Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768 (28 page)

The monarch found this case disturbing, mainly because the evidence of queue-clipping in the provinces might now be cast into
doubt. While confirming a deferred sentence of strangulation for the
"despicable" Chang Erh, he cautioned his prosecutors: "Do not,
because of this case of false accusation, permit your will to be swayed,
or show the slightest negligence in pursuing the queue-clippers, lest
the true criminals slip through the net."4

Although these cases were most prominent in the recent memories
of the grand councillors, other curious occurrences were coming to
the attention of provincial officials. In Honan, for example, "bad
characters spend their fathers' money or dispose of their wives' possessions, then clip their own queues and falsely assert that someone had robbed them and clipped their queues. Sons cheat their fathers,
husbands cheat their wives. There are even cases in which bad children skip school, clip their own queues, and falsely assert that
someone clipped them and made them ill, as an excuse for skipping
school. Such things are happening all over.' The situation in Kiangsu
was similar, though it was not reported to Peking until late November:
"All jurisdictions have reported cases of commoners clipping the tips
of their own queues and falsely accusing others, or turning in others
to collect rewards."" Though the full dimensions of this problem
emerged only some weeks later, a certain skepticism is already discernible in Grand Council discussions of sorcery by mid-October. In
this atmosphere we join the inquisitors as they reopen the cases of
the most notorious of the soulstealing criminals.

Soulstealers in the Dock

Chang Ssu ju Tells All

We left the singing beggar Chang Ssu and his eleven-year-old son in
the county lockup at Su-chou, Anhwei, charged with queue-clipping
at Chao Village. Acting Magistrate Liu reported that the singing
beggar had admitted under torture that he had been recruited by
the tall stranger, Chao San, to clip queues. Yet he was unable to make
him admit that he was really the Chang Ssu ju named by the Shantung queue-clipper, beggar Chin. A search for the tall stranger had
proved fruitless. Now beggar Chang and son were bundled into
criminal-transport carts and shipped to the prefectural yamen at
Feng-yang, where "(:hang Ssu" confessed that he was, indeed, Chang
Ssu-ju. Here at last was a link to master-sorcerer Yu-shih, who had
so far eluded the imperial dragnet. Governor-general G'aojin, who
was then nearby in Hsu-chow managing flood control on the Yellow
River, ordered the criminals brought for him to question personally.
Finally, there seemed to be an end to this troublesome business.

Flanked by the local circuit-intendant and prefect, Governor-general G'aojin had beggar Chang and his son Ch'iu-erh dragged before
him. But the result was not what he had expected. The criminal now
recanted his entire confession and "poured out his grievances,"
insisting that he had been framed by village headman Chao. G'aojin
decided that it was "inconvenient" to verify the story by applying
torture, since the criminal's ankles already bore the marks of the chia kun and were badly swollen and infected. Village headman Chao was
now brought to court, questioned sternly, and made to tell the following story.'

Chang Ssu and his boy had sung their song and then pleaded for
food outside headman Chao's house. Two other beggars, who were
hawking woven bamboo ladles, were given one piece of steamed
bread between them, and beggar Chang was given half a piece. This
was just enough to enrage the famished creatures, who roundly
cursed their benefactor. Headman Chao warned them, "There are
queue-clippers around these (lays. You'd better be off!" (meaning,
"don't tempt me to turn you in"). Chang cursed him again, and the
beggars walked away. "'T'hen I was really angry," admitted Chao,
"and I suspected they might be had characters from outside." So he
ordered his hired hands and tenants to seize them. One of beggar
Chang's companions was found to be carrying a small bag of medicine, and the other a paring knife. Were these in fact the queueclipping sorcerers everyone was talking about? "But there were no
clipped queues, and they wouldn't admit it." Then the men threatened the boy with a beating and terrified him into admitting the
beggars were queue-clippers. When beggar Chang and the others
continued to deny it, headman Chao had them tied to trees and
beaten with an iron chain. They were badly hurt, and Chao feared
that if they were released they might lay charges against him. So, to
fortify the evidence, he ordered hired-hand Fei, who was growing
bald and wore a false queue, to donate part of it. This damning item,
along with the knife and drugs, filled out the list of incriminating
evidence that sorcery lore required, and the headman could confidently turn the criminals over to county authorities.

