Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768 (14 page)

Funihan was not treating the crime as simple sorcery. His sugges tion that more was involved than mere robbery implied that the
sorcerer's ultimate intent might be sedition, perhaps aided by public
disorder. Public disorder was, in fact, one ostensible reason why the
Ch'ing Code prohibited sorcery. It is nonetheless quite remarkable that
Funihan, himself a bannerman, had nothing whatever to say about
the political symbolism of the queue. Was this because the shaved
forehead was considered the key symbol of the tonsure? In the light
of later events, I believe this cannot have been the case; Funihan
surely knew how incendiary was anything touching upon the tonsure.
But it was not his place to look for trouble. The ethnic problem was
best left for others to define. If even Hungli himself had not mentioned it in his private communications with provincial officials, how
could a mere governor presume to do so?

The capture of beggars Ts'ai and Chin was only a beginning.
Funihan's county magistrates soon reported more cases of queueclipping in Shantung villages, all of which pointed even more plainly
toward sorcerers hidden in the lower Yangtze provinces. On August
i i, Funihan reported the arrest of five more queue-clippers, each of
whom told of a different Kiangnan master-sorcerer. Han P'ei-hsien,
a down-and-out literatus, provoked the keenest interest among his
captors.6

Han P'ei-hsien Becomes a Sorcerer's Apprentice

Han told his captors that he was forty-one years old, the son of a
provincial examination graduate of neighboring Chihli Province.
Poverty had driven him to Shantung in search of work. There, in
the region bordering I-chou and Ch'ing-chou departments, some
sixty miles east of the provincial capital, he practiced medicine and
taught school for many years. In the autumn of 1767, he heard of a
monk called Ming-yuan who was said to have practiced a particularly
fine tradition of medicine. Han journeyed to visit him in his Three
Teachings Temple in Hai-chou, just down the coast in Kiangsu Province. Ming-yuan welcomed him, said he indeed "had plenty of techniques," and invited him to become his disciple.

"He used the blindfold method, like this," Han told his interrogators. "First he filled a bronze bowl with water, added some powdered drugs, and had me wash my face with it. Then he wrapped a
white cloth to cover my eyes, whereupon I saw lofty towers, elegant
rooms, ... gold and silver treasures, all manner of high-class things." Han was captivated. A few days later, monk Ming-yuan told him he
wanted to obtain "ten-thousand queues in order to capture ten-thousand souls and build a ten-thousand-soul bridge (wan-hun-ch'iao)." He
showed Han how to stupefy victims by sprinkling powder on them.
All that was needed was enough queue-ends, two or three inches
long. The hairs would he tied to figures of men and horses cut from
"five-color paper," which would be brought to life "by filling seven
large earthen jars with them, reciting incantations over them for
seven times seven days, then daubing them with the blood of living
persons." The life-sized legions could then be sent forth to rob people
of their possessions. By late November 1767, Han had been sent
forth with one of Ming-yuan's acolytes, monk Fa-k'ung. Each had
been given 500 cash and it packet of stupefying powder, and each
was to recruit several others to help clip queues. They were to meet
monk Ming-yuan back in his temple by the end of August the following year.

Han and monk Fa-k'ung set out northward toward Shantung, but
dared not clip along the route for fear of arrest. Nothing accomplished, the two separated upon reaching I-shui County, about a
hundred miles into Shantung. Han himself journeyed northwest as
far as Po-shan, where he settled down to resume the practice of
medicine, his magical mission seemingly shelved. On June 4, 1768,
he encountered monk Fa-k'ung at the temple of a local 'T'aoist. Fak'ung pressed him about the queue-clipping mission, which Han now
promised to fulfill. On June 7, "I clipped the queue of a fourteenor fifteen-year-old boy south of the county seat of Lai-wu." Six days
later he did the same to a boy who was delivering food to fieldworkers. On June i6 he delivered the queue-ends to Fa-k'ung at the
prefectural town of T'ai-an, at the foot of sacred Mount Tai. On
July ig, he encountered "a fourteen- or fifteen-year-old boy"
standing under an acacia tree. "I sprinkled drugs on him, and he
passed out." Just as Han had secreted the boy's severed queue-end
in his traveling bag, villagers seized him and hauled him into the
county yamen.

