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 he
ard 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
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
Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768 Page 20