Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768 (42 page)

8. Yu Ying-shih, "`O Soul, Come Back!' A Study in the Changing Concep tions of the Soul and Afterlife in Pre-Buddhist China," Harvard Journal
of Asiatic Studies 47.2 (1987): 374-375-

9. De Groot, The Religious System of China, IV992.

10. A soul-separating "fright" is called thing or haak-ts'an (Cantonese; = hsiach'in, Mandarin). Stevan Harrell, "The Concept of Soul in Chinese Folk
Religion," Journal of Asian Studies 38 (1979): 524; Marjorie Topley,
"Chinese Traditional Ideas and the Treatment of Disease: Two Examples from Hong Kong," Man 5 (1970): 429-436.

11. Yu, "`0 Soul, Come Back!"' 365-

12. Ibid., 375. The ritual of recall has survived in popular culture until
recent times. De Groot describes a nearly identical ceremony in Amoy,
used to call back the soul of a child who is unconscious or suffering
convulsions. The Religious System of China, I, 234-235-

13. Harrell, "The Concept of Soul," 525, citing Emily M. Ahern, The Cult of
the Dead in a Chinese Village (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1973)A Cantonese "soul-travel" episode is described in detail in N. B. Dennys,
The Folk-lore of China, and Its Affinities with That of the Aryan and Semitic
Races (London: Triibner and Co., 1876), 59-6 1. De Groot cites fictional
sources to show that gifted persons could send their souls from their
bodies "especially with the aim to see hidden things." The Religious System
of China, IV, 103-106.

14. Nathan Sivin points out that the Chinese distinction between death and
sleep is not a sharp one. Death is simply a failure to wake up. The term
ssu ("death") is commonly used to mean "unconscious." Personal communication, December 24, 1988.

15. P'u, Liao-chai chih-i (234), contains a story in which lovesickness was
thought responsible for a young man's soul-loss.

16. Harrell, "The Concept of Soul," 525, citing Arthur P. Wolf, "Gods,
Ghosts, and Ancestors," in Arthur P. Wolf, ed., Religion and Ritual in
Chinese Society (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974), 131-182.

17. De Groot, The Religious System of China, I, 243-244•

18. Ibid., V, 470.

19. Harrell, "The Concept of Soul," 525.

20. Henry Dore [Henri Dore], Researches into Chinese Superstitions (Shanghai:
T'usewei Printing Press, 1918), V, 472.

21. Shen Te-fu, Wan-li yeh-huo-p'ien (Peking: Chung-hua shu-chii, 1g8o),
753• The leader of a sixteenth-century rebellion, a woman named T'ang
Sai-erh, was a White Lotus sectarian who was believed to practice sorcery
by enlivening "paper men." Dictionary of Ming Biography, 1364-1644, 2
vols., ed. L. Carrington Goodrich and Chaoying Fang (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1976), 1251-

22. Classical texts had magical force, quite apart from their doctrinal content.
See de Groot, The Religious System of China, VI, 1o11, on the use of the
1-thing and other classics as protection against demons.

23. Yuan Mei, Tzu pu-yii (Shanghai: Chin-chang t'u-shu-chii, 1914), 2.15b;
a translation of this story appears in de Groot, The Religious System of
China, V, 893.

24. De Groot, The Religious System of China, V, 920.

25. Ibid., V, 926.

26. Ibid., V, 871.

27. Lo Kuan-chung and Feng Meng-lung, P'ing-yao chuan (reprint, based on
an 183o ed., Shanghai: Ku-tien wen-hsueh ch'u-pan-she, 1956), 52.

28. Leach's hypothesis is "that head hair is a visible symbolic displacement
of the invisible genitals." "Magical Hair," 153. See also Chapter 3, note
14-

29. Leach, "Magical Hair," 16o.

30. Paul Hershman, "Hair, Sex, and Dirt." Man 9 (1974): 277, 289.
Hershman writes (275) that a symbol "gains its power" by its deep
psychological connections (e.g., hair = genitals), but then becomes a
free-floating unit of meaning in a ritual situation. Its meaning within a
ritual context is related to, but not necessarily the same as, its root
meaning.

31. James L. Watson, "Of Flesh and Bones: The Management of Death
Pollution in Cantonese Society," in M. Bloch and J. Parry, eds., Death
and the Regeneration of Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1982), 173. Why married daughters do this remains obscure, unless it is to
reinforce affinal ties.

32. There is widespread evidence of keeping disciples' hair. CPTC 858.3,
CCI. 33.7.26 (Liu T'ung-hsun et al.), is an example. On "linking destinies,"
see CPTC 866.6, CL 33.9.15 (Surde). That soul-force was increased by
the number of persons from whom one had acquired hair, rather than
the amount of hair per se, is suggested by the "ten-thousand-soul bridge"
that master-sorcerer Ming-yuan was planning to construct (see Chapter
4)-

33. De Groot, The Religious System of China, V 1, 931.

34. On charms, see Dore, Researches into Chinese Superstitions, III, 255, V,
5oo-509; and de Groot, The Religious System of China, VI, passim.

