Crime and the City: the criminal underworld in sixteenth century Peking
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The presence of a criminal underworld is one of the characteristics of a metropolis. A city unplagued by an underworld, without its share of confidence tricksters and swindlers, burglars and pick-pockets, gambling dens and houses of ill-repute, would probably not be generally counted as a great city. This is certainly true today, and it was also true four hundred years ago, and even earlier. Peking at the end of the sixteenth century was one of the great cities of the world, with a population of about a quarter of a million inhabitants. It too had its underworld. The aim of this paper is to shed some light on the criminal history of the city and also to draw a number of comparisons with the crime committed in another great city of that time, namely Elizabethan London. The study of Ming dynasty law and crime is rendered somewhat unwieldy by the absence of convenient collections of case studies to tell us about crimes that were actually committed and how the law worked in practise to deal with their perpetrators. We lack works such as the Xing’an huilan, for example, which tells us a great deal about crime and the legal punishments meted out in the Qing dynasty. Students of the Elizabethan underworld too have a wide choice of Elizabethan and Jacobean materials to turn to for their study, ranging from pamphlets and broadsheets, with titles such as A Manifest Detection of Dice-Play and A Mirror for Magistrates of Cities, to the plays of Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare. However, drawing on materials found in the Mingshilu, Huang Ming tiaofa shilei zuan, the writings of Feng Menglong and manuals for local officials, we are able to reach a view, albeit less comprehensive than we might hope for, of the rogues and vagabonds active in the Ming capital.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".