Ancient history homework task
Jonathan D. Spence
o
THE DEATH
OF WOMAN
WANG
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© PENGUIN BOOKS
One
THE
OBSERVERS
T H E EARTHQUAKE struck Tan-eh’eng on July 25, 1668. It was evening, the moon just rising. There was no warning, save for a frightening roar that seemed to come from somewhere to the northwest. The buildings in the city began to shake ;:mu the trees took up a rhythmical swaying, tossing ever more wildlv back and forth until their tips almost touched the ground. Then came one sharp violent jolt that brought down, stretches of the citv walls and battlements, officials’ varnens, temples, and thousands of private homes. Broad fissures opened up across the streets and underneath the houses, jets oi water spurted up into the air to a height of twenty feet or more, and streams of water poured down the roads and flooded the irriga- tion ditches. Those people who tried to remain standing felt as if their feet were round stones spinning out of control, and were brought crashing to the ground.
Some, like Li Hsien-yii, fell into the fissures but were buoyed up on underground streams and able to cling to the edge; others had their houses sheared in half and survived in
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the living quarters as the storage rooms slid into the earth. Some watched helplessly as their families fell away from them: Kao Te-mou had lived in a household of twenty-nine with his consorts, children, relatives, and servants, but only he, one son, and one daughter survived.
As suddenly as it had come the earthquake departed. The ground was still. The water seeped away, leaving the open fissures edged with mud and fine sand. The ruins rested in layers where they had fallen, like giant sets of steps.
It was, wrote Feng K’o-ts’an, who in 1673 compiled the Local History of T’an-ch’eng, as if fate were “throwing rocks upon a man who had already fallen in a well.” And Feng repeated two general observations that had been made about T’an-ch’eng by a local historian nearly a century before: first, that although one might expect an equal balance between “Catastrophes” and “Blessings” in the chapter of the chronicle devoted to local events, in T’an-ch’eng nine out of ten events fell in the catastrophe category; second, that while nature generally manifested itself in the form of a twelve-year cycle, with six years of abundance and six years of dearth, once in each of those twelve years in T’an-ch’eng there would be a serious famine as well.
Feng lived in T’an-ch’eng county for five years, and life was not kind to him. He came there as magistrate in 1668, but was dismissed after two years for incompetence in han- dling the finances and horses of the imperial post stations in the county. He stayed on in T’an-ch’eng in deep poverty- ashamed, perhaps, to return to his home in Shao-wu, Fukien, because of his disgrace—and lived on handouts from the local gentry and the money he could get from writing. He was, after all, a chin-shih, a holder of the highest literary degree, which he had won in 1651, and there was no one else still alive in T’an-ch’eng with such a degree; there was not even any living native of the county who had gained the lower
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degree of chii-jen. So Feng was honored there and able to make some money by teaching and from occasional jobs, such as being the chief editor for the Local History, that came his way. He finished the history by late 1673 and returned to Fukien, but the return brought him only more sorrow. His arrival coincided with the beginning of the Rebellion of the Three Feudatories, and Feng was among the many literati and former officials ordered to take up bureaucratic “office” with the rebel forces. He refused. (In his youth he had refused to read any more of his favorite T’ang poet, Li Po, after he learned that Li Po had written poetry in the entourage of the rebel prince Lin of Yung.) Rather than face reprisals from the rebels, Feng retreated to the Fukien mountains, where the constant exposure in bitter weather led to his death.
Perhaps it was because of his melancholy experiences in T’an-ch’eng that in the brief essays with which he introduced several of the economic sections in the Local History Feng wrote so frankly about the miseries of the area, the poverty of its people, and the general inability of the local gentry to help alleviate that misery. He was fascinated by the statistics of disaster in the county, and returned to them again and again: the population of T’an-ch’eng in the early 1670s, he esti- mated, was only one-quarter of what it had been in the later Ming dynasty fifty years before; where once there had been well over 200,000 people in the county, there now were about 60,000. And the area of cultivated land registered for taxation had dropped by almost two-thirds, from 3.75 million acres to under 1.5 million. His figures grew even more precise as he contemplated the earthquake of 1668, which hit T’an- ch’eng only a few months after he had taken up office there as magistrate, and to emphasize his point he contrasted T’an- ch’eng with its larger northern neighbor I-chou: I-chou county had 108 townships, T’an-ch’eng 45; yet 12,000 people died in I-chou in the earthquake while in T’an-ch’eng (with
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well under half the population) nearly 9000 people lost their lives.
By 1668 the people of T’an-ch’eng had been suffering for fifty years. Many had died in the White Lotus risings of 1622, when rebels had risen on the tide of local misery in Shantung province, ravaged the cities around T’an-ch’eng, and induced thousands of peasants to leave their homes, by cart or on foot, carrying their few possessions with them. The leaders of the rising, such as Hou VVu, who came from the nearby county of Tsou, offered to the poor a vision of “moun- tains of gold and mountains of silver, mountains of flour and mountains of rice, fountains of oil and wells full of wine,” and promised to all true believers that “for the rest of their lives they would never again be poor.” Those who left their homes in search of this paradise eventually died in the mountains, were cut down by government troops, or met their deaths at the hands of other Shantung villagers who fought to keep the
roving fugitives away Irom their ownJands.
Many more from T’an-ch’eng died in the 1630s, from hunger, irom banditry, irom sickness; and in the 1640s a fresh evele of troubles began. Great swarms of locusts flew into f Yin-ch’cng in 1040, destroying what was left of the wheat
crop alter a summer d”ought and laying their eggs in the fields; they clung to the walls of the houses and wriggled into peoples clothes, the}’ crawled down the chimneys and smothered the fires with their weight when people tried to kceij them out by blocking doors and windows. The famine of
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that winter-spread on into the following spring, and groping for words to describe it, the local farmers rationalized their despair in proverb form: ‘ T o have the bodies ol one’s close relations eaten bv someone else is not as good as eating them oneself, so as to prolong one’s own life for a few days.” Or, “It makes more sense to eat one’s father, elder brother, or husband so as to preserve one’s own life, rather than have the whole
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family die.” Out in the countryside, says the Local History, the closest friends no longer dared walk out to the fields together.
Bandits followed in the famine’s wake. One such army, several thousand strong, moved down into T’an-ch’eng county from I-chou in April 1641. They looted the market town of Li- chia-chuang, on the county border, and marched southwest to Ma-t’ou market. This they looted too, and spent three days there before setting fire to the shops and homes and moving east to T’an-ch’eng city, which they besieged. But the days the bandits spent in Ma-t’ou had given the people of T’an- ch ‘eng time to organize their defenses. They blocked the city gates with stones and earth, placed cannon ready for firing on the walls, and marshaled the local defense forces under men like Wang Ying, a veteran soldier who had served the gentry so well in defending T’an-ch’eng during the White Lotus attacks of 1622 that they had petitioned (successfully) to have him named to the official rank of squad commander.
A tablet engraved with the names of 292 men who were among the defenders of T’an-ch’eng in 1641 gives some indi- cation of how the more influential people of the county crowded into the city for safety. The list was headed by two Hsiis, whose lands were in Kuei-ch’ang, to the west, brother and son respectively of a local notable who had won the chii- jen literary degree in 1594, and by the scholar Tu Chih-tung, who had obtained the same degree in 1624. The Tus had their lands in Hsia-chuang township, thirty miles northeast, and at least a dozen members of their lineage were listed among the city defenders, as were many from other prominent families—the Changs and the Lius from Kao-ts’e township and the Lis from Ch’ih-t’ou. There were nearly ninety licen- tiates, or junior degree holders, from all over T’an-ch’eng, perhaps a third of those in the county who held the degree at the time, and a further thirty advanced students who had
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received the magistrate’s certification of competence. There were nearly twenty district and township headmen, who had evidently abandoned the countryside they were meant to be protecting and sought the greater safety of the city; there were junior military officers, physicians, clerical staff from the city offices, yamen runners, merchants, gunnery experts, house- hold servants and—ending the list—one Taoist priest.
This group, and other unnamed citizens, fought off the bandits through the morning of April 15 and finally repulsed them, thanks to some lucky cannon shots that hit the bandit camp and the sudden gusting of a heavy wind that swirled dust and stones around and hindered the attackers. Finally giving up the assault on the main city, the rebels looted its suburbs and then swung south to the post station and town- ship of Hung-hua fou, which lured them with its promise of horses—kept there to serve the routes that ran to central China—and the fame of its brothels. Here the same blinding dust storm had forced the people to take shelter in their homes, with doors tightly closed; unaware of the bandits’ ap- proach, they made no attempt to escape, and were cut down in their own homes, or perished when the buildings were set afire. After this raid the bandits moved on to Kiangsu prov- ince, returning for three more days in late May, when they wasted a swathe of country around the market town of Hsia- chuang.
In such brief and violent raids it was the poor who de- stroyed the poor, while the gentry were able to shelter behind the walls of T’an-ch’eng city. But there was no place for even the wealthiest to hide when a raiding force of Manchu troops under General Abatai entered the county in January 1643: among the lists of the dead were many who had fought and survived the battle of 1641. In the terse words of the Local History:
“It was on 30 January 1643 t n a t t n e great army invaded
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the city, slaughtered the officials, and killed 70 or 80 per cent of the gentry, clerks, and common people; inside the city walls and out they killed tens of thousands, in the streets and the courtyards and the alleys the people all herded together were massacred or wounded, the remnants trampled each other down, and of those fleeing the majority were injured. Until 21 February 1643 the great army pitched its camps in our county borders, south from Shen-ma-chuang along the Shu River, and northwest to I-chou, spanning a distance of seventy li* in fifty-four linked camps. They stayed for twenty-two days; over the whole area many were looted and burned, killed and wounded. They also destroyed Ts’ang-shan-pao, killing more than ten thousand men and women there.”
In the report that he handed to his ruler after returning to Manchuria, General Abatai did not bother to give details of specific townships. He merely stated that he had obtained, from the general area of northern China:
“12,250 ounces of gold, 2,205,270 ounces of silver, 4440 ounces of precious stones, 52,230 bolts of silk, 13,840 gar- ments of silk or fur, more than 500 sable, fox, panther, and tiger skins, 1160 sets of whole or split horns, 369,000 human prisoners, somewhere over 321,000 camels, horses, mules, cattle, donkeys, and sheep. Besides this is the silver dug up from various hiding places, divided into three parts, of which one part was given to the generals and officers; and the various things which the ordinary soldiers took for themselves, the value of which cannot be calculated.”
The Ming dynasty collapsed in 1644, as Li Tzu-ch’eng’s rebel army captured Peking, to be chased out in its turn by the troops of the victorious Manchus, but these events, which loom so large in China’s history, barely figure in the record of T’an-ch’eng. The Local History states merely that after the fall of Peking “there was great confusion, and local bandits
- A li is one-third of a mile.
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arose on all sides, burning and killing for several months with none to suppress them, so the people suffered severely.” And we are told no more of the moment in 1644 when the victori- ous Manchu troops, now conquerors of China rather than a marauding party of looters, entered the city of T’an-ch’eng, save for the detail that it was the one still surviving chii-jen holder, Tu Chih-tung (whose wife and little son had been killed by the Manchus the year before), who now led the citizens out from behind the walls to make their formal sub- mission.
The Manchu conquest of China, with its promise of a restoration of order and prosperity and an end to the old cor- ruption and inefficiency of the Ming, brought no sharp change of fortune to T’an-ch’eng: the decade between the late 1640s and the late 1650s continued the previous pattern. The I River flooded in 1649, ruining the autumn crops along a great belt of land stretching for fifteen miles below Ma-t’ou market. In the autumn of 1651 the I and the Shu rivers both flooded, pouring so much water across the fields that the newly appointed magistrate had to come by boat to T’an- ch’eng city to take up his office, sailing across the sodden land. The next year both rivers flooded after heavy summer rains that destroyed the millet and kaoliang crops and brought a winter famine; while in 1659 t n e same rivers flooded in late spring after sixteen days of uninterrupted rain, just as the winter wheat and barley were ready for harvest. The farmers watched helplessly as the sheaves already cut went bobbing off across the waves while the heavy ears of still-standing grain fell water-logged below the surface.
With these natural disasters came yet more bandits—in 1648 bandits from the mountains to the northwest sacked Ma- t’ou market; in 1650 a band driven out of their home base in the western Shantung county of Ko-tse sacked the market of Kuei-ch’ang and laid waste the surrounding area; and in 1651
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another large bandit force, driven out of their base to the northwest by government troops, broke through the defenses of T’an-ch’eng city itself and sacked it. The Local History has poignant stories about each of the raids: woman Yao, aged seventeen in 1648, cursing the bandits as they dragged her out of her house, still cursing as they cut off her arm and killed her; woman Sun, gathering her dead husband’s bones and those of her mother-in-law from the ashes of the home the bandits burned in 1650 and proceeding with the funeral rites as the bandits looked on; Tu Chih-tung, who had survived the wars and sacks of fifteen years, refusing to be carried off lor ransom in the 1651 raid, cursing the bandits and being killed in his home. Surviving relatives often could not recognize their own family members among the piles of the dead, but would identify them by some item of dress or else reluctantly bury them in group graves.
As Huang Liu-hung found when he came to T’an-ch’eng to serve as magistrate in 1670, the people’s problem was one of basic survival—physical and moral—in a world that seemed to be disintegrating before their eyes. When he arrived at his post that summer he asked the locals—both gentry and com- moners—about the area, and this is how he recorded their reply:
“T’an-ch’eng is only a tiny area, and it has long been desti- tute and ravaged. For thirty years now fields have lain under flood water or weeds; we still cannot bear to speak of all the devastation. On top of this came the famine of 1665; and after the earthquake of 1668 not a single ear of grain was har- vested, over half the people were dying of starvation, their homes were all destroyed and ten thousand men and women were crushed to death in the ruins. Those who were left or- phaned wept with hunger and cold by day, and slept out in the open country by night. Fathers and sons could not help
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each other, neighbors could not protect each other. The old and the weak moved from ditch to ditch, the young and strong all fled to other areas. Travelers passing through were moved to tears by what they saw, and thought that if this went on much longer no one would be left in T’an-ch’eng.”
Over the centuries a certain formalization had developed in China for describing rural suffering; passages similar to this can be found in many local histories and officials’ memoirs, and often they may have been mere rhetorical flourishes with- out substance. But for T’an-ch’eng, at least, the description was real enough. There were twenty-seven county cities in the prefecture of Yen, of which T’an-ch’eng and I-chou were generally considered to be the most impoverished; and when Huang compared those two, he found that T’an-ch’eng was clearly the worse off. There had been eight emergency gra- naries in the county during the later Ming dynasty: one in each of the four subdistricts of the county, one at Ma-t’ou market, one at the southern post station, one in the county city, and one in the northwestern Shen-shan hills; by 1670 all had been destroyed. The local wealthy who had survived had grown unwilling to make any more donations or to rebuild the storehouses; they did not even respond to a suggestion that they simply lend out grain, for emergency use, to be repaid at a fixed rate of interest by the county until all their capital had been repaid. Similarly, there had been a system of six county schools and three charity schools for advanced candidates pre- paring for the prefectural examinations, schools endowed with houses that could be rented out to bring in income to pay the teachers’ salaries, and with land and kitchen gardens; these, too, were all destroyed or abandoned, and the wealthy had not rebuilt them. They preferred tutoring their sons in their own homes to sharing their resources with the community. The 1668 earthquake destroyed many more city buildings and stretches of the city wall, but even before this many of the
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buildings were in ruins; the office of the county physician was gone, the bridge that spanned the river on the main road south to Su-ch’ien was down, temples were gutted.
Huang Liu-hung was a scholarly and observant man, from a minor official family in Honan, who had passed the chii-jen examination. T’an-ch’eng was his first posting. It was his re- sponsibility to try to hold the shattered community together, and in the personal memoir and handbook that he compiled twenty years later during his comfortable, retirement in Soochow, he wrote movingly of his attempts to come to terms with the misery that once surrounded him. It is clear that while he was in office Huang worked skillfully for the com- munity, trying to induce his superiors—and through them the government in Peking—to grant tax concessions and corvee labor rebates, and to be generous in reassessing reclaimed land, so that the effects of decades of catastrophes and the culminating earthquake could be mitigated. To attain such concessions one had to keep constantly pressing, for the gov- ernment moved slowly, and as far as Peking was concerned, there were hundreds of T’an-ch’engs, each with its own defi- nitions of its own crises, and each one needing to be evaluated on its own terms. Weeks went by before the effects of the 1668 earthquake in central Shantung were examined by offi- cials from the Board of Revenue, and it took eighteen months before tax rebates for the area were approved. The board’s final decision was that such an earthquake should be con- sidered in the same light as a serious drought or flood, thus bringing the local population a tax rebate for one year of 30 per cent; this rebate was extended to those who had already paid part of the year’s taxes in advance installments. The board also recommended that in view of the high casualties T’an-ch’eng county’s assessed labor-service total should be lowered by 400 persons. However, no generosity was seen in this gesture by the local officials in T’an-ch’eng, who esti-
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mated that almost 1500 of the earthquake’s dead had been on the tax registers as able-bodied males liable for services; the government’s decision therefore meant that the local com- munity would still have to come up with 1100 previously unregistered males and draft them onto the corvee labor rolls.
In his reminiscences Huang reflected on the difficulties he encountered in raising morale in the county, for the locals had come to believe that they were caught in a series of crises that robbed their lives of all meaning. “When I was serving in T’an-ch’eng,” he wrote, “many people held their lives to be of no value, for the area was so wasted and barren, the common people so poor and had suffered so much, that essentially they knew none of the joys of being alive.” Huang observed that this pervasive misery and sense of unworthiness, when coupled with the traditional obstinacy and bellicosity of T’an- ch’eng people, led to stormy family scenes and to a rash of suicides: “A father and son in the same household could be transformed in a moment into violent antagonists; relatives and friends in the same village would get into fights at drink- ing parties; every day one would hear that someone had hanged himself from a beam and killed himself. Others, at intervals, cut their throats or threw themselves into the river.” Huang responded to this by trying to shame the inhabitants of T’an-ch’eng out of committing suicide. In a harsh procla- mation that he ordered posted in the rural villages and in the streets of the local market towns, he wrote:
“Those men who commit suicide, hanging themselves from the rafters or throwing themselves into the water, will spend an eternity as ghosts, crammed in the eaves or drifting on the waters. Who is there to pity them if the officials refuse to collect their bodies and leave them as food for the flies and maggots? Those women who kill themselves, dangling from ropes or hanging from their kerchiefs, will haunt deserted alleys and the inner rooms. Why should anyone feel shame if
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we delay holding an inquest on their corpses and leave their bare bodies exposed for all to see? Your bodies were be- queathed to you by your mothers and fathers who gave birth to you, but you go so far as to destroy those bodies. Only once in ten thousand cosmic cycles can you expect to be rein- carnated into human form, yet you treat your bodies as if they were the bodies of pigs and dogs—that is something I hate and detest. If you have no pity on the bodies bequeathed to you, then why should I have pity on the bodies bequeathed to you? If you think of yourselves as pigs and dogs, then why should I not also look upon you as pigs and dogs?”
Despite Huang’s words, the world of ghosts and nightmares remained a part of T’an-ch’eng. The Local History mentioned how unusually superstitious the people were: over half of them believed in ghosts and magical arts; they venerated women mediums who could conjure up the spirit world as if they were gods; when ill they would never take medicine but consulted the local shamans instead; neighbors would gather in groups and waste thousands of copper coins (which they could not afford) in making offerings as they prayed through the night. One of the most potent local spirits was believed to live in the Ma-ling mountains, just east of the city; he was named “Yu-yii,” and Feng had been intrigued enough by this spirit to inquire into its antecedents. He found that Yu-yii was supposed to be a descendant of a Ch’in warrior with an almost identical name who had studied the mysteries of nature and longevity from Taoist sages; when Yu-yii had plumbed all the mysteries of heaven and nature he retired to a cave at Ma- ling, gave up eating the grains of ordinary mortals, subsisting instead on pine-tree wood, on which diet he attained a great age. Also, Confucius’s favorite pupil, Tseng-tzu, was believed to have settled in the northwest corner of T’an-ch’eng county, among the Mo-shan hills. The site had been honored with a tablet ard a school, though the tablet was now illegible and
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the school in ruins; local youths, gathering there to play music, would sometimes hear at evening the distant sound of a lute, though no player was to be seen.
