The Constitution is not Invariable: the Process of Social Structuring Seen in the Locally Engraved Official Steles in the Middle and Lower Reaches of the Qingshui River in the Qing Dynasty

As a kind of inscription produced by local people, the civilian engraved official steles in the middle and lower reaches of the Qingshui River in the Qing Dynasty are folk documents of great historical value to study regional society. The locally engraved official steles affected the social structure process of the region from two aspects: One is as an institutional strategy, and the other is as inscriptions themselves, which interacted with the public in daily life. As an institutional strategy, the locally engraved official tablets reflected the interaction between the people's everyday life and the official system and revealed the institutional formation mechanism of "the case is the constitution" in this region. We should also notice that the local people understood and used those steles flexibly. As people are governed by institutions, they also constantly improve them. The officials did not uniformly implement the various institutions when they were in power, nor did they have a complete set of institutions. During the working of the system, people's daily experiences, especially when different groups had conflicting interests, had become opportunities to force the adjustment of various systems. "The Constitution Is Not Invariable", which was the daily operation state of the system, led the institutional research in this area to "human". The result of institutional adjustment entered people's daily life in the form of the locally engraved official steles. It turned into social memory, which opened a new structuring process of local society.