Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768 Read online

  Ch'ao-fan, forty-three, from poor and mountainous T'ai-p'ing County in Anhwei, lay surname Huang, was Ching-hsin's acolyte. He had been tonsured at eighteen at a local temple. Later he received ordination at the Tzu-kuang-ssu monastery, whose location is unknown but was probably in Hangchow. He went to live with Chinghsin in 1756.

  The great cultural and religious center of Hangchow had attracted all four: two had forsaken lay life because family deaths had left them alone at what in eighteenth-century China was considered old age. Two had been tonsured in youth: one because of sickness (an eco nomic liability to his family), and the other for reasons unknown. Two bore the government-mandated identity papers (ordination certificates) and two did not. Now all four were pursuing the most common outside occupation of monks: begging. Apart from the spiritual benefits of begging (a demonstration that they had renounced worldly concerns), their monastic homes lacked the means to support them. We do not know exactly the extent of the catchment basin of Hangchow mendicants, but Hsiao-shah was right across the river from the city, and at the teahouse the four decided to set forth together there the next day. Chu-ch'eng and the elderly Ching-hsin would spend the day begging in the villages, while the juniors would carry everyone's traveling boxes to the old God-of-War Temple near the west gate of Hsiao-shan City.

  A wandering Buddhist monk, in an eighteenth-century Japanese impression gleaned from Chinese merchants at Nagasaki. The stubble of hair betrays a degree of indiscipline that would not have been tolerated at an established monastery.

  Making their way along a village street, Chu-ch'eng and Chinghsin saw two boys, aged eleven or twelve, playing in front of a house. One saw Chu-ch'eng's name inscribed on his bronze begging bowl and, to the monk's surprise, recited the ideographs aloud. "So, Mr. 'Official'-you can read!" chuckled the delighted monk. "You study a few more years and you'll certainly get an official post. What's your name? After you've become an official, don't forget me," he added, hoping to please the youngster so he would fetch his parents from the house to give alms. The boys paid no attention. Seeing no adults around, the monks gave up and resumed their progress.

  A few minutes down the road, a frantic couple came running up behind them. "Why did you ask our child's name?" they wailed. "You're a soulstealer!" Once a sorcerer knew a victim's name, who could say what incantations he could work upon it? Chu-ch'eng explained that they had come only to beg. "What's `soulstealing' about saying a few words to your child because he could read?" Agitated villagers quickly crowded around. Some had learned that these days "soulstealers" were coming around from far places, casting spells on children so that they sickened and died. "These two are bad eggs for sure!" The mob, angrier than ever, tied them up and searched them roughly. Finding nothing, they began to beat them. As the hubbub drew a larger crowd, some shouted "burn them!" and others, "drown them!"

  In the crowd was a local headman who managed to quiet the furious peasants but shrank from handling so serious a matter himself. He therefore took them to the imperial post station (the nearest agency of the official establishment) to be questioned. The monks were searched again, but no proof of soulstealing could be found. (What would such proof consist of? Books of sorcery? Tools of magic?) Just to be sure, the literate child was brought in, inspected, and found to be in good health. Nevertheless the distraught parents, trusting in the omnipotence of the written word, demanded that the post-station clerk draw up a formal document stating that all was well. This responsibility the clerk was unwilling to assume. Instead, he wrote up a memorandum for the county authorities. Soon the magistrate's attendants came to haul Chii-ch'eng and Ching-hsin away to the fearsome county yamen of Hsiao-shan. There the two monks found that their companions, too, had been arrested and had been interrogated under torture.

  It was persistent rumors of "soulstealing" that had brought Cheng-i and Ch'ao-fan to grief. In surrounding counties, public fears were running high. In Hsiao-span, Ts'ai Jui, a county constable (pu-i), had been instructed by his superiors to arrest "vagrant monks" from outside the county who might be responsible for "clipping queues." A sorcerer with the right "techniques" could say incantations over the hair clipped from the end of a man's queue and so extract the soul of its former wearer.

  Lurking in the background, unmentioned by anyone connected with the monks' case, was the political meaning of hair: the queue, worn behind a shaved forehead, was the headdress of China's Manchu rulers. It was also universally prescribed, on pain of death, to be worn by Han Chinese males as a symbol of allegiance to the ruling dynasty.