Indeed, despite Huang’s exhortation, the whole cult of state Confucianism must have seemed remote to most of the people of T’an-ch’eng. Licentiates from the county who had dutifully sat for the chu-jen exams in 1669 had pondered three passages chosen that year by the Shantung examiners; they had placed them in their correct context and explicated them. From the Confucian Analects there was the phrase “They who know the truth” from Book VI, chapters 17 and 18: “The Master said, ‘Man is born for uprightness. If a man lose his uprightness, and yet live, his escape from death is the effect of mere good fortune.’ The Master said, ‘They who know the truth are not equal to those who love it, and they who love it are not equal to those who delight in it.’ ” From the Doctrine of the Mean came the phrase “Call him Heaven, how vast is he!” from the closing-sentences of Book XXXII, on the man of true sincerity: “Shall this individual have any being or anything beyond himself on which he depends? Call him man in his ideal, how earnest is he! Call him an abyss, how deep is he! Call him Heaven, how vast is he!” And from the Book of Mencius there was “By viewing the ceremonial ordinances” from Book II, Part I, where Mencius quotes Con- fucius’s disciple Tzu-kung in his absolute praise of his teacher (and of the historian’s power): “Tzu-kung said, ‘By viewing the ceremonial ordinances of a prince, we know the character of his government. By hearing his music, we know the char- acter of his virtue. After the lapse of a hundred ages I can arrange, according to their merits, the kings of a hundred ages—not one of them can escape me. From the birth of man- kind till now, there has never been another like our master.’ ” One could dream, from such passages, of how T’an-ch’eng might some day be ruled, or perhaps had once been ruled. But
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in the event, not a single student from T’an-ch’eng passed the 1669 examination (none had passed since 1646, nor would any pass again until 1708).
In 1670, too, the young Emperor K’ang-hsi issued his cele- brated Sixteen Moral Maxims on the maintenance of correct relationships and the avoidance of strife in family and society. Presumably the people of T’an-ch’eng heard the maxims, since the emperor ordered them ‘read in every township and village, but they must have seemed of doubtful utility, and the people often turned instead to their own local variant of the Confucian cult. This variant offered them at least the solace that their city had once had dignity, since it held as its premise the belief that Confucius himself had once traveled to T’an-ch’eng in search of enlightenment. Evidence for this belief could be found in a passage of the Tso-chuan commen- tary on the Spring and Autumn Annals, one of the original Confucian Classics. There it was stated that the little princi- pality of T’an had once existed on the site of the present city, and in the seventeenth year of Duke Ch’ao of Lu (524 B.C. in the Western calendar) the Viscount of T’an had visited the Duke of Lu, where Confucius was then employed. The duke asked why it was that all the senior officials in T’an had once been named after birds. The viscount replied:
“When my ancestor Shao-hao Che came into his inheri- tance, a phoenix was seen, so to record this bird’s appearance he named his officials with birds’ names. So-and-so Phoenix was minister of the calendar, so-and-so Swallow was master of the equinoxes, so-and-so Shrike master of the solstices, so-and- so Sparrow master of the seasons’ beginnings and so-and-so Golden Pheasant master of their endings; so-and-so Chu Dove was minister of instruction, Tan Dove was minister of war, Shih Dove was minister of works, Shuang Dove was minister of crime, and Hu Dove was minister of public affairs. . . . But after Cauan-hsii came to the throne they could not ar-
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range things by far-off terms and had to arrange them with terms from near at hand; those with offices over the people used terms from the people’s world; they could not do other- wise.
“When Confucius heard this he went to see the Viscount of T’an and studied with him. And afterward he said to the people: ‘I have heard that when the son of heaven loses good order among his officials, he can learn from the wild tribes around. That indeed seems to be true.’ “
The people of T’an-ch’eng claimed to know the exact spot where Confucius had sought the advice of their viscount twenty-two hundred years before—just inside the north gate of the magistrate’s current office compound—and the place was honored with a temple, while a more public plaque in front of the yamen announced the general location. Similarly, it was believed that, after his talks with the viscount, Con- fucius had climbed up into the Ma-ling hills just to the east of T’an-ch’eng, and from that eminence had gazed out to sea; the hill was named after Confucius, and a pavilion in his honor was erected there. Officials may have modified their accounts of these stories with “it is said,” or “people believe that,” but they themselves covered the sites with their poems, and the shrines were among the first to be rebuilt after the earthquake of 1668. The mountain shrine was adjacent to the spirit cave of Yu-yu, and perhaps each gained prestige from the presence of the other.
Huang Liu-hung accepted them, and let them both be, for they were living shrines. He reserved his censure for the many abandoned temples that were scattered across T’an- ch’eng county and threatened his sense of order. They were natural meeting places for dissolute couples, vagrants, and conspirators, he felt, and should be regularly patrolled or—if possible—boarded up. For to Huang each example of deviant behavior increased the misery of T’an-ch’eng, and the preva-
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lence of lust was clear evidence of the decay of moral fiber. Married women and unmarried girls did not stay within their doors as they should, he charged, but made themselves up and dressed in finery; they strolled by the rivers or rode in fancy carriages up into the hills, where they said they went to wor- ship the gods or pay homage to Buddha; but while there crowds of young people of both sexes mingled together and sported in the monks’ lodgings. They were “butterflies besotted by flowers.” Huang Liu-hung conjured up more ex- amples of their depravity: young men lounged by the road- side and mocked the women with obscene jokes; the women, swayed by their passions, handed out their enameled hairpins as pledges of their love, behaving no differently from common prostitutes; husbands rented out their wives, servants egged on their masters, old women acted as go-betweens, nuns besmirched their convents, midwives offered other services besides delivery of the new born. The people became like dogs, “running in and out through holes in their back doors.”
P’u Sung-ling heard the roar of the 1668 earthquake mov- ing up from the direction of T’an-ch’eng as he was drinking wine with his cousin, by the light of a lamp:
“The table began to rock and the wine cups pitched over; we could hear the sounds of the roof beams and the pillars as they began to snap. The color drained from our faces as we looked at each other. After a few moments we realized it was an earthquake and rushed out of the house. We saw the buildings and homes collapse and, as it were, rise up again, heard the sounds of the walls crashing down, the screams of men and women, a blurred roar as if a caldron were coming to the boil. People were dizzy and could not stay on their feet; they sat on the ground and swayed in unison with the earth. The waters of the river rose up ten feet or more; the cries of roosters, the din of dogs barking filled the city. After an hour
2o O The Death of Woman Wang
or so, calm began to return; and then one could see, out in the streets, undressed men and women standing in groups, ex- citedly telling of their own experiences, having quite forgot- ten that they were wearing no clothes.”
P’u Sung-ling was born in 1640 and spent most of his life in the town of Tzu-ch’uan, on the northern slope of the mountain massif of central Shantung that bordered T’an- ch’eng in the south. His hometown had been spared the ter- rors of the Manchu sack of 1643—though not the terrors of anticipation—and he himself can have had little personal re- collection of the agonies of the early 1640s; but his stories about the famines of those years, about families of refugees streaming through I-chou on their way south and dying by the roadside, about men captured by bandits and sold to the Manchus to work on their estates, about widows struggling to hold onto their lands after their husbands are dead—all have the detailed and authentic ring of tales told by survivors, his townsmen, friends or family:
In 1640 there was a great famine, and there were cases of can-
nibalism. One day Liu, who was serving as a police runner in
Tzu, came across a man and a woman weeping bitterly, and
asked them what the trouble was. They replied, “We’ve been
married over a year, but now there is no way we can both survive
in this time of famine, so we weep.”
A while later he saw the couple again, in front of an oil seller’s
shop, and there seemed to be some kind of quarrel going on. Liu
approached and the shopowner, a certain Ma, explained, “This
man and his wife are dying of starvation, every day they come
and beg me for a little sesame oil to keep them alive. Now the
man is trying to sell me his wife. But in my house there are
already more than ten women that I’ve bought, so what does one
more matter to me? If she’s cheap, I’ll make a deal; if not, that’s
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that! It’s really ridiculous that he should go on bothering me like this.”
To this the man replied, “Grain now costs as much as pearls; unless I can get at least three hundred cash I won’t have enough to pay to run away somewhere else. Obviously both of us want to stay alive—if I sell her and even so don’t get enough money to escape death, then what have we gained? It is not that I want to be blunt, rather I am just asking you to show me a bit of charity for which you’ll be rewarded in the underworld.”
Liu was moved by the story, and asked Ma how much he would offer. “In these days the price for a woman is only about one hundred cash,” said Ma.
Liu asked him not to bring down the price, and also said that he would be willing to put up half of it, but Ma wouldn’t agree; so Liu, who was young and easily upset, said to the man, “He’s a mean-spirited person, not worth bothering about. I’d like to make you a present of the sum you mentioned; if you can escape this disaster, and stay together with your wife, won’t that be the best thing of all?” So he gave them the sum from his purse; the couple wept in thanks, and departed.
P’u Sung-iing was seven when serious disasters occurred in his hometown. That summer the bandit army of Hsieh Ch’ien managed to seize Tzu-ch’uan and hold out there for over two months, while a Manchu army slowly assembled and prepared to recapture the city. The deaths and suicides of men and women in Tzu-ch’uan during that year of 1647 dominate the Tzu-ch’uan Local History, just as those in 1643 did that of T’an-ch’eng; and the occupying army may have been little better than the rebels it came to oust, if we may judge from the preamble of one of P’u’s later stories: “Whenever a great army comes to an area,” he wrote, “it causes worse destruction than a force of bandits; for if the people catch some of the bandits they can wreak vengeance on them, but the people do
22 O The Death of Woman Wang
not dare take vengeance against soldiers. The one way troops differ slightly from bandits is that they do not dare to kill people quite so heedlessly.”
P’u was also powerfully moved by the massive rebellion of Yii Ch’i, which ran to its end in eastern Shantung during November and December 1661. He writes of the mass execu- tions and the mass graves where surviving relatives could not locate their dead to claim them; of the artisans of Chi-nan making modest fortunes out of coffin building until the better qualities of wood ran out; of fugitives hiding, when a detach- ment of rebels unexpectedly returned, among the piles of corpses; of families who fled to caves in the hills only to be trapped and killed, their possessions burned. And in this and other rebellions he saw the social changes that were generated as class and regional lines blurred among the refugees: how gentry turned to lead bandit gangs in self-defense or dreamed briefly of personal triumphs, how a literatus could marry a bandit’s daughter under compulsion but come to love her as a wife. He writes of robbers who claimed they only killed “un- righteous men”; of a destitute married couple carefully dis- cussing whether the man should become a bandit or the woman a prostitute; of a Shantung gang that burned the feet of the members of a wealthy family to force them to say where their wealth was hidden, and then left the family’s private granary open so that the starving poor of the village could loot it at their leisure.
Throughout this period the mountains that lay between Tzu-ch’uan and T’an-ch’eng were a base for bandits, who could strike out to the north or south at the comparatively defenseless townships in the valleys. Both T’eng and I coun- ties, west of T’an-ch’eng, were notorious for their troublesome gangs, which had become a byword in other local histories. P’u described the situation sardonically in one of his briefest stories:
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“During the Shun-chih reign,* in the counties of T’eng and I, seven out of every ten people were rebels, and the officials did not dare arrest them all. Later, when things were settled, the magistrates classified them separately as ‘rebel households.’ Whenever there was a conflict between these households and the good local people, the magistrates used to slant their decisions in favor of the rebels, fearing that other- wise they might rebel again. So it came about that litigants would falsely claim to be ‘rebel households’ and their op- ponents would struggle to prove the claim invalid: both claims would have to be laid out, and before one could decide the rights and wrongs of the case one had to decide if the claim to be a rebel was true or false; back and forth went the arguments and counterarguments, and much time was spent checking out the registries.
“It happened that in one of the magistrate’s yamens there were a great many fox spirits, and since they bewitched the magistrate’s daughter, he sent for a shaman; this latter, by means of a spell, trapped the fox spirits in a bottle, which he then threw into the fire. At which one of the foxes in the bottle shouted out, ‘But I am from a rebel household.’ None of those who heard this could hold back his laughter.”
In many of P’u Sung-ling’s stories fantasy and reality are fused in this way, as he struggled to define the inexpressible world in which he had grown up. For he was deeply inter- ested in such local beliefs, and varied between mocking some as superstitious and taking others seriously. He was particu- larly intrigued by ventriloquy, which was something of a Shantung specialty, and described how one Shantung medium—skilled at this art—plied her trade:
“One day a woman of twenty-four or twenty-five came to my village; she carried a bagful of remedies and offered to sell her medical art. When someone sought advice about their
- The first Ch’ing emperor, who ruled from 1644 to 1661.
24 ® The Death of Woman Wang
illness, the young woman replied that she could not supply the prescription herself but that she would have to wait until darkness to consult the spirits. That evening she cleaned out a little room and shut herself inside. A crowd of people pressed around the door and windows, ears ready for any sound, wait- ing. There were a few furtive mutterings, but no one dared so much as cough; inside the room and out there was no move- ment. As darkness fell, suddenly they heard the sound of the hanging screen being moved, and the woman inside asked, ‘Is that you, Chiu-ku?’
“A woman’s voice replied, ‘I have come.’
“The woman also asked, ‘Is La-mei with you?’ and it sounded as if a servant girl answered, ‘Yes, I’ve come.’ . . .
“After a while they heard Chiu-ku call for writing imple- ments, and then the sound of a piece of paper being torn to size, the tinkle of the cap as it was removed from the brush tip, the sound of the inkstick being rubbed across the ink- stone. Later came the sharp sound of the brush being thrown down on a table, followed by the soft sounds of little pinches of medicinal drugs being packaged. After another pause the young woman raised the hanging screen, and called to the patient to come and get her medicine and the prescription.”
P’u adds that the watchful crowd truly believed that spirits had been present, although the prescription, once tested on the patient, turned out not to be very efficacious.
On another occasion P’u Sung-ling was staying with a friend in a Shantung village; the friend falling sick, P’u was advised to repair to the house of woman Liang, a medium who could summon up a fox spirit skilled in medicine:
“Liang was a woman of about forty, and looked extremely wary, as if she were a fox herself; we entered her house and found ourselves in a room divided down the middle by a red curtain. Peeping behind the curtain, I saw a picture of Kuan- yin hanging on the wall and two or three scrolls of a horseman
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holding a spear, with a numerous retinue behind him. At the foot of the north wall was a table with a little chair on it—not more than a foot high—and on the chair an embroidered cushion. It was here, she said, that the spirit sat whenever he came. We all burned incense and bowed; the woman clapped three times on the chiming stones and murmured some indis- tinct sentences. After she had finished this invocation she courteously invited us to be seated on a couch in the outer room, while she stood by the screen and tidied her hair; then, resting her chin in her hands, she told us all the miraculous doings of the spirit. . . . Scarcely had she finished speaking when we heard the faintest of rustling sounds in the room, as of bats calling in their flight; and while we strained to hear, there was a sudden violent noise from the table, as if someone had dropped a heavy stone. ‘You’ll scare people to death!’ said the woman, turning around, and we heard someone sighing and muttering on the table—it sounded like the voice of a still vigorous old man. The woman hid the little chair from view with a palm-leaf fan, and from the chair came a strong voice, saying, ‘Fate unites us, fate unites us.’ “
P’u’s life at this time was sorrowful, after proud begin- nings: he attained the lower literary degree of licentiate com- mendably early, when he was eighteen, and won the praises of local literati and officials, but he could never transmute this into success at the chil-jen examinations, the essential next stage on the ladder to bureaucratic office and fortune. All his life, as his erudition grew, he relentlessly pursued a higher literary degree, but the prize always eluded him, and was granted—with honorific irony—only by special grace when he was seventy-one.
He found some solace, as he tells us gently, in his children and in his wife’s character and patient loyalty:
“When our eldest son Jo was born, my wife used to take him by the hand and they’d go and hide near the paths where
26 O The Death of Woman Wang
they had seen weasels or squirrels—and were thrilled if they could hear them patter by. If the rain hissed down in the yard, if the winds wailed, if the thunder crashed and rumbled, if the chickens screeched out in fear when a wild dog broke into their pen at night, making the pigs squeal and rush around their sty—our son knew no fear, for he had long been sleeping soundly while she gathered the coals into a glowing pile and quietly waited for dawn. . . .
“When she was young she worked hard at her spinning, and even when she was old and had bad pains in her arms she kept on spinning. Our clothes were washed again and again, and even the smallest rents were patched. Unless guests were expected, there was no meat in our kitchen. If I had to go on a journey somewhere, and she got hold of some delicacies, she wouldn’t eat them herself but would store them away, waiting for my return. They had always gone bad by the time I got back home.”
The irony of this last sentence was real, for the moments of happiness within his own family were constantly being ruined by squabbles between his mother and his sisters-in-law, and by the genteel poverty into which all of them had lapsed after his father’s failures in both the careers he had pursued, the scholarly and the commercial.
It was during this decade of the 1670s, while P’u Waited at home for employment or worked drudgingly with local gentry families as scribe or teacher, that he wrote his astonishing collection of stories and notes known as Liao-chai chih-i, roughly translatable as Strange Stories Written in the Liao Studio. We know from P’u’s own account that he drew these stories from a wide range of sources: from his imagination, from earlier collections, from his friends, from acquaintances he met on his travels, and from a growing circle of correspon- dents. From his own comments in his stories we know too that many were colored by his childhood experiences in Shantung,
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aided by the recollections of his own relatives. According to the preface he appended to the collection when he was thirty- nine, the work came hard to him, and he wrote in loneliness:
“I am here alone in the night, the light flickers as the lamp burns down; the wind sighs through my bleak studio, my work table has an icy chill. I am collecting scraps of stuff to make my robe of stories, in the wild hope of adding new chapters to the Tales of the Underworld. I drink to help the book along but can barely express the force of my bitterness- all I can pass on to the reader is this, but perhaps it will be enough to get me some sympathy. Alas, I am a bird scared of the winter frosts who huddles into the branches that give no shelter; I am an insect in autumn chirping under the moon, pressed against the door of the house in search of warmth. Only those who truly care for me can understand what I am saying.”
Yet P’u Sung-ling did not only brood; he could recall him- self to himself and recapture the moments when his boyhood and magic had been joined together:
Once, when I was a boy, I went to the prefectural capital at the time of the spring festival. It was the custom there, on the eve of the festival, for the merchants of the different trades to deco- rate their shops with colored streamers and to parade with drums and wind instruments down to the financial commissioner’s ya- men; they called this “celebrating the spring,” and I went along with some friends to enjoy the fun. On that day the strollers in the streets were packed like walls; on the seats in front of their yamen sat four officials in their robes of red, opposite each other. Since I was just a child, I didn’t know what ranks these officials held; mv ears were filled with the babble of the crowd’s voices and the sound of drums and music.
Suddenly a man leading a young boy whose hair hung loose, and with a carrying pole over his shoulder, climbed up near the
28 0 The Death of Woman Wang
officials; it seemed as if he were trying to explain something, but
with a myriad of voices crashing like waves I couldn’t make out
his actual words. I could see that up on the steps the officials
were laughing and that one of the yamen attendants called out
loudly to the man that he should put on a performance.
“What performance?” asked the man as he rose in response to
the order.
The officials conferred together for a bit, and told the attendant
to ask the man what he was good at.
