Asserting that litigation in late imperial China was a form of documentary warfare, this book offers a social analysis of the men who composed legal documents for commoners and elites alike. Litigation masters--a broad category of legal facilitators ranging from professional plaintmasters to simple but literate men to whom people turned for assistance--emerge in this study as central players in many of the most scandalous cases in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century China. These cases reveal the power of scandal to shape entire categories of law in the popular and official imaginations. The...