Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768 (29 page)

Fuheng ventured that the case "seems to be a miscarriage of justice." Yet the original confession had been specific and detailed, so
Magistrate K'ung must have had his reasons for subjecting the monk
to repeated torture. If Tung-kao and Wu-ch'eng were simply
released, this would hardly "show due regard for the intention of the
original investigator." Hungli accepted the duke's recommendation
that Magistrate K'ung be temporarily detached from duty and
brought to Peking for investigation, and that the two prisoners be
kept, for the time being, in jail.

How could justice have so miscarried? Inquiries to Governor
Funihan in Shantung revealed that the whole affair had been a silly
mistake. What had happened, the governor explained much later,
was that Magistrate K'ung had simply been misled by the yamen
runners who had been sent to find the queue-clipping "victims" whom
the agonized T'ung-kao had named. The runners had been under a
five-day deadline to return with their report. They had been unable
to find the "victims," whose supposed homes were some hundred miles away in another county, and feared punishment for reporting
late. So they had simply said that they had found them and substantiated T'ung-kao's confession."

Perils of the Road

Beggar, queue-clipper, and sodomite Chin Kuan-tzu, whose original
confession had implicated "Chang Ssu-ju," was reinterrogated in
detail during the third week of October.. He now claimed that his
original deposition had been extorted by torture, which, to judge by
his crippled legs, was not implausible. Beggar Chin now told all: he
and Chin Yu-tzu, the youth he was accused of sodomizing, were in
fact cousins from a village near the Shantung provincial capital of
Tsinan. Yu-tzu's father, Chin K'uan, had. headed southward in the
late autumn of the previous year to seek a living as a hired laborer
and had failed to return. This past summer, a villager had told YQ-
tzu he had heard that his father had struck it rich. Yu-tzu's mother
sent him off to find his father, but since Yii-tzu was only seventeen,
she asked his older cousin, Chin Kuan-tzu, to go along and see that
he came to no harm. The two set forth toward the southern hills and
on June 25 reached the home of Yui-tzu's maternal cousin Chao Ping-
ju, where they borrowed some money to sustain them on the road.
Their search for Yi 's father proved fruitless, and eventually they ran
out of money and were reduced to begging along the road. By the
afternoon of June 30 they had reached a village called Li-chia-chuang
in the county of Yi, near the border of Kiangsu. The village was in
an uproar because someone reportedly had clipped the queue of Li
Kou-erh, the young son of Li K'un, a clerk in the county office of
punishments. The pair of wandering beggars sensed trouble and left
the village. They had been spotted by the furious clerk Li, however,
who immediately labeled them "suspicious" and set a mob after them.
They found nothing incriminating in Chin Kuan-tzu's traveling
sack-no knife, no drugs, no queue-but they dragged the unlucky
pair back to the village and tied them up.

Each was strung up and beaten. Eventually Yu-tzu confessed to
having clipped Kou-erh's queue and hidden it somewhere outside
the village. Clerk Li warned him that if he failed to hand over the
queue, he would hack him to death with an axe. The terrified Yutzu managed to bite off the end of his own queue, secrete it in his
hand, and pretend to "find" it under a tree. The next morning the triumphant Li K'un turned the two wanderers over to county
authorities.

Now they applied the Chia-kun and forced Chin Kuan-tzu to say
that he had thrown away his queue-clipping knife and two bags of'
stupefying drugs on a hillside. Runners sent out to find the evidence
turned up only a small ceramic bottle. Pressed by the magistrate to
find the "knife," the chief runner ordered that a knife secretly be
bought. The purchased blade bore a small manufacturer's mark, so
Yu-tzu was told to depose that he had noticed just such a mark on
his cousin's knife. To embroider the case, Chin Kuan-tzu was put to
the torture again and made to depose that he had lured his cousin
out on the road both to clip queues and to commit sodomy. Yu-tzu
at first denied it, but was told that unless lie corroborated the story,
both his legs would be crushed. It was at this point that Chin Kuantzu was forced to fabricate the story about his master, the fortuneteller "Chang Ssu ju." The case thus properly prepared, the magistrate sent it up through channels.

