Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768 (23 page)

The problem was that the elusive fortune-teller had been identified
with no address, not even a county. He was "a Kiangnan man"-but
the Kiangnan jurisdiction consisted of three provinces, containing
perhaps seventy million people. Governor-general G'aojin now asked
that the Shantung culprits be reinterrogated for more detailed information. Word came back that Chang came from a village called Wu-
yueh-hu-chuang, south of the city of P'i-chou, near the Grand Canal
in the northernmost part of Kiangsu, bordering on Shantung, but
no such village could be found. Although the population registers
contained three persons whose names sounded like Chang Ssu ju,
none fit his description. G'aojin's general alarm, based on the Shantung confessions, had produced nothing.

Quite suddenly, in the last week of August, the case broke. A report
from the magistrate of Su-chou announced that a beggar called
"Chang Ssu" had been arrested carrying a knife, a packet of drugs,
and a severed queue. Su-chou, in northern Anhwei, was a mere eighty
miles from the area where Chang had been hunted. And though
"Chang Ssu" ("Chang's fourth son") was missing the last ideograph
of the wanted man's name, and hence was as common a name as
might be imagined, the incriminating evidence was a ray of hope to
the harried Kiangnan bureaucracy.-'° G'aojin reported that he was
arranging to interrogate the man personally. (Vermilion: "You should
do your best to investigate this man's tracks in detail. But as soon as
you use torture, he will not give you a true confession.")

Hungli was also relieved, of course, that an "important criminal"
in the queue-clipping case had at last been caught. Anhwei's governor, Feng Ch'ien, had already informed turn of the arrest at Suchou, and had reported that the local prefect had already established
that the prisoner was indeed the eagerly sought Chang Ssu ju, instigator of the Shantung clipping outrages and link to the sorcerermonk Yu-shih. Hungli again cautioned G'aojin against the use of
torture; the difficulty of obtaining accurate statements was by now
obvious, though he offered no suggestions on how information might
otherwise be wrung from obdurate criminals. On the contrary,
implicit pressure to obtain accurate confessions pervaded Hungli's court letters. Furthermore, if questioning in the field did not produce
reliable results, the prisoner was to be sent under close guard to the
summer court at Ch'eng-te, some seven hundred miles distant beyond
the Great Wall.'"

Although Anhwei governor Feng Chien was G'aojin's subordinate,
he nevertheless was responsible for sending his own memorials
directly to the Throne. Accordingly, he was the official who had the
privilege of breaking the Chang Ssu-ju story to Hungli. But Feng
had evidently not understood the importance of his achievement: to
the monarch's disgust, Feng had sent his memorial by the usual
means-via a personal servant-rather than by the faster military
courier service.42 Hence it had not actually been received in the
summer capital until September 6, more than a fortnight after it was
dispatched. The tardy document reported that the prisoner had
confessed to the following facts.

Chang, aged thirty-six, was from Chin--hsiang County, near the
Grand Canal in southwestern Shantung. He and his eleven-year-old
son, Ch'iu-erh, lived as itinerant beggars, pleasing the roadside crowd
by singing "Lotus Petals Fall" (lien-hua-lo, a romantic folk-ballad conventionally sung by beggars). Father and son had reached the eastern
gate of Hsu-chou on July 26, when they met a man from Hu-kuang
named Chao San, "a tall Han Chinese, age about fifty." Chao asked
what they did for a living, then offered them 500 cash for each queue
they could clip. He explained that if the victim was touched with a
certain drug, he would fall senseless and be easy clipping. Chao would
not reveal what the queues would be used for, but gave Chang a
small knife and a packet of the "stupefying drug" and sent him on
his quest, with orders to meet later at the border of T'ung-shan.
(Nothing here about the sorcerer-monk Yu-shih-the story so far was
hardly different from that of Funihan's Shantung beggars.)43