“At inverting the order of nature,” he replied, and after the
attendant reported this back to the officials and they had conferred
a little longer, the attendant came back down to the man and
told him to produce a peach.
The magician called out to them that he would do it. Taking
off his coat, he laid it on top of his boxes, but then pretended to
complain to his son, saying, “Our officials have made it impossible
for me: the ice has not yet melted from the ground, how is one
to get a peach? Yet if I don’t get one, I’m afraid their excellencies
will all be angry with me.”
His son replied, “Father, you’ve already agreed. How can you
get out of it now?”
The magician brooded over this for a long while, and then ex-
claimed, “I have thought up a good scheme. It’s early spring, the
snow still on the ground. We’ll never find peaches down on this
earth. Only in the garden of the Royal Mother Above, where
through the four seasons nothing ever fades, may we find some.
We’ll have to go up to Heaven and steal some.”
“How so!” cried the boy. “Do you think there are steps which
take one to Heaven?”
“I have my methods,” replied the father, and taking from his
box a coil of rope that looked to be some forty or fifty feet long,
he arranged one of the ends and tossed it away up into the air;
the rope stayed there hanging straight down, as if it were caught
on something. Then, as he slowly payed out the rope, it rose
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slowly higher and higher until it merged into the clouds and
none of the rope was left in his hands. “Come on, son!” he called.
“I’m old and weak, my body is heavy and my joints are stiff; I
could never get up there, it must be you who goes.” And he gave
the end of the rope to the boy, saying, “If you grasp this you’ll be
able to climb up.”
The boy took the rope but looked much put out and com-
plained: “Father, it’s you who are confused! How can you expect
me, on a rope as thin as this, to climb up to the highest heavens.
If it breaks when I am halfway up, what will be left of me?”
But the father urged him forcefully onward: “I’ve given my
word, we can’t have regrets now. I urge you to make this trip. It’ll
be no trouble for you, and when you get back with your loot we’ll
be sure to get a hundred taels reward, and we’ll use the money
to get you a beautiful wife.” So the boy grasped the rope and
went twisting away up it, where his hands had been, his feet fol-
lowed like a spider on the threads of its web, until at last he
reached the clouds and could be seen no more.
After some time had elapsed, a peach—large as a bowl—fell to
earth. The magician was delighted and handed it up to the offi-
cials; they passed it around to each other and examined it, for a
long while unable to tell if it was genuine or not. Suddenly the
rope thudded down to the ground, and the magician cried out in
fear, “Oh, no! Someone up there has cut our rope. What will hap-
pen to my son?” Moments later an object fell to the ground—he
peered at it—it was his son’s head, he held it in his hands and
wept. “The guardians discovered the theft of the peach, they have
killed my boy!” And then piece by piece there fell to earth first a
foot and then all the other limbs, which the father, plunged in
sorrow, gathered up one by one and put away in his box. “I am an
old man,” said he, “and this was my only son. Each day he came
with me on my journeys north and south. Now, because he obeyed
his stern father’s orders, he has unexpectedly met with this cruel
end. I must carry off his body now and bury him.” And climbing
3<D © The Death of Woman Wang
up to the presence of the officials and kneeling before them, he
said to them, “For the sake of this peach you have killed my son.
Have pity on me and help me to pay for his funeral, and I will be
sure to repay you.”
Each of the seated officials, who had watched in horror and
amazement, gave him a good sum. The magician took the money
and stuffed it into the pockets in his belt. Then he rapped on the
box, calling out, “Hey, my little one! Come out and thank every-
one for their generosity. What are you waiting for?” Whereupon
a boy with tousled hair pushed open the box with his head and
came out, turned to the officials and bowed. It was the magician’s
son!
I have always remembered that strange magic, from that long-
ago day until now. Later I was told that followers of the White
Lotus Sect could use magic in this way. Were this couple, per-
haps, descendants of theirs?
The last sentences may modify the boyhood magic, but in
his maturity, P’u Sune-ling could still dream his own dreams
and recapture the dreaming of them:
I was once given hospitality in the guest house of subprefect Pi.
In his garden the flowers and trees grew luxuriantly; in moments
of leisure we would stroll together there, so that I was able to
enjoy the beautiful view fully. One day I returned from admiring
the garden, feeling terribly tired; I took off my shoes, climbed
into bed, and dreamed that two girls, beautifully dressed, came to
me with this request: “We have a favor to ask you, and so it is we
dare to disturb you thus.”
I stood up, startled. “Who is it that wants to see me?”
They replied, “The Goddess of the Flowers.”
In my confusion I couldn’t grasp exactly what they were saying,
but I left the room and followed them. Soon before us appeared
halls and courts that reached up into the clouds; at their foot were
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steps of stone, rising tier on tier; we must have mounted more than
a hundred steps before we reached the upper level. I saw a red
door, opened wide, and two or three more girls, who went ahead
to announce that a guest had come. Shortly thereafter we stood
outside a hall. The door fastenings were of gold and the screens
of green, their shimmering pierced the eye. A girl came down the
steps from inside the hall, the ornaments tinkled at her belt, she
looked like an imperial consort.
Before I could pay my respects to her, she anticipated me by
saying, “Having respectfully troubled you, sir, to come here, it is
I who should be the first to thank you,” and she called to her
attendants to lay a mat upon the ground as if she intended to pay
me obeisance.
I felt myself confused and was unsure how to act, so I addressed
her in these words: “I am only a worthless fellow, and have been
more than enough honored by the fact that you summoned me
here; how could I dare to accept your homage, it would quite spoil
my joy.”
So she ordered them to take up the mat and set out a feast; we
sat to eat facing each other. After we had drunk several cups of
wine, I said to her, “I get drunk after drinking very little, arid am
afraid of acting improperly. If you would tell me why you sum-
moned me, I would feel much more at ease.”
She gave me no answer but made me drink another large cup
of wine. Again and again I asked her the cause of my summons,
until at last she replied, “I am the Goddess of Flowers. The mem-
bers of my family are delicate and we all make our home here.
But often the Wind sends his minions here and they do us great
damage. Now I have decided to offer the Wind direct battle, and
summoned you to draft my challenge.”
I was alarmed and answered, “My learning is so limited that I
am afraid of displeasing you, but since you honor me with your
command, I will struggle for you with my meager abilities.” She
was happy at this and took me up into the hall and gave me the
32 0 The Death of Woman Wang
necessaries for writing. All the ladies busied themselves, to wipe the table and dust mv seat, grind the ink and moisten the brush. One young girl, with her hair dangling down, folded over the paper for me, holding it steady beneath my wrist. I had barely written one or two sentences when the women pressed forward to read it over my shoulder. And I, who usually write so slowly, this one time felt my thoughts pour forth like the rushing waves.
Soon the draft was finished, and the ladies hurried to show it to their mistress. She looked it through and said that it was flaw- less, at which they escorted me back to my home. I awoke and remembered the details of the scene with great clarity; but of the words I had written, well over half had drifted away.
So as not to lose the stories that came his way, P’u would try to transcribe them immediately; often, too, he would de- scribe their exact provenance, as if to impress posterity with his conscientiousness. Thus in the only case of a story that is set identifiably in T’an-ch’eng, he tells us that he was shown a complete written version of the tale by a scholar in I-chou city as he, P’u, sheltered at an inn there one rainy day, on his way to the south, in the autumn of 1670. The story is about a man of some culture who lives in the post-station area of Hung-hua fou in the southern part of T’an-ch’eng county and has an affair with two ladies at once. The ladies give themselves to the scholar eagerly (as they do in many of P’u’s stories), and both turn out to be spirits, one harmful and one beneficial, who had been doomed to the shadow life of wandering ghosts. After a complex plot involving much magic, death, and re- birth, the ghostly spirits are exorcised, the bones of the origi- nal victims laid to rest, and the scholar lives peacefully with both women, now in new and human reincarnations. It is a story of fantasy, sensuality, and insecurity, and as such a fit- ting commentary on the place and time.
Jvoo
THE LAND
IN JANUARY 1671 there was an unusually heavy snowfall in T’an-ch’eng. In most years in Shantung snow was a sign of good fortune, for it protected the young shoots of the winter wheat from extreme cold and ensured a sturdy growth in the spring thaw. It was dryness or cold rain that was a worse threat, and if snow fell the New Year festival was held with especial joyfulness. But this year the snow did not stop falling. Huang Liu-hung, riding out to inspect some land on the border of T’an-ch’eng and I-chou, found the ice thick on the rivers, and at times his horse floundered in snow up to its belly. “There were drifts of ten feet or more on the plains,” says the Local History, “and the snow piled up level with the roofs of the villages and the tops of the trees. Houses were completely buried, and many of the poor people had to dig themselves out with their hands. Small villages were cut off for several days. Birds, wild hares, plants were frozen to death. With their seeds gone many people had no alternative but flight, and one could not count those who froze to death along the road. Trulv it was an unusual catastrophe.”
34 ‘^ The Death of Woman Wang
Yet it remained a local catastrophe, not a widespread re- gional one, and since no major exemptions were given by the central government, the tax collectors had to start making up their 1671 quotas.
At this time, T’an-ch’eng was a small, poor county. An oddly shaped administrative area, it had the bulk of its land in a block some fifteen miles square, and from each side of this two long pincers of land curled up toward the north for twenty-five to thirty miles. The southern area was fertile, the site of T’an-ch’eng city, the county capital, and of Ma-t’ou market, the county’s major trading center; these two towns sat close together, between the Shu and I rivers, which flowed straight through the county on their way to join the Yellow River. The land in the two pincers was hilly, mountainous in places, crisscrossed by smaller rivers, and surprisingly inacces- sible from the county capital. The fertile valley lands between the pincers, which would have made T’an-ch’eng richer, were in fact registered as part of I-chou, T’an-ch’eng’s larger and slightly more prosperous northern neighbor.
T’an-ch’eng was an agricultural county, and little was man- ufactured there: the Local History lists three varieties of cot- ton and silken cloth as being produced locally, but nothing else. Nor did many goods pass through the county: only Ma- t’ou market had much commercial activity, this by road to all directions except the east—where communications were cut by the long range of the Ma-ling mountains—and north and south along the I River, when there were adequate summer rains to keep up the water levels.
This was the winter wheat and kaoliang area of China, with low precipitation, hot in summer and cold in winter. The crops that grew in T’an-ch’eng along with the wheat and kaoliang staples were millet, soybeans and sesame, turnips and other root vegetables, melons and pumpkins, a variety of edible greens as well as onions and garlic, celery and eggplant.
The Land O 35
The fruits that grew were peaches and apricots, plums, pears, and cherries. There were walnuts and chestnuts, and some wild animals and birds that could be trapped and eaten—hare and deer, ducks, quail, pigeons and pheasants. So it was, at least, when times were good and the crops grew.
In these areas of winter crops there was little respite for the farming community, and harvesting was followed bv sowing rather than by rest. As soon as the snows had thawed and the winter-wheat shoots planted the previous October were grow- ing sturdily, the laborers gave a first turning to the fallow fields and began to carry the human and animal fertilizer from the homes and farmyards out to the land. In early May the fields were deep ploughed in preparation for kaoliang and millet (with draft animals if there were any, otherwise by teams of men), and the farmers carefully dropped, handful by handful, a mixture of seed, fertilizer, and crushed soybean powder into each furrow, each handful being about one foot apart. They leveled the fields with a heavy wooden harrow, and the soft soil was pressed down with a stone roller—those without a roller tramped on the ground with their feet. After three or four weeks, if the weather was kind, the young plants were some three inches high and had to be carefully thinned out with a hoe; a week beyond this the rows were weeded and earth was tamped around the base of each shoot so that it would stand upright as it grew; this process of weeding and tamping was repeated again and again as the shoots grew. By early June, in other fields, the winter wheat had ripened and was ready for harvest; the stalks were pulled out of the ground by hand, bound in small bundles, and carried to the threshing ground by barrow or on men’s backs. After the wheat was in, the cleared fields were lightly ploughed and soybean seeds planted in rows (a simple task that children could do) and then covered by harrow; no fertilizer was used unless there happened to be a surplus, but the beans had to be weeded
36 0 The Death of Woman Wang
every few days, and the farmers needed hot weather and sum- mer rains. As the beans grew, the kaoliang and millet came ready for harvesting, and in late August the stalks were pulled out by hand and carried to the threshing ground. Turnips, cabbages, and other vegetables were dried or pickled, and stored. There were no orchards—fruit was picked from indi- vidual trees as it ripened. The fields lay fallow through Sep- tember, and in early October the winter wheat was sown; if the young shoots were visible by the end of October, the chances for next year’s crop were good.
Like every other county in seventeenth-century China, T’an-ch’eng had a fixed revenue quota that it had to pay every year to Peking. The bulk of the revenues needed for paying local expenses in the county, and for meeting the quota de- mands of the central government, was provided in the form of two taxes—one was a tax on the land, the other a tax on certain individual adult males (paid usually with cash, but occasionally with labor service). Since the farmers were al- most never able to pay the full amount at one time, the gov- ernment broke the payment into installments for them, so that they paid according to this schedule:
In the second lunar month of each year 2 0 %
In the third month 1 0 %
In the fourth month 1 0 %
In the fifth month 5%
In the sixth month 5%
In the seventh month 15%
In the eighth month 15%
In the ninth month 1 0 %
In the tenth month 1 0 %
In the three coldest months of winter nothing had to be paid. In T’an-ch’eng’s terms the payment in the second lunar
month (mid-March to mid-April in the Western calendar)
The Land O 37
came when winter had been survived and the spun yarn and other handicrafts had been sold; the late spring taxes would be paid after the winter wheat and barley had been harvested; and the autumn taxes when the kaoliang, soybeans, and millet were in. Relief from taxation was also afforded by the lower rates during the hottest midsummer months between the two harvests.
Each of the nine tax-paying months was further subdivided into two halves of fifteen days each, so that the farmers and collectors had eighteen separate tax periods in every year. A period of five days after the end of each fifteen-day block was designated for the local collectors to track down defaulters; the next five days were set aside for the imposition of penalties.
Such a system could only be made workable by a thorough structure of mutual responsibility and supervision. T’an- ch’eng county was divided into four districts, and each of these districts was subdivided into eight townships. Each of the thirty-two townships of T’an-ch’eng had a township head, appointed for one year or longer by the magistrate, and it was this township head’s responsibility to make sure that the smaller units in his jurisdiction—subdivided further into vil- lages, groups of five households, and individual households- paid in their tax quotas on time.
In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, during the early years of the Ming dynasty, these local tax-gathering coordina- tors were often from powerful landlord families themselves and could be expected to bring massive pressure to bear on other delinquent households; the office was regarded as an honorific one, and on occasion the holders were even received in mass audiences by the emperor. By the 1660s, however, during the founding period of the Ch’ing dynasty, the post was no longer so coveted, nor did it have the same honorific con- notations, though in T’an-ch’eng county one could still find township heads who were widely respected and well con-
38 © The Death of Woman Wang
nected. Yii Shun, for example, the son of a licentiate and one of the successful defenders of T’an-ch’eng city in the fighting of 1641, had been unusually successful in continuing to col- lect taxes in the bleak days after the Manchu conquest of 1644, and he was publicly praised by the magistrate for his zeal. (He had two relatives who were also township heads, and perhaps the Yii family had particular expertise in this area, or special connections.) In 1671 he was still alive at the age of ninety, and Huang Liu-hung gave a banquet in his honor. But for many men the task was arduous, and it became common to appoint two men to share the post in a given township, with a yamen clerk assigned to assist the men in delivering the money collected.
The total population of T’an-ch’eng in 1670 was around 60,000; if there were about 15,000 people in each of the four districts, that would place some 1850 people in each town- ship, scattered among a dozen or more villages. About one in six of these people was registered as an adult male Qting), aged between sixteen and sixty, and thus liable to corvee labor or payment of a commuted tax in lieu of that labor.
Since the rulers of the Ch’ing state were concerned with achieving thorough control over their subject population, this system of registration for taxation purposes was accompanied —at least on paper—by another system of registration and listing known as the pao-chia system. In many ways this over- lapped with the taxation units, but the pao-chia had a more specifically police and militia function. Therefore the popula- tion of T’an-ch’eng county was registered in ascending circles—from the individual household, to the group of ten households, to ten groups of ten, and on to each district within the county. A modified version of the same system existed for the wards of the two main urban concentrations, T’an-ch’eng city and Ma-t’ou market, and for the more densely populated suburbs adjacent to them; a further modifi-
The Land O 39
cation existed for small or isolated village communities that numbered less than one hundred households. T’an-ch’eng city and Ma-t’ou market were the only large urban centers in the county at the time, though there were twenty-two areas desig- nated as “markets” (chi); these overlapped with the thirty-two townships into which the county was divided.
Each commoner household was also expected to list its members in full, by sex, relationship, and age, servants and hired hands included—these were the so-called fao-chia regis- ters, used for mutual security and responsibility in case of emergency for local crime. The names of the upper gentry, of senior and junior degree candidates, of Buddhist and Taoist monks and nuns had also to be reported in separate lists, although they were not included in the pao-chia tabulations. About two-fifths of the households were also expected to fur- nish a militiaman in emergencies, since they either had no member with any kind of literary degree, or no one serving in the yamen or the local government structure in any way, or were not exempt because the head-of-household was a widow or lacked descendants.
All these measures and regulations were allegedly in opera- tion in T’an-ch’eng, but they had little effect on tax collec- tion: by 1670 the county had been consistently in arrears for thirteen years.
On paper, at least, the basic tax rates in T’an-ch’eng were not excessive. The ting tax on registered individual males was 120 copper cash a year (0.12 taels*), assessed on 9498 persons, and yielding 1140 taels a year. (There were 242 members of the gentry and degree holders who were exempted from this payment.) The basic land tax was at a rate of 15.7 copper cash per mou (a mou being one-sixth of an acre); with 828,223 mou of registered land, that would bring in just over
- A tael was one ounce of silver and officially equivalent to one thousand copper cash.
40 0 The Death of Woman Wang
13,000 taels a year. Basic expenses could be easily met from such revenues: a little over 7300 taels had to be sent to the Board of Revenue in Peking; 1125 went for the wages of the magistrate, his runners and porters, his doormen and chair carriers, the militia, and the police director and his staff. There were other minor expenses for ritual sacrifices, rewards to examination candidates, patrolmen for the county post- station inns, and prison maintenance, and at first sight it would seem that these could have been met by quite minor surcharges on the existing taxes, especially since the major costs of the regular military garrisons were met by provincial funds, and T’an-ch’eng had traditionally had low corvee quotas for river work.
The most important cause of the ongoing financial crisis in T’an-ch’eng stemmed from its geographical location on the eastern one of the two main roads to the south. This impor- tant strategic route led eventually to Chekiang and, beyond that, to the base of the southern feudatory Keng Ching- chung; it was a route both for military supplies and for com- munications—whether urgent or routine—sent along the gov- ernment courier system. This meant that at any time people from T’an-ch’eng might be subjected to extraordinary de- mands for road maintenance or transport services, and in addi- tion had the further expense of caring for officials and their retinues passing through. The situation was compounded by the relative poverty of this entire area of Shantung and by the shortage of horses and post stations. The T’an-ch’eng stations had to cover the forty miles of road north to I-chou, over thirty miles south to Ssu-wu, and not only the sixty miles westward to Yi-hsien, but another twenty-five miles beyond that, since Yi-hsien had no horses of its own. The government had as- signed 3360 taels of T’an-ch’eng’s tax monies to be used for the expenses of fodder, wages for grooms and couriers, equip- ment, and other stabling expenses; but this did not meet all
The Land 0 41
the costs involved even for these items, nor did it cover veteri- nary costs and the purchase of extra horses. The result, as Feng K’o-ts’an wrote in the Local History, was that local offi- cials in T’an-ch’eng were either forced into arrears with regu- lar taxation deliveries or forced to neglect the horses under their care. (Feng knew what he was talking about, since he himself had lost his job for just such reasons.) Also, the temptations for local graft were massive, since fodder was costly, and the annual allowance for each horse in the two post stations was a little over thirty-two taels; obviously if one could draw the expenses for horses that were listed on the rolls but not actually in service, one could make a great deal of money, far more for example than by padding the rolls of the grooms, who earned 12.4 taels a year, or soldiers, who earned 6.
