The Chin-shan temple complex, approximately 178 feet in length from left to right, at Ch'eng-te. Built in the Kiangnan style by Hungli's grandfather in imitation of a temple in Chinkiang, Kiangsu Province, that he often visited on his southern tours.
The Tibetan-style potala at Ch'eng-te, begun in 1767 and completed in 1771. Left to right, approximately 477 feet.
Evil from the South
Just before the court set forth for these summer pursuits, the emperor received some secret intelligence. How he found out about the situation in Shantung is carefully hidden behind the vague beginning of the July 25 court letter in which he first broached the case. The drafting of the letter was entrusted to the three senior grand councillors, Fuheng, Yenjisan, and Liu T'ung-hsun, and addressed to the provincial officials of Chekiang, Kiangsu (including the governor-general of the three-province Liangkiang region), and Shantung. "We have heard," it began, that
in the Chekiang region it is said that, when bridges are being constructed, some persons are secretly clipping such things as people's hair and lapels for the purpose of casting spells for sinking the pilings. Now this belief has spread into Shantung. These rumors are truly absurd. It may be just petty thieves using the occasion to cast suspicion on others, so that they may more brazenly play their clever tricks. However, this kind of false story can easily delude and incite the public. Naturally it should be rigorously investigated and forbidden, in order to put an end to evil customs. Let it be known to the governors-general and governors in those jurisdictions that they are to order their subordinates secretly to undertake a thorough investigation. If this situation really exists, the culprits should be arrested forthwith and punished severely. Or it may be that arresting and severely punishing one or two ringleaders will serve as warning to others. Also they must proceed as if nothing momentous Were happening (pu-tung sheng-se), conduct their investigations in a proper manner, and not permit yamen underlings to get involved and use the occasion to stir up trouble and disturb local communities.'
A curious document: we are left in some doubt as to what His Majesty "really" believed. Despite the "absurdity" of the rumors, he believed it possible that someone was maliciously spreading them. Did he also believe that someone was actually attempting to practice sorcery? Whatever else he may have believed, it is evident that foremost in his mind was the panic factor. A credulous public is easy to "delude and incite." Officialdom must not only punish the rumormongers, but must do so without panicking the common people. The final curiosity about this document is its conflation of the "bridgebuilding" and the "queue-clipping" images of' popular sorcery lore. Whoever was Hungli's source of information from the South had heard of both the masons of Te-ch'ing and the monks of Hsiao-shan. Here too are linked, for the first time in an imperial document, sorcery and the tonsure.
Information is power, but it is also security. Just as Hungli had his own sources of information from Shantung, so the governor of Shantung, Funihan, seems to have had sources at court. It is too much to accept as coincidence that the governor wrote his first report on queue-clipping July 24, just one day before Hungli approved the draft of his first court letter on the case. It was more likely a matter of preemptive reporting: covering up information was a serious matter between emperor and bureaucrat. The troublesome business of local sorcery could have been kept from Hungli's attention only at some risk of his hearing about it through the rumor network. Once Governor Funihan had heard that Hungli had such information, only speedy reporting could protect him from charges of conceal- mnent.2 As it turned out, what Funihan had now to report went beyond the spreading of "absurd" stories: actual sorcery had been attempted.