The grand councillors now sent for witnesses: Yu-tzu's mother and
wandering father, both of whom were tracked down, along with his
cousins; and clerk Li and his son. Chin Kuan-tzu was able to identify
everyone. However, Yu-MI's parents denied they knew Kuan-tzu.
Repeated questioning revealed that they had been threatened by the
chief runner at Tsinan, to the effect that "if you admit knowing Chin
Kuan-tzu when you get to Peking, you will be killed when you get
back." This was enough for the grand councillors, who now reported
that Chin had been framed and that the whole "Chang Ssu-ju" story
was rubbish.'' Yet the inquisitors hedged: clerk Li had not yet been
confronted with Yu-tzu, nor had the yamen runners been interrogated. Furthermore, since the Grand Council interrogators had not
used torture, "the results are not exhaustive or definitive." A final
resolution of the case would have to wait, they wrote. What they did
not write was that it waited upon a change of mind at the top.

Converting Hungli

There can be no doubt that the chief prosecutor, from first to last,
was the monarch himself. This is clear from his vermilion comments,
both on memorials from the field and on court letters drafted by
the grand councillors. The extra push, the sharper goad, the added
injunction to speed and rigor, the acerbic abuse of laggard officials: all were his personal contributions. The role of the grand councillors
must have been delicate. They may have shared his fears of sedition.
Yet they also had to face the agonized prisoners, with their mangled
bodies and muddled stories, who had been sent up from provincial
courtrooms. When doubts began to multiply in their minds, they had
a serious political problem on their hands. How could one demonstrate loyalty and ardor in such a case, with its dangerous tonsure
symbolism, the unknown plots that might lie behind it, and its enormous commitment of imperial prestige, and yet fend off the scandal
of miscarried justice?

One route to Hungli's attention was the issue of courtroom torture.
Ch'ing law required a confession for a criminal conviction, and
Hungli, like his contemporaries, considered torture an appropriate
way to extract the necessary details of a confession from an obviously
guilty prisoner. Language smoothed the way. Just as the concepts of
"prisoner" and "criminal" were not clearly distinguished (both were
called fan), the words for "torture" and "punishment" were both
expressed by the same word (hsing). There were, nevertheless, legal
restraints on the use of torture. Use of unauthorized torture implements, as well as killing a prisoner by torture, were punishable, mostly
by administrative discipline. 16

Although torture, as such, presented no moral difficulties, it sometimes presented practical ones. Rightly applied, torture would elicit
the right answers and lead to just judgments. Misused, however, it
could produce the wrong answers, especially if an interrogator went
fishing, so to speak, to see what his agonized prisoner might blurt
out. This was equivalent to seeking raw material for an indictment,
or what we would call "giving the third degree" to a suspect before
arraignment, rather than eliciting true testimony from one formally
charged with a crime. Such "seeking-by-torture" (hsing-ch'iu) was not
forbidden by the Code, but neither was it considered acceptable practice. Hungli feared the disruption that could result from false confessions extorted by exploratory torture. After all, the point of interrogating the small fry was to extract the names of the masterminds.
If a tortured prisoner manufactured names and addresses just to
stop the pain, what had the state gained? Additional credence could
be lent such faulty information by detailed circumstantial accounts
in a confession, which were either concocted by a prisoner out of
jailhouse scuttlebutt, as in the case of monk T'ung-kao, or suggested
by an interrogator's leading questions." Reliable information was what was wanted, and (in Hungli's words) "confessions obtained by
the chia-kun and cudgel are not necessarily entirely reliable."',, As the
case began to fall apart, the falsity of all the confessions obtained
under torture became increasingly plain. Once incredulity began to
glimmer in the Grand Council, it was only a matter of time before it
illumined the Throne.

In the highest reaches of officialdom can be traced, with some
precision, the spread of doubt. When the original Shantung queueclipper, beggar Ts'ai, was reinterrogated in mid-August (at the
request of exasperated officials who found his leads useless) and
changed his story, Hungli believed that the crafty queue-clippers were
sending up a smoke screen to throw the prosecution off the trail or
simply to end their torment. But had they originally confessed freely,
or under torture? Funihan assured the Throne that no torture had
been used. Yet the seeds of suspicion had been sown at court. On
August 29 Hungli ordered the Shantung inquisitors to send the
culprits directly to the summer capital, there to be interrogated under
the watchful eyes of the grand councillors."'