Li Shao-shun Is Enslaved by a Sorcerer

A poor hired laborer, Li was forty-three years old when he was sent
by his master to deliver 150 ounces of silver to a grain merchant in the prefectural town of Tung-ch'ang in payment of a debt for soybeans. Li did as ordered and spent the night in town. On the way
home next day, he met a man carrying a sack, who asked him his
name and native place. Suddenly the stranger turned and sprinkled
some powder in Li's face, whereupon the laborer felt "kind of dizzy"
(hu-hu t'u-t'u) and could only stumble along after his captor. When
his head began to clear, he realized he had been "stupefied" and
begged for mercy. The stranger now ordered Li to "make obeisance
to him as master" and made him swear an oath begging Heaven to
strike him with a thunderbolt if he reneged. He then clapped Li in
the small of his back, which cleared his head. The sorcerer "said that
his powers were mighty, and that if I ran away or told anyone he
would `hook my soul' (kou-hun) and take my life." He then gave Li a
small knife to secrete in his right hand, and a pinch of yellow powder
from his sack. "I was to go up to a young man who had passed us
on the road, sprinkle some powder on him from behind, and cut his
queue." The victim realized nothing, and Li was able to carry out his
orders.

As captor and captive rested beneath a tree, the sorcerer revealed
that he was named Liu, from Pien-ch'iao in Kiangnan, but did not
supply his given name. (Li could only refer to him as "Baldy Liu.")
The sorcerer had learned his "techniques" in Kiangnan, and there
were four or five men in his band. He himself had worked as a
"roadside doctor" and recounted clipping several queues along the
way. "When I asked what the queues were for, he told me to mind
my own business and just follow along to help him clip. Later it would
bring me benefits (hao-ch'u)." Soon the pair met two of Liu's confederates on the road, and the four sat down in a sorghum field to rest
during the heat of the day. Liu shortly ordered Li into a nearby
village to clip queues from people taking their noonday naps. Li
entered the village but lost his nerve. As he turned to leave, a villager
challenged him, but Li cast the yellow powder in his face and the
man fell to the ground. Li threw down his knife and fled; quickly,
however, he was caught, whereupon he told the story of his enslavement. The villagers were led to Baldy Liu (the confederates had fled),
who resisted with his knife but was overcome. Li and Liu were
dragged to the village temple, guarded by a crowd during the night,
and early the next day were trussed up and taken away in a cart to
the Ch'ang-ch'ing county seat. Along the way they were given no water, and Liu died of the heat before they reached their destination
that afternoon. At his interrogation, Li pleaded that he was not a
sorcerer but had been forced to "accept Liu as a master" in order to
save his own life.

In addition to reporting the apprehension of Han P'ei-hsien and
Li Shao-shun, Governor Funihan also revealed in his August i i
memorial that his local officials had captured three other queueclippers, each of whom he now reported to the Throne, enclosing
their confessions. A mendicant Taoist priest, Chang Ch'eng-hsien,
was promised 300 cash per queue by another local Taoist, who taught
him how to hold stupefying powder "in the creases of his finger joints
and blow it into a man's face." A beggar named Chang Yu was
offered it smoke by "a man sitting under an acacia tree," was stupefied, and awoke to find the man "chanting spells" over him, after
which he was unable to resist his orders. A starving beggar called
Cripple Hu was enlisted by "a monk" to clip queues for too cash
each. Governor Funihan pointed out that, with the exception of Han
P'ei-hsien, all these criminals were poor folk, coerced or paid to join
the sorcerer's gang. Only Han had been to the lower Yangtze area,
where these hateful practices were spawned. All signs pointed to an
extra-provincial gang recruiting local people to do its work.

Indeed the record now offered a number of leads. The culprits
arrested in Shantung had all been recruited by sorcerers, most of
them from the South. The three sorcerers identified by name (not
counting "Baldy Liu," who had died in the hands of his captors) all
had special access to the world of shadow, being either Buddhist
monks or (in the case of Chang Ssu-ju) a professional fortune-teller.
Two of the recruiters (monk 'F'ung-yuan and fortune-teller Chang)
had themselves been recruited by master-sorcerers lurking in the
South: monks Wu-yuan (in Chekiang) and Yu-shih (in northern
Anhwei). The Shantung recruits were mostly laymen who had
learned enough to use the potent "stupefying powder" to clip queues,
but none had been admitted to their masters' inner secrets. Obviously
the regime could not stop with the arrest of these petty criminals,
but had to root out the source of the evil by hunting down the mastersorcerers themselves. Interrogation of the Shantung criminals had
yielded fairly exact addresses for two of them (monks Wu-yuan and
Yu-shih). Fortune-teller Chang was only known to be from Kiangnan.
Monk T'ung-yuan had last been seen near Yangchow, north of the Yangtze on the Grand Canal. The hierarchy of plotters was now
revealed in three tiers:

On July 2g Hungli dispatched urgent court letters to all province
chiefs, announcing the Shantung arrests and demanding that the
master-sorcerers be tracked down. He now considered that the sorcery uncovered in Shantung was a menace to the empire as a whole,
not just to the lower Yangtze provinces. Accordingly these orders
were issued to top provincial officials nationwide. How, exactly, did
Hungli understand the soulstealing threat? On what basis was he
mobilizing the provincial bureaucracy to confront it? These criminals,
whose traces are "hidden and hard to detect," use their evil arts to
"delude and ensnare good subjects (mi-yu shan-liang)." They constitute
a "great injury to local communities." Here Hungli pictured the
Throne as carrying out a mission to protect the people from supernatural harm. For such a view there existed a solid legal basis: the
numerous penal sanctions against sorcery included in the Ch'ing
Code.

Sorcery in the Ch'ing Code

In view of its own dominating position in. the empire's ritual life, it
might seem odd that the state saw sorcery as a serious threat. Yet it
did so, as evidenced by the penal code's stern provisions on the
subject. Surely it was the central role of ritual in certifying the dynasty's mandate to rule, as well as sanctifying state authority on all levels,
that made officialdom so protective of its special rights to communicate with the spirit world-and so determined to regulate how
others did so. The fear of sorcery is by no means straightforwardly
expressed in the Code, however. Sorcery is not treated as a single
category, but is distributed under a number of headings and subheadings with a wide range of meanings and associations. An outline of the areas where the Code treats manipulation of the spirit world
will locate the particular offenses we have seen in the 1768 cases:'

Categories under Which Sorcery Is Prohibited
in the Ch'ing Code

The Ten Abominations (shih-o)

• Crimes outside the [civilized] way (pu-tao)
Statutes on Ritual (li-lu) [Offenses within the purview of the
Board of Rites]

• Sacrifices (chi-ssu)

• Ceremonies (1-chih)

Statutes on Criminality (hsing-Iii) [Offenses within the purview
of the Board of Punishments]

• Rebellion and Robbery (tsei-tao)

• Homicide (jen-ming)

Sorcery under the "Ten Abominations"

The "Ten Abominations" occur in the preamble to the Code and are
duplicated later in various substantive statutes. They were a general
statement of principle and not for jurists to apply directly. In this
privileged position, they signal one of the culturally deepest levels of
Chinese legal thought and are in fact drawn almost wholly from the
T'ang Code of A.D. 653. Acts that we would call "sorcery" come under
the "uncivilized" subheading and include: "dismembering a person
to extract vitality" (ts'ai-sheng che-ko-cutting out ears and entrails for
achieving biodynamic powers); making poison (tsao-ku) by magical
means (as distinct from purely chemical agents, such as poisonous
herbs); and inflicting "captive spirits" (yen-mei) upon a victim by means
of incantations. All are acts or conspiracies against persons, not the
state.`' If the deepest levels of revulsion against sorcery are assumed
to be reflected in this preamble, their wholly nonpolitical nature is
astonishing in the light of what follows.