After the fall of the Southern Ming, Wu retired to
Su-chou for nine years, until he was summoned by the Ch'ing court to Peking in 1653 to serve as chancellor of the Directorate of Education (kuo-tzu-chien chi-chiu).
Miyazaki Ichisada has called attention to a stone inscription from Kiangsu that contains the records of a 1228 case concerning the misappropriation of land belonging to the Su-chou prefectural school.(9) These records show the same assemblage of citations from statutes, edicts, and regulations that characterize the present document.
Brian McKnight has well described the interlocking and overlapping character of the different categories of Sung legal regulations.(10) The fragment embedded in the Wu-t'ai shih-an reflects this feature of Sung jurisprudence in even starker detail than the Su-chou inscription and affords the opportunity to examine the detailed reasoning and working behind an original Sung law-finding.