There had been a series of reforms, widespread in China since the late sixteenth century, which had led to many of the old corvee and service payments being commuted to silver; by 1670 the people of T’an-ch’eng paid most tax in silver, but several service taxes still remained: the collecting of great masses of willow branches, for example, to be bound up and used in shoring up the dikes on the Yellow River and Grand Canal; service in leading military horses to their destinations at various garrisons; escorting the mule trains carrying sup- plies; and furnishing special timber to the Board of Public Works for palace construction—this particular item had to be delivered all the way to Peking, a distance of over 550 miles. Furthermore, though there had not customarily been a de- mand on T’an-ch’eng workers for service on the Yellow River and Grand Canal, because of the poverty of the county and its distance from the main waterways, this policy had been re- versed in the early 1650s, again in 1666, and yet again in 1670 for the vast dredging and diking project on Lake E-ma to the south. Huang Liu-hung wrote of the people of T’an- ch’eng being sent nearly one hundred miles, without proper
42 O The Death of Woman Wang
food or shelter, to work on this million-tael project. “Once they had died or fled,” he wrote, “how would they ever be put to work again? And how would the ravaged lands in their own county ever be opened up again for cultivation?”
Certainly in the years prior to the earthquake the govern- ment had responded generously enough by reducing basic quotas to correspond with the levels of disaster in the county. Thus in the late Ming, T’an-ch’eng had a quota of 40,002 able-bodied males eligible for corvee; this figure dropped by 3540 in the famine of 1640, because of death or flight; it dropped by another 2734 men in 1641, killed when bandits destroyed Ma-t’ou and other nearby market towns; and dropped again by 790 later in the year, that being the number who died in the epidemics following the raids. That would have made the total of corvee males in the county 32,938 when the Manchus attacked in 1643. The Local History records that the slaughter was so terrible that “only three or four were left alive out of every ten”; if we take this statement literally as a 30 per cent survival rate, we would be left with a figure of 9881 corvee males, which accords well with the new quota given for the county by the government in 1646 of 9927. This number, after some initial resettlement in the area, was lowered even further to the 1670 figure of 9498, because of the earthquake of 1668 (though, as we have seen, the local officials did not find this an adequate response). Similarly, the number of officially listed townships shrank from eighty-five to thirty-two, and the area of land assessed for tax purposes was lowered over the same period by almost one- third.
This drop in registered land suggests one of two things: either labor was in such short supply that a large percentage of the land in T’an-ch’eng was abandoned, or the chaos of the times was so intense, that landlords were able to remove their land from the tax registers and make sure that it stayed off. If the second alternative is the right one, then it was more likely
The Land O 43
that larger landowners rather than small peasant proprietors had the influence to achieve the desired result—and the tax boon to them may have been even larger than it looks, since the registered “fiscal acre” might in fact be composed of two or three acres ol poor land that could be expected to produce the same amount of crops as one fertile acre. The Local History asserts that when land in T’an-ch’eng was given the lowest rating on the nine-point scale, then it was truly terrible l and- prone to flooding from the I and Shu rivers or their tribu- taries, staying water-logged through the summer: to expect a harvest regularly from such land was like “looking for yields from a field of rocks,” and at the best one could “hope for one good harvest out of every ten.” But the Local History remarks neither on how many people sought to register land in such a category, nor on whether a landlord family with the resources to drain such land effectively was ever reclassified back into a higher tax assessment.
Sometimes the various categories of hardship overlapped, as in the area of Feng-shan township on the I River, which bordered on the jurisdictions of T’an-ch’eng and I-chou. The tax problems here had grown so complex that Huang Liu- hung and the I-chou magistrate were ordered out in the middle of winter to investigate what was happening. Riding through the township in the snow and interviewing the locals, they found twelve small villages, scattered over half a dozen miles, that had received differing degrees of flood damage over the last two decades and were in a desperate situation; about half of the three hundred households that once farmed there had fled or died. Large landholdings had been abandoned by their landlords, so the land was no longer registered in any- one’s name for tax purposes. Around 1600 acres registered as “sandy soil” had once produced crops even during moderate floods; and for twenty-five years, the farmers pointed out, they had paid some taxes, because at least things had been better than d i i r ina the vears 16/10—16/12 Ru t fbp massive Aoodincr
44 ® The Death of Woman Wang
after the 1668 earthquake had washed more sand onto the fields, so the farmers could no longer pay anything at all. In such cases it took prolonged appeals by the local farmers—in conjunction with an appeal by the magistrate to the prefect— before the land was formally removed from the tax rolls.
Even if the local farmers had the surplus grain or money to pay taxes with, their problems were not necessarily over. There was the problem of assayers, who had the monopoly of converting the farmers’ copper cash into the silver that was required for tax payment: some assayers cheated on the purity of the metal, some concealed fragments of the metal while shaping the ingots, some charged large extra fees for applying the seals that stated the purity of the metal, some charged extra to work a little faster—knowing full well that if they worked slowly the farmers would have the extra expense of an overnight stay in the city—and some indulged in such ex- treme forms of cheating as kicking over the melting pot before the silver had been properly weighed out. On other occasions, if the country people brought their grain to the city in person, they were met by “helpful” townsfolk who offered to conduct their business for them while they rested, took the grain (allegedly to the taxation depot), and then never returned with the money. For these and other reasons, said Huang Liu- hung, countrymen looked upon “the city as hell, the clerks as ghosts.” Part of the object of the decentralization under the thirty-two township heads was to have local taxation pickup points so that the farmers would not have to go into T’an- ch’eng city at all. Instead, large tax-collection chests were in- stalled at more convenient points, and the money paid into these chests was (at least theoretically) carefully checked on a daily roster, with correct receipts issued in triplicate: one copy for the payee, one for the collector, and one for the magis- trate’s files.
Taxes on land and agricultural production were not the
The Land O 45
only ones levied in T’an-ch’eng. There were taxes in the forms of objects or produce that had to be sent to Peking, and concealed taxes in the form of produce bought from the locals by the government at far below its cost price. There were taxes on the reed beds, which could be gathered for roofing and fuel, taxes on fishermen, taxes on street peddlers, and taxes (prepaid by the merchants) on every ounce of salt that was sold. There were taxes on every transaction that the licensed brokers performed in real-estate or land sales. There were taxes of five taels a year on every licensed pawnshop— though exemptions were given for deals in which desperate peasants were pawning their farm tools for grain. There were sales taxes on all brokers’ dealings in livestock and tobacco, cotton goods, wines, and grain for making fermented liquor. There was a “meltage fee” for converting taxes paid in copper to silver of the accepted standard.
The collection of these extra taxes could be a nightmare for payer and collector alike, as P’u Sung-ling pointed out in the opening lines of his sardonic story “The Fighting Cricket”:
“The Court took much delight in playing with fighting crickets, and ordered an annual quota of them from the people. These insects used not to be reared in the western part of the country until the magistrate of Hua-yin, eager to make up to his superior, gave him a present of one that was a skilled fighter; thenceforth his superior demanded a regular supply, and the magistrate passed this order down ‘to the village head- men. The result was that ne’er-do-wells in the town sought for fine crickets and raised them carefully; the price of the insects went up and up, and they were treated as objects of rarity. The headmen’s own tough subordinates used this fact when they went to collect the tax levies, and the furnishing of a single cricket could ruin the resources of several households.
“Out in the countryside lived a man named Ch’eng who kept failing at the lower examinations; since he was rather
46 © The Death of Woman Wang
stupid, the local toughs recommended him for the position of headman. Ch’eng did everything he could to get out of it, but could not avoid the job. Before a year was out his resources were all gone; when the time came to supply the quota of crickets, Ch’eng, who did not dare put pressure on his neigh- bors yet could not raise the sum himself, wished in his grief to put an end to his life. . . .”
Pressures, levies, and deadlines were commonplace in T’an- ch’eng, as Huang Liu-hung knew. He would have liked to reduce some of the pressures on the country people by increas- ing taxation on the townsmen, since he was convinced that the taxes on urban commercial transactions could be made to vield far more than they did; he guessed that not more than 20 per cent of taxable commercial transactions were ever re- ported, and even from Ma-t’ou market he only collected a little under 500 taels: 230 from the sheds of the salt picklers that ran along the I River, and some 250 Irom the brokers handling long-distance shipments of cloth and foodstuffs, wine and tobacco. Yet Huang was unable to remedy this state of affairs. One trouble was that the urban population was not easy to control; it was prone to riot over economic grievances, and the more wealthy merchants were not T’an-ch’eng men at all: the majority were from Shansi in the northwest, though there were also many from Kiangsu to the south. They were thus able to exert pressures on those local officials who hailed from their native provinces. The two market headmen of Ma- t’ou at this time were both involved in law cases that showed their weakness and vulnerability: Ch’eng Yii had been framed in a complicated corruption charge by the manager of the local distilled-liquor guild; Chang Mao-te had had his grain supply stolen by two soldiers. When Chang complained to their superiors, the soldiers returned with reinforcements and savagely beat him; “the wounds covered his body as the scales cover the fish,” reported the police official who ex- amined the victim shortly afterward.
The Land 0 47
Several barriers to fair and adequate tax collection were erected by the soldiers in T’an-ch’eng, for they caused trouble out of all proportion to their numbers. They not only feuded with the grooms and postal-system staff, but they were also violent with members of the magistrate’s own staff: the squad leader Chang San let his wife sickle the grain in people’s fields, and later turned some of his squad against the police constable who came to press him for tax payments. Another soldier stood by while his son bloodied the face of one of the yamen runners with a cudgel. A third entered the house of constable Chao, helped himself to drink, and raped Chao’s wife. Other soldiers, like Sang Ssu from the garrison in I-chou, had managed to accumulate land holdings of over four hundred mou, on which he paid no taxes whatsoever; he also beat up the runner who tried to collect tax from him. On other occasions the details of land ownership were so tangled that it was virtually impossible to sort out to whom a given piece of property belonged, with overlapping claims going back into the Ming dynasty, with contracts issued and voided in the 1650s, and with litigants reckless enough to insert forged versions of findings in their favor, dated many years previously, into the magistrate’s own back files in the yamen.
In T’an-ch’eng, Huang Liu-hung had found, the landlords used six major types of deception to lower their land tax as- sessments. They hired managers to run their land under as- sumed names so that they could not be tracked down and held accountable. They pretended that their land was in fact owned by families living in another jurisdiction. They would hand in their taxes in cash or grain as part of a neighboring family’s own tax quota—when that neighboring family was paying at a lower rate. They managed falsely to declare the quality of their land, registering (for example) middle-grade land assessed at 30 per cent as being lowest grade (20 per cent) or the highest (50 per cent) as being middle. They kept
48 0 The Death of Woman Wang
the grain they had grown on their own land had been pro- duced on someone else’s land. In T’an-ch’eng these problems were exacerbated by the fact that a good deal of local land had been bought at cheap prices by landlords who lived in I-chou, hence out of the local magistrate’s jurisdiction.
This kind of graft was carried out by landlords entirely in their own interest: as Huang Liu-hung put it, “They want to make a large grain production look small so that they can get out of a heavy tax levy.” Even more complex was the system by which certain landlords took over the tax responsibilities of others in the system of protection and proxy remittances known as pao-lan. This system was particularly used by those who wanted to avoid the service levies owed by each regis- tered adult; since landlords with examination degrees were exempt from much of the service tax, their poor relations and friends, or other wealthy neighbors, would make their land over to such privileged families, so that they themselves paid tax at a lower rate, as well as shared in certain other privileges such as paying the lower “meltage fees” or using the tax- receipt boxes in the county city, where the gentry could get certain auxiliary charges waived. The poor actively sought to get in on such proxy relationships, both for the tax advantages and for the protection against the magistrate’s staff that the rich household could give them. In return the landlords got prestige and loyal followers. Upper gentry might have several dozen such semidependents, known as “bonded adults,” and even low-level degree candidates had ten or more. As a result, the local headmen responsible for apportioning service tasks, or registering new able-bodied males in the county lists, would keep away from the “bonded adults” and pile even heavier assessments on those who were without such backing; the result was that an annual levy, which should have been around one-tenth of a tael, rose for many of the poor to be one or even two taels in a given year, a sum that they could not
The Land O 49
In the late spring of 1671 locusts hatched out in the fields
from eggs that had been laid there the previous year. In a
specially composed prayer to the God of T’an-ch’eng City—
the most important of the local gods, and the one directly
responsible for the welfare of its people—Huang tried to sway
the god with a combination of reason and emotion, in order to
prevent another crisis being added to all the others. His prayer
was given added urgency by local memories of the terrible
locust plague and famine of 1640:
O City God, both of us have duties to perform in this county:
resisting disasters that may occur, offering protection in times of
trouble, such things are in the City God’s spiritual realm and are
part of the official’s responsibilities. This year, while the workers
were out in the fields but the grain had not yet matured, the eggs
that had been laid by last year’s locusts hatched out in the soil,
causing almost half the wheat crops in the countryside to suffer
this affliction. In the last ten davs yet more locusts have come from
our neighboring area to the southwest*: their trembling wings
stretch in unbroken lines, they fill in the furrows and cover the
ridges of the fields. The people scurry and wail, as if the end of
the world were come.
We have already prayed to the Citv God, but he did not de-
stroy the locusts. Could this possibly have been because it was too
hard for him to save us from this natural calamity? Or because
the Ch’ing-ming festivalf was near at hand? If not for those rea-
sons, then was it because the officials had failed in their duties,
and lacked the sincerity to reach the underworld? The people
could not repel this calamity, so they appealed to the officials for
help. The officials could not repel this calamity for the people, so
they pray to the City God. The City God is majestic on high;
could He not transmit these prayers from the people and from
their officials, and petition the Lord of All? The people think
- I.e., from the county of P’ei. + t: »u -x. t e a J f J . . 1 . – . 1 ‘
50 0 The Death of Woman Wang
that the spread of this disaster is unavoidable, for as the locusts
advance they cover an area of over a thousand U, in the midst of
which T’an-ch’eng is but a tiny spot, so how could they be chased
away just from here? They say this because they have no remedy
if they use human means. But that is not true of the City God.
From his vantage point he can anticipate the needs of the people
and officials, and feel sorrow for their sufferings.
O God, drive them away quickly! Do not let them destroy our
crops of grain! Do not let them lay their eggs in our fields! Then
will the people have an autumn harvest. God grant this. God heed
our request.
P’u Sung-ling did not believe that local officials could han-
dle these problems of tax collection and natural disasters any
better than they could control local banditry; if anything, his
skepticism here was even greater. And so we find that his
remarkable protagonist Hsiao-erh, who more than any of P’u’s
other characters is able to save a community from economic
collapse, is also nearer than most of his other characters to
direct sources of heavenly aid:
C hao Wang and his wife, who lived in the country of T’eng, were devout Buddhists. They ate no meat or forbidden foods, and in their district they were regarded as worthy people. They were quite prosperous and had a daughter, Hsiao-
erh, who was unusually intelligent and beautiful. Chao loved her
like a jewel.
At the age of five she was sent off to study with a teacher, as
was her elder brother Ch’ang-ch’un; after five years she had
mastered the Five Classics. In her class was a boy named Ting
Tzu-mo, three years her senior and stylishly cultured; the two
fell in love and Ting privately let his mother know his feelings.
She in turn asked the Chaos if her son might marry their daughter,
but since they had hopes that she would marry into a wealthy
familv thpv rpfmpd to allow the pnoflpement.
The Land O 51
Shortly after this, Chao was converted by the White Lotus sect;
and when Hsu Hung-ju rebelled, the whole family were im-
plicated as rebels. Hsiao-erh, being well educated and quick-
witted, was able to grasp at one glance the magical skills with
which one transformed paper into soldiers or beans into horses:
she was much the best of the six young girls whom Hsu selected
for special training, and so he initiated her into all his techniques.
Because of her achievements her father, Chao, was also given
important assignments.
When Ting was seventeen he passed the licentiate’s examina-
tions in T’eng, but was unwilling to discuss marriage with any-
one, since he could never get Hsiao-erh out of his mind; so he
slipped away and enrolled under Hsii’s standard. Hsiao-erh was
delighted to see him and showed him favors far beyond the
ordinary. Since she was Hsii’s disciple, and Hsu had put her in
charge of military affairs, she was fully occupied, being in and
out of his office day and night, and she had not even a moment
to spare for her parents. Yet whenever Ting came to see her in
the evenings, she sent the servants away, and they would stay
together until the small hours. One night he asked her secretly,
“Do you know the real reason why I came here to you?” She
replied that she didn’t. “I have no crazy dreams of honor,” said
Ting; “the reason I came here was because of you. This evil
Way will not succeed; it is bound to end in disaster. You are an
intelligent woman, can’t you see that? If you run away from
here with me you will find you can trust my loyalty completely.”
Hsiao-erh seemed sorrowful for a while; then, as if wakening
from a dream, she said, “It would not be proper to just turn my
back on my parents and leave. Please let me tell them.”
So the two of them went to tell her parents of their hopes and
fears, but Chao could not grasp what they were saying. “My
teacher is a god,” he said. “How could he make any errors?”
Hsiao-erh knew she could admonish them no further, and changed
her hair style from the tufts of the child to the chignon of the
married woman.
52 Q The Death of Woman Wang
She took two paper kites; she straddled one and Ting the other.
Majestically the kites spread out their wings like two great Chien
birds; they spread their wings and off they flew. At dawn they
reached the borders of Lai-wu county. The girl squeezed the neck
of her kite, and immediately the two kites landed gently on the
ground and changed into two donkeys, on which the couple
galloped off to the village of Shan-yin-li. There they claimed to
be refugees from the current turmoils, rented a house, and settled
in. The two of them had left in a great hurry; they had almost
no possessions and nothing to buy any with. Ting took this much
to heart and tried to borrow a little rice from the neighbors, but
none of them was willing to let him have even the smallest amount.
Hsiao-erh didn’t seem at all depressed, however, but went and
pawned her hairpins and earrings.
Closing their door, she would seat herself tranquilly opposite
Ting, and they would play together at guessing games in the
lamplight, or see who could remember most from the books thev
had read in order to sec which of them was the superior; the
loser would have to bend his fingers painfully down onto his
wrist.
West of their house lived a neighbor’ called Weng, a leading
figure among the local outlaws, and one day when he came back
from a raid, Hsiao-erh said to Ting, “With such a wealthy neigh-
bor, what should we be worrying about? Let’s see if he will make
us a short-term loan of one thousand taels.” Ting thought that
that would be very difficult, but she replied, “I’ll fix things so
that he’ll be delighted to help us.” So saving, she cut a sheet of
paper into the silhouette of the Judge of the Underworld, put
the silhouette on the ground, and placed a chicken cage over it.
Taking Ting by the hand, she climbed onto the bed, heated up
some fine old wine, and used the Rituals of the Chou Dynasty as
the source for a new game: each would name such-and-such a
volume, such-and-such a page, such-and-such a line of the text; if,
upon checking the point chosen, there was an ideogram with the
The Land O 53
radical for food, water, or liquor, then the chooser drank a forfeit;
if the phrase contained the wine radical, then the loser drank
double. Hsiao-erh happened to hit upon the word “wine,” and
Ting made her drink a mug of wine; in return she vowed, “If
we are to receive the money you must hit on an ideogram for
‘drinking.’” Ting made his choice in the book and came up with
“turtle.” Hsiao-erh roared with laughter—”We’ve as good as made
it”—and filled a wine cup drop by drop for Ting to drink; as he
protested, she pointed out, “Your job involves water, so you must
drink as the turtle does.” They were still arguing over the decision
when they heard a tap-tapping in the cage, and Hsiao-erh got up
and called out, “It’s here.” Lifting the cage, she looked inside, and
there was a bag full of lumps of gold. Ting couldn’t hide his
surprise and joy.
