Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768 (22 page)

An Agent in Place

The post of Soochow textile commissioner (chih-tsao) was customarily
filled by a trusted member of the Imperial Household Department
(nei-witfu). Stationed right in the middle of the politically sensitive
lower Yangtze region, he could provide his master not only luxurious
silks but also timely intelligence.22 Serving now in that post was the
imperial household bannerman Sacai (d. 1786), a royal relation in
the collateral line and scion of a high-ranking military family.21 He
had won a provincial-level (chii-jen) degree through the special track
in which Manchus could write examination papers in their own language. If this was anything more than affirmative action to ease
bannermen into high posts, Sacai's cultural orientation must have
been unusually true-blue Manchu by the standards of the day.
Moreover, by the time of the sorcery crisis he had been assigned to
Soochow for at least five years and could be accounted an old
Kiangnan hand. There was accordingly no reason to expect anything
but the best from him as imperial eyes and ears in the lower Yangtze.

Imagine, then, Hungli's annoyance when it turned out that Sacai
had reported not so much as a brush stroke about the soulstealing
threat. "The textile commissioner is responsible for memorializing
about [important] affairs." In it teeming city like Soochow, had Sacai
heard and seen nothing? In it matter of such importance, how could
he remain indifferent?

Can it be that he fears the power of the governor-general and governor?
Or perhaps he fears to stir resentment among local officials by unearthing hidden facts? Or is it that he regards governmental affairs to
be outside his purview and matters of no concern and therefore intends
to remain silent? If that is so, then perhaps the special responsibility of
the commissioner to memorialize in detail has been no more than an
empty name. How can he just routinely report such matters as rainfall
and grain prices, thinking that piling up documents according to regulations will fulfill his responsibilities?21

Like G'aojin and Jangboo before him, Sacai now had to disclose
the embarrassing news of the spring sorcery rumors. More embarrassing still, however, were the May events right in the Soochow area,
which of course His Majesty had never heard about: the arrest of the
Soochow beggars and the incident at Hsu-k'ou-chen, which I related
in Chapter i. Sacai revealed how the suspects had been released for
lack of evidence, and how local officials had posted notices forbidding
commoners to seize innocent people on mere suspicion of sorcery.
Sacai wrote that he had not heard of local officials' following up these
events with arrests, but neither had he heard of any actual victims of
queue-clipping. Now he had to report on his colleagues:

When Governor-general G'aojin was in Soochow holding the Governor's
seal in an acting capacity, he spoke to your slave [i.e., Sacai] about these
matters. He said that the county investigations had revealed these cases
to be baseless. In the fourth month [May June], when Governor
Jangboo arrived at his post, he asked whether your slave had heard any
news about local affairs. Your slave informed him about this matter. He
said the important thing is not to post notices [forbidding commoners
to seize suspects], but rather to carry out rigorous investigations and
arrests. Why he did not then memorialize Your Majesty, your slave
really does not know.25

Hungli had caught Jangboo and G'aojin in a Hagrant cover-up.
Their reports had [tinted of neither the Soochow nor the Hsu-k'ouchen affairs, but merely acknowledged "rumors." Although Jangboo
had not arrived at Soochow to assume his post until May 13, he was
nevertheless briefed by Sacai (if Sacai is to be believed) no later than
June 14, when he could very well have alerted the Throne.26 But
how could he have expected, back then, that anything would come
of it? Whether failure to report these events was due to skepticism
or to fear of stirring up trouble, the monarch's suspicions were now
resoundingly confirmed. Both officials got scathing reprimands.
"Scoundrel" local officials, who had been permitted to "turn right and wrong upside down" by forbidding commoners to seize sorcery
suspects, should have been impeached by their provincial superiors.
Cover-ups were common in the provinces, "reporting large matters
as small, representing something as nothing." But Kiangnan was by
far the worst: "G'aojin has long been habituated to fecklessness and
has shown no vigor whatever. Jangboo served long in the post of
Kiangsu provincial treasurer and could not avoid being imbued with
bad habits. Later as governor of Shansi he was fairly vigorous, and
We thought that he had repented his chronic faults. But since his
transfer to the Kiangsu governorship, they evidently have re-
emerged."27

All the criminals arrested and released in May were to be rounded
up again and sent immediately to the summer capital at Ch'eng-te
for interrogation. (These included the beggars of Soochow and the
monks who had been nearly lynched at Hsu-k'ou-chen.) If any were
allowed to escape, or if officials "coached their testimony" (chiaokung), G'aojin and Jangboo would be held personally responsible.
"We shall be lenient to them no more."

