Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768 (40 page)

13. Naquin and Rawski, Chinese Society, 121.

14. TCH'1'SL 158.32.

15. TCH'I'SL 158-32b-33-

16. Yeh Hsien-en, Ming-Ch'ing Hui-thou nung-ts'un she-hui yii tien-p'u-chih
(Anhwei: Hsin-hua shu-c:hii, 1983), 291.

17. Quoted in Ch'uan Han-sheng, "Ch'ien-lung ship-san-nien ti mi-kuei went'i," in his Chung-kuo ching-chi-shih lun-[.rung (Hong Kong: Hsin-ya yenchiu-so, 1972), 560.

18. Wang Hui-tsu, Pin-t'a meng-hen In, hsia, C1. 57, quoted in Lin Man-houng,
"Currency and Society," 294-

19. Lin Man-houng, "Currency and Society," 267.

20. P'eng Hsin-wei, Chung-kuo huo-pi ship (Shanghai: Ch'un-lien ch'u-panshe, 1958), 605.

21. Wang Hui-tsu, Pin-t'a meng-hen lu, hsia, Cl. 5g, quoted in Lin Man-houng,
"Currency and Society," 294-

22. Lin Man-houng, "Currency and Society," 295.

23. Although P'eng's chart (see text at note 2o) shows the negative silver
balance beginning in the period 1821-18sjo, this figure (from East India
Company records) (foes not include the brisk opium-smuggling business,
so the reversal probably began at least a decade earlier.

24. An independent department can be considered a county-scale unit,
though it ranked slightly higher in the administrative hierarchy.

25. Kuang-te chou-chip, 1881 ed., 50.13; An-chi hsien-chih, 1871 ed., 8.29;
Steven C. Averill has described immigration to Kiangsi, which seems
analogous to the process in Kuang-te and neighboring areas, in "The
Shed People and the Opening of the Yangzi Highlands," Modern China
g.1 (1983): 84-126.

26. Kuang-te chou-chih, 1881 ed., 24.1ob. To be sure, a plea for tax remission
paints the bleakest picture. Yet events a generation later, on the eve of
the soulstealing panic, afford only too vivid a confirmation of its general
accuracy, as will be seen in the discussion of beggars later in this chapter.

27. Yeh, Ming-Ch'ing Hui-thou, esp. 232-302.

28. A report in 1843 notes that migrants from the poorer southeast prefectures of Chekiang were flooding into the hills of the Kuang-te-Hui-chou
region and living as "shed people" (p'eng-min) on waste land. Many immigrants could find no work and probably formed a pool for the kind
of roving beggar-desperados found in eighteenth-century Kuang-te,
described below. TCHTSL 158.29b.

29. Wang Shih-to, Wang Hui-weng i-ping jih-chi (i 936; reprint, Taiwan: Wenhai ch'u-pan-she, 1967), 1.13, 2.10.

30. Chi-ch'i hsien-chih, 1755 ed. (Taipei: T'ai-pei-shih Chi-ch'i t'ung-hsiang
hui, 1963), 83-

31. Tanii Toshihito extracts, from literati essays, an impressive picture of
the crush of travelers on China's roads during the eighteenth century.
His main point is how easy it was for queue-clippers to move around,
and how hard it was for the authorities to identify and catch them.
"Kenryo jidai no ichi koiki hanzai jiken to kokka no taio: katsuben'an
no shakaishiteki sobyo," Shirin 70.6 (November 1987): 33-72.

32. Ho, Studies on the Population of China, 278. Ho's remains the standard
work.

33. On migration and its effects, see ibid., chaps. 6-8.

34. A mid-nineteenth-century Ch'ing governor recalled hearing from elders
in his home town in Chihli (Pao-ting Prefecture) that "in former times"
one might see only a few homeless vagrants in a village or market town,
and everyone laughed at them and despised them. "But now [that is,
around 183o] a community of a hundred might have ten or more, and
this was their normal condition." Quoted in P'eng Tse-i, "Ya-p'ien chanhou shih-nien-chien yin-kui ch'ien-chien po-tung-hsia ti Chung-kuo
ching-chi yii chieh-chi kuan-hsi," Li-shih yen-chiu, no. 6 (1961): 63. These
conditions arose from the economic crisis caused by the silver shortage
of that period.

35. I use the terms "clergy" and "clerical" in this book to avoid the clumsy
expression "ritual specialist" (though I sometimes use that term as well).
In late imperial China, most ritual specialists were not comparable to
the Western clergy, in that they did not "belong" to any ecclesiastical
order. Nor did they all practice their specialty as a "calling" or to the
exclusion of other pursuits. In the case of people broadly considered
"Buddhists," there was a large intermediate group of novices who were
not full members of the sangha and might never be unless they became
formally ordained. Most "monks" did not live in the big, well-regulated
elite monasteries, but rather in small temples in or near lay communities.
As for "priests" who were roughly in the Taoist tradition, most were
neither full-time practitioners nor inhabitants of religious establishments
of any sort. Many "monks" and "priests" performed ritual services at
community temples of the eclectic "popular religion" rather than at
exclusively "Buddhist" or "Taoist" establishments. In short, some religious practitioners lived much more closely regulated lives than others.
There was a vast distance between the small, highly trained monastic
elite and the mass of relatively unregulated "monks." Official documents
refer to "Buddhist monks" or "nuns" (seng or ni) and "Taoist priests"
(tao) as a kind of shorthand to describe a wide variety of people who in
dress, tonsure, and behavior identified themselves with one or another of the major religious traditions. Officials were compelled to classify
people, though the results should not be taken literally. In old China,
the distinction between "clergy" and "lay" was much hazier than in the
West. For general discussions of this subject, refer to works by Prip-
Moller, Schipper, Thompson, Watson, Welch, and Wolf in the
bibliography.

36. SYT CL 33.7.20 (Fuheng).

37. On the crowded North China plain, about one hundred miles southwest
of Peking.

38. The grand councillors turned the matter over to the Chihli provincial
authorities, who searched all the temples and monasteries Li had mentioned. They found "Buddhist and Taoist scriptures," but no drugs,
charms, or sorcery manuals. Every one of the persons Li had mentioned
in his story was arrested and taken to Ch'eng-te for interrogation. Eventually Li and all the others were exonerated and sent home.

39. CSL 790.10, CL 32.intercalary 7.17.

40. One problem was that the routinization of reporting procedure (reports
being transmitted through the provincial bureaucracy to the Board of
Rites, rather than being memorialized by provincial officials to the
Throne) gave local officials the impression that the exercise was entirely
formulaic. Ironically, this routinization had been mandated in 1674 by
order of Hungli's grandfather. The removal of the imperial factor
(taking the Throne out of the information path) meant that the whole
system became a dead letter. CPTC 864.6, CL 33-8-13-

41. Hungli rejected the idea. Such a superficial measure would miss the
heart of the problem, reads his vermilion comment (it is unclear what
he thought the heart of the problem was). Furthermore, this was not the
time (evidently fearing to stir up commotion among the clergy just as
the antisorcery campaign was gaining ground): "We'll discuss it after the
case is over." A similar proposal was offered by Hui Yueh-li, the Chekiang provincial judge, who observed that very few monks today had
ordination certificates. Hui suggested requiring travel passes for all
clergy. CPTC 864.12, CL 33.9.2. This proposal, like G'aojin's, was a
characteristic response from the provincial bureaucracy: sooner than
institute rigorous investigations, it was better to routinize the whole
problem by instituting regular documentary procedures. This sort of
response is analyzed further in Chapter 9.

42. Present-day official attitudes toward beggars are still heavily freighted
with concerns for public security, as well as moral cant. I am indebted
to Susan Naquin for the following reference from the China Daily: "Beggars Threaten Social Order." Although beggars were said to have decreased
in number, there remained an estimated 670,000 nationwide in 1987,
which was supposedly a decrease of 37 percent since 1979. These people
"pose a hazard to the social order and should arouse wide social concerns
... Only 20 percent of those who beg do so because of natural disasters
or the misfortunes of their families. Most see begging as an easy way to
make money; others are playing truant or escaping from forced mar riages arranged by their parents. Some are mental patients forsaken by
their families ... In Guangzhou City in 1987, 35 percent of the beggars
were also criminals," according to a report in People's Daily. China Daily
(Peking), May 16, 1988.

43. CPTC 865.5, CL 33.8.19 (Min O-yuan).

44. If Min's program was actually authorized, however, I have not found
the edict.

45. CSL 813.15b, CL 33.6.22.

46. Tanii Toshihito quotes a travel account by Sun Chia-kan (1721) about
destitute men who became monks in order to survive. "Kenryo jidai,"
6o.

47. This last reference is from Nathaniel Gist Gee, A Class of Social Outcasts:
Notes on Beggars in China (Peking: Peking Leader Press, 1925). On beggar
typologies, see also Jean Jacques Matignon, "Le mendiant de Pekin," in
Superstition, crime, et misere en Chine, 4th ed. (Lyons: Storck, 1902), 207246; and Hsu K'o, Ch'ing-pai lei-ch'ao (Shanghai, 1928; reprint, Peking:
Hsin-hua shu-chii, 1986), 5473-

48. An annotation by "Hsien-fang" to P'u Sung-ling, Liao-chai chih-i, ed.
Chang Yu-ho (Shanghai: Ku-chi ch'u-pan-she, 1978), 131-132.

49. David C. Schak, A Chinese Beggars' Den: Poverty and Mobility in an Underclass Community (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1988), 26.

50. Hsu, Ch'ing-pai lei-chao, 5475•

51. Ibid.

52. CSL 787.2, CL 32.6.17.

53. Hsing-k'o shih-shu, vol. 2773, CL 34.5.3 and 5.4. The first case took place
in Kwangsi, the second in Shensi.

54. Such research would require a large-scale longitudinal study of the
chronological records of the Board of Punishments, the Hsing-k'o shihshu, which are kept at the First Historical Archives, Peking. It takes little
research to show that social hostility to beggars is rising in American
society. Consider a 1988 story from New York City: "The number of
panhandlers appears to have multiplied over the last year and their
methods have become increasingly aggressive, even intimidating." One
New Yorker admitted that beggars provided "a new target for my homicidal fantasies." Even hardened city residents who habitually refuse
beggars suffer "some psychological cost .. A tiny little low-scale war is
going on inside. Sometimes it comes out as anger." Fox Butterfield, "New
Yorkers Turning Angry with More Beggars on Street," New York Times,
July 29, 1988, 1.

55. For a recent "anxiety" explanation, see Brian P. Levack, The Witch-Hunt
in Early Modern Europe (London: Longman Group, 1987), 140-142.

3. Threats Seen and ]Unseen

1. On the Yung-cheng succession, see Silas H. L. Wu, Passage to Power:
K'ang-hsi and His Heir Apparent, 1661-1722 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1979). On Injen's reign, the major work is Feng Erh-
k'ang, Yung-cheng chuan (Peking: Jen-min ch'u-pan-she, 1985).

2. CSL 2.5b, YC 13.9.3•

3. In fiscal affairs, for instance, Madeleine Zelin's study of Injen's rationalization of provincial finance shows how new factors, such as inflation,
introduced problems into local government that were beyond the powers
of the new surtax system to remedy. The Magistrate's Tael: Rationalizing
Fiscal Reform in Eighteenth-Century Ch'ing China (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1984), 2gi-298.

4. On Hungli's biography, begin with Fang Chao-ying's essay in Arthur W.
Hummel, Eminent Chinese of the Ch'ing Period, 2 vols. (Washington, D.C.:
Government Printing Office, 1941), 369-373. A sensitive study of aspects
of Hungli's character and training is Harold L. Kahn, Monarchy in the
Emperor's Eyes: Image and Reality in the Ch'ien-lung Reign (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971).

5. The communication system and the "vermilion" component of it are
discussed in Chapter 6.

6. It is unknown when Manchu men adopted their characteristic shaved
forehead and queue. It was presumably a convenient headdress for a
hard-riding warrior people: no frontal hair to obstruct the eyes while
shooting.

7. Frederic Wakeman, Jr., The Great Enterprise: The Manchu Restoration of
Imperial Order in Seveneenth-Century China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 416-422, 646-650, 868, and elsewhere.

8. To-erh-kun she-cheng jih-chi (entry for June 22, 1645), quoted in Shan
Shih-yuan, "Ch'ing-tai Ch'i-chii-chu," in Ch'ing-tai tang-an shih-liao ts'ungpien (Peking, Chung-hua shu-chii), vol. 4 (1979): 260.

9. CSL.SC 17.7b-8b.

10. TLTI 2.17, 3.558.

11. Frederic Wakeman, Jr., "Localism and Loyalism during the Ch'ing Conquest of Kiangnan: The Tragedy of Chiang-yin," in Frederic Wakeman,
Jr., and Carolyn Grant, eds., Conflict and Control in Late Imperial China
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 43-85-

12. This episode is drawn from Hsing-k'o t'i-pen, hsu-fa 0004.

13. The Han-ch'uan case is from Hsing-pu t'i-pen, hsu fa 469.7 (February 28,
1648) and 469.16 (1648, exact date missing).

14. "In ritual situations: long hair = unrestrained sexuality; short hair or
partially shaved head or tightly bound hair = restricted sexuality; close
shaven head = celibacy." Leach makes the point even more apposite by
citing the psychiatrist Charles Berg on the subject of seventeenth-century
England: Cavaliers (long hair, sexual license, lack of self-discipline)
versus Roundheads (short hair, sexual restraint, rigorous self-discipline).
Edmund R. Leach, "Magical Hair," Journal of the Royal Anthropological
Institute 88 (1958): 153-154• Christopher R. Hallpike rejects Leach's
association of short hair and sexual restraint, but his own hypothesis
strongly supports the theme of social discipline: "Cutting the hair equals
[i.e., is symbolically associated with] social control." "Social Hair," Man 4
(1969): 261.

15. Wakeman, The Great Enterprise, 646-650.