How unusual was this chronic disaster area? Though it may have been a particularly bad case, the ecology of Kuang-te was not unique. This little Appalachia formed the northern anchor of a 18o-mile chain of hilly counties running from northeast (near Lake T'ai) to southwest (at the Kiangsi border). Ironically, the vigor of Ch'ing commercial life has been symbolized for social historians by the empirewide success of merchants from Hui-chou, which lies toward the southwestern end of this region. But Hui-chou's local economy accords rather closely with the picture of Kuang-te just sketched: a hilly region with poor land, a settlement area for landless peasants crowded out of coastal regions, and a relatively uncommercialized agriculture. In Hui-chou, agricultural relations among long-settled folk rested on a system of virtual serfdom, in vivid contrast to the free-wheeling farm economy of the flatland.21 The population of this region as a whole was swollen by a tide of immigration that continued well into the next century.28
The scholar Wang Shih-to, who lived as a refugee in this region during the 1850s (Chi-ch'i County, part of Hui-thou Prefecture), described the area as chronically poor, overpopulated, and short of basic commodities. Despite high rates of female infanticide, population expansion was sustained by extremely early marriage, to the extent that "a man could become a grandfather at the age of thirty."29 The county he was describing exported tea, forest products, and (sporadically) precious metals and lead. Yer the bottom line was abject misery: "The county is everywhere mountainous, and the peasants toil upward, level by level, to plant a foot or reap an inch. If it is dry, they fear their crops will wither; if it rains, they fear they will be washed away. Though they labor ceaselessly all year, their clothing is fit only for oxen and horses, their food only for dogs and swine."10 Though Chi-ch'i participated in the regional market (indeed, the commercialization of the core areas was what made its few exports salable), this county and those around it present a stark contrast to the world of Soochow and Hangchow. When hard times hit those metropolises, what of hinterland counties like this one?
No account of the eighteenth-century economy, then, can omit the gulf between core and periphery, between fertile river deltas and hardscrabble mountain uplands. What went along with this gradient in the economic map was an unceasing flow of people: migrants and sojourners, merchants and mountebanks, monks and pilgrims, cutpurses and beggars thronged the eighteenth-century roadways. The stream of travelers-some moved by enterprise, some by devotion, and some by desperation-had its effects on men's consciousness.;'
Migration, Out and Down
Suspicion of soulstealing focused on wanderers: strangers, people without roots, people of obscure origins and uncertain purpose, people lacking social connections, people out of control. The victims of lynch mobs and of torture chambers were mostly wandering monks and beggars; and if we consider monks a species of beggars, then the suspected soulstealers were all beggars. Where did they come from, and why were they feared?
Population growth and ecological change. The population of China roughly doubled during the eighteenth century, from around 150 million in 1700 to around 313 million in 1794.32 The precondition for this expansion was China's capacity to develop new ways-and new places-for people to make a living. These ways and places included New World crops, such as maize and sweet potatoes, which made the hills yield a living to immigrants. They included massive internal movement of population, particularly to Szechwan, which had been depopulated by the internal wars of the conquest period; to the highlands of the Yangtze and Han river systems; to Manchuria; to largely aboriginal Taiwan; and to lands overseas. All over China, people were moving upward as well as outward: forested hills became flourishing sweet potato and maize farms, until their soil eroded and became barely cultivable. The expansion of cultivated land area during the eighteenth century cannot be measured, but (taking the nation as a whole) is thought to have kept pace with population growth until around 18oo. All this can be seen as a triumph of will and work-and an ecological disaster, as China's mountain soil gradually washed into her rivers.33
The commerce of the Ch'ien-lung reign can be seen as a sump for absorbing the increase of labor power. It enabled families with tiny landholdings to survive by selling the handicraft labor of their women and children. Yet there is plenty of evidence that neither commercial expansion nor out-migration could take care of everyone, and that a certain number of people were entirely forced out of the productive economy. Their solution was not migration outward, but downward: into an underclass of beggars. We have no reliable way of gauging the numbers or proportion of displaced persons in the Prosperous Age. Devices for registering population di.d riot reach the homeless. Observers a century later saw plenty of vagrancy, of course, during the economic crises of the nineteenth century. By contrast, the eighteenth century looked like a golden age.34 Yet, despite the disparity in numbers, I am struck by the social awareness of vagrancy even in the r 76os. The question is of particular interest because vagrants of all sorts, both clergy and lay, were objects of suspicion during the soulstealing panic.35
The clerical underclass. At the height of the sorcery crisis, an elderly "Taoist" (tao-shih) named Li Ying was arrested by Chihli authorities on suspicion of queue-clipping and eventually shipped to the summer capital at Ch'eng-te for interrogation by the Grand Council.36 His confession:
I'm from Ting-thou." I'm fifty-six years old. My father, mother, wife and children are long dead. I've always been a hired laborer. In the thirty-first year of the Ch'ien-lung reign 11766/671 I'd been working in Fang-shan County, but I was so poor I couldn't go on, so I decided to join the clergy (ch'u-chia, lit. "leave the family"). At Yellow-lotus grotto I became a follower of the Taoist master Fu-yueh. I cut brushwood and carried water for him. Because the temple was too poor, Fu-yueh couldn't keep me there. There was a Buddhist monk of the Shih-t'ang Temple named Kuang-shan (also a Ting-thou man) repairing the temple. I went there and began to work for him.
Li later heard of the Taoist master Wang Lai-shui, "who always stayed in his mountain retreat." A disciple took him up to visit the master, "who was unwilling to accept me, because food was short." While descending the mountain ten days later, Li fell and broke his leg. "On the road I met a man called Han Chun-fa who helped me into the village and took care of me for several months. In the second month of this year, my leg had healed and I left to go begging. In the seventh month, I got to the area of Hsiao-ching, where His Excellency the Governor-general was passing by. I went over to have a look and then I was arrested."38
How extensive was the underclass of marginal clergy? The provincial judge of Szechwan pointed to "increasing numbers" of unemployed men and women who "concealed themselves in Buddhist establishments," but did not shave their heads. They were known as "hair-wearing Buddhist practitioners" (tai fa hsiu-hsing). As "neither clergy nor laity" they lived secretly in monasteries and convents and "conspired with one another in illegal activities, wasting the assets of the monasteries. 1139 We can see this as mass pietism or as a spillover of persons whom the economy could not absorb. In either case, security-minded officials considered these people a threat. There was, of course, no reliable way to count them.
Most astonishing, in the light of the Throne's deep suspicions of the clergy, is how badly the government's system for registering the clergy (see Chapter 5) had decayed by the 176os. In the view of the experienced provincial official G'aojin, an imperial relation and governor-general of the Liangkiang provinces, nobody bothered to assemble accurate information. G'aojin had personally checked the registers of some of his subordinate counties and found them wildly discrepant. Not only were aggregate numbers not reported; the licensing system, too, had broken down. According to G'aojin, only 20 or 30 percent of "clergy" now carried ordination certificates. This was because nobody had enforced the rule that monks and priests had to report every new disciple (that is, every newly tonsured novice) to the authorities. The result was alarming: large numbers of people were masquerading as monks and priests, "and th
e loyal and treacherous can not be distinguished." Not only were the sangha vows not observed; "there are even heterodox teachings and evil arts (hsiehshu) being used to delude the simple people, in defiance of the laws. 1140
G'aojin's fears are quite in line with standard official stereotypes about the clergy, as reflected in the Collected Statutes. But may not mid-eighteenth-century conditions have lent such anxieties a particular urgency? There were now so many wanderers, wrote G'aojin, who "privately had themselves shaved" (that is, not through the orthodox tonsure ritual at monasteries or temples) and who were entered in no register, that it would constitute a major social disruption to round them all up and force them to return to lay life, as most would have no way to support themselves. G'aojin told his local subordinates to sweep unregistered clergy into the lists. But this was mere patchwork, he wrote to the Throne. Instead, he proposed reviving the practice of reporting registered clergy to the Throne at year's end, along with general population and harvest figures, thereby infusing some urgency back into the control system.4' Here was a social environment in which more people than ever (men like the "Taoist," Li Ying) were on the roads, without livelihood. The "clergy" was evidently absorbing myriads of them into socially sanctioned (if not officially licensed) mendicant lives.
To the bureaucratic mind, wandering beggars of any sort threatened public security. People without homes and families were people out of control.42 The old methods of registering and controlling the clergy were no longer enough, wrote Min 0-yuan, provincial treasurer of Hupei, at the height of the queue-clipping crisis.43 There was now a new threat in the form of thousands of vagrant monks and priests, some only marginally clerical, who formed a breeding ground for sedition and lawlessness. The statutory controls were only useful for settled clergy living within a jurisdiction. But now there were thousands of "roving clergy" (yu fang seng-tao) who wandered beyond the law's reach. "They use the excuse of `worshiping at famous mountains' or `looking for masters or friends,' going northward in the evening and southward at dawn, and their tracks are impossible to trace." They lodge at temples that are known for putting up such persons, places they call "hanging your sack" (kua-t'a). There, traitors, bandits, forgers, and imposters take their ease, "reclining on straw pallets and drinking the water, borrowing the shade and concealing themselves." Every year, each province is alerted to arrest several thousand wanted criminals, but many cannot be found. Most have adopted clerical dress, dropped out of sight, and moved elsewhere. That is why "in major cases of sorcery-books and sorcery-tales," there is invariably a "traitor-monk or heterodox Taoist" in the background, "deluding good subjects." Because they have no fixed abode, it is impossible to track them down.
Min's view of the clergy underclass turned on the idea that many "monks" and "priests" were not "really" clergy at all, but rogues who took clerical garb to evade the law. Although most clerics caught up in the queue-clipping panic were indeed not regularly ordained, many were in that intermediate stratum of tonsured novices, who will be discussed further in Chapter 5. In any case, they were more like beggars than criminals. Some (like Chii-ch'eng of Hsiao-shan or Li Ying of Ting-chou) were lone survivors of family tragedies. From an official point of view, however, any uncontrolled movement of persons was dangerous. Min now proposed new rules by which no cleric could be affiliated with a temple or monastery outside his own jurisdiction, nor could he travel more than thirty miles from such a place. If he did, officials could arrest and investigate him for "any criminal activity." Even if no criminality were found, he would be punished with a beating, according to that marvelous catch-all provision in the Ch'ing Code, "Doing inappropriate things, heavy punishment" (pu-ying [wei], chung; statute 386), and forced to return to lay life. Temples and monasteries were to send all such wanderers away and tender a bond to the authorities that none was being harbored. (The emperor replied, "This matter is worth Our concern." )44
Such warnings struck a sensitive nerve in the royal mind. Hungli's own suspicion of the Buddhist clergy (as distinct from his ostentatious patronage of Buddhism as such) was deeply ingrained. It was not just that monks and their movements were hard for the civil authorities to regulate. Hungli's attitude reflected a more general Confucian disdain for men who "willingly shaved their heads to become monks and even failed to care for their parents, wives, and children, and whose activities are accordingly suspicious," as he expressed himself on another occasion.45 In this respect, monks were comparable to the despised eunuchs, who forsook their principal filial obligation, to have progeny, for the sake of employment.
