The passage of persons, things, and even ideas across China's land and sea boundaries was subject to a comprehensive network of rules promulgated by the Qing state (1644-1911) and its predecessors. This intricate regulatory system was of functional importance in the management of China's relations with foreign countries, and it offers rich food for comparative thinking about the evolution of rules for interstate conduct. Yet this normative system has largely escaped study, in part because law was never highly regarded by the official chroniclers of Chinese history and in part because the rules themselves are widely scattered throughout the numerous compendia of laws and regulations. This article will introduce and examine the border control regulations and procedures of the Qing Dynasty. Selected cases will be used to illustrate the dynamic process of interstate law-making in China's relations with some of its East Asian neighbors in the later imperial era.

This article has two principal aims. One is to survey the laws on boundary regulation and show that some of the basic operating principles and procedures which developed during the Imperial era resemble concepts or practices separately developed in the West. The other principal aim is to provide historians of China's foreign relations with a key to the maze of interlocking rules and regulations which established the framework governing Qing foreign relations. This article also illustrates how Qing officials applied the often conflicting mandates emanating from the ideology of the tribute system, on the one hand, and the stipulations in the regulations of the "Six Boards" on the other.

Close study of the records of imperial China's foreign relations does not support the thesis that China in the past always dictated the terms of its relations with other states, as suggested by the traditional "tributary system" model. Rather, this record reveals a complex mixture of rules and practices, some reflecting the hierarchal presuppositions of the tribute model, others representing ad hoc working compromises between China and other countries. Yet another category of rules and practices appears to have been grounded in shared notions of fairness, equality, reciprocity, and mutual respect for "territorial sovereignty." Indeed, Qing boundary rules and cases spanning more than one hundred years indicate that substantive equality and reciprocity, coupled with Sinocentric hierarchy in form, were the dominant characteristics of the border control system, at least with regard to Qing relations with Korea, Vietnam, Siam and Burma.