In Beijing, China, the scholar Dai Mingshi was executed by the Qing Dynasty for crimes of literary sedition stemming from his collected works, the "Nanshan Ji." Investigators found that Dai had used certain reign dates and phrasings that were construed as disrespect toward the Manchu ruling house and as secretly nostalgic for the fallen Ming Dynasty. His case was one of the earliest and most prominent of the Qing literary inquisitions, in which writing itself became a capital offense.

The Dai Mingshi case exemplified the Qing literary inquisition's devastating effect on Chinese intellectual and poetic life, driving writers to extreme self-censorship and the destruction of countless manuscripts. The climate of fear profoundly shaped Qing dynasty poetry, pushing poets toward indirect expression, allegory, and coded language that became hallmarks of the period's literary style, and the case remains a reference point in modern Chinese poetry about political repression.