If Min's description of a floating clerical underclass indicates more than jangled official nerves, how important a social phenomenon was it by mid-Ch'ing times? One would predict. that population pressure had begun to erode the economic base of the lay family in many areas by the late 176os. Yet we have so little data on the underclass that, beyond mere poverty, we know nothing systematic about their social backgrounds. Begging as an alternative to starving, and mendicant clergy as a variety of beggar, are certainly nothing new in the 176os.46 Yet fear of sorcery fed not upon numbers but upon perceptions. In the idiom of bureaucratic control, Min O-yuan was expressing anxiety about the uncontrolled movement of rootless people. Was there a popular analogue to this anxiety? If so, it may well have been expressed in the idiom of sorcery fear. Among the public, one of several things may have been happening: either fear of mendicant strangers was growing because there were more of them passing through communities; or public feelings about mendicants were changing, regardless of how many of them there were; or both. Even without social changes of this sort, fear of strangers was deeply rooted in popular religion, as I shall explain in Chapter 5.
Lay beggars. Nearly all writers on "beggars" begin by listing the various "types" of beggars (the blind, the deformed, those who sang or juggled for the market crowds, the local beggars, and the seasonal outsiders). Certain traits seem to have been quite conventional (operatic airs sung only by beggars, for example, and the "professional whine," common to street beggars) .41 It is now quite clear that a substantial fraction of "clergy" by the i 76os was essentially a variety of beggar. Clerical dress and behavior signaled a mendicant role that was publicly familiar and indeed respected, however objectionable it may have been to officialdom. An eighteenth-century observer points out that wealthy people who would disdain to give even a penny to an ordinary beggar would empty their pockets into a monk's begging bowl in hopes of gaining karma-credit in the afterlife.48 Certainly, lay beggars bore a social stigma that clergy did not; their mere appearance (disgustingly filthy, hair matted, dressed in rags) contrasted with the conventionally robed monks.49 Even so, the distinction between monks and lay beggars was not crystal-clear in the public mind. It was a long-standing custom in Peking to call ordinary beggars chiaohua-tzu, from mu-hua-a term that originally referred to the religiously sanctioned begging of Buddhist monks.50 Monkhood was perhaps the most acceptable of a number of specialized, conventional roles for beggars. We may think of these roles as social templates, already well established in the eighteenth century, to which increasing numbers of people could cling as times got harder. That these templates still retained their power to shape behavior is perhaps the essence of the eighteenth-century condition: those squeezed out by the economic pressures of Ch'ing society could still find, in the world of social symbols, acceptable paths to survival. A later age of social breakdown would find such templates cracking under the pressure of mass destitution.
To judge from undated evidence of a century or more later (presented by the folklorist Hsu K'o in his invaluable collection of Ch'ing tales and social vignettes), beggars were well entrenched in various ecological niches in local society. Some had customary jobs as warrantservers for county authorities. Some had worked out a seasonal arrangement: beggars from northern Anhwei would collect in towns along the Chekiang-Kiangsu border every winter (the slack season in their own villages), sustain themselves by begging until spring, then return home
. These seem to have been ordinary peasants who lacked the by-employments to survive between crop seasons.'' But how helpful is Hsu K'o's information (some of which must have been from the late nineteenth century or even later) for understanding eighteenth-century conditions? Even though economic conditions, crowding, and social breakdown were much worse a century later, contemporary perceptions of the growth of a clerical underclass should at least make us watchful for evidence of an actual increase of mendicancy in general in the mid-eighteenth century.
The discussion of outward migration in Ch'ing times has largely concerned movement of people into the relatively underpopulated borders, into interior uplands, and overseas. Because local officials had to cope with it, and because the state sometimes encouraged it, such outward migration shows up readily in state documents. The extent of downward migration-dropping out of the settled occupations into vagrancy and begging-is harder to estimate. It occasionally became part of the documentary record when beggars were disorderly: in the little Appalachia of Kuang-te, which I mentioned earlier, the Prosperous Age of mid-Ch'ien-lung times had produced, by 1767, gangs of "beggar-bandits" (kai fei), who now roamed the area, taking what they wanted by force and battling constables with clubs and brickbats. It turned out that ten of the beggars who were caught had previously been arrested on the same charges in nearby Hui-thou and Hsiu-ning but had been let off with beatings. Hungli now ordered stiffer punishments. The economic problems of Kuangte he did not mention at all.52
Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768 Page 5
