Punishment or Redemption? Prisoner’s paper in Ming China

In this paper, “paper redemption(紙贖)” and “paper punishment(罰紙)” was discussed. In the literature of the Ming Dynasty, terms such as “paper redemption” and “paper punishment” did indeed cause some misunderstandings. This article first confirms that the terms “paper redemption” and “paper punishment” refer to prisoner’s paper, and further explores why Ming Dynasty people used the terms “paper redemption” and “paper punishment”. In the process of analyzing the evolution of Ming Dynasty officials’ understanding of prisoner’s paper, it was found that the emergence of terms such as paper redemption and paper punishment has certain historical reasons. In the Ming Dynasty, people generally had a negative understanding of prisoner paper, believing that this system brought a heavy economic burden to the lower class and the literati would grant amnesty to the innocent and exempt them from paying paper, resulting in the majority of those who needed to pay paper being guilty. Therefore, this tendency led to the phenomenon of prisoner’s paper being referred to as “punishment paper”.