Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768 (2 page)

In the year 1768, on the eve of China's tragic modern age, there ran
through her society a premonitory shiver: a vision of sorcerers
roaming the land, stealing souls.' By enchanting either the written
name of the victim or a piece of his hair or clothing, the sorcerer
would cause him to sicken and die. He then would use the stolen
soul-force for his own purposes. What are we to make of this hysteria
that affected the society of twelve great provinces and was felt in
peasant huts and imperial palaces?2 Were the conditions of the age
(seemingly so prosperous) sending warnings about the future that
could be sensed only in the guise of black magic? Men and women
of the eighteenth century-before the West arrived in force-were
already creating the conditions of China's modern society. In the
light of what the Chinese have experienced since, it would not be
surprising to find that their eighteenth-century ancestors perceived
these conditions as phantom images of fearsome power.

Though we say that we cannot see the future, its conditions lie all
around us. They are as if encrypted. We cannot read them because
we lack the key (which will be in our hands only when it is too late
to use it). But we see their coded fragments and must call them
something. Many aspects of our own contemporary culture might be
called premonitory shivers: panicky renderings of' unreadable messages about the kind of society we are creating. Our dominating
passion, after all, is to give life meaning, even if sometimes a hideous
one.

The Masons of Te-ch'ing

The silk district of Chekiang Province, "one vast rich and fertile
mulberry garden," is a virtually flat floodplain, laced with creeks and
canals and studded with residual hills, which appear to a visitor "as
if they had been thrown out as guards between the vast plain, which
extends eastward to the sea, and the mountains of the west."3 A
century before the time of our story, the inhabitants were already so
committed to the silk industry that "no place was without mulberry
trees, and in the spring and summer not a person was not engaged
in sericulture." Day and night, wrote a seventeenth-century observer,
the inhabitants worked to harvest the raw silk, "which they produce
to pay their taxes and rent, and on which they rely for clothing and
food." So wholly dependent were they on the silk market that "if ever
it is unprofitable, they have to sell their houses and property."4 In
the midst of this thoroughly commercialized district lay the county
seat of Te-ch'ing, some twenty miles north of historic Hangchow. The
river Nan-t'iao, on its way northward to Lake T'ai, ran right through
the walled city. In 1768, the thirty-third year of the reign of Hungli
(Ch'ien-lung),5 fourth monarch of the Manchu Ch'ing Dynasty, the
water-gate and bridge in the eastern side of the city wall had fallen
to ruin and needed rebuilding.6

Magistrate Juan hired the mason Wu Tung-ming from Jen-ho, the
neighboring county. Wu and his crew began, on January 22, the
heavy work of pounding the great wooden pilings into the riverbed.
The water was running high, and the men struggled at their task.'
Nevertheless, pilings were sunk by March 6, and Wu's men began to
install the new gate. By the twenty-sixth, Wu was running low on rice
to feed his men and made the ten-mile journey to his home town,
the commercial center T'ang-hsi on the Grand Canal, to buy a fresh
supply. When he arrived home, he learned that a stranger had been
asking for him: a peasant named Shen Shih-liang, who proceeded to
seek Wu's help in a curious and frightful project.

Peasant Shen, aged forty-three, lived in a family compound with
two sons of his deceased older half-brother.8 These harsh, violent
men tormented him, cheated him of his money, and even beat and
abused his mother. Without hope of earthly remedy, he besought the
powers of darkness. At the local temple he filed a formal "complaint"
with the King of the Underworld by burning a yellow paper petition
before the altar.`-' In February, Shen heard of a promising new remedy: travelers brought news of the Te-ch'ing water-gate project.
They had heard that the masons needed the names of living persons
to write on paper slips, which could be nailed onto the tops of the
pilings to add spiritual force to the blows of the sledgehammers. This
was called "soulstealing" (chiao-hun). Those whose soul-force was thus
stolen would fall ill and die. With renewed hope, Shen had written
the names of his hated nephews on slips of paper (since he himself
was illiterate, he painstakingly copied them from an account book
kept by his nephews in connection with a commercial fishing venture).
Now producing the rolled-up slips of paper, Shen asked mason Wu:
What about it? Do you practice this technique?

Wu would have none of it. He knew that masons, along with
carpenters and other builders, were commonly thought to have
baleful magical powers (as I shall explain in Chapter 5). He was also, no doubt, aware of the kind of rumors peasant Shen had repeated,
and feared that he might be implicated in this hated practice of
soulstealing. He quickly summoned the local headman and had Shen
brought to Te-ch'ing for questioning. Magistrate Juan settled the
matter by having Shen beaten twenty-five strokes and then released.
Mason Wu's misadventures with sorcery, however, were not over: he
was soon to be implicated in an outbreak of public hysteria.10

The walled city of Te-ch'ing. Water-gates can be seen at right
and lower left of the city.

