Abstract: Ban fang, also called Banguan or Chaiguan, illegal prisons set up by the local officials to confine the minor offenders and related witness, existed apart from official prisons from the late Ming through the Qing After analyzing the concept o f Ban fang in terms of historical linguistics and the textual information of the phenomenon, the author introduces notions of resources, practice and time-space to explore the process of structuralization of banguang in order to understand ban fang in the relationship network of activity process rather than as an entity .The article depicts the transformative rule between paper law and living law, o r between legal practice and legal representation, and regards the pluralism of imperial law and the law of empire as unity in diversity, and considers banfang as essentially in terms of a resource /game /space relationship.