7. Te-ch'inghsien hsu-chih (18o8), io.6. Mason Wu later denied that the water level had presented any unusual difficulty; but that was what he had to say, given the nature of the charges against him.
8. All ages referred to here are calculated in the Chinese style, in which the person is reckoned to have attained one year at birth. The Western calculation would make each man one year younger.
9. For information on this folk practice (kao yin-chuang) I am indebted to Professor Li Shih-yu, personal communication.
10. 1 am not sure why Shen was questioned in Te-ch'ing, rather than in Jenho County where the solicitation took place. Perhaps it was because Tech'ing was the locus of the intended crime.
11. CPTC 853.2, CL 33.7.1.
12. LFTC/FLCT CL 33•
13. None of the monasteries or temples referred to in the confessions can be identified with certainty in the 1784 edition of the Hang-choufu-chih, which indicates that they were all very minor establishments, probably of the "hereditary" type discussed in Chapter 5. To assume the monastic tonsure (a wholly shaved head) was the first step in entering the clergy.
14. A Jesuit prisoner in Peking in 1785 recorded the circumstances of his interrogation: "The prisoners were led before the tribunal, and while being questioned, were chained with three chains, on hands, feet, and around the neck, and had to kneel bareheaded on the floor before the officials." Bernward H. Willeke, Imperial Government and Catholic Missions in China during the Years 1784-1785 (Saint Bonaventure, New York: Franciscan Institute, 1948), 138.
15. Thomas Allom, China: Scenery, Architecture, Social Habits, &c., Illustrated, 2 vols. (London: London Printing and Publishing Company, [ 18-?]), II, 85.
16. On government runners, see Ch'ii 'I°ung-tsu, Local Government in China under the Ch'ing (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962), 5673; on runners' "mean" status, see Anders Hansson, "Regional Outcast Groups in Late Imperial China" (Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1988), 47-49-
17. The lynchers in both cases were arrested and convicted of manslaughter. I have succeeded in locating the original and review judgments only for the An-chi case (Hsing-k'o shih-shu, vol. 2772, CL 34.3.29, and vol. 2781, CL 34.6.23).
18. Chiang-su an-ch'a-ssu lu-ch'eng Chang-thou-hsien na-huo ch'i-kai Ch'en Hanju teng i-an ch'uan-chuan ch'ao-ts'e, LFTC/FLCT Cl, 33.8. The Soochow case is documented by this ninety-page booklet, submitted by provincial authorities to the Grand Council as the complete record of the case of Ch'en Han ju et al. The interrogation of the suspects by the Grand Council and the Board of Punishments is summarized in LFTC/FLCT CL 33.9.17. Except when another source is cited, all material on the Soochow case comes from these documents. Three similar cases occurred within the province at about the same time: in K'un-shah (April 30), again in Soochow (May 14), and in An-tung (May 28). All involved suspected queue-clippers' being attacked by mobs, placed under arrest, and later released. For reasons of space, I have not related them here. They are summarized in CPTC 855.4, CL 33.7.30 (G'ao_Jin).
19. Persons suspected or accused of crimes were routinely designated "criminals" (fan) in official documents. In order to preserve the Havor of this Chinese judicial bias against the accused, I have used "criminals," in both direct and indirect quotations, wherever this Chinese term appears.
20. Henry Brougham Loch, quoted in Derk Bodde, "Prison Life in Eighteenth-Century Peking,"Journal of the American Oriental Society 89.2 (1969): 329.
21. Quoted in Bodde, "Prison Life," 320.
22. LFTC/FLCT CL 33.9.17 (Fuheng).
23. Clyde Kluckhohn, Navaho Witchcraft (1944; reprint, Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), 116.
24. "Introduction," in John Middleton and E. H. Winter, eds., Witchcraft and Sorcery in East Africa (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963), 21.
25. John Beattie, "Sorcery in Bunyoro," in ibid., 27-55•
26. CPTC 865.1, CL 33.7.15 (Dingcang). The reader may wonder at the term "panic." I have used it advisedly, because that is what Western observers called it when they saw it on other occasions. A correspondent of the North China Daily News who witnessed a queue-cutting scare in 1876 (see Chapter to) wrote that the "commotion which has been witnessed here [Wuchang] since Friday last" was caused by a belief that queue-clippers were abroad, and that their victims would die within three days: "The news spread like a panic through the city ... Grave men are to be seen walking along the streets with their tails hanging down over their shoulders in front. Others are tenderly carrying them in their hands, and evince considerable anxiety on the appearance of 'a foreigner or any suspicious-looking character ... [N learly all the children carry [a magical charm] in it red hag at the lapel of their dress or have it written on a piece of yellow cloth and tied into their hair." August 4, 1876, p. 1 19.
2. The Prosperous Age
1. Scholarship on these trends is ably synthesized in Susan Naquin and Evelyn S. Rawski, Chinese Society in the Eighteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987).
2. A recent bibliography lists, on the subject of China's late imperial economic development (called at one time "sprouts of capitalism"), 565 articles, 26 monographs, and 7 documentary collections published in mainland China between 1951 and 1984. T'ien Chu-chien and Sung Yuan-ch'iang, eds., Chung-kuo tzu-pen chu-i meng-ya (Chengtu: Pa-shu shushe, 1987), 1o16-1o63.
3. Naquin and Rawski, Chinese Society, loo.
4. The works of William S. Atwell have led the way to understanding the role of monetized silver in the late Ming- economy. See especially his "Some Observations on the `Seventeenth-Century Crisis' in China and Japan,"Journal of Asian Studies 45.2 (1986): 224, and "Notes on Silver, Foreign Trade, and the Late Ming Economy," Ch'ing-shih wen-t'i 3.8 (1977): 5; on the money supply and its effects in the seventeenth century, see Frederic Wakeman, Jr., "China and the Seventeenth-Century Crisis," Late Imperial China 7.1 (1986): 1-26; on the Ch'ing money supply in general, see Hans-Ulrich Vogel, Central Chinese Monetary Policy and Yunnan Copper Mining during the Early Ch'ing, r 644-r8oo (Cambridge, Mass.: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, forthcoming); and [.in Man-houng, "Currency and Society: The Monetary Crisis and Political-Economic Ideology of Early Nineteenth-Century China" (Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1989).
5. Naquin and Rawski, Chinese Society, 222.
6. The regional-systems analysis, worked out by G. William Skinner, is the most influential modern effort to make sense of the functional divisions of the Chinese economy and to relate these divisions to the politicaladministrative system. See, for example, Skinner's "Regional Urbanization in Nineteenth-Century China" in his (edited with Mark Elvin) The City in Late Imperial China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1977), 211-252.
7. Liu Shih-chi, Ming Ch'ing shih-tai Chiang-nan shih-chen yen-chiu (Peking: Chung-kuo she-hui k'o-hsueh ch'u-pan-she, 1988), 61.
8. Liu Shih-chi (ibid., 63), quoting Ts'ai Shih-yuan, who is arguing that government restrictions on rice export from Fukien should be lifted. The stability of rice prices was, unfortunately, not to last long.
9. Liu Shih-chi (ibid., 17), quoting a gazetteer from the Sung-chiang area.
10. The classic description of the "standard marketing community" is based on fieldwork by G. William Skinner in the Chengtu plain. Although it has had to be modified somewhat for other regions, the "marketing community" is a concept that has been borne out by historical study of earlier periods. Skinner, "Marketing and Social Structure in Rural China (Part I)," journal of Asian Studies 24.1 (1964): 3-43-
11. Naquin and Rawski, Chinese Society, 114-123.
12. The emancipation decrees are summarized in TCHTSL 158.3ob ff. See also Hansson, "Regional Outcast Groups"; Naquin and Rawski, Chinese Society, too; and Philip A. Kuhn, "Chinese Views of Social Classification," in James L. Watson, ed., Class and Stratification in Post-Revolution China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 22-23-
13. Naquin and Rawski, Chinese Society, 121.
14. TCH'1'SL 158.32.
15. TCH
'I'SL 158-32b-33-
16. Yeh Hsien-en, Ming-Ch'ing Hui-thou nung-ts'un she-hui yii tien-p'u-chih (Anhwei: Hsin-hua shu-c:hii, 1983), 291.
17. Quoted in Ch'uan Han-sheng, "Ch'ien-lung ship-san-nien ti mi-kuei went'i," in his Chung-kuo ching-chi-shih lun-[.rung (Hong Kong: Hsin-ya yenchiu-so, 1972), 560.
18. Wang Hui-tsu, Pin-t'a meng-hen In, hsia, C1. 57, quoted in Lin Man-houng, "Currency and Society," 294-
19. Lin Man-houng, "Currency and Society," 267.
20. P'eng Hsin-wei, Chung-kuo huo-pi ship (Shanghai: Ch'un-lien ch'u-panshe, 1958), 605.
21. Wang Hui-tsu, Pin-t'a meng-hen lu, hsia, Cl. 5g, quoted in Lin Man-houng, "Currency and Society," 294-
22. Lin Man-houng, "Currency and Society," 295.
23. Although P'eng's chart (see text at note 2o) shows the negative silver balance beginning in the period 1821-18sjo, this figure (from East India Company records) (foes not include the brisk opium-smuggling business, so the reversal probably began at least a decade earlier.
24. An independent department can be considered a county-scale unit, though it ranked slightly higher in the administrative hierarchy.
25. Kuang-te chou-chip, 1881 ed., 50.13; An-chi hsien-chih, 1871 ed., 8.29; Steven C. Averill has described immigration to Kiangsi, which seems analogous to the process in Kuang-te and neighboring areas, in "The Shed People and the Opening of the Yangzi Highlands," Modern China g.1 (1983): 84-126.
26. Kuang-te chou-chih, 1881 ed., 24.1ob. To be sure, a plea for tax remission paints the bleakest picture. Yet events a generation later, on the eve of the soulstealing panic, afford only too vivid a confirmation of its general accuracy, as will be seen in the discussion of beggars later in this chapter.
27. Yeh, Ming-Ch'ing Hui-thou, esp. 232-302.
28. A report in 1843 notes that migrants from the poorer southeast prefectures of Chekiang were flooding into the hills of the Kuang-te-Hui-chou region and living as "shed people" (p'eng-min) on waste land. Many immigrants could find no work and probably formed a pool for the kind of roving beggar-desperados found in eighteenth-century Kuang-te, described below. TCHTSL 158.29b.
29. Wang Shih-to, Wang Hui-weng i-ping jih-chi (i 936; reprint, Taiwan: Wenhai ch'u-pan-she, 1967), 1.13, 2.10.
30. Chi-ch'i hsien-chih, 1755 ed. (Taipei: T'ai-pei-shih Chi-ch'i t'ung-hsiang hui, 1963), 83-
31. Tanii Toshihito extracts, from literati essays, an impressive picture of the crush of travelers on China's roads during the eighteenth century. His main point is how easy it was for queue-clippers to move around, and how hard it was for the authorities to identify and catch them. "Kenryo jidai no ichi koiki hanzai jiken to kokka no taio: katsuben'an no shakaishiteki sobyo," Shirin 70.6 (November 1987): 33-72.
32. Ho, Studies on the Population of China, 278. Ho's remains the standard work.
33. On migration and its effects, see ibid., chaps. 6-8.
34. A mid-nineteenth-century Ch'ing governor recalled hearing from elders in his home town in Chihli (Pao-ting Prefecture) that "in former times" one might see only a few homeless vagrants in a village or market town, and everyone laughed at them and despised them. "But now [that is, around 183o] a community of a hundred might have ten or more, and this was their normal condition." Quoted in P'eng Tse-i, "Ya-p'ien chanhou shih-nien-chien yin-kui ch'ien-chien po-tung-hsia ti Chung-kuo ching-chi yii chieh-chi kuan-hsi," Li-shih yen-chiu, no. 6 (1961): 63. These conditions arose from the economic crisis caused by the silver shortage of that period.
35. I use the terms "clergy" and "clerical" in this book to avoid the clumsy expression "ritual specialist" (though I sometimes use that term as well). In late imperial China, most ritual specialists were not comparable to the Western clergy, in that they did not "belong" to any ecclesiastical order. Nor did they all practice their specialty as a "calling" or to the exclusion of other pursuits. In the case of people broadly considered "Buddhists," there was a large intermediate group of novices who were not full members of the sangha and might never be unless they became formally ordained. Most "monks" did not live in the big, well-regulated elite monasteries, but rather in small temples in or near lay communities. As for "priests" who were roughly in the Taoist tradition, most were neither full-time practitioners nor inhabitants of religious establishments of any sort. Many "monks" and "priests" performed ritual services at community temples of the eclectic "popular religion" rather than at exclusively "Buddhist" or "Taoist" establishments. In short, some religious practitioners lived much more closely regulated lives than others. There was a vast distance between the small, highly trained monastic elite and the mass of relatively unregulated "monks." Official documents refer to "Buddhist monks" or "nuns" (seng or ni) and "Taoist priests" (tao) as a kind of shorthand to describe a wide variety of people who in dress, tonsure, and behavior identified themselves with one or another of the major religious traditions. Officials were compelled to classify people, though the results should not be taken literally. In old China, the distinction between "clergy" and "lay" was much hazier than in the West. For general discussions of this subject, refer to works by Prip- Moller, Schipper, Thompson, Watson, Welch, and Wolf in the bibliography.
36. SYT CL 33.7.20 (Fuheng).
37. On the crowded North China plain, about one hundred miles southwest of Peking.
38. The grand councillors turned the matter over to the Chihli provincial authorities, who searched all the temples and monasteries Li had mentioned. They found "Buddhist and Taoist scriptures," but no drugs, charms, or sorcery manuals. Every one of the persons Li had mentioned in his story was arrested and taken to Ch'eng-te for interrogation. Eventually Li and all the others were exonerated and sent home.
39. CSL 790.10, CL 32.intercalary 7.17.
40. One problem was that the routinization of reporting procedure (reports being transmitted through the provincial bureaucracy to the Board of Rites, rather than being memorialized by provincial officials to the Throne) gave local officials the impression that the exercise was entirely formulaic. Ironically, this routinization had been mandated in 1674 by order of Hungli's grandfather. The removal of the imperial factor (taking the Throne out of the information path) meant that the whole system became a dead letter. CPTC 864.6, CL 33-8-13-
41. Hungli rejected the idea. Such a superficial measure would miss the heart of the problem, reads his vermilion comment (it is unclear what he thought the heart of the problem was). Furthermore, this was not the time (evidently fearing to stir up commotion among the clergy just as the antisorcery campaign was gaining ground): "We'll discuss it after the case is over." A similar proposal was offered by Hui Yueh-li, the Chekiang provincial judge, who observed that very few monks today had ordination certificates. Hui suggested requiring travel passes for all clergy. CPTC 864.12, CL 33.9.2. This proposal, like G'aojin's, was a characteristic response from the provincial bureaucracy: sooner than institute rigorous investigations, it was better to routinize the whole problem by instituting regular documentary procedures. This sort of response is analyzed further in Chapter 9.
42. Present-day official attitudes toward beggars are still heavily freighted with concerns for public security, as well as moral cant. I am indebted to Susan Naquin for the following reference from the China Daily: "Beggars Threaten Social Order." Although beggars were said to have decreased in number, there remained an estimated 670,000 nationwide in 1987, which was supposedly a decrease of 37 percent since 1979. These people "pose a hazard to the social order and should arouse wide social concerns ... Only 20 percent of those who beg do so because of natural disasters or the misfortunes of their families. Most see begging as an easy way to make money; others are playing truant or escaping from forced mar riages arranged by their parents. Some are mental patients forsaken by their families ... In Guangzhou City in 1987, 35 percent of the beggars were also criminals," according to a report in People's Daily. China Daily (Peking), May 16, 1988.
43. CPTC 865.5, CL 33.8.19 (Min O-yuan).
44. If Min's program was act
ually authorized, however, I have not found the edict.
45. CSL 813.15b, CL 33.6.22.
46. Tanii Toshihito quotes a travel account by Sun Chia-kan (1721) about destitute men who became monks in order to survive. "Kenryo jidai," 6o.
47. This last reference is from Nathaniel Gist Gee, A Class of Social Outcasts: Notes on Beggars in China (Peking: Peking Leader Press, 1925). On beggar typologies, see also Jean Jacques Matignon, "Le mendiant de Pekin," in Superstition, crime, et misere en Chine, 4th ed. (Lyons: Storck, 1902), 207246; and Hsu K'o, Ch'ing-pai lei-ch'ao (Shanghai, 1928; reprint, Peking: Hsin-hua shu-chii, 1986), 5473-
48. An annotation by "Hsien-fang" to P'u Sung-ling, Liao-chai chih-i, ed. Chang Yu-ho (Shanghai: Ku-chi ch'u-pan-she, 1978), 131-132.
49. David C. Schak, A Chinese Beggars' Den: Poverty and Mobility in an Underclass Community (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1988), 26.
50. Hsu, Ch'ing-pai lei-chao, 5475•
51. Ibid.
52. CSL 787.2, CL 32.6.17.
53. Hsing-k'o shih-shu, vol. 2773, CL 34.5.3 and 5.4. The first case took place in Kwangsi, the second in Shensi.
54. Such research would require a large-scale longitudinal study of the chronological records of the Board of Punishments, the Hsing-k'o shihshu, which are kept at the First Historical Archives, Peking. It takes little research to show that social hostility to beggars is rising in American society. Consider a 1988 story from New York City: "The number of panhandlers appears to have multiplied over the last year and their methods have become increasingly aggressive, even intimidating." One New Yorker admitted that beggars provided "a new target for my homicidal fantasies." Even hardened city residents who habitually refuse beggars suffer "some psychological cost .. A tiny little low-scale war is going on inside. Sometimes it comes out as anger." Fox Butterfield, "New Yorkers Turning Angry with More Beggars on Street," New York Times, July 29, 1988, 1.
Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768 Page 28