  Patrolling outside the city's west gate, constable Ts'ai heard streettalk that two monks from "far away" with strange accents were lodging in the old God-of-War Temple. As Ts'ai later reported to the magistrate, he then entered the temple and began to question Ch'ao-fan and Cheng-i. Getting no satisfaction, he began to search their baggage. From Ch'ao-fan's he pulled clothing, a bronze begging bowl, clerical robes, and two certificates of ordination. In Chii- ch'eng's, which he had to break open with a stone, he found three pairs of scissors, a pigskin rain-cape, an awl, and a cord for binding a queue.

  An excited crowd gathered. "What's a monk doing with this kind of stuff?" These fellows must be up to no good. There were cries of "beat them up" and "burn them!" Constable Ts'ai, as he continued in his report, summoned his courage and told the mob to keep out of this; since Ch'ao-fan was a "real monk" (as shown by his certificates) there was no basis for arresting him. Cheng-i, however, not only lacked an ordination certificate (meaning he was only a novice, a status readily obtainable) but also had with him Chu-ch'eng's traveling box and its suspicious contents. Bound in chains, the young monk was taken off to the yamen. Ch'ao-fan found his way to the yamen to lodge a protest, but was then arrested himself and brought with the others before the magistrate.

  The queue and the shaved forehead. At a barber's stall, a man is having his forehead shaved in the prescribed manner.

  In the great hall, Chu-ch'eng and his companions, chained hand and foot, knelt before the county magistrate, who sat at his high desk flanked by his judicial secretaries.'' The questioning began: "How many queues have you clipped?"

  The terrified Chu-ch'eng protested that he had clipped none. The magistrate then presented Chu-ch'eng with the evidence constable Ts'ai had brought in: four pairs of scissors, one cord for binding a queue, and two short pieces of braided hair. "Are these, or are they not, evidence of your queue-clipping?" Chu-ch'eng answered that three of the scissors had belonged to his dead son, who had been a leather-worker. The fourth he knew nothing of. The queue-plaiting cord had, he said, been used to bind his hair in the days before he had taken vows and shaved his head. Afterward, he had no use for it but kept it with his gear. For the braided hair, he offered no explanation.

  An unsatisfactory confession, this, from a prisoner whose guilt was presumed in advance. Now began the customary courtroom torture. Attendants dragged Chu-cheng over to the chia-kun, or "pressing beam." We are not told whether this was the regulation ankle-press, a device for crushing the ankles by slow degrees, or an equally fearsome instrument that inflicted multiple fractures of the shinbones. A nineteenth-century observer describes the ankle-press as "a sort of double wooden vice" consisting of three upright beams, of which the outer two functioned as levers:

  The chief torturer gradually introduces a wedge into the intervals, alternately changing sides. This mode of forming an expansion at the upper part, causes the lower ends to draw toward the central upright, which is fixed into the plank, by which the ankles of the victim are painfully compressed, or completely crushed. Should the unhappy sufferer be resolute from innocence, or obstinate from guilt, and submit to the consummation of the horrid procedure, his bones are ultimately reduced to a jelly.'

  Overwhelmed by the pain, Chu-ch'eng eventually declared that all charges against him were the truth. Still the magistrate was not satisfied, because the agonized monk's story was not sufficiently coherent. Twice more the chia-kun was tightened, but
with no better result. Ching-hsin now underwent the same torments. After three days, the magistrate had something resembling admissions of guilt from all four monks. The maimed prisoners were sent, probably in the regulation wheeled boxes used for transporting prisoners, some twenty miles eastward to the Shao-hsing prefectural yamen, the next rung in the official ladder, and again interrogated. This time, since Chu-ch'eng's bones were already broken, the presses were not used. Instead, his lips were slapped ten times with a wooden switch. Cheng-i was again subjected to the chia-kun. Ching-hsin and Ch'ao-fan were by this time seen as less promising culprits and were spared further torture.

  By now the testimony was more confused than ever, and the pris oners were sent on up the ladder: this time to their final place of torment, the provincial judge's yamen in Hangchow. There something surprising happened.

  "The ankle-press at work.

  Various authorized torture ("punishment") implements: (i) the ankle-press; (2) a device for squeezing the fingers; (3) the cangue; (4) a prisoner transfer cart.

  Ever since their first encounter with the Hsiao-shan authorities, Cheng-i and Ch'ao-fan had stubbornly clung to the story that constable Ts'ai had arrested them falsely, because they had refused him money. This was a story common enough in local society. Yet who would believe these ragged monks? Could the public hysteria about sorcery be wholly groundless? And what of the concrete evidence Ts'ai had produced from Chu-ch'eng's baggage? At neither the county nor the prefectural level were the monks believed. Now the provincial judge, Tseng Jih-li, pursued the same line of questioning:

  Judge Tseng: Chu-ch'eng, you're a beggar-monk, so you naturally have to beg for your vegetarian food. But how come you had to ask the name of someone's child? This is crystal-clear proof of your soulstealing. When you made your first confession here, you wouldn't admit that you had asked the child's name.

  Chu-ch'eng: ... That day, at the county yamen, I said I had asked his name, so the magistrate kept asking about soulstealing. The attendants gave me the chia-kun three times, and my legs still haven't healed. I was really scared, so when I arrived here and Your Excellencies questioned me, I didn't dare say anything about asking the kid's name ...

  Judge Tseng: ... If there wasn't solid proof that you did these things, how come the crowd was so angry that they wanted to burn you or drown you?

  Chu-ch'eng: . . . When they saw the parents had grabbed us, they all suspected we were soulstealers, so they shouted about burning and drowning us. Really, that was all just guff. Later, when the headman took us to the post station, the crowd all went away ...

  Officials at the grand provincial yamen were apparently less inclined to coddle police underlings than were officials at the county, who depended on the likes of constable Ts'ai to carry on their daily business. As the prisoners cowered before the provincial judge, Cheng-i repeated his tale of attempted extortion. Ts'ai Jui, he insisted, had told them that day in the temple that he had been ordered to arrest "vagrant monks" and would let them off only if they paid him the "customary fee." Cheng-i had answered, "We're beggar monks. Where are we going to get money to pay you?"

  Something about Cheng-i's story struck judge Tseng as plausible. Men like constable Ts'ai were not professional police, but belonged to the general category of local underlings known as "government runners" (ya-i). They performed many distasteful and demeaning local jobs such as torturing suspects, serving summonses, "urging" the payment of taxes, and running miscellaneous errands around the government offices. Those who, like Ts'ai, did police work were considered to be of "mean" status and not permitted to sit for civilservice examinations. They were paid little and had to support themselves by demanding "customary fees" from all commoners whom they dealt with. Some "runners" were not even on the official rolls, but were destitute men who had attached themselves as supernumeraries to others. These received no pay at all and simply preyed upon the public. It was commonly said that runners were a low lot and had to be kept in check, yet few officials could do so because the runners' services could not be dispensed with.16

  Now constable Ts'ai was brought forward and made to kneel. Though Judge Tseng probed at his story, Ts'ai clung firmly to it, and was left kneeling for the rest of the day. At last the exhausted man realized that the game was up. Indeed, he now confessed, he had demanded cash. When the monks balked, he proceeded to search their baggage: "Where did these things come from? Now if you don't fork over several strings of cash, I'll take you to the county and say you're queue-clippers."

  With the discovery of the compromising scissors and queue-binder, the stakes rose. As the shouting match grew louder, the inevitable crowd gathered. Amid the hysteria, Ts'ai sensed more trouble than he could handle. He persuaded the crowd to disperse by arresting Cheng-i and dragging him off. Instead of taking him directly to the county yamen, however, he brought him and the incriminating baggage to his own home, located in a blind alley which backed onto the city wall. He was followed by the irate Ch'ao-fan, who demanded his traveling box. "I'll give it to you only if you bring in those two other monks," said Ts'ai. Ch'ao-fan, fuming, set off for the yamen to protest.

  Constable Ts'ai's confession went on. Once safely in his own house with the chained Cheng-i, he said, "Now that everyone's gone, just cough up a few strings of cash, and I'll be glad to let you escape." But the outraged monk insisted that he was going to file an official complaint. Ts'ai started beating him, but without result. He realized that he was in serious trouble unless he could make the queueclipping charge stick. Unfortunately, there was only one lock of hair in Chu-ch'eng's box; furthermore, it was straight hair and did not really resemble a clipped queue-end. So Ts'ai found an old lock of hair in his own house, went out in the alley where Cheng-i could not see him, and carefully braided it. For a bit more evidence, he cut some strands of fiber from his own hat fringe and braided them up to resemble two little queues. This hastily concocted evidence he placed in the monk's traveling box along with his own pair of scissors (making a total of four), and marched his prisoner off to the magistrate's yamen.

