IMPERIAL DECREE • DICTIONARY ONE.COM • Definition of Imperial decree

... taxes. When I lived among the peasantry in the seventies, corporal punishment inflicted by order of the Commune was among the means usually employed; and though the custom was recently prohibited by an Imperial decree of Nicholas II, I am not at all sure that it ...

— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace

... jewel called Riy[o]bu was but a craftsman's doublet and should be split apart. Only a splinter of diamond, they declared, crowned a mass of paste. Indignation made learning hot, and in 1870 the cement was liquefied in civil war. The doublet was rent asunder by imperial decree, as when a lapidist melts the mastic that holds in deception adamant and glass, while real diamond stands all fire short of the hydro-oxygen flame. The Riy[o]bu temples were purged of all Buddhist symbols, furniture, equipment ...

— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis