Workdays absorbed by Teaching

The Punishment of Strangulation -- from this site with poorly scanned images of a book of punishment illustrations.

It's not surprising that my entire workday is expended in the course I'm teaching for the past few days and the next few as well.

Still, work goes on a sluggish pace.

Last night at our classical Chinese reading group, I had an exchange with one younger history student from China. He said he'd heard of a professor at the University of Chicago who had published an article in Chinese. Wow! For this student, that was a real symbol of accomplishment.

So now I have a goal to earn some real cultural capital...

A bit of reading group vocabulary. Once again, this is from my classmate HXY's work on legal history of the Qing dynasty:有司 a general class of local officials. See Hucker, says Ann
後經改議隱逃窩主擬絞秋決 After revision of this interpretation, the person who hid the fugitive would be strangled to death after the Autumn Assizes.
株連 implicated
累及 implicated
無任情困辱 don't punish or humiliate them at will 任情 is a really nice word -- see the baidu entry
特嚴法示懲 specially-made strict law as deterrent