Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768 (30 page)

An opportunity now presented itself to the grand councillors:
Grand Secretary Liu T'ung-hsun was about to depart Peking for the
summer capital. At sixty-eight, Liu had a distinguished record in the
upper reaches of Peking politics (including twelve years on the Grand
Council) and a reputation as an incorruptible official, an outspoken
breaker of bad news, and an advocate of unpalatable policies. Though
Hungli may sometimes have considered him meddlesome, he bore
Liu an unshakable respect. He had once briefly imprisoned Liu for
an unwelcome suggestion, but shortly pardoned him and continued
to employ him in the highest positions, including that of chief tutor
of the emperor's sons. So deeply did Hungli appreciate his toughminded servant that upon Liu's death in 1773 he paid a personal
condolence call upon his family.27 As senior grand councillor on the
scene, Liu had sweated through the Peking summer while the sovereign was at Ch'eng-te. As sorcery fear gripped the capital, he had
handled the delicate job of unearthing the culprits while not raising
panic among the common people. As soulstealing culprits were
shipped in from provincial courtrooms, he had ample exposure to
the shoddy and mendacious cases prepared by local prosecutors. His
memoranda to Hungli are masterpieces of subtlety: they lay out the
defects of the cases, including long quotes or paraphrases of the
recantations, all carefully packaged in a (logged zealotry that refuses
to accept the "crafty" and "evasive" testimony at face value. These
documents, at least, could never expose Liu to charges of being soft
on soulstealing. After the singing beggar recanted in Peking on
October 15, it was time something was done to spare the Throne
worse embarrassment. This would require concerted action in the
monarch's presence.

As president of the Board of Punishments, Liu had the annual
duty of journeying to Ch'eng-te to help the monarch scrutinize the reports of the autumn assizes, in which condemned prisoners' cases
were reviewed. When the reviews had been presented to the Throne,
Hungli would check off (kou-tao) those to be put to death. The routine
every year was for Liu, who had remained in Peking to manage
Grand Council business, to journey to the summer capital around
the middle of October and accompany His Majesty back to Peking.
On the leisurely southwest progress through the crisp autumn countryside, Hungli, in consultation with Liu, would brush a vermilion
"check" next to each condemned name.28 Liu left Peking on about
October i8 and was in Ch'eng-te by October 21. He and Fuheng
were with the monarch for the next five days.

A meeting of minds must have occurred by October 25, to judge
by the tone of Duke Fuheng's subsequent interrogation reports. Gone
now was the hedging about miscarriages of justice, gone the apparent
reluctance to accept recantations at face value. Liu joined the procession when the court set out upon the road on October 26, while
Fuheng remained in Ch'eng-te to finish interrogating the prisoners.
The imperial party reached Peking on November i, and two days
later Hungli called off the soulstealing prosecution.29

Calling off the campaign was not a simple matter of canceling
orders. The Throne had invested in it se, much prestige and moral
authority that a more ceremonious ending was required. i0 First, court
letters were sent by Fuheng, Yenjisan, and Liu T'ung-hsun to all
governors-general and governors. The queue-clipping case had
"spread to various provinces" because officials in Kiangsu and Chekiang had not reported it promptly. The response to repeated imperial
edicts had been maladministration by "local officials." As a result,
those cases that were brought to trial "were not without incidents of
extortion by torture." (This last, added to the court letter in vermilion, clearly troubled Hungli, though he certainly had known about
it earlier in the campaign.) Therefore he had ordered criminals sent
to Peking for reinterrogation. None turned out to be the chief criminals, and there were many instances in which innocent persons had
been falsely accused. This was "all the result of local officials in
Kiangsu and Chekiang letting the affair fester to the point of
disaster." Any further prosecution would simply disrupt local society.
This would be "inconsistent with our system of government." The
prosecution was therefore to be stopped.

Curiously, however, the court letter insisted that this should not be taken by local officials as a signal to relax vigilance. Watchfulness was
still the order of the day, and an official who captured a "chief
criminal" would thereby be deemed to have "redeemed his faults. 1131

On the same day was promulgated an open edict that cast all the
blame on provincial officials. The soulstealing menace, it began, first
appeared in Kiangsu and Chekiang, then spread to Shantung and
other provinces. Had provincial officials rigorously prosecuted the
case "when they first heard of it," pressing their local subordinates
for results, "clues could naturally have been found, and the chief
criminals would have been unable to slip through the net." Instead,
"right from the beginning" bureaucrats had followed their accustomed routines and failed to report the matter, "seeking to turn
something into nothing," and only when pressed by the Throne itself
did they begin to order prosecution.

Now, although there have been arrests in Shantung, Anhwei,
Kiangsu, and Chekiang, "We feared that among them there were
some whose depositions were extorted by torture." Therefore Hungli
had ordered that the criminals be sent to Peking for interrogation
by a tribunal drawn from the Grand Council, the Board of Punishments, and the Peking Gendarmerie. The original depositions proved
unreliable, and there were indeed cases of extortion by torture. "It
was apparent that in those provinces officials began by concealing
the facts and followed by evading responsibility." As a result, the
"principal criminals" were not caught. Nothing was done but to "send
petty functionaries out in all directions to cause trouble for the villages." This was "entirely out of keeping with our system of government." Here Hungli bit the bullet: "Now, at last, it will not be necessary to continue prosecuting this case."