One early spring evening, a Te-ch'ing man, Chi Chao-mei, had
been helping with funeral arrangements at the house of a recently
bereaved neighbor. On his way home he had a few drinks, and he
was relaxed enough by the time he reached his house that his uncle
suspected him of having been out gambling and began to beat him.
Smarting and fearful, Chi fled the house and walked the twenty-odd
miles to Hangchow, the provincial capital, where he thought to support himself by begging. After midnight on April 3, he found himself
before the Temple of Tranquil Benevolence near the shore of
Hangchow's fabled West Lake. A bystander grew suspicious of Chi's
Te-ch'ing accent, and when Chi acknowledged his origins, a crowd
surrounded him. One man shouted, "Here you show up in the middle
of the night, and either you're about some thievery, or else it's because
you people in Te-ch'ing are building a bridge and you've come here
to steal souls!" The crowd quickly turned ugly and set upon the
outsider, seizing and pummeling him. Off they dragged him to the
house of the local security headman.

The headman tied Chi to a bench and threatened to beat him if
he held back the truth. The bruised and terrified Chi now concocted
a story that he really was a soulstealer. "Since you're a soulstealer,"
shouted the headman, "you must have paper charms on you. How
many souls have you stolen?" Chi said he had indeed had fifty charms,
but that he had thrown forty-eight of them into West Lake. He had
used the other two to cause the deaths of two children, whose names
he proceeded to invent.

The next day Chi was taken to the constabulary, and from there
to the yamen (government office) of Ch'ien-t'ang, the metropolitan
county of Hangchow Prefecture (located in the same city). There
Magistrate Chao asked where Chi had obtained the charms, and who
had told him to steal souls. Chi had heard the usual rumors about
the bridge project in Te-ch'ing, that the pilings had been hard to
sink, and that the masons needed names of living persons whose soulforce could lend power to their hammers. He had also heard that the contracting mason was Wu something or other, and that his given
name had the ideograph ming in it: "It was Wu Jui-ming who gave
them to me." Mason Wu Tung-ming must by now have been thoroughly dismayed by the hazards of his calling, for he was forthwith
haled into the Ch'ien-t'ang County yamen. Luckily, Chi's perjured
story was quickly exposed when he failed to pick Wu from a lineup.
Put to the torture, Chi now admitted that his whole story had been
concocted out of fear.

Constable leading a prisoner, who is carrying
his own sleeping mat and a fan.

The sorcery scare in Chekiang had by now sparked several
unpleasant and bizarre incidents. In addition to the affairs of Shen
Shih-liang and Chi Chao-mei, there had been the matter of Wu's coworker, mason Kuo, who, on March 25, had been approached by a
thirty-five-year-old herbalist, Mo Fang-chou, who sought to entrap
him into placing a paper packet on a bridge piling so Mo could
ingratiate himself with the authorities by turning in a soulstealer. The
furious mason had seized Mo and dragged him to the county yamen,
where the would-be informer was beaten and exposed in a cangue
(a heavy wooden stock placed around the prisoner's neck) for his
trouble.

These irksome cases moved the provincial authorities to hold an
inquiry in which accusers and accused alike could be questioned, thus
to make an end of it. Governor Hsiung Hsueh-p'eng ordered the
local prefect to convene a court with the magistrates of Ch'ien-t'ang
and Te-ch'ing counties. Chi again failed to identify Wu in a lineup.
The authorities searched Wu's home secretly and found no sorcerer's
paraphernalia. Magistrate Juan had already made discreet inquiries
among the bridge-workers and found no evidence that persons'
names had been intoned while the pilings were being driven. Sorcery
indeed! Herbalist Mo, peasant Shen, and even the unfortunate Chi
Chao-mei were exposed in the cangue at the Hangchow city gates as
a warning to the superstitious multitude. After all, nobody had been
shown to have sickened or died on account of soulstealing; on the
contrary, public credulity had damaged civic order. Such was the
agnostic summary later offered to the Throne by Yungde, the succeeding Chekiang governor." But fear of sorcery was not so easily
exorcised from the public mind.

The Hsiao-shan Affair

On the evening of April 8, 1768, four men, marked as Buddhist
monks by their dark robes and shaved heads, met at a rural teahouse in Hsiao-shan County, Chekiang, just across the river from
Hangchow. All were based in Hangchow temples and were wandering
the nearby villages to beg alms. Sketches of these men may be drawn
from their own later testimony.12

Scene at the entrance of a county yamen in the lower Yangtze region. The
convicts in cages are being left to die of starvation. At lower right are two
convicts wearing the cangue.