Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768 (10 page)

The years of the Ch'ing conquest saw stirring examples of local
resistance centered symbolically on the tonsure decree. Loyalty to the
defunct Ming political order was less powerful a rallying cry to local
communities than was the preservation of cultural self-respect
implied in resisting the shaved forehead. The famous cases of local
resistance in the Yangtze Valley exhibited the strong connection, in
the public mind, between hairstyle and self-respect." We can appreciate the importance of this cultural sticking point to the invaders as
well: it channeled the application of force toward the most obdurate
centers of resistance. In this respect, the tonsure decree was it shrewd
move: better to flush resistance into the open and destroy it quickly
than to nourish a sullen passivity toward the new regime.

But what are we to make of the continued ferreting out of individual cases of defiance in the conquered provinces? The zeal and ruthlessness with which the conquerors persecuted local hair-growers
suggests that even the slightest deviation from the tonsure decree
might prove a nucleus for popular resistance. And enforcement
might serve as a measure of official zeal in the service of the new
order. The following cases, in which deviance of isolated individuals
was discovered by accident, indicate not only the minuteness of the
conquerors' attention to conformity among ordinary subjects but also
their determination to bend local officials to the service of the new
regime. The incidents evoke the harsh and bloody mood that
attended the tonsure decree in the early Ch'ing. Can this keen
Manchu sensitivity to tonsure violations have died out completely by
1768? As for the general populace, must we lean on "racial memory"
to imagine that the threat of family extirpation may occasionally have
been mentioned by fathers to sons when it was time to visit the
barber?

The scholar's cap. It was early March in 1647, three years after the
Manchu conquerors had swept into North China and occupied
Peking.''' Late winter in the far northwest was dry and bitterly cold.
Chang Shang, Han bannerman and governor of Kansu Province, had
just received orders from Peking to make an inspection tour. By
March 4 he had reached the outskirts of Yung-ch'ang, a remote
county just within the Great Wall. Along the sides of the dusty road
to greet him knelt the entire body of students of the county school.
Astride his horse, Chang noticed to his satisfaction that all were
wearing Manchu-style winter caps. As he later reported, however, "I
espied one man who seemed to have retained the hair on the front
of his head. After I reached the county yamen, I summoned all the
students for academic examination." As they gathered in the great
hall, "I personally went over to the man in question and removed his
cap. Indeed, his hair was totally unshaven."

Infuriated, Chang ordered local officials to investigate. They
reported that the region had been repeatedly posted with warnings
about the tonsure decree, on Chang's instructions, and that even this
unfortunate culprit, Lu K'o-hsing, a military licentiate living in a
rural area, had no excuse. Chang clapped Lii in jail and memorialized
the Throne asking that he be executed, "to uphold the laws of the
ruling dynasty." Replied the Throne (the stern Dorgon speaking, we
may assume), "Let him be executed on the spot. But what about the
local officials, the household head, the local headman, and the neighbors? There are established precedents for punishing them, too. Why were they not followed? Let the Board of Punishments be informed."
Lu's unshaven head was hacked from his body and publicly exposed
"to warn the masses." The patriarch of Lu's household, along with
the local headman and the neighbors, were all punished with beatings, and the county magistrate was docked three months' wages.

A disturbance in the marketplace. Later that same year, in central
China, not far from Wuchang, the capital of Hupei Province, a minor
fracas occurred in the market town of Yu-chen.'3 A peasant named
Kuo Shan-hsien, who had come into town to sell chickens, had got
himself into a loud argument over some trivial matter. Tempers
flared, and local constables were summoned. Unluckily for Kuo, his
frontal hair was discovered to be nearly an inch long, and he was
placed under arrest. On his person was discovered a paper bearing
the signature of a person named Yin, the same surname as that of a
local bandit in that area, now deceased. Kuo was suspected of being
part of Yin's gang, and was taken to the county yamen. There the
paper was found to be in the hand of Kuo's own landlord, also
surnamed Yin, and to be of no significance. The acting magistrate,
Chang Wen-teng, evidently considered Kuo's hair to be a matter of
no great significance, either, and the peasant was released. But he
was then rearrested, specifically on the hair charge, by the market
tax-collector, who had him taken once again to the county yamen.
This time Acting Magistrate Chang had the man's head shaved, but
released him as before. The tax-collector, perhaps with his own career
prospects in mind, would not let the matter rest, and complained
directly to the provincial authorities. His charge was as much directed
at the lenient Chang, whom he accused of "protecting traitors," as
against peasant Kuo, the principal culprit.