A little time later one of Weng’s maidservants, carrying a baby,
came over to relax with them for a bit, and told them this: “When
my master came home he lit the lamp and sat down for the eve-
ning; suddenly an unfathomable crevasse opened in the earth, and
one of the Judges of the Underworld emerged and said to him,
‘I am an official from Below, and the Master of T’ai-shan gathered
us all together to make a record of the evil deeds of all criminals;
I must provide one thousand silver lamps, each of which weighs
ten ounces; if you donate one hundred lamps I will exonerate you
from your crimes.’ My master was terrified, burned incense and
prostrated himself in prayer, and made an offering of one thou-
sand taels. At which the Judge of the Underworld softly faded
back into the earth, which closed up after him.” Both the man and
the woman, on hearing these words, clucked away in feigned
astonishment.
After this the couple started to buv cattle and horses, hired
servants and maids, and built themselves a dwelling. But their
wealth attracted the attention of a local ne’er-do-well; he assembled
a group of ruffians and broke into their home to pillage. Ting
and his wife were awakened from their dreams; lighting a torch
54 ^ The Death of Woman Wang
of grasses, they saw that their house was filled with thieves. Two
of the thieves seized Ting, while a third ran his hands over Hsiao-
erh’s breasts. She sat up, stark naked, pointed her finger at them,
and cried out, “Halt! Halt!’1 The thirteen thieves, tongues pro-
truding, stood motionless, idiots, as if made of wood. Hsiao-erh
dressed and climbed down from the bed, called her servants to
her, and had them tie the thieves’ arms behind their backs, one
by one, while she made them confess to their plot; she reproached
them, saying, “We came from far away to hide ourselves among
your hills, trusting that we would get help from you; how could
you have acted with so little humanity? All of us have periods of
ease and periods of crisis; those who are in bad trouble had only
to tell us; we are not the kind of people to hoard everything up for
ourselves. You have acted like wolves and deserve to die, but
since I am sorry for you, I shall let you go—though I will not for-
give you if you do wrong again!” The thieves all prostrated them-
selves in thanks and went away.
Some time later the White Lotus leader, Hsu Hung-ju, was
captured, and Hsiao-erh’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Chao, together
with their son and daughter-in-law, were all executed. Ting went
off with some money and ransomed the little three-year-old son of
Hsiao-erh’s dead brother, Ch’ang-ch’un; they brought him up as
their own son and gave him the surname Ting and the personal
name of Ch’eng-t’iao [son with two ancestral halls], so the villagers
gradually came to realize that the couple were related to members
of the White Lotus sect. At this time there happened to be locusts
destroying the crops, and Hsiao-erh made hundreds of kites out
of paper and sent them to patrol her fields, so that the locusts all
flew elsewhere and left her fields alone, undamaged; accordingly,
the other villagers were all jealous and denounced the couple to
the local officials as being survivors of Hsu Hung-ju’s sect. The
local mandarin also had his eye on their wealth, and saw them
as a fat prize, so he arrested Ting; Ting bought back his freedom
by paying a massive bribe, but Hsiao-erh said, “We obtained our
The Land Q 55
wealth by improper means, it will inevitably melt away; neverthe-
less we can live no longer in this district of snakes and scorpions.”
So they sold off all their holdings, cheaply, and left.
They moved to the western suburbs of the district capital. Now
Hsiao-erh was extraordinarily clever; she was good at handling
money and better than any man at running a business. She opened
up a factorv for making objects out of glass, and herself instructed
all the workers who came to work there; the result was that all the
lamps made there had the most curious forms and magical colors,
none of her competitors could match them, and she sold them
without any trouble at high prices. After a few years they were
richer than ever.
Hsiao-erh watched strictly over her servants and maids, and of
the hundreds she fed every one had some function. When she had
leisure time she and Ting brewed tea and played a game of chess,
or they played their games of scanning through the Classics and
the Histories. Every five days she went through the accounts,
checking on the inflow and outflow of money and grain and on
the tasks performed by the servants: as Ting checked off their
names on the lists, and the amount of work they had done,
Hsiao-erh assigned them each different tallies; those who had been
diligent received various rewards, while the lazy were whipped
and made to stay kneeling for a long stretch of time. On some
days she granted a holiday and demanded no work in the eve-
ning; she and her husband laid out food and wine and then
invited the servants to come and sing their local folk songs so
that all could enjoy themselves.
Hsiao-erh’s acuity was like a god’s, and no one dared to try and
deceive her; besides which she gave higher recompense for work
done than was really justified, so everything went smoothly. There
were more than two hundred families in her village, and to all the
poor she gave a certain amount of working capital, with the result
that there were no drifters or unemployed in her district. When
droughts came she had the villagers build an altar out in the
56 O The Death of Woman Wang
countryside and had herself carried there at night; after she per- formed the rites of “The Steps of Emperor Yii,” refreshing rains fell, and there was enough for everyone in an area five li around. So people thought her even more like a god.
When she went out on excursions she made no attempt to cover her face, and all the people in her village saw her; some- times the young men of the village would gather together and talk about her beauty privately to each other, but when she ap- peared in person before them they hushed their chatter and dared not even raise their eyes to look at her.
Every autumn she gave some money to the village children who were not yet big enough to work in the fields, and sent them off to collect wild sow thistles; after twenty years of this she had filled buildings with the plants. People thought this was silly and mocked her in private; but when there was a great famine in Shantung, and people began to eat each other, Hsiao-erh took out these leaves she had saved, mixed them with grain, and gave them to the starving. So it was that the nearby villagers were able to stay alive. They did not have to run away or die.
P’u Sung-ling must have got the idea of using this glass- lantern factory as a resource for the whole community from the real glass factory that was operating at this time in Po- shan county, just south of his home town of Tzu-ch’uan. But there was no such local industry in T’an-ch’eng, and Huang Liu-hung had neither outside sources of income to draw on nor any magical formulas for separating the T’an-ch’eng gentry—whether criminal or respectable—from their money. He knew from experience that gentry could not be treated like commoners when it came to tax collection: commoners would usually pay out of fear, if pressed hard enough, but with gentry there was always delay and the danger of making them lose face if one pushed them too hard; this could lead to local antagonisms and even to appeals over the magistrate’s head to other officials, or else to harassment of his staff.
The Land 0 57
Yet Huang finally decided he had to take action against one particular landlord, Liu T’ing-yiian, of Hsin-wang township, seven miles west of T’an-ch’eng city and near Ma-t’ou. Hsin- wang was one of four townships in the county that were particularly notorious for proxy corruption, the others being Chu-lu and Chung-kou in the northeast of the county, and Hsing-shu to the south. Most of these townships were also notorious for the length of time they had been in arrears, and Huang Liu-hung had tried to raise the morale of the taxpayers by promising ritual wine, garlands, ceremonial clothes, and a send-off through the main gate of the yamen to all those who paid up on time. This had not helped in Hsin-wang, where over half the people were in a proxy relationship to some landlord or other, and those who had not been able to find such protection were fleeing in increasing numbers, making the payments even higher for those who remained.
In 1671 the two township heads in Hsin-wang were Hu Chi-ming and a colleague also named Hu; by the late spring they were desperate at their inability to extract taxation from the community caught in its circle of evasion, proxy relation- ships, and flight. In their desperation they agreed to give tes- timony against the landlord Liu T’ing-yiian, who, though he held his land in Hsin-wang, had made his personal residence in the township of Kao-ts’e, just next to the county city. The Lius were one of the two lineages that dominated Kao-ts’e, and they could provide a safe haven there for any fugitives. Though the two Hus decided to give testimony against Liu in the magistrate’s court, they asked to be given an extension until all the winter-wheat crops had been harvested, in the hopes that they could raise enough money from the farmers (once more sales had been made) to meet the first part of their quotas.
The landlord Liu T’ing-yiian acted swiftly to take advantage of this pause . H e s ta t ioned a h i r ed t h u g outs ide t h e magis-
trate s prvnrf” tn inf”iminaf=» nnfnoccoc »̂TI-I-» YTr»i’-»V»– /-.^»«« *-~ ~;,.«
58 Cf The Death of Woman Wang
evidence against the Liu family, and with another group of henchmen he tracked down the two Hus, beat them savagely, and broke their legs. Not content with that, he had Hu Chi- ming’s battered body slung from a pole and carried out of T’an-ch’cng altogether, into I-chou, so as to delay the whole investigation further. Liu himself then fled from T’an-ch’eng and hid out elsewhere. No other witnesses could be found who were willing to testify, so the case was suspended.
Three
THE WIDOW
WOMAN P’ENG’S HUSBAND, Ch’en T’ai-chen, died of illness in 1669. He had not been wealthy, but he left her a little money, some land near T’an-ch’eng city, a house, and an ox. They had one child, a boy called Lien, and it now became the widow’s responsibility to raise and educate him so that he might worthily carry on his father’s line.
The Local History contains numerous biographies designed to show how—with determination and strict moral purpose- one could survive as a widow, make a living, and bring up one’s children to be either worthy scholars or loyal wives in their turn. One woman was widowed at twenty-one and left with three sons; she brought them all up successfully, and lived to be eighty-four. Woman Li, widowed with two sons, sent one off to work the land and put aside monev from her spinning to educate the other; he passed the local examina- tions and went on to pass the provincial level chi’t-jen ex- amination (one of the five from T’an-ch’eng in a century to attain that honor). Both these women were dead by 1670, but
6o 0 The Death of Woman Wang
many others were alive to bear testimony to the ideal: Woman Tu, whose husband and his brothers were all killed by the Manchus in 1643, had brought up her own two sons as well as three orphaned nephews and two nieces; she was fifty- five. Woman Liu, widowed and childless at twenty-five, had adopted a son from her husband’s uncle to continue her hus- band’s blood line and be his legal heir; she was forty-six. Woman T’ien was fifty-six, having been widowed when preg- nant at the age of nineteen, and brought her son up to man- hood. The paragon of them all was woman Fan, of Leng-ts’un township, still living at eighty-one, having brought up her own son, her husband’s first wife’s two sons, and her own orphaned grandson, all to be successful candidates in the local examinations.
P’u Sung-ling had an ambiguous attitude toward such ac- counts, and he could at times mock the alleged probity of these widows so busy with their spinning:
An old widow was spinning one evening when suddenly a young girl pushed open the door and said with a laugh, “Old woman, aren’t you tired?” The girl looked eighteen or nineteen; her face was beautiful, her clothes were bright and elegant. Startled, the old woman asked her where she came from, and the girl replied, “I pitied your lonely life and came to keep you company.” The old woman suspected that she had run away from some wealthy home, and kept on questioning her insistently. But the girl said, “Old woman, don’t be afraid. I am alone in the world, just as you are. Admiring the purity of your life, I came to be with you; if we stav together, we can avoid loneliness—isn’t that the best thing?” The old woman suspected that she must be a fox spirit, and stayed silent and suspicious. The girl climbed up onto the frame and started spinning in her place, saying, “You don’t have to worry- I’m good at making my own living in this way, and you won’t have to support me.” When the old lady saw how friendly and helpful she was. and how sweet, she felt at ease.
The Widow O 61
When it grew quite dark, the girl said to the old woman, “I brought with me my covers and pillow, and they are still outside the door. When you go out to relieve yourself, please bring them in for me.” The old woman went out and found a bag of clothes, and the girl laid them out on the bed; they were of some kind of brocaded fabric, incomparably fragrant and soft; the old woman laid out her own cotton quilt and lay down on the bed with the girl. Hardly had the girl slipped off her silken dress than a strange scent filled the room; and as they lay there the old woman thought to herself, What a shame to be next to such a beauty and not to have a man’s body. From her pillow the girl smiled and said, “You’re an old woman of seventy, how can you still have such reckless thoughts?” And the old woman replied, “I wasn’t.” The girl said, “If you are not having reckless thoughts, why were you wishing that vou were a man?” The old woman was now all the more sure she was dealing with a fox spirit, and grew frightened. At which the girl smiled again, saying, “You are the one who wants to be a man, how can it be that you are afraid of me?”
P’u Sung-ling also mocked the gentry—the self-same men who compiled the biographies of the honorable and virtuous —for their combination of fastidiousness and lechery, the very characteristics that they lavishly praised others for not having. And he implied that they often had ambiguous motives for including women in their lists of the “virtuous.” P’u’s sus- picions are borne out well enough by examples from T’an- ch’eng, at least at one level, since Feng K’o-ts’an mentions that he drew the material for the biographies in the “honorable and virtuous” sections of his Local History from the local gentry. There is no doubt that these sections reflect gentry values or an idealized version of them; we can also tell that the gentry practiced a form of historiographical nepotism, since four of the local compilers managed between them to include three of their mothers and two sisters-in-law among the chosen fifty-six.
62 O The Death of Woman Wang
But in general P’u seems to have subscribed to the prevail- ing views concerning the need for widows’ morality and fixity of purpose. Thus in one of his stories a widow is expressly given permission to remarry by her dying husband, but when she violates propriety by taking a lover before the funeral ceremonies are completed, the dead husband wreaks divine vengeance on her and her family: her naked body, transfixed with arrows, is found lying in the garden of her father’s burn- ing house. P’u differs, however, from most of his contempo- raries in that he often describes his fictional widows as being knowledgeable about the law and familiar with the intricacies of yatnen politics, quite able to outwit the men who try to rob them of their lands or their good names. He was always par- ticularly intrigued by the problems that a widow faced as she tried to bring up a family of boys; and in one of his sterner stories, “Hsi-liu,” he amplifies the predicament by having as heroine a woman who not only had not wanted to marry her husband in the first place but had been left a stepson to bring up alongside her own son:
si-liu was the daughter of a scholar living in Chung-tu. She was given this name—which means “delicate willow” —because her waist was so incomparably slender.
She was an intelligent girl with a good grasp of literature and had a particular fondness for books on human physiognomy. Easygoing by nature, she was not one to criticize others; but whenever anyone came to make inquiries about possibly marrying her, she always insisted on taking a personal look at the suitor, and though she examined many men, she found them all wanting. By the time she was nineteen her parents had grown angry, and said to her, “How can there be no mate suitable for you on this earth? Do you want to keep your girlish braids until you’re an old woman?”
Hsi-liu replied, “I had truly hoped that with my human forces
The Widow © 63
I could overcome the divine forces, but I have not succeeded over
these many vears and can see that it is my fate. From this time
on I will ask no more than to obey my parents’ commands.”
At this time it happened that there was a scholar named Kao,
from a good family and known for his abilities, who asked for
Hsi-liu’s hand in marriage and sent over the bridal gifts. So the
ceremonies were performed.
Husband and wife got on well together. Kao had a son of five
from a former marriage, named Ch’ang-fu, and Hsi-liu looked
after the boy so lovingly that if she had to go off and visit her
parents, he yelled and wept and tried to follow her, and no
amount of scolding would make him stop. After a little over a year
Hsi-liu gave birth to a son of her own, and named him Ch’ang-hu
—”the reliable one.” When her husband asked what the name
signified, she answered, “Only that I hope he will remain long
with his parents.”
Hsi-liu was cursory over woman’s work and seemed to take
little interest in it; but she pored carefully over the records in
which the acreage of their properties and the size of their tax
assessment were listed, and worried if anything was not exactly
accurate. After a time she said to Kao, “Would you be willing
to give up attending to our family’s business affairs and let me
look after them?” Kao let her take over; for six months every-
thing went well with the family’s affairs, and Kao praised her.
One day Kao went off to a neighboring village to drink wine
with friends, and while he was away one of the local tax col-
lectors came, demanding payment. He banged on the door and
cursed at Hsi-liu; she sent one of her maids to calm him down,
but since he wouldn’t go away, she had to send one of the men-
servants to go and fetch her husband home. When Kao returned,
the man left. Kao laughed and said, “Hsi-liu, do you now begin
to see why an intelligent woman can never be the match for a
stupid man?”
When Hsi-liu heard these words she lowered her head and
64 ^ The Death of Woman Wang
began to cry; worried, Kao drew her to him and tried to en-
courage her, but for a long time she could not be comforted.
He was unhappy that she was so caught up in running the house-
hold affairs, and suggested that he take them over again himself,
but she wouldn’t let him.
She rose at dawn, and retired late, and managed everything
with the greatest diligence. She would put aside the money for
each year’s taxes a year in advance, and no more did the runners
sent to press for payments come to her door; in the same way
she calculated in advance for their food and clothing needs, and
thus their expenditure was controlled. Kao was delighted, and
playfully said to her, “How can mv ‘delicate willow’ be so delicate?
Your eyebrows are delicate, your waist is delicate, your little feet
are delicate; but I am delighted that your determination is even
more delicate than those.”
And Hsi-liu replied, “My husband’s name means ‘high,’ and
you are truly high: your character is high, your ambitions are
high, your scholarship is high; but what I hope is that the number
of your years will be even higher.”
There was, in their village, a dealer who sold beautiful coffins,
and Hsi-liu insisted on buying one regardless of the cost; since
she didn’t have enough money, she raised it by asking around
among her relatives and neighbors. Kao did not see the urgency
for the purchase and tried to stop her, but she paid him no heed.
About a year later there was a death in a wealthy neighboring
family, and they offered her double what the coffin had cost; the
profit would have been so good that Kao urged his wife to accept
the offer, but she wouldn’t do it. He asked why not. She did not
reply. He asked her again, and her eyes glistened with tears. Kao
was surprised but did not want to contradict her directly, so he
left the matter there.
Another year went by, and Kao was now twenty-five. Hsi-liu
would not let him go away on long journeys, and if he was late
coming back from some visit, she would send the servants over to
The Widow O 65
ask him to return, and thev would follow him back down the
roads. Kao’s friends all joked with him about this.
One day Kao was out drinking with some friends; he felt there
was something wrong with him and started for home, but halfway
back he fell from his horse and died. The weather at this time
was damp and hot, but fortunately all his burial clothes had been
made ready in advance. The villagers all praised Hsi-liu for her
foresight.
Her stepson, Ch’ang-fu, was now ten years old and just be-
ginning to learn essay writing, but after his father died he grew
peevish and lazy and refused to study. He would run off and
follow the herdsboys on their outings—scolding him had no
effect, and even after beatings he continued his wanton behavior.
Hsi-liu had no remedy left, so she called him to her and said,
“You have shown that you don’t want to study; how is there any
wav that we can force vou? But in poor households there can be
none without employment, so change your clothes and go and
work alongside the servants. If vou don’t, I’ll have vou beaten, and
it will be too late for regrets.” So in ripped, wadded clothes
Ch’ang-fu went to herd the pigs, and when he came home after
work he took his pottery bowl and joined the other servants for
a meal of gruel. After a few days he had suffered enough and,
weeping, knelt outside the family courtyard, begging to be al-
lowed to study again. Hsi-liu turned avvav from him toward the
wall as if she hadn’t even heard him, and there was nothing for
Ch’ang-fu to do but pick up his whip, swallow his tears, and
depart. As autumn came to an end Ch’ang-fu had no clothes for
his body and no shoes for his feet; the freezing rain soaked into
his bodv and he carried his head hunched into his shoulders like a
beggar. The villagers all pitied him, and those who had children
from a former marriage took Hsi-liu as a warning. Thev murmured
angrily against her, and Hsi-liu gradually became aware of it,
but ignored them as if it were nothing to do with her. Pinallv
Ch’ang-fu could bear the hardship no more; he abandoned his
66 0 The Death of Woman Wang
pigs and ran away. Still Hsi-liu took no action, neither sending
anyone to check on him nor even making inquiries about him.
After a few more months there was nowhere left for Ch’ang-fu
to beg for food, and dceph’ grieving, he returned home. Yet he
dared not enter, and begged an old woman neighbor to go and
tell his mother he was back. Hsi-liu said, “If he will accept a
beating of one hundred blows he can come in and see me; if not,
then let him be on his way again.”
Ch’ang-fu heard this and ran in, weeping that he would
gladly receive the blows. “Do you now understand how to change
your ways and repent?” she asked.
“I repent,” he said.
And his mother responded, “If you know how to repent, then
there is no need to give you a beating. Go in peace and tend to
your pigs; if you behave badly again, there will be no forgiveness.”
Ch’ang-fu cried out, “I’d be happy to receive the hundred
blows if you would let me study again.”
Hsi-liu made no response, but when the old woman added her
own pleas, she finally agreed. She gave him a bath and some
clothes and sent him off to study with the same teacher as his
younger brother. Ch’ang-fu worked diligentlv and well, far dif-
ferently from the past, and after three years he passed the local
district examinations. Governor Yang saw his essavs and was im-
pressed; he had Ch’ang-fu given a monthly stipend to help him
along with the cost of his studies.
Ch’ang-hu, on the other hand, was incredibly stupid; after
studying for several A’ears he still could not remember the ideo-
graphs for his own name. Hsi-liu told him to put away his books
and go out and work in the fields, but he preferred to fool around
and showed himself unwilling to take the pains of hard work.
His mother said angrily, “Each of the four classes has its oc-
cupation, but since you are incapable of study and unable to
work in the fields, how are you going to avoid dying in some
ditch?” She had him beaten, and from then on he went out with
The Widow O 67
the hired hands to work in the fields. If he was late getting up,
then she scolded him and followed after him, cursing. And secretly
she began to give the best there was in clothing, food, and drink
to his elder brother, Ch’ang-fu. Although Ch’ang-hu dared not
complain, he could not avoid being deeply upset.
When the vear’s work in the fields was over, Hsi-liu took some
monev and gave it to Ch’ang-hu so that he could learn the ways
of a traveling peddler; but Ch’ang-hu, who had a passion for
gambling, lost all the money she gave him and then, in an attempt
to deceive her, made up a story that he had been robbed. Hsi-liu
found out and was having him beaten almost to death when his
elder brother Ch’ang-fu knelt at her feet and begged for mercy,
offering to substitute his own body in his brother’s place; so her
anger gradually abated, but from that time on whenever Ch’ang-hu
left the house his mother had him watched. This made his conduct
slightly better, but the change did not really come from within
his heart.
One dav Ch’ang-hu asked his mother if he could join a group
of merchants who were traveling to Loyang. In fact, he wanted
to use this chance of a distant journey to give full scope to his
desires, and was deeply worried that his mother might not agree
to his request. But when Hsi-liu heard it she seemed to have no
suspicions at all, gave him thirty taels of silver, and packed his
baggage for him. And as he was leaving she handed him an ingot
of gold, saying, “This has been handed down from our ancestors
and is not for ordinary spending; keep it as ballast in your baggage
and use it only in an emergency. Besides, this is your first ex-
perience of life on the road, and I am not expecting you to make
any great profit; all I ask is that you not squander this thirty
taels.” She repeated this as Ch’ang-hu was leaving; he agreed
completely and went on his way, elated and thoroughly pleased
with himself.
When he reached Loyang he parted from his traveling com-
panions with thanks and went to lodge in the house of a famous
68 0 The Death of Woman Wang
courtesan named Li; after passing ten nights or more with her,
he had spent all his cash, but since he still had the gold ingot in
his baggage, he didn’t worry much about having run out of money.
But when he took out the ingot and cut into it, he found it was
fake gold; he was badly frightened and the color left his face.
Li’s mother, when she learned of the situation, cursed him
sharply, Ch’ang-hu was deeply worried, for his purse was empty
and there was nowhere for him to go; his only hope was that the
girl would remember the happiness they had enjoyed together
and would not cut him off right away. Suddenly two men came
into his room with ropes which they fastened swiftly round his
neck. Ch’ang-hu was terrified and had no idea what to do; when
he piteously begged to know the reason for this treatment, he
learned that the girl had taken the fake gold and lodged a com-
plaint with the local prefect. Brought before the official, Ch’ang-hu
was not allowed to testify but was put in fetters and beaten until
he was nearly dead and then thrown into prison. Since he had no
money for his expenses, he was badly mistreated by the jailers; by
begging for food from his fellow prisoners he was just able to stay
alive.
Now on the day that Ch’ang-hu had left home, his mother,
Hsi-liu, had said to his elder brother, Ch’ang-fu, “Remember that
when twenty days have passed I must send vou off to Lovang. I
have so many things to do that I’m afraid I might forget.”
Ch’ang-fu asked her what she meant, but she appeared overcome
with grief and he withdrew, not daring to question her further.
When the twenty days were up, he asked her again and she
answered sadlv, “Your younger brother is now leading a dissolute
life, just as you did when vou refused to study. If I had not ac-
quired this terrible reputation, how would you ever have become
what you are today? Everyone says that I am cruel, but none of
them know of the tears that have flowed over my pillow.” And
the tears coursed down Hsi-liu’s face while Ch’ang-fu stood re-
spectfully waiting, not daring to inquire further. When she had
The Widow 0 69
finished weeping, Hsi-liu continued, “Since a dissolute heart still
beat in your brother’s body, I gave him some fake gold so that he
would be badly mistreated. By now he must already be locked in
prison. The governor thinks well of you; go and ask him for
clemency so that your brother will be spared from death and
a true sense of remorse be born in him.”
Ch’ang-fu departed immediately; by the time he reached Lo-
yang it was three days since his younger brother had been arrested;
when he visited him in prison, his brother was desperate, his face
like a ghost’s. Ch’ang-hu wept when he saw his elder brother
and could not raise his head. Ch’ang-fu wept also. Now since
Ch’ang-fu was especially admired by the governor of the province,
his name was known to everyone around, and when the prefect
learned that he was Ch’ang-hu’s elder brother, he immediately
ordered Ch’ang-hu released from prison.
When Ch’ang-hu reached home he was still afraid his mother
would be angry with him, so he came up to her, crawling on his
knees. “Have you satisfied your desires?” she asked. Ch’ang-hu’s
face was still tear-stained; he dared make no further sound.
Ch’ang-fu knelt at his side, and the mother at last told them
both to rise.
From this time on Ch’ang-hu was deeply repentant and handled
all the business of the household with diligence; if it happened
that he was remiss over something, his mother would ask him to
correct it without getting angry. Yet several months went by
and still she did not speak to him about his working in trade; he
wanted to ask her but did not dare, so he told his elder brother of
his wishes. Hsi-liu was happy when she heard about it; she
pawned some of her possessions and gave the money to Ch’ang-hu;
within six months he had doubled the capital. That same vear, in
the autumn, Ch’ang-fu passed the provincial exams; three years
later he obtained the highest degree. By this time his vounger
brother had made tens of thousands in trade.
A local merchant, on his way to Loyang, managed to sneak
70 0 The Death of Woman Wang
a look at Hsi-liu. Though she was in her forties, she looked like a woman only a little over thirty; her clothes, her hair style were of the simplest. One would have thought she came from a poor family.
In Hsi-liu’s story, though money produces the climax, lack of money is not the crux of the matter. That, rather, lies in the tangled tensions between compassion, discipline, and the misguided but still potent force of public opinion. But in other stories P’u Sung-ling showed how neighbors and rela- tives could descend on a widow and strip her home and family to the bones—whittling away the land by lawsuits or by phys- ical coercion, harassing the widow with their attentions, driv- ing her heirs into sexual excess or inducing them to gamble away their inheritances.
In T’an-ch’eng, too, we can find evidence of the financial pressure that widows were sometimes subjected to, though this is often confusingly couched in terms of pressure to re- marry. Thus in the Local History’s brief biography of widow Wu, who had been left with a one-year-old baby, we find this passage: “After her mother-in-law also died, her late husband’s elder brother tried to make her remarry. Woman Wu cut off her hair and disfigured her face, and finally returned her former possessions to her husband’s elder brother, while she took her orphaned son back with her to her mother’s home, and the boy was adopted into her clan.” The death of the widow An is described in these terms: “She had been married for only half a year when her husband was overtaken by a violent illness and died. She wept in deep grief and vowed she would die with him; but the people in her district did not believe her. The following day she took her bride’s trousseau and her other clothes and burned them. Her father-in-law and mother-in-law could not stop her. The members of the clan gathered, and examined her. Woman An beat her breast and
The Widow O 71
cried out again and again, ‘Oh, husband, you have passed away and I shall follow you.’ Shortly thereafter she threw herself into the fire, but was rescued by a neighbor’s wife. Those looking after her kept a close eye on her, but the next day she managed to trick her mother-in-law into leaving the room, barred the door, and hanged herself. She was eighteen years old.”
Finally, in the case of the widow Kao, whose husband had been killed in the 1643 sack of T’an-ch’eng, we read: “At this time the family property was all ruined, soldiers and bandits roamed the area, there was nowhere for people to live in peace, she suffered the loneliness and misery of being a weak woman with a young orphan son. Her clansmen tried to make her marry again, scheming thus to get hold of her property, but woman Kao disfigured her own face and swore she would die rather than remarry. Weeping, she stated her cause to the magistrate and swore she would not be of two hearts. At her husband’s burial she grieved bitterly, and took no food for seven days. She taught her son to read so that he would not fall below the standards set by his father. Her difficulties took ten thousand forms, she struggled constantly to have enough money, but the harder things were, the more she was upright in conduct, and stayed thus for over thirty years; and her son grew up well, to be upright and principled like her.”
It seems certain that in each of these cases the crisis that led to the outcome—abandonment of property for woman Wu, suicide for woman An, and appeal to the authorities by woman Kao—stemmed from one specific subclause in the Legal Code of the Ch’ing dealing with the rights of widows and the laws of inheritance. The Code, issued in the name of the state and constantly updated by the Board of Punishments in Peking, was not only concerned with overt criminal acts; it also provided the standard and authoritative interpretations of the rights and obligations of Chinese in all walks of life, and
72 O The Death of Woman Wang
married couples were no exception. The relevant passage (listed in the Code’s economic section) stated, “If a widow remarries, her husband’s property, as well as the dowry that she originally brought with her, shall become the property of her former husband’s family.” The clause, originally intended to encourage a widow to stay true to her dead husband’s memory, had an obvious negative effect if—far from en- couraging her in her sentiments of loyalty—the husband’s rel- atives pushed the widow to remarry against her will. They would not just be divesting themselves of the cost of her up- keep and of child care, but be gaining substantial profits as well.
This clause of the Legal Code helps to explain the pres- sures that were placed on woman Peng in T’an-ch’eng during the spring and early summer of 1670. She fulfilled part of her obligations immediately by enrolling her son, Lien, in the village school; it was only a small school, and the teacher was a part-time one who had to supplement his income by working in his own fields, but this was an important first stage if Lien was to gain literati status and honor his father. But almost from the first her husband’s relatives, instead of supporting her, began to harass her. The main villains were her son’s second cousins, the three brothers Ch’en Kuo-lin, Ch’en Kuo- hsiang, and Ch’en Kuo-lien. The youngest of them took her ox and refused to return it; this was a serious act, since the ox was not only an essential animal for families with fields to plow but was also treasured evidence of a family’s status, well looked after and tethered before the doorway to the house (when not at work) for all to see. After taking the ox, Ch’en Kuo-lien extorted three taels from woman P’eng. The middle brother, Ch’en Kuo-hsiang, moved uninvited into her house and tried to drive her out. The clan head, Ch’en San-fu, did not intervene to help her, and her own husband’s adopted brother, Ch’en T’ai-hsiang, was also of no assistance. But if they were trying to force her to move away from the area or to
The Widow O 73
find another husband so as to protect herself and her son, they failed completely. Woman P’eng vowed she would not leave her home, and had an angry confrontation with the cousin Ch’en Kuo-hsiang, who swore, “I’ll make sure that no scrap of anything is left to you.”
The Legal Code also contained this provision: “A woman whose husband dies shall inherit his property when there is no son to receive it; but in such cases the clan head must choose an heir to inherit the property in accordance with the degrees of family relationship.” From Ch’en Kuo-hsiang’s threat, and from his later actions, it is clear that he knew at least the general outlines of this provision and that he in- tended to try to take advantage of it. For if the boy Lien was dead, and the letter of the law was observed, the three brothers would inherit the property, since the Ch’en family tree had this form in 1670:
C H ‘ E N MALE
(deceased)
CH’EN MALE C H ‘ E N MALE
(deceased*) (deceased])
CH’EN T’AI-CHEN = WOMAN P’ENG TAI-HSIANG C H ‘ E N P’ING
(adopted’) (d. 1643)
CH’EN LIEN
CH’EN KUO-LIN KUO-HSIANG KUO-LIEN
Ch’en Lien’s uncle, T’ai-hsiang, could not inherit, according to the law, because he had been adopted in from another lineage, by a father who already possessed a natural son, and thus was not entitled to take precedence over males in the direct line of Ch’en ancestral descent where matters of inheri- tance were concerned.
The problem for the three Ch’en brothers then became
74 ^ The Death of Woman Wang
this: how to kill the boy Ch’en Lien and receive only a mini- mal penalty so that they could live to inherit the property. It was Ch’cn Kuo-hsiang who came up with an answer, an answer that depended for its success on the chaos of recent events in T’an-ch’cng county and (once again) on some famil- iarity with the law. The brothers’ father, Ch’en P’ing, like so many others, had died when the Manchu troops sacked T’an- ch’eng in 1643; DUt his corpse had never been recovered, and the exact cause and place of death were unknown. Ch’en Kuo- hsiang decided to invent a story that his father had been killed by Ch’en Lien’s father; that as a filial son he had seethed with rage over this event; and that he had finally avenged his dead father by killing—not the murderer, because the murderer was dead—but the closest relative, the murderer’s own son. To explain this act of filial vengeance after almost thirty years had passed since his father’s death, he would claim that he had been drinking heavily just before taking action.
There was indeed a vengeance clause concerning sons and their parents in the Legal Code of the Ch’ing, though the Ch’ens did not have all the details right. The actual stipula- tions were these: “Whenever a grandparent or parent is being attacked by an assailant, and the grandson or son immediately intervenes to protect him and attacks the assailant in return, if the son or grandson causes no injury, he shall receive no punishment; if he causes injury, he shall be punished in ac- cordance with the laws on assault, lessened by three degrees; if lie causes death, he shall be punished as in regular cases of homicide.
“If a grandparent or parent is killed by an assailant, and the son or grandson, without reporting the matter to the authori- ties, acts on his own initiative and kills the murderer, he shall be beaten sixty strokes; if he kills the murderer immediately, he shall receive no punishment.”
Officials of the Board of Punishments had noted the impor-
The Widow O 75
tance of the word “immediately” in both these clauses and had inserted a brief modifier to it in 1646: if the son or grandson acted not “immediately” but “after a slight delay,” then he should be punished in accordance with the regular laws on assault or (in the case of murdering the parent’s murderer) in accordance with the laws on “killing without authority a per- son who merits the death penalty,” that is to say, with a beat- ing of one hundred blows.
The Ch’en brothers were not aware of the finer points of this law, and they assumed that “sons avenging a father’s death” could generally expect to receive lenient treatment from the authorities. In fact, this had been true in earlier periods of Chinese history, and it was to control such acts of vengeance that the Code had taken the precise stand then in force. The brothers did not realize that the law would neither accept twenty-seven years as a reasonable period of elapsed time nor accept the son of the murderer as an adequate substi- tute for the murderer himself.
On July 6, 1670, the middle of the three brothers, Ch’en Kuo-hsiang, walked to the schoolhouse in T’an-ch’eng where the boy Ch’en Lien was studying with his schoolmates. He carried with him a heavy wooden paddle, of the kind used to beat loads of washing. The teacher was absent. Ch’en Kuo- hsiang sat down on the desk and asked the children where their teacher was. They replied that he was out in his fields, working. Ch’en Kuo-hsiang then seized Lien and dragged him out of the schoolroom. The schoolroom was on the edge of the temple compound, and it was in front of the temple to the goddess of mercy, Kuan-yin, that he beat the boy to death.
The next morning Ch’en Kuo-hsiang handed himself over to the authorities, admitting responsibility for the murder, but claiming that he had acted out of filial love and while under the influence of drink. He said he had run into Ch’en Lien by chance in the temple, and the meeting had triggered the act of
76 O The Death of Woman Wang
revenge. His case collapsed almost instantly, since the school- boys said he had been sober when he came to the classroom, and had begun beating Ch’en Lien in their sight. Further- more, the three brothers gave conflicting testimony as to where their father had allegedly been murdered by Ch’en T’ai- chen those many years ago, and they could produce no wit- nesses who had ever heard them speak of vengeance before the summer of 1670. Indeed, the evidence showed that they had lived in harmony with their father’s alleged murderer for nearly thirty years. As the magistrate sarcastically remarked, it was fortunate for Ch’en T’ai-chen that for almost thirty years he had never met his nephew while the nephew was drunk.
Ch’en Kuo-hsiang was, therefore, tried not under the filial piety vengeance substatutes, as he had hoped, but under quite a different section of the Code, that of “striking a relative in the second, third, or fourth degree.” It was the magistrate’s opinion that in view of the relationship between the murderer and victim the charge should be “beating to death a relation of the third degree”; thus whether or not Ch’en Kuo-hsiang was junior or senior to Lien, since he had killed by design, convic- tion brought the penalty of strangulation.
Woman P’eng did not get her ox or her money back, be- cause the younger of the three brothers, who had taken them, fled across the border from T’an-ch’eng and could not be found. Since her boy was dead, and she was now left with no male relations in direct line of descent to her husband, the clan head was ordered to nominate a member of another branch of the Ch’en clan to be her heir.
your
o
THE FEUD
o
P’u SUNG-LING knew all about family quarrels. This is how
he described his own early married life:
I was my father’s third son, and over ten years old before I was
engaged. My parents heard that a Mr. Liu was ready to betroth his
second daughter, and so began to negotiate through a matchmaker.
When people criticized my father for his poverty, Mr. Liu an-
swered, “I hear that he is like those immortals who endure
humiliation on earth; also that he teaches his sons to read, and
has not given up working despite his poverty. He will make sure
that they do not go astray, so what does it matter that he is poor?”
So they drew up the contract. In 1655 rumors spread around that
the Court was going to choose girls from good families to be
imperial concubines, and everyone grew very uneasy. At first Mr.
Liu did not believe this, but he did not dare be stubborn, so he
went along with everyone else and sent his daughter to live in
his son-in-law’s house. She was twelve at the time and slept in the
same room as her future mother-in-law, woman Tung. When the
rumors died down she returned to her own home.
78 O The Death of Woman Wang
Two years later we were married. She was affectionate, artless
in speech, and not garrulous; and if she was not as bright as her
sisters-in-law, neither was she unpleasant to her mother-in-law,
as they were. My mother used to say that my wife had the heart
of a newborn baby; she was very fond of her, favored her, and
would praise her to all comers. This served to annoy the wife of
my eldest brother more than ever; she ganged up with the other
sisters-in-law against my wife, blamed my mother for her favor-
itism, and continually snooped around her. But my mother con-
tinued to act honorably and justly, protecting my wife with her
love as if she were one of my mother’s own children—she had
done the same with the concubine’s son—and never giving the
smallest cause for reproach.
Nevertheless, the other sisters-in-law used the silliest pretexts
to find fault with my mother; they caused an endless uproar and
their long tongues were never still. At last my father said, “Things
can’t go on like this any longer,” and divided his half dozen acres
of land among his sons. It was a bad year, and we got no more
than five measures of buckwheat and three of millet. The others
refused to take any implements that were broken and squabbled
over getting ones that were still in good condition, but my wife
remained speechless, as if she were dumb. My brothers all ended
up with separate dwellings in the main compound, each of which
had a kitchen and sitting room in perfect condition. I was the
only one who had to move out altogether, and ended up in an
old peasant cottage of three rooms, where not one wall was whole;
small trees grew dense around it, and everything was covered with
a tangle of thorns and weeds.
From these experiences P’u Sung-ling developed some of
his most savage stories: in one of these a large family of
brothers and stepbrothers—each named after an impeccable
Confucian virtue—tear their family apart in a series of in-
creasingly bitter fights. From his observation of local bandit
The Feud O 79
groups, moreover, and from prevalent local tales, he moved beyond pastiche to see the effects of raw terror within a com- munity and the ways that misery spawned recklessness and sudden, unreasoning violence that were almost impossible to deal with. P’u Sung-ling had little faith in local officials’ abil- ity to handle situations of this sort, and the moral of the following story about Ts’ui Meng was merely that such vio- lence must ultimately be controlled by the individual’s will; if channeled for the good of the community there was then a hope that it might ultimately help to make up for the officials’ neglect and enable the local villagers to protect themselves.
Ts’ui Meng, “Ts’ui the violent”—who had the alternate name Wu-meng, “nonviolent”—was the son of a distin-guished family in Chien-ch’ang. His character was tough and unyielding, and even when he was a child in school, if one of his classmates slightly contradicted him about something, he would fly at him, hitting and beating. His teacher kept trying to stop him, but without success, and so gave him his name, and his alternate name.
By the time Ts’ui was sixteen or seventeen he had incredible martial strength, and seizing a long pole, he could vault onto the high roof of a house. He delighted in correcting injustices, and so everyone in his district respected him; the petitioners seeking his help crowded the stairs and filled the rooms of his house. Ts’ui curbed the violent people and assisted the weak, and did not mind if he made some people hate him. If someone opposed him, Ts’ui would strike him with stones or a staff, and they would end up badly hurt; so whenever his anger began to rise, no one dared to try to control him.
Only to his mother did Ts’ui show respect, and he would calm down when she appeared: she would scold him for his conduct, and he would respond obediently to all her commands, but as soon as she was gone he would forget all about it.
80 O The Death of Woman Wang
In the next-door house lived a vicious wife who cruelly mis-
treated her mother-in-law, so that the old lady had almost died
from hunger. The old lady’s son used to feed her in secret, but
when the wife found out about it she cursed the old woman on
every pretext; the yelling could be heard by all the neighboring
households. Ts’ui was enraged; he climbed over the wall into the
woman’s house, cut off her nose and ears, her lips and tongue, and
left her dead. Ts’ui’s mother was greatly alarmed when she heard
what had happened; she called the neighbor over and did every-
thing she could to comfort him. She also gave him a young slave
girl, and so the whole business was hushed up.
But now Ts/ui’s mother wept and would eat no food. He was
worried in turn. He knelt before her and begged to be beaten;
he told her that he was deeply sorry. His mother wept on and
made no reply till Ts’ui’s wife, Chou, knelt down at his side; then
the mother beat her son, and besides that she took a needle and
punctured his forearm with it in the form of two crossed lines,
rubbing red earth into the marks so that thev could never be
erased. Ts’ui endured all this, and when it was done his mother
began to eat again.
Ts’ui’s mother delighted in offering food to Buddhist and
Taoist mendicants, and they would come by her house and eat
their fill. One dav Ts’ui encountered a Taoist monk in her door-
way, and the monk gazed at him, saying, “Your honor has the
air of one who is going to meet with the gravest misfortune, and
I fear it will be difficult to assure you of a natural end. It should
not be thus in the household of those who have siven them-es selves to good works.”
Ts’ui had only just received the warning from his mother, and
so when he heard these words he replied respectfully, “I am quite
aware of that, but whenever I see a case of injustice, there is no
way I can hold myself back. If I force myself to change, would
I be able to avoid this fate?”
“Don’t let us talk of avoiding or not avoiding things for the
The Feud O 81
moment,” the Taoist answered with a smile. “First I would like
you to ask yourself whether you can change or not. You will have
to battle painfully with yourself, but if there is one chance in
ten thousand that you can do it, then I shall impart to you the
skills for avoiding death.” Ts’ui had never had any belief in
exorcism, so he merely smiled and made no reply. “I can tell you
are not a believer,” said the monk, “but what I am talking about
has nothing to do with magical practices. The operation involves
the highest level of virtue, and if it does not succeed no damage
will have been done.” So Ts’ui asked to be enlightened further,
and the monk replied, “Outside your door there is a youngster
with whom you must form a close friendship; when you are con-
demned to death it is he who will be able to restore your life to
you.” And he called Ts’ui to come outside, and pointed out the
person he meant.
The boy was surnamed Chao; his given name was Seng-ko.
The Chao family were originally from Nan-ch’ang, but since
there had been a year of bad famine there, they had moved to
Chien-ch’ang. From this time on Ts’ui showed the greatest affec-
tion for Chao Seng-ko; he invited him to live with him at home
and gave him everything that he could require. Chao Seng-ko
was twelve years old at this time; he paid his formal respects to
Ts’ui’s mother and was adopted as his younger brother. The
following year the head of the Chao family, having affairs to
attend to in the east, departed with all his family, so Ts’ui lost all
contact with Seng-ko.
Ever since the death of the wife in the next-door house, Ts’ui’s
mother had kept a tight watch over her son; and if anyone came
by to tell him his troubles, she would send that person away
without ceremony. One day the younger brother of Ts’ui’s mother
died, and Ts’ui went along with her to pay their respects to the
bereaved family. On the road they came upon a group of people
escorting a young man in bonds; they were swearing at him to
hurry up, and hitting him. The crowd of those watching what
82 0 The Death of Woman Wang
was going on had blocked the road, and none of the travelers
could get by. Ts’ui asked what was happening, and those who
recognized him clustered around him to explain.
What had happened was this: There was the son of a certain
well-known member of the gentry who tyrannized his whole dis-
trict; having noticed the beauty of Li Shen’s wife, he determined
to have her for himself. Since he had no direct way to do this,
he sent off one of his household retainers to get into a gambling
game with Li Shen; as they played he lent Li large sums of money
at high interest, saying he could post his wife as bond for the
loans, and the more Li lost the more he gave him, until by
morning Li had run up debts of several thousand taels. Bv the
time half a year had gone by, principal and interest came to over
thirty thousand taels, and there was no way Li could pav it back.
So thev sent over a group of men to seize his wife by force, and
when Li wept and protested outside their gateway, they dragged
him off and tied him to a tree, beating him and jabbing him with
spikes until he was forced to sign a statement that he would not
pursue the matter further.
When Ts’ui heard this he felt the fury rising up inside him like
a mountain—he whipped his horse forward as if he were about to
do battle. But opening the curtains of her sedan chair, his mother
cried out, “Hev! Are you going to start that again:1” and Ts’ui
stopped. After thev had made their condolences they returned
home, but Ts’ui would neither speak nor eat; he sat motionless,
staring straight ahead, as if angered by something. His wife asked
him what was the matter, but he would not answer. That night
he lay on the bed fully clothed and tossed and turned till morning;
the next night he did the same. Suddenly he rose and left the room;
as abruptly he returned and lay down again. This he did three
or four times, his wife did not dare question him; she just lay
anxiously, listening. Finally Ts’ui went out for some time; when
he returned he closed the door and fell into a deep sleep.
That same night somebody killed the wife stealer as he lay on
The Feud O 83
his bed—his stomach was ripped open so that his intestines spilled
out, and Li’s wife was also found, naked and dead, on the floor
by the bed.
The local officials suspected Li himself of the crime and had
him arrested; they tortured him terribly with the pressing boards
until the bones of his ankles showed through the skin, but still
he would not confess. Finally after more than a year he could
bear the punishment no more: he made a false confession and was
condemned to death.
At this time Ts’ui’s mother died, and when the funeral was
over, Ts’ui said to his wife, “It was indeed I who killed that man,
but because my old mother was still alive I did not dare admit it.
Now that my service to her is over, how can I let someone else
take the blame for a crime that I myself committed’? 1 must report
to the officials and meet mv death.” Ts’ui’s wife was terrified and
clung to him, but he tore himself from her grasp and departed,
handing himself in to the yamen. The magistrate was greatlv
surprised and had Ts’ui put in prison, planning to free Li; but
Li would not leave, insisting that he really was the guilty one.
The magistrate could not decide the case and kept them both in
custody. Li’s relatives all came to argue with him, but he said,
“What Ts’ui did was what I wanted to do but was unable to.
After he had done this for me, how could I bear to sit back and
watch him die? I am going to act as if Ts’ui had never handed
himself in.” He refused to retract his confession, and fought o
with Ts’ui over it, until finally everyone at the yamen learned
the true story and Li was forced to leave the prison. Ts’ui was
condemned to death.
Just before the date for his execution an official from the Board
of Punishments named Chao happened to be in the area inspecting
the lists of prisoners condemned for capital crimes, to see if any
might deserve a reduction in sentence. When he came upon
Ts’ui’s name he set aside the others and called for him. Ts’ui
entered, looked up to the platform where the official was sitting,
84 O The Death of Woman Wang
and recognized Chao Seng-ko! Both grieved and happy, he told
him the true story; Chao paced back and forth for a long time,
and then ordered Ts’ui kept in prison, but told the jailers to
treat him well. Chao then reduced his sentence in accordance with
the procedures for those who have turned themselves in and con-
fessed, and had him sent into exile to serve as a soldier in Yunnan.
Li enrolled himself as Ts’ui’s servant and went with him. Before
a year had passed he received an amnesty and returned home; this
again was due to Chao’s influence.
After Ts’ui returned home, Li staved alwavs with him and
undertook the management of all his business affairs. When Ts’ui
offered him money, Li would not accept it; he took special delight
in mastering the skills of pole climbing and boxing, and Ts’ui
treated him with great consideration, buying a wife for him and
giving him lands. Ts’ui now used all his strength to change his
former conduct, and every time he would touch the scars on his
forearm his eyes shone with tears; if quarrels broke out among
their neighbors in the district, Li would pretend that he had been
told to act as peacemaker, and then kept the matter concealed
from Ts’ui.
There was a certain student of the Imperial Academy named
Wang whose familv was overbearing and rich; everyone from
round about who was untrustworthy or immoral used to gather
at the Wangs’ home. As for the substantial local families, many
of them were ravaged, and if they tried to protest, Wang would
send brigands to kill them on the road. Wang’s son was as licen-
tious and cruel as his father, and the two of them maintained an
illicit relationship with a widowed aunt of Wang’s. Wang’s own
wife, woman Ch’iu, tried to get him to stop, and he strangled
her; so woman Ch’iu’s brothers lodged a formal complaint with
the magistrate. Wang, however, bribed the magistrate, and the
Ch’iu brothers were charged in turn with lodging a false charge.
The brothers, not knowing where to turn, went to Ts’ui to beg
for help, but Li intercepted them and made them go away.
The Feud O 85
A few days later some guests came by, and since there happened
to be no servants around, Ts’ui told Li Shen to go and prepare
the tea. Li stayed silent and left the room; later he said to some-
one, “I am a friend of Ts’ui Meng, I followed him ten thousand
li into exile, you cannot say I have not behaved well; whereas he
has never paid me wages and treats me as if I were his servant. I
don’t like that.” And he left angrily. The person told Ts’ui of this
conversation, and he was surprised at the change in Li, though he
did nothing about it.
Without warning Li laid an accusation against Ts’ui in the
magistrate’s court, charging him with having paid him no wages
for three years. Ts’ui was completely astonished and went off
in person to confront him; Li argued angrily with him, but the
magistrate was not convinced by Li and had him beaten and
dismissed from the court. A few days after this Li suddenly broke
into Wang’s house at night and killed the father, the son, and the
aunt; he stuck a piece of paper to the wall on which he wrote his
name, but when the constables came to arrest him they found he
had disappeared without a trace. The surviving members of the
Wang family suspected that Ts’ui had been the person responsible,
but the magistrate did not believe them. Only then did Ts’ui
begin to understand that Li had made his previous accusation so
that Ts’ui would not be involved in this later killing. Warrants
were sent around to the nearby counties ordering the arrest of
Li, but since at this time Li Tzu-ch’eng’s rebellion* was raging,
the whole business was forgotten about; and after the Ming
dynasty fell, Li Shen returned home with his family and resumed
his friendship with Ts’ui, as before.
At this time bands of robbers sprang up everywhere, and a
nephew of Wang’s named Wang Te-jen assembled a group of
toughs who had once been in league with his uncle; they took
- Li Tzu-ch’eng raised a rebel army in northwest China in the 1630s and seized Peking in 1644, ending the Ming dynasty. He was ousted the same year by die Manchus, who formed the Ch’ing dynasty.
86 0 The Death of Woman Wang
a base in the mountains and became thieves, pillaging the villages
and grazing grounds in the area. One night he assembled the
band and came down, saying that he would be revenged on
Ts’ui. Ts’ui happened to be away from home, and Li Shen
luckily saw them coming and was able to escape over the wall
and hide in a safe place. The robbers searched for Ts’ui, and when
they could not find him they took his wife and any objects of
value that were there, then left.
When Li got back only one servant remained, and he was too
frightened and upset to know what to do. Li took a length of
rope and cut it into dozens of pieces; he gave the shorter pieces
to the servant and kept the longer ones for himself. He told the
servant to go beyond the robbers’ lair and climb halfway up the
mountain, where he was to set fire to the bits of rope and scatter
them among the patches of briers; then he could return home,
with nothing more to worry about. The servant agreed to do what
he asked, and went off on his mission. Li had noticed that the
robbers all wore red sashes round their waists and red turbans
on their heads, so he dressed himself in the same fashion. Outside
the gateway was an old mare that had just foaled and had been
left there by the robbers; Li tethered the foal and saddled the
horse, put the bit in its mouth, and set off. When he reached
the robbers’ lair, which was in a large village they had.captured,
he tethered the mare outside the village and climbed in over the
wall. He saw crowds of robbers moving around everywhere, still
carrying their arms; and by skillful questioning he was able to
find out that Ts’ui’s wife was being kept in Wang’s house. Shortly
thereafter the signal was given for everyone to retire for the night,
and they were just rumbling off to obey when someone called
out that there was a fire in the eastern hills; all the robbers
gathered to watch. At first there were only one or two specks of
light, but more and more appeared like stars; Li rushed up breath-
lessly, shouting out that there was danger in the eastern hills.
Wang was alarmed, put on his armor, and led off his troops,
The Feud O 87
while Li slipped away from the group to the right and made his
way back into the village.
Me saw two of the robbers standing guard under an awning,
and said to them, “General Wang forgot his sword.” As they
hurried in to look for it Li struck at their heads from behind:
one of them fell dead, the other turned around to look at Li, who
beheaded him as well. Carrying Ts’ui’s wife on his back, Li
climbed over the wall, untied the horse, and gave the reins to
the woman, saying, “Since you don’t know the way back, just
let the horse find it.” The mare hurried off at a trot, anxious to
get back to her foal. Li followed on after them until he reached
a defile in the mountains; there he set fire to the pieces of rope,
which he had hung up in various places, and returned home.
Next day Ts’ui returned; because of the gross insult he had
suffered he was torn body and soul with impetuous rage and
wanted to ride out alone to attack the bandits, but Li was able
to dissuade him. They assembled all the villagers to make a com-
mon strategy, but most of them were timorous and did not daTe
take action; after discussing the problem from every point of view,
they found about twenty villagers who seemed brave enough,
though unfortunately they had no weapons. It happened at this
time that they caught two spies in the home of Wang Te-jen’s
relatives, and Ts’ui was just about to kill them when Li stopped
him; he told the twenty villagers to pick up simple wooden poles
and line up in front of the two robbers, then cut off the bandits’
ears and let them go. The villagers were all angry, and said to Li,
“We were afraid that the bandits would find out we had no other
weapons than these, and now you have shown them. If they
come back with the whole band, the entire village will be un-
protected.”
“I want them to come,” said Li. First he seized and killed those
who had been sheltering the bandits, and then he sent men all
around to get bows and arrows and firearms while he himself went
to the city and borrowed two large cannon.
88 O The Death of Woman Wang
At nightfall Li Shen took the strongest villagers with him to
the defile in the mountains and put the cannon in position, leav-
ing two men there with concealed fire and telling them to shoot
when they saw the bandits. Then he went to the defile at the
eastern end of the valley, cut down a number of trees, and piled
them on the top of the slope; he and Ts’ui each took ten men and
waited at the edge of the cliff. Near the end of the first watch
they heard the sound of horses neighing in the distance, and the
bandits arrived, riding past in an unbroken stream. The villagers
waited until all the bandits had entered the valley, then sent the
trees rolling down to cut their retreat; at the same moment the
cannon opened fire, and the sounds of the men crying out rose
in the air, filling the mountains and valleys. The bandits fled
back, trampling each other, but when they reached the entrance
to the valley in the east they could not get through, and there
was no other means of escape. From both cliffs arrows and shot
rained down; robbers with severed heads and shattered limbs lay
piled in confusion on the valley floor.
Only some twenty robbers were left alive, and they knelt long
on the ground, begging for their lives; men were sent down to
tie them up, and they were brought back as prisoners. Profiting
from the victory, the villagers went to the bandits’ lair, but the
guards heard them coming and escaped into hiding; so the villagers
took away all the military supplies from the camp and returned
home.
Ts’ui was overjoyed and asked Li to explain his earlier plan of
lighting the fires. Li replied, “I had the servant light the fires
at the eastern mountains because I feared the bandits might pursue
me to the west; I used short pieces of rope because I wanted
them to burn through quickly, fearing that the bandits’ scouts
might find out that there was no one there. 1 placed the fires at
the entrance to the valley because the entrance was narrow and
could be blocked off by one person; if the bandits got there in
pursuit of me, they would be frightened back when they saw
The Feud O 89
the fires. It was a clumsy plan, designed for a moment of extreme
danger.” They questioned some of the captured robbers, who
confirmed that they pursued Li into the valley but were frightened
when they saw the fires, and withdrew.
They cut off the noses and ears of the twenty bandits, and
then let them go. From this time forth the fame of the two men
spread around, and all those from near and far who were fleeing
from disasters came to be their followers, crowding around as on
a market day. The two formed a local defense force of more than
three hundred men, and not one of the cruel bandits in the area
dared to attack them; the people of the region trusted in the two
men, and lived in peace.
In T’an-ch’eng county there lived a W a n g family that
could have been the prototype for P’u Sung-ling’s fictional
Wangs. T h e family head was a certain W a n g San, who had
originally lived in the area of Ch’i-hsia county, two hundred
and fifty miles to the northeast; he had been a subcommander
in the army of Yii Ch’i , the rebel who had held out for
months against three Manchu armies in the Shantung moun-
tains during 1661 and early 1662. W h e n the rebels were
broken by the besieging armies and by the savage reprisals
taken against the villages near their base areas, Yii Ch’i had
managed to escape, leaving many of his subordinates behind
to be executed; W a n g San had escaped at the same time, and
he made his way to T’an-ch’eng. There, with the money he
brought with him, he had purchased a fortified farm house in
Wu-chang village, situated in the very south of the county, so
that in an emergency he could leave the jurisdiction of
Shantung by slipping across the border at P’ei into Kiangsu
province. T h e villagers had seen groups of horsemen ride up
to his house at night armed with swords and bows, and often
the Wangs rode off for days on end; but no one had dared to
report the family to the authorities.
9<o 0 The Death of Woman Wang
Wang San had a son as tough as he was, named Wang K’o- hsi, who had married the daughter of a local landlord named Chiang; that same Chiang had deeded sixty acres of good land to the Wangs in addition to letting his daughter enter their family. Chiang’s motive in both these transactions was to buy protection from the Wangs—for everyone in the area knew that the Wangs were gangsters as well as landlords.
T’an-ch’eng presented no prototype for P’u Sung-ling’s fic- tional hero, the violent Ts’ui Meng; perhaps a local farmer named Li Tung-chen came the nearest of anyone to catching a flicker of the same independence. Li lived fifteen miles southwest of T’an-ch’eng city, near Lao-kou market, where he owned a sprawling home—several rooms with earth walls and floors grouped around a central courtyard, surrounded by a wall. It was a poor sort of house despite its size, with nothing worth stealing. Six of his seven sons lived there with him—his eldest son, Li Yuan, had moved a short distance, to Ni-hu village, and set up on his own.
Father and eldest son had both been hoping to obtain a lease on the sixty acres of land owned by Chiang, since it abutted on theirs—their “mouths had been watering for it,” according to the neighbors—and they were furious when Chiang, in the spring of 1670, deeded the land to Wang San. The Lis showed their disappointment that Chiang had made his land over to Wang by being careless about where their animals strayed: several times their donkeys and pigs crossed the boundaries of Wang’s new fields.
One day in early summer Wang K’o-hsi came with men to work on his land and found one of Li Yiian’s pigs rooting there. He killed the pig and cursed out Li Tung-chen for letting his animals trample the Wang fields. Li Tung-chen, enraged in turn, swore that the Wangs were the “leaders of a gang of mounted thugs.” Though it was true enough, the Wangs decided this last charge was an act of public defiance
The Feud 0 91
that could not be forgiven; and on July 6 (the day, by coinci- dence, on which Ch’en Kuo-hsiang beat Ch’en Lien to death near the city) they met in their home with three friends to plan their reprisal for Li’s insult. They decided to recruit two more men—Su Ta, famous for his pugnacity, and Li the Fat, experienced and shrewd; and they sent one of their number to the diviner to find out what would be a lucky day to “under- take a great matter.” The diviner recommended the day “Double Six,” the sixth day of the sixth lunar month (July 22), so the Wangs laid their plans for that evening.
On the afternoon of the twenty-second, Wang’s group rode across country on donkeys, carrying concealed weapons; they left the donkeys on the hill behind Li Tung-chen’s house and hid in the underbrush there until darkness fell. There were eight of them altogether: one stayed to guard the donkeys; Wang San covered the road behind the house; two were sent to watch the front entrance; Wang K’o-hsi, his face smeared with red mud to avoid recognition, climbed with the three others over the wall into Li Tung-chen’s courtyard. It was a hot night, and Li was lying out in the courtyard with two friends and several of his sons. Before he could rise, Wang K’o-hsi speared him in the stomach; as Li staggered to his feet, crying out, “Who’s here?” a sword blow caught him on the back of the neck, another pierced his side, and he fell dead. Li’s fifth son was killed next. Then his seventh. The sixth son ran for the gate, but was cut down. (He died the next day.) The women were left unharmed, but the two guests were both wounded and were being forced to tell Wang where the other sons were when the third son, who was still able to run despite a wound in his head, reached a neighbor’s house and rang an alarm bell. At the sound of the bell the killers re- grouped and rode back home.
For three days the surviving members of the Li family tried to decide what to do. None of them dared to accuse the
92 0 The Death of Woman Wang
Wangs directly; nor did the neighbors; nor did the wounded guests. The Lis finally decided to bring a double charge of “robbery out of vengeance, and the murder of four persons in one family” against Chiang, the neighbor who had given his land to the Wangs; the Lis calculated that in order to clear himself of the charges Chiang would have to end up by impli- cating the Wangs. But though the magistrate’s constables did arrest Chiang in response to the Lis’ charge and bring him into T’an-ch’eng city for questioning, no one had anticipated the extent of Wang San’s gall: Wang came in person to the court, swore out a statement that Chiang was an honest per- son, that there was no cause to arrest him, and that he, Wang, would stand guarantor for Chiang’s conduct. With that he escorted him out of the court under the astonished gaze of the courtroom clerks, none of whom dared protest.
Two weeks later Li Yuan lodged another charge, this time of “homicide of four persons,” dropping the references to vengeance and robbery and naming nobody as the accused. Huang Liu-hung, who had just taken up office as magistrate, decided to try to find out what lay behind these various ac- cusations, though he knew it would be difficult, since security, even in his own office, was poor. He had located at least twenty-four local ruffians, scattered across the four districts of his county, all of whom had contacts at different levels within his own yamen and got news of any decision as soon as he made it.
The magistrate’s method was to proceed by indirection. He first summoned Li Yuan to a private nighttime interview, during which he persuaded him to name the protagonists in the case by promising to help his family attain their ven- geance on the killers. Once Li had named the Wangs and provided details of the killings, Huang sent him home. The next day he summoned the one police constable he was sure he could trust, Yix Piao, and asked him, “Do you know the
The Feud © 93
names of the robbers who killed Li Tung-chen and his sons?” Yii stared at him in alarm for some time, and replied,
“Though I know who it is, I dare not tell you the name.” Huang: “Then just tell me how we can catch him.”
Yii: “The difficulty would not be in catching him, but I’m afraid he’d get advance news of it.”
Huang: “Can you think of anyone who would like to be revenged on this robber?”
Yii Piao again thought for a long time, and answered, “There’s a man in this county called Kuan Ming-yii whose younger brother was killed by the robber; every time he talks about it he is moved to tears, but he doesn’t know how to take his revenge.”
Huang continued to move carefully, since the mere sum- moning of this Kuan might lay him open to reprisals. Instead, he summoned Kuan’s cousin Kuan Ming-pao, who was in- volved in a criminal case, and had him accompanied to the hearing by Kuan Ming-yii, in his capacity as village head- man. After the hearing he summoned Kuan Ming-yii to a private interview, and again proceeded by question and answer:
Huang: “Is that Ming-pao your younger brother?” Kuan: “No, he’s my younger cousin.” Huang: “Are you an only child, with no younger brother?” Kuan: “I had a younger brother, but he’s dead.” Huang: “How did he die?” Kuan: “He was killed by robbers.” Huang: “Which robbers?” Kuan: “Since your honor asks me that, he must surely
know who it was. The killer of my brother was Wang San. My brother was thirteen years old, and while out cutting grain accidentally stepped over the line onto Wang San’s land. Wang San tied him up, dragged him to his home, killed him and buried his body somewhere in the garden behind his
94 ® The Death of Woman Wang
house. I dare not tell you how much I still hate him. The man who killed Li Tung-chen and his sons was the same Wang San. If your honor has any assignment for me, you have only to tell me.”
Huang: “You’ll have a chance to avenge your brother’s death. The day after tomorrow I’ll be coming to check levies in the eastern district. Early on that morning you must pay a visit to Wang San and make sure he is indeed at home; I’ll tell Yii Piao to be hiding behind the garden wall, and as soon as you’ve told Yii, I will be there. If there are any leaks I shall have you killed.”
Huang then took six taels of silver and gave Kuan three, promising him the rest after Wang San had been caught.
To keep his side of the bargain, the magistrate had to as- semble a force which would be strong enough to arrest the Wangs, yet news of which would not reach them in advance. On paper, at least, he had enough troops to deal with the situa- tion. There were three detachments of regular soldiers in T’an- ch’eng county: 150 soldiers were garrisoned in the county capital, and either used to defend the city or the smaller market towns out in the countryside; 80 were on duty at the southernmost point of the county, at the important post sta- tion of Hung-hua-fou; 21 were assigned to guard the seven government inns on the main roads. About a quarter of these troops were classified as cavalry, the rest as infantry. A further 132 riders and grooms were attached to the other main post stations. And the magistrate had his own personal staff of 103; among this number were 50 militia soldiers, 16 runners, and 8 police constables. These police constables seem to have been Huang Liu-hung’s most reliable staff—at seventeen and a half taels a year they were paid almost three times as much as the runners and soldiers, who only earned six—and were well trained and loyal; but the others posed problems. There was no particular shared esprit: the soldiers and grooms were con-
The Feud 0 95
stantly feuding with each other, even brawling in the streets, while both troops and horsemen used violence against the clerks and runners. The horses were in terrible condition- there were nowhere near the stipulated number of 130, and many of those in the stables were too weak to be ridden. Even the lieutenant in charge of the city troops, Chu Ch’eng-ming, although he was brave enough and a good officer, could not be relied on in this case, since he was known to have been on friendly terms with the Wangs.
To minimize the chance of leaks, the magistrate simply announced that he would be going on a routine tour of in- spection in the area around the market town of Ma-t’ou. The evening after his conversation with Kuan Ming-yii, he as- sembled a group of just under forty riders—the eight police constables and thirty of his own militia and staff—and set off for Ma-t’ou. When Lieutenant Chu offered to accompany him, Huang said that would not be necessary, but they could meet up the following day near the town of Chung-fang. To give his story credence, the magistrate and his men rode the six miles west to Ma-t’ou, through steady rain; but instead of staying there they left, after a short rest, and rode through the night southeast to Chung-fang, which they reached a little before dawn. Here, about six miles from the Wangs’ house, they ate and rested, while the police constable Yii Piao checked in at his rendezvous with Kuan Ming-yii.
The group was still at breakfast when Yii Piao galloped back to say that Kuan Ming-yii had arrived as planned at Wang San’s house, offering to pay his respects and bringing two geese as a present. Delighted, Wang San had asked him in, and the two had had some drinks together; but the magis- trate would have to hurry, since Wang was planning to ride over to the market at Lao-kou later in the morning. Huang had just been joined by Lieutenant Chu with twenty more cavalry, yet even as they galloped off to Wang San’s house he
96 0 The Death of Woman Wang
refused to tell Chu where they were going, shouting out, “You’ll know when you get there.”
Despite the elaborate precautions, Wang San had somehow been alerted by the time they arrived. The gates were barred; men, some with firearms, some with swords, were at their posts; and Wang San (identified by one of Huang’s police constables) was standing in full view on the wall, holding a long halberd with a crescent blade.
Huang’s main worry was that Wang’s men would scatter out into the nearby fields of high kaoliang, and he knew it would take a difficult battle to storm the house. So when Wang made a feigned retreat toward the back of his house, Huang pretended to be taken in, and he led his own troops around to the back, hoping that if given the chance Wang would run for P’ei and that he might be able to trap him on the level ground near the border. “We entice the tiger to come down from the mountain,” Huang told his police. As Wang and twenty of his men rode out through the front gate, Huang joined in pursuit; Wang was still ahead of his pursuers as they reached the P’ei border, and Lieutenant Chu reined in his troops, saying that it was against regulations to go beyond their jurisdiction. But Huang, letting the excitement of the chase get ahead of his usual administrator’s caution, called out, “T’an troops are chasing T’an bandits—what have regu- lations got to do with it?” and rode his men over the river.
On the other bank, with their backs to a hill, Wang and his men were waiting for them. It is not clear why they stopped there: perhaps their horses were exhausted, perhaps they thought the T’an-ch’eng men would stop on their own side of the border, perhaps they thought the magistrate’s men would have no stomach for a fight. The latter is the most likely, for Wang’s men moved into the offensive at once, unhorsing one of Chu’s squad commanders with their lances and striking another in the chest; these commanders, since they were wear-
The Feud O 97
ing chest armor, were not badly hurt, but the examples dis- couraged anyone else from advancing until one of the magis- trate’s militia men hit one of Wang’s men in the chest with an arrow and killed him. The militia men’s spirits were further raised by the arrival of Kuan Ming-yu with around thirty armed villagers, so that the Wangs were now outnumbered nearly ninety to twenty, and the battle was sharply joined.
Wang K’o-hsi was knocked out by Kuan Ming-yii with his cudgel, and Wang San, riding to his son’s rescue, was felled with an arrow in the chest. Three other of Wang’s com- panions were killed or captured, and the rest escaped. Huang did not pursue them; he had captured the two Wangs, the men he wanted most.
The Wangs were taken back to T’an-ch’eng city and inter- rogated through the night. Wang San’s arrow wound was festering, and he died during the questioning, though not before he admitted his part in the killing of Li Tung-chen. Wang K’o-hsi also confessed. Despite Wang San’s death the city of T’an-ch’eng was in a panic. The gentry packed their possessions, fearing there might be a general rising of the Wangs’ supporters; and Huang grew so anxious about an at- tempt being made to free Wang K’o-hsi from jail that he had him transported to the stronger prison in I-chou, to the north.
The day after the arrest of the Wangs, over eighty house- holds fled from the villages in southeastern T’an-ch’eng. All were believed to have been connected with Wang San’s gang, and presumably they now feared reprisals, but it is not clear whom they feared reprisals from: other gangsters, the magis- trate’s troops, or their own neighbors.
Wang San was long remembered by the people of T’an- ch’eng. Though his death from his wounds showed that he was not a heavenly spirit as some had believed, nevertheless people could not forget the extent of his operations, the size of his gang, or that final act of astonishing bravado: when he
98 © The Death of Woman Wang
himself was the killer, coming in person to the court and standing guarantor for the man who had been falsely accused in his stead.
The Wangs had confessed to one of the crimes considered most serious in the Legal Code, “killing three persons in one family.” The clause ran: “All those who kill, whether with premeditation, deliberately, in the course of burning their house, or while committing a robbery, three persons from the same family (none of whom were guilty of capital crimes), or who dismember another person, shall be executed by the lingering death; their property shall be made over to the sur- viving family of the deceased; their wives and sons shall be banished in perpetuity to a distance of 2000 li; and the main accessories shall be beheaded.” One might have supposed, therefore, that Li Tung-chen’s widow and his four surviving children, after time for the legal complications to be settled, would have ended up rich with money that Wang San had accumulated over the vears. But this was not the case. When Huang took an inventory of Wang San’s house in Wu-chang village, he found to his surprise that there was nothing of value in any of the three buildings, just some simple furnish- ings; and in the extensive stables, though the dung was feet deep on the floor, there were no horses, just a few donkeys. One of Wang’s tenants supplied the answer: Wang kept nothing of value in T’an-ch’eng, he just used the county as his base; he shipped everything of value to P’ei, across the Kiangsu provincial boundary, where it was guarded for him by his blood brother, a senior degree holder named Chu. There is no evidence that the magistrate ever began the ad- ministrative and legal proceedings that would have been necessary to relieve a degree holder in Kiangsu of his property for transfer to a farming family in Shantung.
7ivz
%<$
THE WOMAN
WHO RAN
AWAY
O
IN THE WRITTEN and collected memory of T’an-ch’eng as it was stored in the biographical sections of the Local History, the highest standards were demanded and claimed. This was even truer for women than for men, and the dissemination of these biographies of “Honorable and Virtuous Women” was one of the important ways that the local worthies—acting in full accord with the stated values of the government—sought to impose their views of correct female behavior. By this they meant, in general, the behavior of women toward their hus- bands, for of the fifty-six T’an-ch’eng women’s biographies
ioo O The Death of Woman Wang
printed in the 1670s, only three were of unmarried women, and of these three two were betrothed and about to be mar- ried. The virtues fostered were those of chastity, courage, tenacity, and unquestioning acceptance of the prevailing hierarchy—unto death if necessary: fifteen of the listed women had committed suicide, and in thirteen of these sui- cides the motive was loyalty to a deceased husband or to avoid rape, which would shame both wife and husband. In contrast to the suicides for vengeance, or out of anger, which Huang Liu-hung had criticized so strongly, these suicides (if by childless women) were considered morally “correct,” as they showed the depth of the woman’s reverence for her husband. They were praised even if the husband himself was no longer in good standing in the community—as can be seen from the case of woman Kao. This woman visited her seriously ill hus- band in the T’an-ch’eng prison, where he was being held on a murder charge; while in the cell she tried to hang both herself and him with the cloths used to bind her feet. Foiled in her attempt by the jailers, and barred from any further visits to the prison, she went to the temple of the City God and addressed him thus: “I wish to die as my husband is dying. His misery is my misery. How can I live on alone? My will is fixed: rather than die with him at the end, I shall be the one to go first. Only the God understands my situation.” And she hanged herself on the verandah of the temple. Such suicides were not restricted to members of elite families who had been educated in the neo-Confucian ideals of loyalty: one woman Liu, who killed herself after her husband’s death from illness, was a carpenter’s daughter, her husband a farm laborer; an- other was married to a small trader who traveled back and forth between the market towns of Li-chia-chuang and Lai-wu.
The insistence on the wife’s loyalty to the husband was so strong that it applied even when the couple were betrothed rather than married. When another woman Liu’s fiance,
The Woman Who Ran Away © 101
Chang Shou, died before the ceremonies were completed and her parents secretly arranged her betrothal to another man, she “cut her hair and disfigured her face” and vowed that she would always be loyal to the man who would have been her husband. She insisted on serving Chang’s parents as if they were her in-laws, and lived out her life with them in vegetar- ian abstemiousness. Even more poignant is the biography of a girl only thirteen years old who was living with the family of her future husband, Liu, in the village of Wang-t’ien, north of the county city. Such an arrangement was common enough at the time—a young girl could get food and protection, while her future mother-in-law got an extra pair of hands to help in the house. But in 1651, before the official marriage had taken place, Liu was slandered for having illicit relations with his widowed sister-in-law; with some impetuous notion of clearing her good name and proving his own integrity, he castrated himself. Both his parents and the young girl’s mother argued that the betrothal contract was now broken, since Liu was “no longer a whole person,” and they arranged for a new engage- ment. But as the new husband was being summoned, the young girl, on the pretext that she had to wash her body before receiving him, barred the door, and hanged herself.
Such stories were held in living memories as well as in the written record, and plenty of people were alive in 1671 to tell the present generation of past sacrifices: woman Wang’s father-in-law was in his seventies; the former district head- man, Yii Shun, was over ninety; widow Fan was eighty-one, and her biography shows she had already borne her son by the time of the great famine of 1615—when “men sold their wives for a few tens of cash, or sold their sons for the price of a few steamed dumplings”—and was a widow by 1622, when the White Lotus rebels enticed so many from T’an-ch’eng to their fate. For most of these old survivors, as for the newer generations, the grimmest of the stories must have clustered
io2 O The Death of Woman Wang
about the Manchu sack of their city in 1643, a n d it was from these stories that some of the most exemplary cases could be drawn. At least nine of the women listed in the T’an-ch’eng biographies lost their husbands to the Manchus in that year, and descriptions were kept of how four other upright women met their ends: Woman Hsieh and woman T’ien, who had married two brothers and shared the same home, hanged themselves from the same beam with their sashes as the troops approached; one was twenty-four, the other twenty. Woman Ho, who had been left a widow by her husband’s death five years before, was caught by soldiers as she tried to flee with her six-year-old daughter; when she resisted them they struck her with their swords, but she broke away and flung herself into a well, holding her daughter in her arms. The next day neighbors heard the little girl crying, and they rescued her, but woman Ho was dead. As the troops looted the outer rooms of her home, woman Ch’en waited with her eight-year-old son in the main hall of her private apartment. Her husband was away, somewhere in the city, trying with the help of his brother to carry their mother to safety. The woman Ch’en and her son were both crying. Soldiers entered the room and dragged her outside, across the courtyard. She struggled, shouting and swearing at them. She was still cursing when they pulled her through the main gateway into the street, so they killed her.
Others survived in T’an-ch’eng, but narrowly. Woman Hsu was captured by the troops and wounded, but she man- aged to escape with her six-year-old son. Woman Yang was seven months pregnant when the soldiers killed her husband and her mother-in-law. She proceeded publicly with the funeral rites for them, and the soldiers let her be. (Two months later, when the armies had departed, she bore a son.) Woman Kao jumped from the city wall holding her five-year- old son after the troops had killed her husband and the older
The Woman Who Ran Away O 103
children. She ran to the east, and would have drowned while
trying to cross the Shu River, but she was rescued by local
villagers who sheltered her and the boy.
P’u Sung-ling paid his own homage to such women’s
courage in a brief story called “Chang’s Wife”:
In the year 1674, when the Three Feudatories had risen in re-
bellion, the expeditionary troops being sent south were bivouacked
with their horses in the area of Yen; not a dog or chicken was left,
the hearths were empty, women and girls all suffered their out-
rages.
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