The Shantung Cases
Funihan had been going about his master's business of ensuring the security of the realm. Having heard "in the fifth month" (mid-June to mid-July) that there were persons in the provincial capital, Tsinan, "clipping men's queues after stupefying the victims," he considered that this was a matter of "evil arts" (hsieh-shu) that required swift action. He immediately ordered local officials to investigate "secretly" and to set a dragnet for the culprits. Later, while in the southern Shantung city of Yen-chou inspecting troops, Funihan learned from the prefect that in two counties of his jurisdiction, Tsou and Yi, two beggars had been arrested for clipping queues. On the west, these counties bordered the Grand Canal that carried grain shipments to granaries near the capital. On the east, they lay beside the main overland route from Hangchow to Peking.' Funihan had the criminals, along with one of their victims, brought to the Yen-thou yamen, where he interrogated them personally. The criminals, he reported, made the following confessions, which became officialdom's window upon the dark realm of sorcery. Here the identities of the mastersorcerers were first revealed, and upon these confessions was founded the government's campaign.4
Ts'ai T'ing-chang Learns about Soul force
Far from his family home in Szechwan, beggar Ts'ai T'ing-chang's strange adventures had begun while he was sojourning in Peking. There he lived at the Lung-ch'ang Temple in Hsi-ssu p'ai-lou Street, where he made a meager living selling his calligraphy. While there he made the acquaintance of a monk named T'ung-yuan. Later, unable to support himself, he left Peking for the South, and in late March or early April encountered monk T'ung-yuan again, outside the Grand Canal metropolis of Yangchow. With T'ung-yuan were three other monks, his acolytes I-hsing, 1[-te, and I-an. T'ung-yuan related that he had learned of certain sorcerers in Jen-ho, in Chekiang Province: one Chang and one Wang, along with a monk, Wuyuan, who knew marvelous magical arts. First you sprinkled a stupefying powder in a victim's face; while he was helpless you quickly clipped hair from the end of his queue. Then, by reciting magical incantations over the hair, you could steal his soul. By tying the soulforce-bearing hairs around paper cutouts of men and horses, you could use the enlivened creatures as agents to steal people's possessions. T'ung-yuan told beggar Ts'ai that, back in Chekiang, monk Wu-yuan had assembled a group of sixteen confederates, some monks and some laymen, each of whom regularly set out to recruit more followers and to clip queues. Evidently a large underground network was spreading in the South.
Beggar Ts'ai (his confession continued) was persuaded to join monk T'ung-yuan's gang and was taught. the magical incantations. (Here was the essence of Chinese sorcery lore: a sorcerer's power lay in techniques that anyone could learn.) T'ung-yuan, along with beggar Ts'ai and acolyte I-an, now set out northward in hopes of clipping queues along the way. When they reached the town of Chung-shan-tien in Shantung's Tsou County, Ts'ai obtained some "stupefying powder" from his master. He then went to a shop where a local man, one Hao Kuo-huan, was buying steamed bread. Ts'ai sprinkled his powder in Hao's face and attempted to clip his queue with a small knife. Pursued by the outraged and insufficiently stupefied Hao, Ts'ai was arrested by a local constable. In the confusion, monk T'ung-yuan disappeared.
Chin Kuan-tzu Meets a Fortune-Teller
A native of Shantung's Chang-ch'iu County, in the metropolitan prefecture of Tsinan, beggar Chin Kuan-tzu had encountered an old acquaintance in a nearby Taoist temple: Chang Ssu ju, a fortuneteller from the Kiangnan region. Fortune-teller Chang was accompanied by three confederates, all Shantungese. He told beggar Chin that in Su-thou, Anhwei Province (not to be confused with Soochow in Kiangsu, where the suspicious beggars had been arrested in May), in the Dark Dragon Temple in the town of Shih-chuang, there lived a monk called Yu-shih who had a magical technique for clipping queues and tying up paper cutouts with them for the purpose of robbing people. Beggar Chin was invited to join the gang. Fortuneteller Chang gave him a knife and a packet of stupefying powder and told him to travel about clipping the queues of young boys. After the band split up, beggar Chin got as far as the market town of Hsiao- chuang-chi in his native county, where he abducted a young boy, Chin Yu-tzu, and forcibly sodomized him. On July i, he reached Yi County, where he clipped the queue of another young boy, Li Kou. Shortly afterward he was arrested by county authorities.
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br /> In his memorial to the Throne, Governor Funihan noted the ominous possibility that the two sources of evil arts, one in Chekiang and one in Anhwei, might spring from a single source: a dangerous plotter lurking somewhere in the area. And the dark suspicion occurred to him that sending gangs here and there, inciting and deluding people into becoming their confederates, might not be merely for the purpose of stealing goods. The conscientious governor was sending secret memoranda to the governors of Chekiang, Kiangsu, and Anhwei, as well as to the governor-general of the Liangkiang region. The prisoners he was sending to Tsinan to be interrogated further by the provincial judge and treasurer. Their initial confessions were forwarded to the emperor, along with the memorial reporting the arrests.5
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:
Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768 Page 9