Governor-general G'aojin found witnesses to corroborate all these
details. He also determined that the knife was too dull to cut hair
and the drugs incapable of "stupefying" anyone. Yet both county and
prefectural authorities had previously sustained the case. There was
no alternative but to send the criminals to Peking to face the Shantung criminal, beggar Chin, who had been brought to the capital to
have his tangled testimony combed out by the grand councillors
themselves. Beggar Chin, who had named Chang Ssu ju in the first
place, would surely know him when he saw him.

The beggar and his son reached Peking on October i i, and a panel
of grand councillors, led by Liu T'ung-hsun, interrogated them personally. The father, his legs infected and suppurating, was barely alive after his journey. His whole body was "yellow and swollen," and
he was suffering from acute dysentery. Yet he clung to his story: that
he and his son came from Wei County in southern Chihli Province
(not from Kiangnan at all), and that they had taken to the road
because of poverty. He denied cursing headman Chao, but corroborated all the details of the frame-up. Their Excellencies now looked
down at the kneeling boy, Ch'iu-erh. "If your father really isn't Chang
Ssu-ju, why did you depose that he was?" asked one.

Ch'iu-erh responded: "The prefect asked me, What's your father's
name? I said, He's called Chang Ssu. The prefect said, He's obviously
Chang Ssu ju, why don't you tell the truth? Then they took the chiakun and pressed it down on me and frightened me. Then he said, If
you say that he is Chang Ssu-ju, I'll give you something to eat. Then
he told somebody to give me a pear to eat. I was scared when I looked
at the chia-kun, and also I didn't know what kind of person Chang
Ssu-ju was, so I went ahead and said what they wanted. But my
father's really called Chang Ssu, not Chang Ssu-ju."

Attendants then carried in the Shantung criminal, beggar Chin,
who could not identify the prisoner. Beggar Chin now maintained
that he had made the name up: there was no such person as "Chang
Ssu-ju." He had known a man named "Chang Ssu" in his native
county and, under pressure from his own interrogators, had simply
added a "ju" to it. This struck the grand councillors as suspicious.
Though the singing beggar denied the name Chang Ssu-ju, he could
not deny the fact that he was Chang Ssu (meaning, as noted earlier,
"Chang's fourth son," of whom there must have been a very large
number in China). Were both these criminals simply feigning mutual
nonrecognition? The questioners turned again to beggar Chang:
"You used to be a regular member of Chin Kuan-tzu's gang, but now
you say flatly that you do not recognize him. What evidence have you
that would make anyone believe you?"8 Chang Ssu repeated the same
story as before.

In the light of the confused testimony, the panel dared not reach
a conclusion. There was nothing but to wait for corroboration from
the provinces: the trial of village headman Chao for false implication
was still in progress, and the provincial judgment had to be taken
into account. The supposed "Chang Ssu" in Chin Kuan-tzu's native
county could also be sought. But nature would not wait. On October
25, Chang Ssu died in prison. Because of his condition, pointed out
the grand councillors, doctors had been ministering to him even during his testimony. The coroner inspected the body and certified
that there had been no mistreatment by jail attendants. Magistrate
Liu, who had been charged with sending him to Peking in the first
place, had certified that beggar Chang was already seriously ill when
he was shipped off to the capital. So nobody in Peking could be held
responsible. The grand councillors concluded that he was, after all,
not the queue-clipper they were looking for. He was to be furnished
with a coffin and buried (at state expense), and the boy Ch'iu-erh
was to be escorted back to the county where he had originally been
arrested.`'

The Original Queue-Clipper's Tale

The inquisitors in Peking now went back to the beginning. By the
time he was reinterrogated at Peking in mid-October, Shantung's
original queue-clipper, beggar Ts'ai T'ing-chang, was already gravely
ill. Though he now claimed that his original confession had been
concocted under torture, the grand councillors were not so easily to
be put off the track.

Inquisitors: In Your Shantung confession, you said you stayed in
Yangchow at a hostel run by a man named Wu. Now we actually have
the Yangchow hostel-keeper named Wu Lien right here in court. It's
plain that you weren't lying before.

