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.
The crisis comprised two ominous cases suspiciously close in their timing, one involving the literate elite and one the common people. The "Case of the Bogus Memorial" (wei-kao an) and the Ma Ch'aochu uprising were alike only in that both remained ultimately unresolved. Yet they excited such evident alarm at court that one might suppose they were occurring at a time of extreme social or political instability, rather than in the middle of the most successful and prosperous reign in Chinese history. Though there is absolutely no evidence that the cases were connected in fact, they were certainly linked in the imperial mind. Together, they shook Hungli's confidence that the "alien rule" issue had finally been put to rest. Yet in neither case did Hungli feel secure enough to mention the ethnic issue, even in his secret correspondence.
It was in August 1751 that a curious document came to the attention of 'a local postal-relay supervisor in Kweichow.2' It was a copy of what purported to be a memorial to the Throne by Sun Chia-kan (1683-1753), a senior official, currently serving in Peking as president of the Board of Works. Earlier in his career, Sun had become well known to the public because of his blunt advice to Hungli's father (who c
haracteristically rewarded him for it) and his acerbic criticisms of official misconduct. The "memorial" found in Kweichow was full of "outrageous" and "slanderous" language, according to a secret report from the governor-general, who passed the suspicious document on to Peking. It even bore an alleged (and wholly implausible) imperial endorsement at the end. During the weeks that followed, the Throne received numerous reports from widely separated parts of the empire that other copies had turned up. By the turn of the year, the search for the originator of this "Bogus Memorial" had become a nationwide dragnet. Thousands were arrested. Copies were found as alarmingly near as the Bannerman's Academy in Peking, and as far as the distant southwest borders. Persons accused of pos sessing or copying the document ranged from high-ranking provincial officials to merchants, clergy, gentry, and even bannermen. After many false leads, generated by coerced confessions, the governor of Kiangsi announced in January 1753 the arrest of a lowly military official, Lu Lu-sheng, on whom a Grand Council tribunal soon fastened the ultimate guilt. After Lu's execution by slow slicing, Hungli declared the case closed. Shaky evidence and a hasty execution make the "solution" of this case exceedingly doubtful. Nevertheless, the nature of the "memorial" and its widespread dissemination offer some hints about Hungli's problems with sedition.
Although at the time "even coolies in the street" knew what the Bogus Memorial contained,22 no copy of it now survives, so thorough was the Throne in burning all that were found (the Grand Council archives appear to contain not even a file copy, so humiliating must its contents have been to Hungli). Circumstantial evidence suggests that the "memorial" aimed a harsh, personal attack at the monarch, and at officials close to him, for "five unforgivable acts and ten great transgressions." It also seems to have alluded to the ruinous financial burdens heaped upon the localities through which the monarch had just passed on his first southern tour. It may further have attacked Hungli's harsh treatment of certain high officials, particularly the Han bannerman general, Chang Kuang-ssu, one of the two commanders he had beheaded in 1749 for allegedly botching the military campaign against the Chin-ch'uan tribes. Finally, evidence from the documents of the Ma Ch'ao-chu affair, which I shall turn to next, indicates that it even impugned the legitimacy of the Manchu dynasty.23 Certainly the white-hot fury with which Hungli sought the originators of the Bogus Memorial, the harsh punishment he inflicted upon anyone who possessed or transmitted a copy, and his effective destruction of all copies, show how badly this attack frightened the Throne-not least because of the widespread opposition it revealed among literate men. It was characteristic of Hungli that he would shortly begin to suspect a deeply laid plot against the dynasty: one that linked the Bogus Memorial to a notorious literati sedition case that dated from his father's day, and to the mysterious case of Ma Ch'ao-chu.24
The Ma Ch'ao-chu conspiracy. We must assume that the Bogus Memorial impugned Manchu legitimacy, because Hungli came to believe that it was connected to the avowedly anti-Manchu conspiracy of Ma Ch'ao-chu, which was unearthed in the spring of 1752.25 The Ma affair was Hungli's first confrontation with a Ming-restorationist movement. The vindictive and bloody campaign against it was a melodramatic overture to the second quarter of Hungli's reign.
Ma Ch'ao-chu was reportedly a peasant from Ch'i-chou in Hupei, in the Yangtze Valley about forty miles downriver from the provincial capital, Wuchang. While sojourning across the border in western Anhwei, he had fallen under the influence of a monk, who (according to the government's investigation) instilled in him visions of a grand destiny. Ma began to claim connections to a remnant Ming regime inhabiting "The Kingdom of the Western Sea" (Hsi-yang-kuo), ruled by a "Young Lord," a scion of the Ming royal house of Chu. In the kingdom there supposedly lived descendants of the defeated southwestern warlord, Wu San-kuei, along with 36,000 armed soldiers. There too lived a certain Li K'ai-hua, a well-known folk vision of a future emperor, and a woman called "Niang-niang," the name of a popular fertility goddess. Claiming to be a general in this kingdom, Ma told his followers that magic flying machines could bring his armies from their western stronghold to central China in a few hours, and that an attack on the Yangtze Valley was imminent.26
All this came to light when alert officials discovered newly forged swords along with rebel proclamations in the mountains east of Lot'ien, about seventy-five miles northeast of Wuchang. Just outside the highly commercialized regional core, this was a poor, rugged area where settlers eked out a precarious living from slash-and-burn agriculture. Though Ma had fled, numerous followers, including some of his relatives, were captured. So many culprits jammed the provincial jail in Wuchang that the authorities hesitated to try them all at the same time, for fear of inciting public disturbances. Hungli, however, ordered them to go right ahead.27
Shaken by the Lo-t'ien discoveries, Hungli ordered that the local magistrate, who had earlier failed to prosecute Ma's group, be summarily executed, a rare penalty in such a case.28 The ferocity of the manhunt for Ma himself (who was never caught, if indeed he ever really existed) resulted in the arrests of hundreds of suspects and continued for many years.29 Emerging as it did just as the authorities were in hot pursuit of the Bogus Memorial culprits, the Ma Ch'aochu affair evidently convinced Hungli that the dynasty was the target of a large-scale plot.