Back in Kiangnan, the botched interrogation of the singing beggar
Chang Ssu was apparent to Governor-general G'aojin by September
to as he heard the beggar's story and examined his crippled legs.
G'aojin recited the monarch's own words back to him: "It is indeed
just as your Sage Edict said: as soon as you apply the chia-kun and
the cudgel, there is it contrary effect on the case .112() He went on to
interrogate Chang Ssu's accusers and came up with the story related
above. G'aojin was spared the burden of discrediting the case, for his
prisoner was quickly summoned to Peking. There the grand councillors could see for themselves.

The mechanics of the court-letter system make it hard to estimate
what the grand councillors, as a body or as individuals, thought about
the case until their own interrogation reports began to emerge in
mid-September. Liu "l"ung-hsun and his colleagues in Peking wrote
the summer capital on September 15 that fresh inconsistencies in the
Shantung confessions were appearing daily. Kneeling before them,
the original Shantung queue-clippers, beggars Chin and Ts'ai, had
recanted their confessions. The inquisitors prodded them: "T'ungyuan and Chang Ssu-ju have been arrested in Kiangnan and will
arrive in Peking any day to corroborate your confessions. Then how
will you evade the truth?" Because of Chin's infected legs, the fingerpress was now used instead of the chia-kun, and the criminal obedi ently repeated his old confession in detail. But "as soon as the fingerpress was loosened" he recanted again and blurted out the whole
story of his victimization. Obviously additional witnesses would have
to be summoned from Shantung. (Vermilion: "Summon them
quickly.") For the time being, the panel would "wait until the prisoner's wounds had healed somewhat" before applying more torture.
But meanwhile "we dare not show the slightest laxity or allow ourselves to be deceived .1121

But the case was now badly compromised. If new evidence discredited these confessions upon which the whole case had been built,
what embarrassments might be expected from the numerous provincial cases that were about to descend on Peking? And how were such
embarrassments to be told to the monarch, who had invested in this
case not only his personal prestige but the honor of the dynasty?

By September 2 1, Hungli was already reacting to the bad news.
He complained that the provincial confessions were "all wild and
groundless." This was either because the villains were lying, "or
because the examining officials are fabricating confessions. In either
case, they are not to be believed." Amid such "flickering lights and
shadows," what hope is there of catching the real culprits? He rejected
a suggestion that suspicious persons be held in indefinite confinement, however; skillful interrogation would identify the innocent,
who must then be promptly released.22

The scale of the potential miscarriage of justice was becoming
apparent even to the zealous monarch, and by October 5 he speculated (in an unusual letter, in the confidential channel, to all province
chiefs) that the whole plot might have been conceived by traitors who
sought to stir up hatred of officialdom and so incite uprisings. Yet
there was no choice but to press ahead, rounding up all suspicious
characters even while taking care not to oppress the innocent: a
hopelessly contradictory instruction from the standpoint of the hardpressed provincial bureaucracy.23

In Peking, inconsistencies continued to pile up. The confessions of
Ts'ai T'ing-chang and Han P'ei-hsien were hopelessly compro-
mised.24 The story of how the singing beggar had been framed was
duly conveyed to Hungli. Furthermore, when confronted with
"Chang Ssu ju," the original informer, beggar Chin, could not identify him. But the monarch still played the gimlet-eyed prosecutor.
Surely, he wrote on October 17, these criminals would have agreed
not to identify one another in court, in order to conceal their plot. Liu 'I"ung-hsun was to examine the prisoners with even greater care.
As soon as he "detected a hint of discrepancy between words and
demeanor," he was to "seize the opportunity to press harder, so that
the true thread might be discerned." Furthermore, every effort must
be made to wring from monk T'ung-kao the answer to what those
queue-hairs were really to be used for.25 But at the summer capital,
Duke Fuheng had also become a doubter. On October 17, the inconsistencies were too much for him, and he ordered Governor Jangboo
to send all his prisoners from Kiangsu to Peking to have their testimonies cross-checked.26