Ts'ai: What I confessed in Shantung about being in Wu Sheng's hostel
in Yangchow, and about splitting up with Yi-an and T'ung-yuan to
go out and clip queues, was all made up as I went along. Actually, I
didn't leave Peking until June fifth of this year. My kinsmen in Peking,
Chu ]an and Wang Yun, have already corroborated that here in court.
Obviously I was still living in Peking (luring late March and early
April. I couldn't have gone to Shantung, much less to Yangchow. The
Wu Sheng I named in my confession was made up. I don't know who
this Wu Lien is that you've brought here to court. How could I recognize him?

Inquisitors: Why did you lie in your Shantung confession?

Ts'ai: "When I told the county officials that I was on my way south from
Peking, they didn't believe me. They said I must certainly have been coming
north from Kiangnan. I couldn't bear the torture, so what could I do
but agree. The county officials demanded that I say I was based in
Kiangnan. I couldn't bring myself to say it, but I was afraid of the
torture and ... said it was Yangchow.10

In the first Shantung case, local officials had already been convinced that sorcerers were moving northward from Kiangnan. The county bureaucracy evidently had picked up the same rumors that
reached Hungli through his private channels and triggered the July
25 court letter that had begun the prosecution in the provinces.
Should the grand councillors consider that this strengthened the case,
or weakened it? The sorcerer's apprentice, Han P'ei-hsien, only compounded the confusion. He now insisted that all details of his Shantung confession had been invented under torture, and that there was
no such person as the sorcerer-monk "Ming-yuan." The grand councillors remained puzzled, however, over the concreteness of his original testimony. Why did he know so much about the details of how
sorcerers worked?" The case of monk Tung-kao, soon to be interrogated in Ch'eng-te, would offer a plausible answer.

A Silly Misunderstanding

On October 25, Duke Fuheng informed the emperor about the irksome case of Yung-kao, the monk captured in Shantung whose
confession had touched off a sweep of Kiangsu monasteries and
temples.'2 The dragnet had indeed turned up T'ung-kao's master,
the sorcerer-monk Wu-ch'eng, and others whom T'ung-kao had
named, who were now in the Board of Punishments lockup at the
summer capital. Nevertheless, Wu-ch'eng, through whom Hungli had
counted on getting to the bottom of the plot, disclaimed any knowledge of sorcery and insisted that he had not seen his disciple, T'ungkao, since they had parted company two years earlier at the Temple
of the Purple Bamboo Grove in Nanking. Ordinarily such a barefaced
denial would hardly be worth recording, save that T'ung-kao himself
now recanted. The original confession had aroused Duke Fuheng's
suspicion because of its numerous absurdities. For example, "clipping
a queue is an act performed when the victim is off his guard. How
can the clipper have had time to ask the victim's name before committing the act?"

The scene of T'ung-kao's reinterrogation might have shaken the
most resolute of prosecutors. The tattered creature who was dragged
before Fuheng exhibited "suppuration of both legs from various
torture wounds. His spirit was so melancholy that at the slightest
scolding he cringed and begged for death."' The broken monk at first
persisted in his original story, but when the torture instruments were
brought out he conceded that his previous confession had been an
invention. Though his ancestral home was in Anhwei, he had lived since childhood in Chihli. Later he had been tonsured in Honan,
then became Wu-ch'eng's disciple and moved to Nanking. In 1766,
master and disciple separated, and Tung-kao resolved to return to
his old village in Chihli as a layman, so he stopped shaving his head
and set out for home. He had reached Ssu-shui in Shantung, where
his unfamiliar accent and half-grown hair attracted the notice of a
government runner, who arrested him as a suspicious character.

The Ssu-shui magistrate was unable to get anything out of him, so
the Yen-thou prefect decided to interrogate him, aided by Magistrate K'ung Ch'uan-chih of Tsou County (a descendant of Confucius in the sixty-eighth generation), who had been successful at
persuading Shantung's first queue-clipper, beggar Ts'ai, to confess.
Magistrate K'ung first hung Tung-kao in chains from a tree, then
had him kneel on chains spread with cinders, while pressing upon
the backs of his legs with a wooden pole. Later he had his back
whipped, then used the chia-kun to break his legs, after which T'ungkao made up his story. The "spells" his inquisitors heard him murmuring under torture were in fact Buddhist scriptures, known to all
monks. The names of his "clipping victims"? These were folk he had
met along the road. His "co-conspirators" were indeed monks he had
known, whose names he blurted out under torture. And the sorcery
lore about stupefying powder, paper men, and paper horses? This
he had heard from fellow inmates while lying in prison.13