Jangboo threw himself on the imperial mercy: he had "carelessly
allowed subordinates" to gloss over important matters and feared
that he himself had been "somewhat imbued with bad practices." He
asked Hungli to have him impeached and punished by the Board of
Civil Office. (Vermilion: "It is still too early to impeach you; let's see
how well you can do at catching the criminals." )2" As a practical
matter, the governor could only busy himself pursuing sorcerers
already implicated by others' confessions. It was only a matter of days
before cutpurse Liu's master, "Bearded Wei," was arrested, and
jangboo interrogated him personally. He admitted recruiting cutpurse Liu but said that he himself had been hired by a former shopassistant to procure the queues for him for "medicinal" uses.29 There,
for the moment, the trail went cold.

Coming Clean in Chekiang

The minor Manchu aristocrat, Yungde, had slipped perhaps too
easily into the upper reaches of the provincial bureaucracy. This
collateral relation of the imperial line30 had served only a brief
apprenticeship in the Board of Punishments before being posted to
the premier circuit-intendancy in Chekiang, among the duties of
which was coastal defense of the Hangchow region. Having served for a decade without mishap, he was elevated in 1765/66 to be provincial treasurer. His suggestions for minor administrative improvements must have pleased Hungli, for he was promoted to provincial
governor, a post he assumed on April 25, 1 768.11

The newly promoted Yungde must have been astonished and dismayed when he received a communication from Shantung governor
Funihan (sent around July 24): confessions of the beggar-criminals
Ts'ai and Chin had revealed the Chekiang origins of the mysterious
queue-clipping cult that had now surfaced in Shantung. Yungde
realized that the Throne would now have to be informed of the
Chekiang "soulstealing" affair, which seemed to have been ended so
neatly without disturbing His Majesty. Yungde braced himself for the
inevitable imperial court letters, which indeed arrived at his
Hangchow yamen on August 4 and 6, demanding information and
urgent action.32

Yes, replied Yungde, in the early spring of this year, the rumor of
soulstealing had "suddenly" arisen among the local people. He himself, then still in the subordinate post of provincial treasurer, had
realized right away that sorcery was a serious felony. He had immediately "reported orally" (no documentary record, of course) to his
superior, then Governor Hsiung Hsueh-p'eng. Investigation quickly
turned up the stories of the Te-ch'ing and Hsiao-shan sorcery scares,
which turned out to have been started by groundless rumors among
credulous rustics. "That is why former Governor Hsiung did not
report these affairs to Your Majesty." Once Yungde had become
governor, he had "suspected that there might be criminals secretly
stirring up trouble" and had warned local officials to be vigilant.

Now, Yungde continued, the confessions in the recent Shantung
case had revealed hidden masters of the soulstealing cult in Chekiang.
He had dispatched plainclothesmen all through the province, but no
monks with the name "Wu-yuan" had turned up. All that could be
found was one monk with a homophonous name (same sound, different ideographs), who could not be shown to have had any traffic
with criminals. Furthermore, even in the remotest mountain monasteries, nobody could be found with the name "Chang Ssu ju" (the
fortune-teller implicated by Chin Kuan-tzu) or with other names
supplied by the Shantung prisoners. All Yungde could do was to
keep looking. Furthermore, he would impeach the magistrate of any
county where such criminals were found to be hiding. Hungli's
vermilion brush traced his contempt for such bland assurances: "I
would not have expected that you would prove to be so useless .1133

