Page 166 - Merchants and Mandarins China Trade Era

152.

reported these facts to the governor-general, who in turn
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replied: 1 It appears that the woman was first wounded, & after-

wards fell into the water, & was drowned--But in this way still,

the fact is, that her death was caused by throwing the jar, &

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the case should be brought under the law of Killing in an
8
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Affra y . He therefore demanded that the foreign seaman Fa-
lan-se-szu-t'e-la-na-fei-ya (Francis Terranovia) be delivered

up for trial.

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Once the Chinese decided the law 1Killing in an Affray
had jurisdiction in the incident, in their eyes there could

no longer be any dispute over the circumstances of the death.

That the jar had hit the woman and that the jar came from Ter­

ranovia's hands (they firmly believed this to be the truth)
made him a participant in the woman's death. According to the

Chinese system of justice his conduct was reprehensible and

he must be punished. Such an attitude pointed up the funda­

mental and gaping differences between traditional Chinese and

Western concepts of law and justice. The basic foundation of

Chinese society was the achievement of harmony through adher­

ence to Confucian morality. Law was subordinate to morality,

in that the Chinese view�d it merely as a punitive factor. The

scholar-gentry class, the elite in the Chinese social structure,

Governor-general Yuan's edict to P'an-yU Wang is in Con-
sular Despatches: Canton, B.C. Wilcocks, Dec. 12, 1821. "KillTng
in an Affray" actually was one type of accidental homicide. The
other was killing purely by accident, for which the penalty was a
fine payable to the deceased's family. But the Chinese generally
lumped all accidental homicides into the former category.