The author of the pref. (written at the Ministry of Justice) notes that some 50 years had elapsed since the publication of Quan Shichao’s Bo’an xinbian (q.v.); the archives were accumulating by the day and officials in charge of the autumn assizes, fearing that in the end they would be thrown into disorder, decided to use their spare time to compile them, selecting the more important documents and eliminating the superfluous, and arranging them chronologically and by categories. He also remarks that the pieces quoted in the commentaries currently used to supplement the Penal Code, such as Huizuan, Huibian, Tongzuan and Quanzuan (see section 4.1.1., Qing A and B), have all been “selected and compiled” (采輯) by private secretaries in the provinces and are full of lacunae (挂一漏百); in contrast, the present compilation “collects [the documents of] the Ministry of Justice in their integrity, looks for pearls [directly] in the abyss and picks jade [directly] from the mountain” (是書匯刑部之全，求珠于淵，采玉于山). (These considerations are already found, though with a few changes of words, in Chen Tinggui’s 1811 pref. to Shuotie [q.v.].) The general mulu is followed by a mulu in 6 j. titled Shuotie jianming mulu 說帖簡明目錄, listing the titles of each memorandum in each category (that is, the parts, sections, and statutes in the Penal Code), with their date, the ministry provincial bureau involved, and the name of the culprit; the statutes concerned are indicated at the bottom of the central margin. In the body of the text the documents can be located through the part and section of the Code to which they belong (in the upper central margin) and the name of the culprit (in the lower central margin). The cases date mostly from the Jiaqing and Daoguang reigns, with a few from late Qianlong. (In the ed. seen at Tōyō Bunko parts of the jianming mulu have been mistakenly bound with the text proper through j. 6, obviously due to a confusion between the numbering of the chapters of the mulu and of the main text.)