This encounter exemplifi es the context in which China’s legal reform took place in the early twentieth century. Although the government was the main driver of legal reform, government heads may not have accurately perceived the outcomes of that reform. Reading this conversational exchange, we can easily feel Cao’s frustration. A member of one of the fi rst generations of modern law specialists in China, who had returned from Japan and was now enjoying a good living and exemplary reputation practicing law in Beijing, Cao was now being equated by the highest fi gure in the new government with the notorious litigation hooligans of the imperial era. Although the substantive difference in terms of income and legal status between a modern lawyer and a litigation master of the old days mattered, so too did the perception and interpretation of that difference, as it is they that shaped the modern lawyer’s social status. Traditional perceptions, such as that expressed by Yuan, and efforts to overcome them in turn affected the outcomes of the country’s important legal reform. At the same time, traditional Chinese legal thinking on how justice should be done in trial hearings also provided useful guidance for Republican judges, helping them to make sense of transplanted criminal procedures and imported laws that lacked suffi cient guidelines for their practical application in Chinese society. Such traditional thinking and efforts to assimilate it into imported legal rules also affected the outcome of China’s fi rst experiment with legal transplantation. This book tells the story of the efforts and pains exerted by legal practitioners in overhauling an indigenous criminal justice system in its entirety and replacing it with a foreign legal transplant in early twentieth century China within a short period of time and in the face of military and political pressure. Within the subtitle of this monograph, Practicing law in Republican Beijing (1910s?1930s)