This series of collections (the titles appear on the cover labels of some of the fascicles, or have been supplied by librarians) contain reports from the Qing Ministry of Justice concerning serious criminal cases, decided in 1736 and 1784-85 in the first two eds. seen, and in the Guangxu period in the rest. It is not entirely clear to whom these poorly printed fascicles were intended. They were probably produced for the joint review (會審) by the several ministerial instances involved, and then for the emperor’s final review and approval in the autumn asssizes. Then they would be collected as reference material for the personnel of the Ministry of Justice provincial bureaus—the rule was that each year two officials and one clerk were selected in each bureau to take charge of autumn assizes full-time—and/or the provincial authorities who initially submitted the dossiers. (For a testimony of a surveillance commissioner reviewing “autumn assizes registers” [秋審冊] to make a decision on a case submitted to the Ministry, see Zhang Jixin 張集馨, Dao Xian huanhai jianwen lu 道咸宦海見聞錄, Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1999, 86.) Clearly, the few copies seen are only a tiny part of what must have been put out in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The format is the same everywhere: entries are categorized by provincial bureau in the ministry (usually one fascicle per province—some are very slim, with only one or two cases—but there are a few examples of one fasc. with several provinces, and in the more voluminous copies the cases from one province may extend over several fascicles), and then by chronological order of the final decisions. Each report (introduced by the marker 一起) starts with the name (preceded by the nature of punishment incurred, e.g., “beheading” 斬犯), age, home province, prefecture, and county of the criminal. The bureau concerned, punishment, and name of criminal are indicated in the central margin. While some sets in the series have short documents, most case reports provide a full record—albeit in abbreviated form—of the exchanges between the various entities concerned, including the throne (in the form of rescripts) as well as the provincial authorities, the ministry bureaus, and the Three Judicial Offices (三法司), leading to a final decision—execution “confirmed” (情實) or “deferred” (緩決)—within the framework of the autumn assizes. There is in principle a separation between three different categories: crimes by officials (官犯), crimes involving people related by mourning (服制) and crimes in “ordinary” circumstances (常犯). However, though such separation exists, it is rarely signaled in the printed text. Many entries document how a particular capital offender who was sentenced to deferred execution after the autumn assizes (絞/斬監候) could see his sentence reviewed and deferred year after year until eventual execution or, alternatively, commutation to a lesser sentence. The handwritten additions in the 46-ce ed. at Columbia are thus placed at the end of cases and provide the Sanfa si’s answer to the emperor’s request for a new evaluation in a multi-year process. The term zhaoce 招冊 in the title generally referred to the summary reports of serious criminal cases drafted and submitted by lower courts, together with their proposed sentences, for review by higher tribunals; the dossiers featured in the present collections seem to combine abbreviated versions of those original reports, submitted to the emperor in view of the autumn assizes. While leading cases and ministry memoranda (see section 4.1.4) are valuable for capturing the detailed process of legal reasoning within the Ministry of Justice bureaus in complex or doubtful cases, the present series is useful because it provides a wide sampling of judgments in “serious” criminal cases.