35. Dennys, The Folk-lore of China, 82-83.

36. Wu Jung and Chang Yen, comps., and Chou Yen, ed., Lu-pan-ching
chiang-chia-ching (Shanghai: Sao-yeh Shan-fang, 19o9), 4.3b-4. The material quoted here is from an appended section entitled "Mi-chueh hsien-
chi," the origin of which is not given. The work as a whole dates from
the mid-fifteenth century but incorporates earlier material. On the history and character of this book, see Klass Ruitenbeek, "Craft and Ritual
in Traditional Chinese Carpentry," Chinese Science 7 (December 1986):
13-16. This book was thought to have such magical power that when a
bookseller sold a copy, he always faced away from the book. Once you
had looked at the book, you had to inflict magical harm on someone,
otherwise you would suffer harm yourself Ts'ao Sung-yeh, "Ni-shui muchiang ku-shih t'an-t'ao," Min-su (Kwangchow), lob (April 1930): 1.

37. Further tips on how to defeat builders' sorcery are quoted by Sawada
Mizuho from popular lore in fiction and literati essays: Chugoku no juho,
213-237. For instance (218), if you find a baneful object in your bedroom, "do not touch it, but fry it in hot oil and then throw it in the fire.
The carpenter will either die or become ill." Sometimes the curse was unintended: an inhabitant of a house began to "cough up blood," after
which it was discovered that a carpenter had injured his hand while
raising a roof-beam and his blood had soaked into the wood (230)-

38. C. K. Yang, Religion in Chinese Society: A Study of Contemporary Social
Functions of Religion and Some of Their Historical Factors (Berkeley: University of California Press, ig6i), 134-135, 156-158.

39. I have benefited from reading an unpublished paper by Kristofer
Schipper: "On Chinese Folk Religion" (n.d.). I am also grateful to Nathan
Sivin for extensive remarks on this subject (personal communication,
December 24, 1988).

40. Yang, Religion in Chinese Society, 188-i8g; TCHTSL 501.2. I owe thanks
to Susan Naquin for sharing with me her extensive notes on the Ch'ing
clergy.

41. These officers were called seng-lu-ssu (for Buddhists) and tao-lu-ssu (for
Taoists). TCHTSL 501.5. In 1773 the supervision of these offices was
turned over to the Imperial Household Department, for reasons unclear.
TCHTSL 1219.3-

42. Personnel of these offices were to he reported by provincial governors
or commanders-in-chief to the Board of Rites, which would then transmit
the lists to the Board of Civil Office to be inscribed in registers. The
whole system was delegated to the provincial bureaucracy and the two
boards; the old Ming practice of reporting lists of personnel to the
Throne was discontinued. All this was evidently intended to routinize
the procedures and generate less paperwork for the Throne. TCHTSL
501.6.

43. TCHTSL 501.5-8.

44. TCHTSL 5oi.8b-i i. The term used here for Buddhist secular clergy
(ying-fu seng) is obscure and may be a localism. Dc Groot (Sectarianism,
127) links the term to a Yogic sect, but I can find no confirmation of
this in standard reference works on Buddhism. The term for secular
Taoists is huo-chii tao-shih. Hungli's edict against the secular clergy may
have been inspired by a Ming pronouncement four centuries earlier.
J. J. M. de Groot, Sectarianism and Religious Persecution in China
(Amsterdam: Johannes Muller, 1903-1904), 121.

45. KCT CL 33.1.18 (374) and CL 33.2.13 (644)-

46. P'u, Liao-chai chih-i, 131. In this most popular collection of supernatural
tales, the one story in which a monk uses sorcery to harm a niggardly
donor stands out as an exception (194-199).

47. The actual practice of Buddhism and the life of the Buddhist clergy in
late imperial times still await research. In the discussion that follows, I
am falling back on fieldwork that reveals conditions in the early twentieth
century. Though this solution is far from satisfactory, it has the merit of
dealing with practice rather than with prescription. Furthermore, I am
assuming that the aspects of clerical life I am discussing here probably
changed rather slowly. I rely mainly on Johannes Prip-Moller, Chinese
Buddhist Monasteries: Their Plan and Its Function as a Setting for Buddhist
Monastic Life (Copenhagen, 1936; reprint, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1967), chap. 5; and Holmes Welch, The Practice of
Chinese Buddhism, 1900-1950 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1967), esp. chaps. 9-10.

48. Welch, The Practice of Chinese Buddhism, 207-210.

49. On Taoist healing exorcism, see Michael Saso, "Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy in Taoist Ritual," in Wolf, ed., Religion and Ritual in Chinese Society,
329-335-

50. Yung-chia hsien-chih, 1882 ed., 6.12, quoting Hsiang Ou, Tung-ch'iao
Hsiang-shih chia-hsun. I have not been able to date Hsiang Ou's work.

51. James L. Watson, "Funeral Specialists in Cantonese Society: Pollution,
Performance, and Social Hierarchy," in Watson and Rawski, eds., Death
Ritual in Late Imperial and Modern China, t 18.

52. Macfarlane's point is that "they are more likely to be accused of sorcery
than witchcraft, for they are not a perennial, secret, inside challenge to
a group, but just passing threats." The distinction here concerns the
presence in "witches" of the innate malevolence (i.e., a motive for
injuring particular people) that can only result from living together a
long while. Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England: A Regional and Comparative Study (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), 229.

53. The view that community tension lies behind witchcraft scares offers no
help in the case of sorcery, when suspected sorcerers come from outside
the community, as in the Chinese case, and are complete strangers to
their victims. For a leading "social tension" view, see Max G. Marwick,
Sorcery in Its Social Setting (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1965), and for a critique, Christina Larner, Witchcraft and Religion: The
Politics of Popular Belief (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), 50-51.

54. Robert P. Weller, "Bandits, Beggars, and Ghosts: The Failure of State
Control over Religious Interpretation in Taiwan," American Ethnologist
12 (1985): 49-55-

55. Jack Potter, "Cantonese Shamanism," in Wolf, ed., Religion and Ritual in
Chinese Society, 206-231.

56. The one big exception would seem to be geomancy, or grave magic,
which is sometimes used as a weapon in community conflict: one group
of agnates aligns ancestral bones to generate magic that favors its own
lineage branch over another. This view is offered by Maurice Freedman;
see, for instance, "Ancestor Worship: Two Facets of the Chinese Case,"
in The Study of Chinese Society: Essays by Maurice Freedman, sel. and ed. G.
William Skinner (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1979), 296-312,
originally published in 1967. On the use of grave magic in community
conflict, see also Steven J. Bennett, "Patterns of Sky and Earth: A Chinese
Science of Applied Cosmology," Chinese Science 3 (1978): 1-26, at 22.

57. Schak, A Chinese Beggars' Den, 63. This outstanding ethnography is rich
in data from nineteenth- and twentieth-century observers as well as from
the author's own fieldwork on Taiwan. See especially chapter 3.

58. Ibid., 59.

6. The Campaign in the Provinces

1. Except for the metropolitan province of Chihli, which had only a governor-general.

2. On the upper layers of the provincial bureaucracy, see Fu Tsung-mao,
Ch'ing-tai tofu chih-tu chih yen-chiu (Taipei: Kuo-li cheng-chih ta-hsueh,
1963).

3. The median time of service in the provincial bureaucracy in 1768 varied
in proportion to rank and reflected the normal promotion pattern: for
governors-general, i i years; for governors, 9.5; for provincial treasurers, 5; and for provincial judges, 2-5-

4. Based on the provincial estimates for 1787 in Ho, Studies on the Population
of China, 283, and Brian R. Mitchell, European Historical Statistics, 17501975, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Facts on File, 198 1), The European figures
are from censuses of 18oi.

5. Taking the governors-general and governors serving in 1768, the
average length of time served in a single post (since attaining governor's
rank) was 3.5 years for governors-general and 2.2 years for governors.
The figure for governors-general is somewhat skewed upward by the
unusually long tenure (nineteen years) of Fang Kuan-ch'eng as governorgeneral of Chihli. All my statistics on the bureaucracy are calculated
from Ch'ien Shih-fu's comprehensive charts in Ch'ing-tai chih-khan nienpiao, 4 vols. (Peking: Chung-hua shu-chii, ig8o).

6. The average number of governors per province who served during
Hungli's thirty-third year was 2.5. Some provinces witnessed a bewildering succession of chief executives: Shantung saw four governors that
year, and Fukien five. During the mid-eighteenth century, it was not
unusual for three governors to serve in a province during a single year.
The year 1768 was one of particularly rapid turnover, due partly to the
disruption caused by the soulstealing crisis itself.

7. See the cases of Wu Shao-shih and Wu T'an in Chapter 9.

8. Authoritative studies of the communications system are John K. Fairbank
and Teng Ssu-yu, "On the Transmission of Ch'ing Documents" and "On
the Types and Uses of Ch'ing Documents," Harvard Journal of Asiatic
Studies 5 (1940): 1-71, and 6 (1941): 135-246; Silas H. L. Wu, "The
Memorial Systems of the Ch'ing Dynasty (1644-1911)," Harvard journal
of Asiatic Studies 27 (1967): 7-75; Chuang Chi-fa, Ch'ing-tai tsou-che chihtu (Taipei: National Palace Museum, 1979); Beatrice S. Bartlett, "The
Vermilion Brush: The Origins of the Grand Council System" (Ph.D.
dissertation, Yale University, 1980); and Bartlett, "Ch'ing Palace Memorials in the Archives of the National Palace Museum," National Palace
Museum Bulletin (Taipei) 13.6 (1979): 1-2 1.