  There, even under torture, Cheng-i clung to his extortion story. But the magistrate sagely pointed out that there was obviously no bad blood between constable Ts'ai and Cheng-i, the two being total strangers, so Ts'ai could have had no motive for framing him. On this basis, the case had gone up through the prefectural court without being suspected.

  Now that Ts'ai had confessed to the frame-up, however, judge Tseng turned the case back to the Hsiao-shan County authorities. The constable was beaten, exposed in the cangue, and finally let goperhaps a more circumspect guardian of public order. The monks were freed, each with 3,200 cash to sustain him while his broken bones healed.

  Popular hysteria and petty corruption had nearly resulted in a serious judicial error. Courtroom torture had elicited confessions, but these were compromised by the accuseds' complaints before higher authorities. Once the case reached the provincial level, the bias against the accused was balanced by the worldly-wise skepticism of high officials far removed from the pressures and temptations of grubby county courtrooms. A case of sorcery? More likely, the usual nuisance of a credulous rabble abetted by greedy local police ruffians and incompetent county authorities: a case the province was now happily rid of.

  Yet the tide of public fear was stronger than judge Tseng and his colleagues knew. The same day that Chu-ch'eng and his friends were arrested, persons elsewhere in Hsiao-shan had beaten an itinerant tinker to death because they believed that two charms found on him were soulstealing spells. Officials later discovered that they were conventional formulae for propitiating the Earth deity. The unlucky tinker had been carrying them while cutting trees in his ancestral cemetery. A week earlier in An-chi County, which bordered Tech'ing, the epicenter of sorcery fears, an unidentified stranger with an unfamiliar accent had been roped to a tree and beaten to death by villagers on suspicion of soulstealing."

  Within a fortnight, rumors of soulstealing in Chekiang had spread to Kiangsu
. Soulstealing (by the queue-clipping method) was believed to be practiced by itinerant beggar-monks from Chekiang, who were entering the neighboring province to practice their loathsome craft. The local authorities were alerted. Likely suspects were quickly found.

  The Beggars of Soochow

  In Soochow, an ornament of China's most elegant urban culture, seat of the governor of Kiangsu, China's richest province, on May 3, 1768, local constables seized an old beggar of "suspicious" appearance. The charge was clipping queues for the purpose of soulstealing.'s Local authorities did not, however, allege an association between queueclipping sorcery and the political symbolism of the queue.

  The ragged creature who was dragged into the constabulary on that May morning was Ch'iu Yung-nien, a native of Soochow Prefecture. Ch'iu, fifty-eight, was an unemployed cook who had turned to begging "along the creeks and rivers." By April 26, his wanderings had brought him to Ch'ang-shu, a county seat just south of the Yangtze, where he took lodgings at a rooming house. There he met two unemployed men who, like him, had taken to the road in order to survive: Ch'en Han-ju, twenty-six, an unemployed "maker of dusters and hat fringes," whose home was Soochow; and Chang Yuch'eng, forty-one, formerly a peddler of dried salt fish. Chang was the only one from outside the province, having wandered all the way from Shao-hsing, Chekiang (a journey of i 20 miles along the Grand Canal). These three marginal men, cast off by the "prosperous age" of the mid-Ch'ing, found that they were all heading south toward Soochow, and on May 2 set out together.

  By the next day they had reached Lu-mu, a teeming commercial district north of the Soochow city wall, on the banks of the Grand Canal. While his companions begged in a pawnshop, Ch'iu squatted by the roadside. There he was seized by constables from the Soochow garrison, accompanied by two constables from the Ch'ang-chou County yamen. He was found to be carrying a knife and some paper charms. As the constables questioned him, a crowd gathered. Among the bystanders was a ten-year-old boy, Ku Chen-nan, who told anyone who would listen that earlier the same day he had felt his queue tugged, but could not see who had done it. That was enough for the police. Beggars Chang and Ch'en were quickly found and imprisoned with Ch'iu. The three were tortured with the chia-kun in the usual manner. Confronted with the incriminating evidence found on him, Ch'iu insisted that the knife was for making "orchid-flower beans" for sale. The paper charms (each imprinted with "great peace," t'aip'ing) he would paste on doorways in the market streets and then ask for handouts. All three steadfastly denied the crime of queue-clipping. The boy, brought in and questioned, repeated his story: