Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768
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15. P'u, Liao-chai chih-i (234), contains a story in which lovesickness was thought responsible for a young man's soul-loss.
16. Harrell, "The Concept of Soul," 525, citing Arthur P. Wolf, "Gods, Ghosts, and Ancestors," in Arthur P. Wolf, ed., Religion and Ritual in Chinese Society (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974), 131-182.
17. De Groot, The Religious System of China, I, 243-244•
18. Ibid., V, 470.
19. Harrell, "The Concept of Soul," 525.
20. Henry Dore [Henri Dore], Researches into Chinese Superstitions (Shanghai: T'usewei Printing Press, 1918), V, 472.
21. Shen Te-fu, Wan-li yeh-huo-p'ien (Peking: Chung-hua shu-chii, 1g8o), 753• The leader of a sixteenth-century rebellion, a woman named T'ang Sai-erh, was a White Lotus sectarian who was believed to practice sorcery by enlivening "paper men." Dictionary of Ming Biography, 1364-1644, 2 vols., ed. L. Carrington Goodrich and Chaoying Fang (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), 1251-
22. Classical texts had magical force, quite apart from their doctrinal content. See de Groot, The Religious System of China, VI, 1o11, on the use of the 1-thing and other classics as protection against demons.
23. Yuan Mei, Tzu pu-yii (Shanghai: Chin-chang t'u-shu-chii, 1914), 2.15b; a translation of this story appears in de Groot, The Religious System of China, V, 893.
24. De Groot, The Religious System of China, V, 920.
25. Ibid., V, 926.
26. Ibid., V, 871.
27. Lo Kuan-chung and Feng Meng-lung, P'ing-yao chuan (reprint, based on an 183o ed., Shanghai: Ku-tien wen-hsueh ch'u-pan-she, 1956), 52.
28. Leach's hypothesis is "that head hair is a visible symbolic displacement of the invisible genitals." "Magical Hair," 153. See also Chapter 3, note 14-
29. Leach, "Magical Hair," 16o.
30. Paul Hershman, "Hair, Sex, and Dirt." Man 9 (1974): 277, 289. Hershman writes (275) that a symbol "gains its power" by its deep psychological connections (e.g., hair = genitals), but then becomes a free-floating unit of meaning in a ritual situation. Its meaning within a ritual context is related to, but not necessarily the same as, its root meaning.
31. James L. Watson, "Of Flesh and Bones: The Management of Death Pollution in Cantonese Society," in M. Bloch and J. Parry, eds., Death and the Regeneration of Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 173. Why married daughters do this remains obscure, unless it is to reinforce affinal ties.
32. There is widespread evidence of keeping disciples' hair. CPTC 858.3, CCI. 33.7.26 (Liu T'ung-hsun et al.), is an example. On "linking destinies," see CPTC 866.6, CL 33.9.15 (Surde). That soul-force was increased by the number of persons from whom one had acquired hair, rather than the amount of hair per se, is suggested by the "ten-thousand-soul bridge" that master-sorcerer Ming-yuan was planning to construct (see Chapter 4)-
33. De Groot, The Religious System of China, V 1, 931.
34. On charms, see Dore, Researches into Chinese Superstitions, III, 255, V, 5oo-509; and de Groot, The Religious System of China, VI, passim.
35. Dennys, The Folk-lore of China, 82-83.
36. Wu Jung and Chang Yen, comps., and Chou Yen, ed., Lu-pan-ching chiang-chia-ching (Shanghai: Sao-yeh Shan-fang, 19o9), 4.3b-4. The material quoted here is from an appended section entitled "Mi-chueh hsien- chi," the origin of which is not given. The work as a whole dates from the mid-fifteenth century but incorporates earlier material. On the history and character of this book, see Klass Ruitenbeek, "Craft and Ritual in Traditional Chinese Carpentry," Chinese Science 7 (December 1986): 13-16. This book was thought to have such magical power that when a bookseller sold a copy, he always faced away from the book. Once you had looked at the book, you had to inflict magical harm on someone, otherwise you would suffer harm yourself Ts'ao Sung-yeh, "Ni-shui muchiang ku-shih t'an-t'ao," Min-su (Kwangchow), lob (April 1930): 1.
37. Further tips on how to defeat builders' sorcery are quoted by Sawada Mizuho from popular lore in fiction and literati essays: Chugoku no juho, 213-237. For instance (218), if you find a baneful object in your bedroom, "do not touch it, but fry it in hot oil and then throw it in the fire. The carpenter will either die or become ill." Sometimes the curse was unintended: an inhabitant of a house began to "cough up blood," after which it was discovered that a carpenter had injured his hand while raising a roof-beam and his blood had soaked into the wood (230)-
38. C. K. Yang, Religion in Chinese Society: A Study of Contemporary Social Functions of Religion and Some of Their Historical Factors (Berkeley: University of California Press, ig6i), 134-135, 156-158.
39. I have benefited from reading an unpublished paper by Kristofer Schipper: "On Chinese Folk Religion" (n.d.). I am also grateful to Nathan Sivin for extensive remarks on this subject (personal communication, December 24, 1988).
40. Yang, Religion in Chinese Society, 188-i8g; TCHTSL 501.2. I owe thanks to Susan Naquin for sharing with me her extensive notes on the Ch'ing clergy.
41. These officers were called seng-lu-ssu (for Buddhists) and tao-lu-ssu (for Taoists). TCHTSL 501.5. In 1773 the supervision of these offices was turned over to the Imperial Household Department, for reasons unclear. TCHTSL 1219.3-
42. Personnel of these offices were to he reported by provincial governors or commanders-in-chief to the Board of Rites, which would then transmit the lists to the Board of Civil Office to be inscribed in registers. The whole system was delegated to the provincial bureaucracy and the two boards; the old Ming practice of reporting lists of personnel to the Throne was discontinued. All this was evidently intended to routinize the procedures and generate less paperwork for the Throne. TCHTSL 501.6.
43. TCHTSL 501.5-8.
44. TCHTSL 5oi.8b-i i. The term used here for Buddhist secular clergy (ying-fu seng) is obscure and may be a localism. Dc Groot (Sectarianism, 127) links the term to a Yogic sect, but I can find no confirmation of this in standard reference works on Buddhism. The term for secular Taoists is huo-chii tao-shih. Hungli's edict against the secular clergy may have been inspired by a Ming pronouncement four centuries earlier. J. J. M. de Groot, Sectarianism and Religious Persecution in China (Amsterdam: Johannes Muller, 1903-1904), 121.
45. KCT CL 33.1.18 (374) and CL 33.2.13 (644)-
46. P'u, Liao-chai chih-i, 131. In this most popular collection of supernatural tales, the one story in which a monk uses sorcery to harm a niggardly donor stands out as an exception (194-199).
47. The actual practice of Buddhism and the life of the Buddhist clergy in late imperial times still await research. In the discussion that follows, I am falling back on fieldwork that reveals conditions in the early twentieth century. Though this solution is far from satisfactory, it has the merit of dealing with practice rather than with prescription. Furthermore, I am assuming that the aspects of clerical life I am discussing here probably changed rather slowly. I rely mainly on Johannes Prip-Moller, Chinese Buddhist Monasteries: Their Plan and Its Function as a Setting for Buddhist Monastic Life (Copenhagen, 1936; reprint, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1967), chap. 5; and Holmes Welch, The Practice of Chinese Buddhism, 1900-1950 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), esp. chaps. 9-10.
48. Welch, The Practice of Chinese Buddhism, 207-210.
49. On Taoist healing exorcism, see Michael Saso, "Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy in Taoist Ritual," in Wolf, ed., Religion and Ritual in Chinese Society, 329-335-
50. Yung-chia hsien-chih, 1882 ed., 6.12, quoting Hsiang Ou, Tung-ch'iao Hsiang-shih chia-hsun. I have not been able to date Hsiang Ou's work.
51. James L. Watson, "Funeral Specialists in Cantonese Society: Pollution, Performance, and Social Hierarchy," in Watson and Rawski, eds., Death Ritual in Late Imperial and Modern China, t 18.
52. Macfarlane's point is that "they are more likely to be accused of sorcery than witchcraft, for they are not a perennial, secret, inside challenge to a group, but just passing threats." The distinction here concerns the presence in "witches" of the innate malevolence (i.e., a motive for
injuring particular people) that can only result from living together a long while. Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England: A Regional and Comparative Study (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), 229.
53. The view that community tension lies behind witchcraft scares offers no help in the case of sorcery, when suspected sorcerers come from outside the community, as in the Chinese case, and are complete strangers to their victims. For a leading "social tension" view, see Max G. Marwick, Sorcery in Its Social Setting (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1965), and for a critique, Christina Larner, Witchcraft and Religion: The Politics of Popular Belief (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), 50-51.
54. Robert P. Weller, "Bandits, Beggars, and Ghosts: The Failure of State Control over Religious Interpretation in Taiwan," American Ethnologist 12 (1985): 49-55-
55. Jack Potter, "Cantonese Shamanism," in Wolf, ed., Religion and Ritual in Chinese Society, 206-231.
56. The one big exception would seem to be geomancy, or grave magic, which is sometimes used as a weapon in community conflict: one group of agnates aligns ancestral bones to generate magic that favors its own lineage branch over another. This view is offered by Maurice Freedman; see, for instance, "Ancestor Worship: Two Facets of the Chinese Case," in The Study of Chinese Society: Essays by Maurice Freedman, sel. and ed. G. William Skinner (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1979), 296-312, originally published in 1967. On the use of grave magic in community conflict, see also Steven J. Bennett, "Patterns of Sky and Earth: A Chinese Science of Applied Cosmology," Chinese Science 3 (1978): 1-26, at 22.
57. Schak, A Chinese Beggars' Den, 63. This outstanding ethnography is rich in data from nineteenth- and twentieth-century observers as well as from the author's own fieldwork on Taiwan. See especially chapter 3.
58. Ibid., 59.
6. The Campaign in the Provinces
1. Except for the metropolitan province of Chihli, which had only a governor-general.
2. On the upper layers of the provincial bureaucracy, see Fu Tsung-mao, Ch'ing-tai tofu chih-tu chih yen-chiu (Taipei: Kuo-li cheng-chih ta-hsueh, 1963).
3. The median time of service in the provincial bureaucracy in 1768 varied in proportion to rank and reflected the normal promotion pattern: for governors-general, i i years; for governors, 9.5; for provincial treasurers, 5; and for provincial judges, 2-5-
4. Based on the provincial estimates for 1787 in Ho, Studies on the Population of China, 283, and Brian R. Mitchell, European Historical Statistics, 17501975, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Facts on File, 198 1), The European figures are from censuses of 18oi.
5. Taking the governors-general and governors serving in 1768, the average length of time served in a single post (since attaining governor's rank) was 3.5 years for governors-general and 2.2 years for governors. The figure for governors-general is somewhat skewed upward by the unusually long tenure (nineteen years) of Fang Kuan-ch'eng as governorgeneral of Chihli. All my statistics on the bureaucracy are calculated from Ch'ien Shih-fu's comprehensive charts in Ch'ing-tai chih-khan nienpiao, 4 vols. (Peking: Chung-hua shu-chii, ig8o).
6. The average number of governors per province who served during Hungli's thirty-third year was 2.5. Some provinces witnessed a bewildering succession of chief executives: Shantung saw four governors that year, and Fukien five. During the mid-eighteenth century, it was not unusual for three governors to serve in a province during a single year. The year 1768 was one of particularly rapid turnover, due partly to the disruption caused by the soulstealing crisis itself.
7. See the cases of Wu Shao-shih and Wu T'an in Chapter 9.
8. Authoritative studies of the communications system are John K. Fairbank and Teng Ssu-yu, "On the Transmission of Ch'ing Documents" and "On the Types and Uses of Ch'ing Documents," Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 5 (1940): 1-71, and 6 (1941): 135-246; Silas H. L. Wu, "The Memorial Systems of the Ch'ing Dynasty (1644-1911)," Harvard journal of Asiatic Studies 27 (1967): 7-75; Chuang Chi-fa, Ch'ing-tai tsou-che chihtu (Taipei: National Palace Museum, 1979); Beatrice S. Bartlett, "The Vermilion Brush: The Origins of the Grand Council System" (Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1980); and Bartlett, "Ch'ing Palace Memorials in the Archives of the National Palace Museum," National Palace Museum Bulletin (Taipei) 13.6 (1979): 1-2 1.
9. By regulation, all vermilion-endorsed memorials had to be sent back to the palace for storage, which is why we have them at our disposal in Peking and Taipei today.
10. Such as expressions of gratitude for appointments; see Chapter 9.
11. Upon G'aojin's death in 1779, Hungli's funerary poem particularly praised his rise from the lower ranks. CSLC 23.8-13; Hummel, Eminent Chinese, 411, 413. On G'aojin's family background, see Jonathan D. Spence, Ts'ao Yin and the K'ang-hsi Emperor: Bondservant and Master (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), 16.
12. CSL 813.3ob. The memorial is excerpted here, along with the vermilion rescript, but I have not found the original memorial.
13. Jangboo himself was to die in prison eleven years later, convicted of corruption. CSLC 23.41-44
14. CSLC 16.44b; Hummel, Eminent Chinese, 413. Documents on the Yangchow case begin in CSL 813.196, CI. 33.6.25-
15. CPTC 853.3, CL 33.7.10; CPTC 862.2, CI. 33.7.14 (Jangboo).
16. KCTC 27, CL 33.7.15. Jangboo hastened to assure Hungli that he was preparing to impeach all subordinates who had suppressed information on the spring incidents or released queue-clipping criminals. The emperor replied that, on second thought, impeachments had better wait until after the case was solved-or nobody would be prepared to report events that might implicate him in previous laxity! Here was a classic limitation on bureaucratic discipline: impeachments for withholding information would only result later in less information being revealed. CPTC 862.2, CL 33.7.14 (Jangboo).
17. KCTC CL 33.7.9. Though suspicions may arise here that Hungli was using the soulstealing crisis to divert attention from a scandal that smirched imperial in-laws, it seems not to have been so. G'aoheng and the other culprits had already been delivered to the Grand Council for trial, which ended in their conviction and execution.
18. Vermilion on CPTC 853.5, CL 33.7.18 (Jangboo).
19. CPTC 854.2, CL 33.7.15 (G'aojin); KCTC CL 33.7.18.
20. SYT CL 33.7.20.
21. CPTC 853.5, CL 33.7.18 (Jangboo).
22. On the development of this institution, see Spence, Ts'ao Yin and the K'ang-hsi Emperor, 82-89.
23. CSK 325.1o864.
24. SYT CL 33.7.11. Rainfall and grain prices were considered particularly sensitive intelligence because they were indexes of the popular temper and hence affected state security.
25. CPTC 862.3, CL 33.7.18 (Sacai).
26. KCT, vol. 30, p. 248, CL 33.4.1 (Jangboo).
27. CSL 815.39b, CL 33.7.24•
28. CPTC 862.5, CL 33.7.26 (Jangboo).
29. CPTC 857.3, CL 33.7.26 (Jangboo).
30. The descendants of the uncles of the dynastic founder, Nurhaci, bore the prefix Gioro (chueh-lo) before their personal names. They were more distantly related to the royal line than Imperial Clansmen (tsung-shih).
