Yuan dianzhang 元典章 (Compendium of statutes and substatutes of the Yuan, or, more concisely, Institutions of the Yuan dynasty), 1322; the Shen Jiaben (1908) edition [this edition] was superseded in 1972 with the publication of a facsimile of the original revised and expanded 1303 edition. “The text consists of a huge collection of codes, ordinances, precedents, cases, and bureaucratic notes, thus reflecting the rich variety of the legal and social life of the Yuan dynasty.” Because so much of the text is “in the peculiar style of the Yuan period colloquial Chinese and further reflects, in many cases, the diction and grammar of Mongolian documents that underlie the Chinese texts, it has been difficult to read and also is offensive to cultivated Chinese because of the crudeness of its language.” --Cf. Wilkinson, Chinese history, a manual, p. 873.