unique collection of legal and administrative documents reproduced from Chinese archives. Without question this comprises the largest and best collection of Chinese legal materials outside China. The volume of material alone is astonishing: an estimated 36,700 sheets of paper (photocopies, many of them spiral-bound in more than two hundred volumes) plus 135 reels of microfilm. The collection is impressive not only in size, but also in temporal, geographic, and topical scope. It includes some twenty-five thousand legal cases (and other records) from the Qing, Republican, and PRC eras, dating from the mid-eighteenth century through the 1980s. The emphasis of the collection is civil law, including inheritance, marriage, land transactions, debt, and contractual disputes. Beyond legal history, it promises to be exceptionally valuable for the study of China's economy. There are also significant quantities of local administrative records related to questions of security, taxation, household registration, and village governance. |
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