Beggar Chang related that he and his son had reached Chao Village in Su-chou on August 12, where they began singing before the
gate of the household of village headman Chao. When the ballad
ended, the crowd dispersed, except for the Chao family's hired man,
Fei Yung-men. Chang approached the hired man and sprinkled him
with stupefying powder so that he collapsed senseless. Chang then
cut off the end of the man's queue and fled. Later when he forded
a stream, his packet of drugs was drenched. After they had dried
out, Chang tested them on his son and found that their efficacy had
been lost. It was not long before county constables (alerted to the crime by the victim, now revived) caught up with the beggars and
found the incriminating evidence of queue-end, drugs, and knife.
Governor Feng reported that his subordinates were making vigorous
efforts to find the mysterious Chao San, and that he personally would
interrogate "Chang Ssu" to confirm that he was the fortune-teller
"Chang Ssu ju" implicated in the Shantung confession and to track
down the sorcerer-monk Yii-shih who had directed the plot. Even as
the Kiangnan cases seemed to be on the brink of solution, however,
officials in the imperial capital were facing a threat closer to home.

Something Wicked This Way Comes

Sorcery was spreading northward. As it spread, there emerged disturbing signs that the danger was not confined to village society but
might have wider implications. Early in August, the governor-general
of Chihli, Fang Kuan-ch'eng, alerted the Throne that sorcery had
already crept out of Shantung and into his province, the one in which
Peking was located.

A Case of Prophylaxis

Protecting oneself from sorcery involved a varied counter-technology
of charms, amulets, and other ritual weapons, as we saw in Chapter
5. As soulstealing rumors spread upriver from Kiangnan in June, a
popular charm jingle was heard along the Yangtze:

Such rubbish tried the patience of sensible officials, who feared
that the spread of prophylaxis-magic would fan the flames of sorcery
fear itself. Provincial officials threatened to impeach local subordinates who allowed such rumors to be repeated. But the public was
not easily to be denied its self-protection. Not long after, prophylaxis
of 'a more alarming kind surfaced nearer the imperial capital itself.

Peasant Meng Shih-hui, forty years of age, farmed in a village near
the county seat of Ching-chou, in southern Chihli near the Shantung border.4 During the hot night of July i8, lie had been asleep in the
back room of his but, while his wife slept in the front room with
their children. The front door stood open to catch the night air. As
(fawn approached, "I suddenly shivered," Meng told the authorities,
"and felt stupefied. My wife called me but I didn't wake up. Then
she discovered that my queue had been cut, about six inches." The
alert wife had heard that if you cut off the rest of the queue and
washed the head, you would escape harm. (Rumors about queueclipping sorcerers had been drifting in from across the Shantung
border since late June. Shantung folks said that to thwart such sorcery
one should cut off' the whole remaining part of the queue and wash
the head with an infusion of artemisia, straw stalks, honeysuckle, and
garlic.) So she called a barber and had the stupefied Meng shorn and
treated. "By afternoon I gradually began to wake up." It was shortly
discovered that the same thing had happened elsewhere in the county
to Hsia Ko-pai, a twenty-nine-year-old baker and, in a nearby jurisdiction, to Wang Jan, a boy of fifteen.

The sorcery alarm quickly swept through the village rumor network to the county seat, and Magistrate Chang haled the victims to
the yamen for questioning. Ultimately his findings were forwarded
to the summer capital, where the alarmed emperor ordered that the
victims be sent immediately to Peking for interrogation by the Grand
Council. Afterward they were to be released, because one could not
equate such ignorant rustics with monks, who shaved their heads and
abandoned their families, an unfilial act that immediately suggested
possible collusion with evildoers.46 While the monarch and the chief
grand councillor, Duke Fuheng, were summering in Ch'eng-te, business at the capital was being overseen by Grand Councillors Liu
T'ung-hsun and Liu Lun. They examined the victims, found no
evidence of suspicious behavior (aside frorn the missing queues), and
recommended sending them home.

But now Hungli was not satisfied. Though the sorcery prophylaxis
of such rustics was not quite the same as flouting the tonsure decree,
another highly suspicious event had intervened: Magistrate Chang,
at the instruction of' his superior, the governor-general, had personally accompanied the victims to Peking, rather than deputing an
underling. Had he been ordered to do so in order to "coach" their
testimony en route, perhaps to cover up either his own negligence
or something more sinister? Better have the victims sent on to the
summer capital, now escorted by an official of the Board of
Punishments."