There can be no doubt that the Lo-t'ien plotters rejected the Manchus as aliens: they violated the Ch'ing tonsure decree. According to confessions by two men who had been "enticed" into selling their land and joining the band, "When people entered the stockade [Ma's stronghold, known as the `Heavenly Stockade' (t'ien-t'ang sai)], they smeared their mouths with blood [to sanctify their oath of loyalty] and swallowed paper charms. Also they let their hair grow and didn't shave their foreheads. '130 Yet Hungli phrased his response with great care. However unpleasantly surprised by these threats to his Prosperous Age, lie kept his reaction well within the cosmopolitan mode. The rebels were simply attacking the universal monarchy, not an alien regime. The closest he would come to acknowledging the existence of the tonsure question was to acknowledge that the rebels had "offended Our Imperial Ancestors": "Our great Ch'ing Dynasty has reigned humanely and benevolently for more than a century. It is inconceivable that there should now arise such ungrateful and immoral monsters, secretly brewing such poison. They are truly unbearable to Heaven and Earth."31 But the governor-general's report about the tonsure violation is never mentioned, even in Hungli's secret communications to his provincial officials, to say nothing of his public edicts.
Yet the fury of his response must have given him away: those rounded up were to be "tortured with extreme severity," their lives to be preserved only so that they could confess.32 Hungli clearly preferred to avoid mentioning the ethnic issue altogether, even in secret correspondence with the upper bureaucracy. His primary motive for secrecy seems to have been the need to avoid shaking public confidence: even though these petty rebels are "not worth consideration," he wrote, yet this group must be crushed swiftly, because "a single spark can start a prairie-fire." And the facts of the case (he means here the anti-Ch'ing symbolism) must be kept secret.83 To breathe a word about the tonsure, whether in public or private, was asking for trouble.
Here we first meet what I shall call the "panic factor": an imperial belief that the credulous masses were ever on the brink of violent, panicky reactions to hints of political crisis or cosmic disorder. This belief arises again and again in the course of our story. It conditioned imperial policy to avoid, whenever possible, the public acknowledgment of either sedition or sorcery. It even affected the language of internal official documents, as if the very mention of an evil would evoke it in reality. As a general rule, it meant that extraordinary threats were to be described in conventional language. Were we to judge the public temperament from Hungli's fears about it, we would have to call it highly volatile and unstable. Such fears were very much alive during the sorcery scare of 1768. That, I believe, is why Hungli initially forbore to mention the tonsure violation, even in secre
t correspondence with his highest officials.
In neither the Bogus Memorial case nor the Ma Ch'ao-chu uprising could the Throne mention the ethnic issue. Hungli's initial inclination was much the same in the soulstealing crisis of 1768, despite its provocative tonsure imagery. The "ethnic mode," though vital to the survival of the conquest regime, had to be pursued in other arenas. One that soon commended itself to Hungli was the literary purge: bullying literati for alleged written slurs against Manchu origins, a device that Hungli eventually used in a major national campaign in the 177os. However he may have shrunk from mentioning such a blatant anti-Manchu threat as tonsure violation, Hungli showed hairtrigger militancy against petty slights to Manchu honor. Wording that offered even the subtlest suggestion of an ethnic slur could cost a writer his head. By contrast to large-scale sedition cases with a potential for mass unrest, the literary purge was an arena in which the Throne could control both the pace and the scope of events. Here was a kind of "sedition" case in which ethnic pride could safely be celebrated.
Literary purges prefigured. The rhetorical usefulness of a literary purge was demonstrated only three years after the events just described. In 1755 a Han author, Hu Chung-tsao, was accused (in what even then must have seemed a far-fetched textual construction) of using expressions in his poetry to stir up ethnic hatred for Manchus. Hu was a disciple and factional booster of the late Ortai, one of the two powerful grandees inherited by Hungli from his father's administration. Hu also cultivated Ortai's nephew, Ocang, with whom he exchanged letters and poetry. Hungli's vicious attack on Hu ("does not belong in the human race") has been interpreted as an attack on factionalism.34 What I find striking about the case, however, is how Hungli linked his attack on Hu for slandering the Manchus with an attack on Ocang for conduct unbecoming a Manchu. The two sides of the case can only be understood together: they were Hungli's recognition that sedition and assimilation were two facets of a single threat.35
Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768 Page 7