After the defeat in the Opium War (1839-1842), Qing China was compelled to accept the imposition of extraterritoriality, a legal framework that granted Westerners immunity from Chinese jurisdiction. Conventional scholarly narratives regarding this colonial construct tend to focus on coastal treaty ports such as Shanghai and Hong Kong, resulting in perspectives that are either centered around Western interests or institutional structures. In contrast, this dissertation redirects attention to Sichuan province, a hinterland in the southwest of the Qing Empire, and explores the societal ramifications of extraterritoriality between the 1860s and 1911. Drawing primarily from a rich collection of judicial cases found in the Ba County archives, this study illuminates the increasing influence wielded by Chinese nationals who availed themselves of the privileges afforded by the foreign extraterritorial regime, while simultaneously revealing the formidable challenges it posed to the Qing government’s state-building efforts and societal cohesion. By foregrounding the experiences of the hinterland, particularly those involving Chinese non-state actors, within the context of Western colonial legal frameworks, this research challenges prevailing assumptions that Western colonial privileges were beyond the reach and relevance of the common Chinese populace. I argue that the expansion of imperialism into the interior regions of China during the 1860s gave rise to a network of Sino-foreign legal patronage, enabling selected groups of Chinese individuals to access foreign consular courts and extraterritorial rights, while also allowing foreigners continued access to socio-economic resources within Chinese society. This novel network facilitated Chinese adaptation to statex controlled commercial activities and expanded their avenues for civil litigation. However, the emergence of this network disrupted a crucial collaborative mechanism that existed between the state and society in late imperial China, whereby civil disputes could be resolved outside the formal court system. I further illustrates that instead of engaging in violent resistance against extraterritoriality, both the Chinese state and society strategically managed its impact through nonviolent means. As an increasing number of Chinese individuals embraced foreign extraterritorial privileges, the demarcation between Chinese and foreign jurisdictions under extraterritoriality became increasingly blurred. Rather than serving as a mechanism to regulate and govern SinoWestern interactions, the provisions outlined in the treaty agreements, as evidenced by the actors examined in this study, proved to be a tenuous foundation that was readily discarded. Nevertheless, it was within this unregulated borderland that indigenous judicial norms intersected with colonial legal institutions, giving rise to an enterprising legal culture and shifting the balance of power between the state and society as well as the colonizer and the colonized.