The provincial judge now had Kuo arrested once more and
brought him, the tax-collector, and Acting Magistrate Chang into his
court for direct confrontation. He found that indeed there had been
undue leniency: landlord Yin and Kuo's local neighbors, as well as
Chang and Kuo, all deserved punishment. However, he opined that
there was a difference between intentionally allowing the hair to grow
(like the defiant militiamen of the doomed Yangtze cities) and negligently failing to shave in timely fashion. Kuo, he recommended,
should get off with a beating.

This moderate judgment was reversed by the governor-general. In
a concurring opinion, the governor noted that the tonsure decree
had been broadcast repeatedly. Kuo was only an ignorant rustic, but he had managed to get himself arrested not once but twice on the
same charge. Why should he not be made a warning to others? Only
when the matter had been found out was he forcibly shaved: surely
he had repeated his crime intentionally. As for magistrate Chang, it
was inexcusable that he could not control a contumacious subject, but
rather, when the man was arrested, first procrastinated and then had
him forcibly shaved, so that there was no evidence of the length of
his hair. The Throne accepted the sterner verdict: Kuo was to be
beheaded, Chang cashiered. As it turned out, the governor reported,
Kuo died in prison "of illness," thereby "incurring Heaven's punishment ... so the Kingly Law did not fail in the slightest particular."

Those early years after the conquest were dangerous times, and
not just for martyrs. The sword struck anyone who, either from
laziness or from ignorance, failed to meet the symbolic requirements
of the new regime. These were not militant loyalists, but isolated
subjects caught largely by accident. Moreover, for every "traitor"
executed, at least one bureaucrat was disciplined. The pressure was
on: even in the remotest corner of the conquered lands, to tolerate
political crime could mean the end of a man's career. In this way,
both the Han commoners and their co-opted masters-the Han
bureaucracy-were held to account. The tonsure decree was a touchstone by which the Throne tested its servants.

Hair, shame, and submission. In none of these early tonsure cases is
the queue itself an object of Ch'ing enforcement. This seems to have
resulted from attitudes of both the Manchus and the Chinese. Once
the tonsure decree was issued, the conquest regime seems to have
focused its attention on the shaved forehead precisely because the
Chinese loyalists resisted it so stubbornly. The reason, apparently,
was that the deeper humiliation was not braiding (the queue) but
shaving (the forehead). Although we lack direct evidence, some
castration imagery may have been implied, adult manhood (and elite
status) having been signalized under the old regime by long, elaborately kept hair. Ironically, what to the Manchu warriors symbolized
manliness, to the Chinese symbolized effeminacy. More likely, if
Edmund Leach is right about the ritual meanings of hair, the Manchu
tonsure was a symbol of restraint triumphant over license.14 A more
decorous explanation, acceptable to Confucians at the time, is that
propriety was offended by tampering with the body bequeathed by
one's parents.'' Another possible explanation of Chinese resistance
to head-shaving is its historical link to shame and punishment. A penal code of the third century B.C., for instance, lists shaving (of
head-hair and beard), along with tattooing and mutilation, as humiliations to be inflicted on slaves and convicts. These shameful connotations of head-shaving may have persisted through the imperial
period.16 In the later Ch'ing period, care was taken that convicts
observe the tonsure requirements. Jail wardens had to ensure that
felons under deferred death sentences had their foreheads properly
shaved before the autumn assizes, and that those serving sentences
of internal banishment were inspected quarterly to ensure that their
foreheads were shaved (no mention whatever of the queue).''

