Cai Songnian, the older of the two brothers who produced the original 1859 edition, was an official at the Ministry of Justice; his aim was to compile a guide that would synthesize the more useful part of the statutes and substatutes in the Penal Code and avoid redundancies, taking account of the fact that the detail and complexities of the Code make it impossible for non-specialists to memorize it in its entirety. The work was completed by Cai Fengnian after the brothers had returned to the south to mourn their mother. There is a set of 14 tables (諸圖) before the mulu, devoted to the “six spoils” and various forms of redemption of punishment. The text proper is split between a small commentary at the top of the page (based on [Da Qing lü] jizhu 輯注 [q.v.] and on various authorities), and the presentation of the statutes and substatutes which have been selected, with some small-character notes marked by zhu 註, at the bottom. The order of the statutes (of which 24 have been omitted because they are rarely used) follows the 1853 edition of the Code; the substatutes have been occasionally rearranged for the sake of clarity; it may happen that the text of either a statute or a substatute be omitted when there is a redundancy. A few leading cases (成案) introducing judgments by analogy (比照科斷) are cited where the statuses and substatutes lack clear indications. Explanatory notes are sometimes inserted after the text of a statute or substatute. The text is punctuated, and the paragraphs within individual articles are separated by a circle (as in the original Code). J. 1-7 correspond to the seven parts of the Code (general rules and “Six Ministries”); j. 8, only 2 pages long, introduces the regulations on “catching fugitives” (督捕則例). Jiang Qingji says in his pref. that the usefulness of the Cai brothers’ work was revealed to him when he was appointed acting surveillance commissioner of Jiangsu in 1860 and was faced with a bewildering accumulation of old files; he compares it to Tanglü shuyi 唐律疏議 for balance and to Xingtong fu jie (q.v.) for concision. He eventually had a new collated ed. engraved, adding several tens of post-1860 substatutes. The original Jiang Qingji ed. has not been seen, but the fanli of the 1870 Jiangsu shuju ed., dated 1864 and signed by the two brothers, must correspond to it. The Jiangsu shuju ed. was published on the order of Governor Ding Richang, as indicated in an entry of Ding’s Fu Wu gongdu (q.v.), undated ed., 41/9a-b, recommending to update the contents; it was supposed to be appended to Muling shu jiyao (q.v.).