With that, the whole story had to come out. Yungde now forwarded
to Peking a complete account of the interrogation of all the Chekiang
criminals from last spring, including mason Wu, peasant Shen, the
Hsiao-shan monks, and constable Ts'ai.=i ' The monarch read it with
mounting annoyance. Chekiang officials had plainly "been lenient to
villains and nourished traitors." Indeed, accusations against the
masons of Te-ch'ing "cannot have been entirely without cause." Punishing the accusers (constable Ts'ai, for instance) amounted to "turning
right and wrong upside down." After this, how would commoners
dare to seize malefactors, or constables dare to make arrests? As for
Yungde himself, there was no use putting the blame on his predecessor. As provincial treasurer at the time, he himself was responsible
for reporting directly to the Throne. If' provincial treasurers merely
reported financial trivia, and provincial judges merely court cases,
"how would that accord with Our basic purpose in permitting you to
communicate confidentially and directly with Us?" In matters so
urgent, all officials were prosecutors. As for the criminals arrested
and released last spring (the masons and monks): ship them in chains
to the summer capital, where competent inquisitors would wring the
truth from them.;,'

More Help from Shantung

Back in Kiangsu, even as Jangboo was stymied in the case of cutpurse
Liu, he faced a new problem: the dragnet in neighboring Shantung,
which had already caught so large and promising a batch of sorcerers,
now offered fresh challenges. On September 12 Governor Funihan
reported that, way back on July 3, a government runner in a county
town had arrested T'ung-kao, a suspicious-looking wandering monk.
The prefect of Yen-chou had just sent him a report about this case,
so the criminal had actually been languishing in jail for upward of
two months. The criminal had protested that he was no queue-clipper
but was on his way to Chihli to visit relatives. Inquiries in Chihli had
turned up nobody resembling his relatives, so he was sent to the
prefectural yamen to be interrogated. He confessed that he had taken
the monastic tonsure in Honan and later had become the disciple of
a monk named Wu-ch'eng, who resided at the Temple of the Purple
Bamboo Grove in Nanking. His new master was a sorcerer with
"magical techniques of clipping queues" and enlivening paper men
and horses with the soul-force drawn from clipped queue-ends.
These would then become "yin-souls," who would serve their master by stealing people's possessions. Wu-ch'eng sent T'ung-kao forth with
eight other disciples, all supplied with knives and "stupefying drugs,"
to clip the necessary queues where they could. T'ung-kao named two
men whose queues he said he had clipped, and local authorities
reported that these crimes had indeed been verified by the victims.
The drugs, knife, and queues he had abandoned earlier, while on
the run, so the incriminating exhibits were not available to the court.
Nevertheless, his guilt was hardly in question, because his confession
squared with damning circumstantial evidence. 16

All this was by now a familiar story to the alert Governor Funihan,
who immediately realized that the criminals were none other than
the gang of' his first culprit, beggar Ts'ai, and had changed their
names to avoid detection. Yet Tung-kao would not admit knowing
fortune-teller Chang, monk Ming-yuan, or any of the other sorcerers
named by previous culprits. Funihan had notified Kiangnan officials
to be on the lookout for sorcerer Wu-ch'eng and his eight other
disciples.;' Kiangnan officials now had plenty of leads to pursue.
Jangboo rushed his agents to Nanking to seize Wu-ch'eng; but the
sorcerer had slipped away, forewarned by means unknown. Meanwhile, an even more vexing case was absorbing Jangboo's attention.

The Ill-Fortune of ' Chang Ssu ju

The name of the Kiangnan fortune-teller, Chang Ssu ju, had first
emerged in the confession of Funihan's Shantung prisoner, the
queue-clipper and sodomite, beggar Chin. Chin had revealed that it
was fortune-teller Chang who had told him of the sorcerer-monk
Yu-shih and had enlisted him in the queue-clipping gang.;" Now the
hunt for Chang was high on the agenda of officials throughout
the Kiangnan region. Since Kiangnan officials began receiving communications from the Shantung governor in late July, they had been
aware that the epicenter of the plot was in their jurisdiction. Through
the steamy weeks of August, the names and addresses revealed in
the Shantung confessions had been tracked down relentlessly. Governor-general G'aojin reported to the Throne that he had ordered
the Su-chou authorities to search secretly for the Dark Dragon
Temple where lurked the master-sorcerer Yu-shih.=i`' Though a
temple of that name was found, no monk there was called Yu-shih.
(Vermilion: "What's this stuff? Can't he change his name?") Nor
were there found books or paraphernalia of sorcery. Temples else where with similar-sounding names were searched, also fruitlessly.
The governor-general suggested that, since beggar Chin had said he
had only heard of Yii-shih through fortune-teller Chang, clearly
Chang was the criminal to find in order to track down this mastersorcerer.