So Chinese horror at forehead-shaving clearly drew Manchu
enforcement to this point, and the queue remained a symbolically
less potent concern. After a man had assumed the required headdress,
however, a sudden, symbolic act of defiance was not possible except
by cutting off the queue (since frontal hair would take some time to
grow). Certainly, forcing someone else to display symbolic defiance
would be most easily accomplished by cutting off his queue." And
picture the state of mind of someone whose queue was clipped against
his will! Thanks to another person's action, he was now vulnerable
to having his whole family exterminated by the state. Such anxiety
cannot be ruled out as we try to explain why men were so afraid of
queue-clippers in 1768. Nevertheless, as a component of the tonsure
requirement, the queue seems to have remained much less important
than the shaved forehead right up to the time of the sorcery scare.1)

Hungli Confronts Sedition

The Prosperous Age of Hungli seemed eons away from those bloody
times. If queue-clipping was indeed sedition, a symbolic rejection of
Manchu hegemony, it was something no official, whether in Peking
or the provinces, wanted to confront openly. Were not the days of
ethnic bitterness now happily displaced by a placid and harmonious
universal empire? Accordingly, during the first six weeks of the soulstealing crisis, Hungli's secret correspondence with his provincial
officials broached not a word about the tonsure. Instead, the monarch
stuck to the subject of sorcery, a time-honored concern of the universal empire, whoever its rulers. Yet the tonsure question would not
long stay buried, and there emerged in due course the monarchy's
other face: the sensitive alien regime under symbolic attack for its
alienness.

The rhetoric employed by the Manchu rulers displayed both the
cosmopolitanism of the universal empire and the narrow defensiveness of the ethnic minority. As a minority people ruling a great
empire, the Manchu monarchy had to have it both ways: they had to
express their supremacy in both a cosmopolitan mode and an ethnic
mode. Both were needed to solve the regime's basic problem: how
to rule the universal empire as a legitimate dynastic house, and still
preserve the coherence and elan of the conquest elite. As universal
rulers, their title rested, not on ethnic identity, but on generally
accepted norms of virtue and culture. But to survive as a powerholding minority group, their own special qualities had to be not only
defended but celebrated. Hungli believed that Manchus, because of
their precious ethnic heritage, could actually rule the Middle
Kingdom better than could the Han, and in fact were particularly
qualified to translate the moral precepts of Confucianism into imperial rule. The monarchy therefore required two rhetorical arenas:
one for the cosmopolitan side of the regime, the other for the ethnic.
But sedition posed delicate choices, because challenges to the Manchu
monarchy often made the ethnic point: the Manchus were illegitimate
because they were outsiders. Consequently sedition cases did not
furnish a particularly good arena in which to celebrate ethnicity.

Hungli's ruling style was an uncomfortable mix of militant ethnicity
and cosmopolitan culture. He wanted to make Manchu-ness an integral component of the imperial institution. The Throne would be
both the guardian of Manchu cultural integrity and the symbol of a
multiracial hegemony justified by cosmopolitan Confucian rhetoric.20
As champion of Manchu virtues, he took two tacks: to terrorize
intellectuals for real or imagined ethnic slights, and to boost the
ethnic consciousness of his Manchu compatriots by lecturing them
about their martial tradition and superior character. Nevertheless, in
cases of real plots against the regime, to mention the ethnic issue at
all seemed risky and inflammatory. His behavior in two serious sedition cases of the sixteenth and seventeenth years of his reign illustrate
how careful he was to keep quiet about ethnic symbolism-particularly the deadly issue of the tonsure-when he really believed the
dynasty to be in danger.

The case of the Bogus Memorial. Hungli at forty, a seasoned ruler
sixteen years into his reign, encountered a crisis, of complex origins,
that we still do not fully understand. He had endured the death of
his beloved empress, Hsiao-hsien, in the spring of 1748. That year also brought news of military disasters, in the distant campaign
against the Chin-ch'uan aborigines of Szechwan, that revealed unsuspected weakness in the Ch'ing military establishment (Hungli was so
infuriated that he had the two top commanders beheaded). Then, in
1751, he launched his first southern tour, a pretentious and magnificent imperial gesture in the manner of his grandfather. Grief, frustration, and grandiosity lend this juncture in his reign a peculiar air
of embattlement. It was around this time that Hungli confronted his
first serious sedition crisis.