With that, peasant Meng and the others, under guard, set out
toward the hills of Ch'eng-te to testify at the summer court. There,
perhaps somewhat scrubbed up, they knelt before Grand Councillor
Duke Fuheng, brother-in-law to His Majesty, who personally interrogated them about how they had lost their queues. This devoted
and able servant of Hungli was the great-grandson of an illustrious
military leader and grandson of one of the K'ang-hsi emperor's most
trusted ministers. Fuheng had cemented his position beside the
Throne by subduing the Chin-ch'uan aborigines in 1749. But his
close personal relationship to Hungli was founded on more powerful
feelings: the sovereign's memory of Fuheng's late sister, Hungli's
beloved first empress, who had died just the previous year.48 Only in
his late forties, and twenty years a grand councillor by the time of
the soulstealing crisis, Duke Fuheng was involved in drafting most of
Hungli's edicts and court letters on the sorcery question.

Before the duke now groveled three men at the very opposite
social pole of the Chinese world. All three stuck to their original
stories: the boy, Wang Jan, was clipped while walking along the street;
Hsia Ko-pai was sleeping in the outer room of his mother's house.
But Meng's case was still suspicious. Since he was sleeping in the inner
room, how could the queue-clipper have reached him unheard?
Meng maintained that his wife was sleeping soundly and heard
nothing. "If she had heard anything," Meng protested to the duke,
"why wouldn't she have shouted right then, instead of waiting until
dawn to wake me?" As for Hungli's suspicions about Magistrate
Chang's "coaching," Meng and Hsia insisted that, en route to Peking,
"our food along the road was all provided by His Excellency, Magistrate Chang. Aside from that, His Excellency didn't say anything to
us.

Duke Fuheng was inclined to believe them. Wang Jan was a child
and not to be held responsible. Peasant Meng and baker Hsia were
"rustic villagers." Though they had "temporarily" cut off the rest of
their queues, they now were regrowing them in normal fashion.
Apparently there was nothing to link them with the "bandit gang,"
and they should therefore be sent home, as Liu T'ung-hsun had
recommended. "Noted," Hungli wrote laconically on Fuheng's
report, in effect endorsing the recommendation but reserving his
inner thoughts on the case.'`-' This meant that the three self-clippers
could be released, but on the responsibility of his ministers. What
had to be determined, in the weeks that followed, was whether this
case could be treated as sorcery aimed at common folk, a crime grave enough in the Ch'ing Code; or whether the tonsure aspect of the case
made it sedition against the ruling dynasty.

Meanwhile, Hungli was receiving alarming reports from Peking
that the capital itself was being infiltrated by sorcerers who were
clipping hair and clothing. Although none had yet been caught, there
was increasing evidence of their presence: new victims were reported
every day. Many were so powerfully affected that they fainted and
collapsed on the spot. Others were completely unaware, until later,
that they had been clipped. Some had their whole queues stolen,
others cut off the remainder of their queues themselves as prophylaxis in the manner of peasant Meng. Never was the sorcerer seen,
either by the victim or by bystanders. Among recent cases were two
women: the wife of a cart-puller who had suddenly been stupefied
and had her lapel clipped. Another was the sister of a soldier; her
hair had been clipped while she was asleep at night next to her
mother. The hair was later found abandoned in a back courtyard.
Although she "did not feel very faint," she complained of "a strange
feeling of romantic longing," as if the sorcerer had cast a spell upon
her.50 To protect themselves, prudent householders pasted antisorcery charms on doors and walls. A tense populace was further
alarmed by rumors of "strange insects," flying in from neighboring
Shansi Province, whose bite was harmful or fatal. Drawings of this
insect had been posted in public places by persons unknown. And
handbills were being passed among Peking residents that foretold
famines, mass deaths, and ghostly visitations.51