How are we to reconcile the ambivalence of the secret court letters
and the vindictiveness of the open edict? It is plain (from the vermilion emendation) that Hungli was personally upset and embarrassed by the confessions concocted under torture. Yet the fact that
he continued to insist (in the secret channel) on vigilance, and (in
both channels) on the objective existence of the "chief criminals" even
though not a single one had been found, suggests a face-saving
compromise. Hungli's state of mind emerges most lucidly in an
extraordinary vermilion rescript to a memorial from Funihan. The
Shantung governor had replied to the November 3 court letter in
plaintive terms. He had prosecuted the case "with dedication" and had "spared no effort." Although the chief criminals had not been
caught, "Shantung was then free of queue-clipping incidents after
mid-August." The vermilion reads:

Seen. Although Shantung's handling of this case did exceed the bounds
of propriety, We shall not blame you. If you were held responsible for
excesses after being ordered to prosecute rigorously, then how would
provincial officials know, in the future, what course to follow? Nevertheless, planting evidence and seeking-by-torture are really not the Correct Way.3°

Let such candor not tempt the governor into "negligence," warned
Hungli. Yet a whiff of royal remorse was in the air, and provincial
officials were exceedingly sensitive to the prevailing winds. Hungli
knew that the dignity of the Throne could be maintained only by
insisting on the reality of the plot and by punishing officials who had
failed to prosecute with sufficient vigor. The other side of the compromise, however, was to impeach officials who had tortured false
confessions out of innocent people.

Settling Accounts with the Bureaucracy

So far, there had been no concession that the case itself was poorly
founded. On the contrary, the chief "criminals" had really existed
and had eluded justice because of provincial mismanagement. Punishment was now in order: "Those governors-general and governors
of Kiangsu and Chekiang, who let this case fester to the point of
disaster," were to be referred to the Board of Civil Office for "rigorous discipline," in order to "rectify the bureaucratic system.":;; Here
was Hungli's revenge for the cover-up. Those to be disciplined for
laxity and mendacity were Governor-general G'aojin (Liangkiang),
Governor] an gboo (Kiangsu), Governor Feng Ch'ien (Anhwei), Governor Hsiang Hsueh-p'eng (Chekiang), Governor Yungde (Chekiang), Governor Mingde (Yunnan, formerly Kiangsu), and Governor Surde (Shansi). A number of county-level officials were cashiered for having exonerated sorcery suspects the preceding spring.
To keep the compromise in balance, a number of lower officials were
impeached for manufacturing evidence through the improper use of
torture on innocent prisoners. Some distinguished careers were
ruined, particularly among lower officials. Prefect Shao Ta-yeh of
Hsu-chou, for instance, was a renowned administrator whose flood control work had spared his people from inundation over a tenure
of seven years. In retribution for his part in botching the case of the
singing beggar, he was rusticated to a remote military post, where he
died a few years later.34

The nub of the problem, however, was Governor Funihan himself,
whose memorials (and enclosed confessions) had kept the soulstealing
case on the boil for three months. Day after day, the grand councillors
at the summer capital and at Peking had viewed the human debris
sent up from Shantung courts as they reinterrogated the soulstealing
criminals. Governor Funihan had insisted all along that his own
interrogations "did not rely upon torture," a statement that had
greatly enhanced the credibility of the confessions.35 What, then,
asked the grand councillors, was the meaning of these gravely
wounded prisoners, whose lacerated bodies still had not healed?
Monk T'ung-kao, should he survive, would be maimed for life. If
they had been tortured in county or prefectural courts, had not
Funihan seen their condition personally when they were brought
before him? Funihan was ordered to explain himself.36

The governor replied that, when he first saw beggars Ts'ai and
Chin, it was evident that they had been tortured, but "they could still
walk," and had named their masters and confederates without undergoing further ordeals. As for the crippled T'ung-kao, he had only
appeared at the governor's court after the dispatch of the "no torture"
memorial. Funihan then humbly reminded His Majesty of his own
command of August 5 to "do your utmost" (chin fa) to dig the truth
out of the culprits. With that sort of backing, he asked, why would
he have hesitated to report that "conscientious investigating officials
had used torture" in pursuing the case? At this rather spunky
rejoinder came the vermilion sneer: "Even more mendacious." The
Board of Civil Office was ordered to recommend punishment.37
When it came, the punishment was rather mild, considering how
much trouble the governor had inflicted upon the bureaucracy, and
embarrassment upon the Throne. The offense, of course, was not
torturing prisoners (Hungli had already expressed a certain sympathetic understanding on that point), but lying about it to the Throne.
Funihan was demoted to the post of provincial treasurer of Shansi
(Vermilion: "and take away his rank while in the job") but was perhaps relieved that Hungli forbore to route the case into the criminal
track, as he had for his predecessor Governor Chun-t'ai sixteen years earlier in a roughly similar context. In the light of all that had
happened, Funihan had received but a slap on the wrist: an unmistakable concession of royal error .38

The End of the Trail

Once the monarch was firmly oriented toward calling off the prosecution, the inquisitors knew that it was all right to resolve these
embarrassing cases. Exonerations followed quickly and clearly. First
resolved were the cases of the monks who were nearly lynched at
Hsu-k'ou-chen and the beggars of Soochow. On November 8, Fuheng
confirmed the original finding of the Wu County magistrate: Chingchuang and his companions were all "honest monks true to their
calling" and should be released forthwith. Fisherman Chang, who
had accosted them in the temple and pursued them into the street,
was to be held responsible for the disturbance. Although they were
unable to prove that this was an attempt at extortion (like that of
constable Ts'ai in Hsiao-shan), the grand councillors decided that a
beating was not enough for fisherman Chang. Besides being required
to make restitution to the monks for their lost baggage and money,
he was to be exposed in the cangue for two months "to instruct the
people." The ruffians who had robbed their boat, Li San and T'ang
Hua, were each to be beaten eighty strokes according to the useful
statute that forbade "doing what ought not be done."39