31. Kuo-ch'ao ch'i-hsien lei-cheng, ch'u-pien (1884--go; reprint, Taipei: Wen-hai ch'u-pan-she, 1966), 29o. 14-15b. Biographical writings on Yungde are sparse, which perhaps reflects his contemporaries' estimate of him.
32. CPTC 853.2, CL 33.7.1 (Yungde).
33. Ibid.
34. We do not know the exact date these documents were forwarded, but they were certainly on Hungli's desk before September i. These are the confessions referred to in Chapter i, note 6.
35. KCTC CL 33.7.21
36. CPTC 856. 1, CL 33.8.2 (Funihan).
37. CPTC 851.1, Cl, 33.8.2 (Funihan).
38. CPTC 852.1, CL 33.6.11 (Funihan).
39. CPTC 854.2, Cl, 33.7.15 ((;'aojin).
40. CPTC 854.2, CL 33.7.15 (G'aojin). G'aojin evidently received the Suchou report even as he was composing his memorial and appended it as a happy ending to an otherwise discouraging story.
&nbs
p; 41. CSL 815.46b-47, CL 33.7.26.
42. CSL 815.57, CL 33.7.27•
43. Some minor details of this story are filled in from later documents. See LFTC/FLCT CL 33.9.5 (Liu T'ung-hsun et al.) and CPTC 854.9, CL 33.8.17 (Dingcang).
44. CPTC 865.1, CL 33.7.15 (Dingcang).
45. On the Meng Shih-hui case: CPTC 859. 1, CL 33.6.20; CPTC 851.1, CL 33.7.4 (Fang Kuan-ch'eng); SYT CL 33.6.22; LFTC/FLCT CL 33.7.11 (Liu T'ung-hsun and Liu Lun); CSL 813.15-15b (CL 33.6.22 and 23, drafted by Fuheng et al.); SYT CL 33.7.20 (Fuheng).
46. CSL 813.15b, CL 33.6.22.
47. KCTC and SYT CL 33.7.12.
48. Hummel, Eminent Chinese, 252.
49. SYT CL 33.7.20.
50. CPTC 858. 1, CL 33.7.17 (Liu T'ung-hsun et al.).
51. CSL 815.5-6b, CL 33.7.18; CPTC SLHK 187-188, CL 33.7.26 (Toendo).
52. Chien-kuai pu-kuai, ch'i kuai tzu-pai.
53. CSL 815.5-6b, 713-9, Cl, 33.7.18-19.
54. CPTC 858.2, CL 33.7.23 (Liu T'ung-hsun et al.).
55. SYT CL 33.7.8, CSL 814.17.
56. The career of Asha (ca. 1710-1776) illustrates how the Manchu elite was able to preserve itself by keeping mediocre men in high provincial office even when they were well-known incompetents. Asha belonged to one of the Upper Three Banners (those attached to the monarch himself, and in whose personnel the monarch reposed special trust). In 1726, probably in his late teens, lie obtained a staff position in the Grand Secretariat directly from one of Peking's special schools for bannermen's children (kuan-hsueh). After his apprenticeship in the lower ranks of the capital bureaucracy, he was sent in 1745 to Kansu as provincial treasurer. Four years later he was elevated to the plush job of governor of Kiangsi, where he reportedly pleased his royal master with suggestions for minor improvements in military training routines. The following year he was transferred to the governorship of Shansi, where he blotted his copybook by forcing wealthy households in a famine area to pay "relief" funds directly into a local government treasury. Hungli, no doubt reflecting the outrage of the Shansi elite, was furious; the action was "vile and erroneous" and Asha was "unworthy of the post of Governor." He was stripped of his office and given a minor job in the Board of Civil Office. By 1755, with brevet rank of provincial treasurer, he was assigned to the Zungaria border camps as supply officer. Somehow, within the year, he obtained a recommendation for "military merit," whereupon he was made Kiangsi governor again in 1757, back where he had started eleven years earlier.