CONFLICT, COMMUNITY AND CRIME IN FIN-DE-SIÈCLE SICHUAN

A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY AND THE COMMITTEE ON GRADUATE STUDIES OF STANFORD UNIVERSITY IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

QUINN DOYLE JAVERS MAY 2012

© 2012 by Quinn Doyle Javers. All Rights Reserved. Re-distributed by Stanford University under license with the author.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- Noncommercial 3.0 United States License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/

This dissertation is online at: http://purl.stanford.edu/gr339jp1011

ii I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Matthew Sommer, Primary Adviser

I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Karen Wigen

I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Christian Henriot

Approved for the Stanford University Committee on Graduate Studies. Patricia J. Gumport, Vice Provost Graduate Education

This signature page was generated electronically upon submission of this dissertation in electronic format. An original signed hard copy of the signature page is on file in University Archives.

iii

Abstract

The 350 legal cases from the ming’an [“cases of unnatural death”] category of the Ba County archive that survive from the final decade of the nineteenth century create a textured picture of social life and state-society relations at the grassroots near the end of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912). Close analysis of these cases enhances our understanding of the lives of ordinary people in the last decades of the old regime by untangling the webs of social relations, practices, and norms that bound people together and gave their actions meaning. At the same time, this study illuminates the role that local courts played, even at the end of the dynasty, in settling disputes and in enforcing the normative forms of authority that underpinned social order.

In order to take full advantage of these rich archival materials, the manuscript has adopted a number of historical lenses. Chapter One introduces the social geography of the county, emphasizing the social use of rivers and roads. The chapter concludes with a look at legal cases for which claimants drew their own maps and submitted them to the court as evidence.

Chapter Two examines both female and male suicide. The female suicides that take took place in Ba County were not heroic acts of martyrdom for the sake of elite values, but desperate and pathetic acts applauded by no-one. Instead, the chapter focuses on the social webs that these cases expose. Turning to male suicide, a topic

iv largely untouched by previous scholarship on China, the local archive again reveals webs of connections and expectations that bound actors, notably those between employer and employee.

Chapter Three considers homicide and, like the chapter on suicide, interrogates these cases as sources for social history. The chapter explores economically motivated violence, particularly the role of debt and its collection as well as land disputes. It then briefly compares homicide rates in Ba County with those in other parts of China as well as Japan, Western Europe, and the United States, in an effort to determine how violent this society was.

Chapter Four considers the role of false accusations and false testimony in the legal culture of late Qing Sichuan. Untruths formed a strategy deployed by a wide range of individuals in order to compel the court to hear their grievances. They also formed an integral part of the larger legal culture and thus illuminate the driving role that common people had in animating this culture.

Chapter Five exposes ritualized processes of local disputation. Key here are lists of damaged or stolen objects compiled by litigants and submitted to the court as part of claims for restitution. These acts of property destruction reveal another aspect of violence’s social life, as an emotive performance drawing on shared scripts.

Together, these chapters offer a vivid and unprecedented picture of life in late-

Qing China. This study employs death to illuminate the webs of social life in the county. Despite the frequent opacity of the actual event (suicide, homicide or other violence), these acts explode into view the surrounding social connections and cleavages, revealing how both death and violence were instrumental in local life.

v

Acknowledgements

I have incurred many debts while writing this dissertation. Foremost among them is to Matt Sommer, who has been an exceptional mentor and guide throughout my time at graduate school, and even before. I am deeply honored to be his first student to finish (although he may not have always felt the same). Kären Wigen has also been inspirational. Her keen, critical eye, and rigor continue to strengthen my work, and her intellectual passions have joyfully infected my own thinking. I was enormously lucky that Christian Henriot sojourned in the Bay Area during a good part of my graduate studies. Our interactions, in class and outside, have sharpened my thinking and quickened my enthusiasm.

The years spent researching and writing of this project were supported by a number of institutions. While writing the dissertation in California, I was funded by the History Department’s Weter Dissertation Fellowships and a Mellon Dissertation

Fellowship from the Stanford Humanities Center. While in Sichuan, I was supported by Fulbright IIE fellowship and a Dissertation Grant in Chinese Studies from Freeman

Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford. I would also like to thank the

Center for East Asian Studies at Stanford for a number of small grants.

A host of individuals lubricated my way through my years at graduate school.

In Sichuan, I would like to thank Li Zan and Zhao Weini at Sichuan University Law

vi School for being such wonderful hosts, guides, and mentors. Also at Sichuan

University, I thank Zhou Haifeng and Ning Kai for all their help. The staff at the

Sichuan Provincial Archive has my deepest thanks for their assistance. I’d also like to thank Maura Dykstra for being a friendly face at the archive (and beyond). The owners of the yibin ranmian shop behind the archive have my cheers – their noodles still haunt my dreams.

At Stanford, my appreciation to Tom Mullaney and Mark Lewis for their thoughtful comments on my research, and to Richard Roberts for his sage advice.

Philip Thai, Ying Hu, Meiyu Hsieh, Sayoko Sakakibara and Brigid Vance formed a wonderful and rigorous cohort of dissertators, and improved my writing and thinking enormously. Renana Keidar and Aviv Mezer were instrumental in my escape from

Stanford. Alex Bay, Stephen Whiteman, Eddie Vazquez and Pierre Fuller made nights more fun and mornings more difficult. I’d also like to thank Josh Chin and David

Winning who were there in the beginning.

Finally, I would like to thank my family, particularly Ron and Eileen Javers, my brother Eamon as well as Mick and Joanne Pateman, for the their love and support.

My boys, Cullen and Cormac, made grad school much more fun, and gave me good reasons to leave it. To Sophie, what can I say: I remain “looped in the loops of her hair.” Always.

vii

Table of Contents

Abstract iv

Acknowledgments vii

Note on Conversions and Conventions x

Introduction 1

Chapter 1. Spatial Aspects of Social Life 18

Chapter 2. Suicide and Social Practices 66

Chapter 3. Killers Among Us: Homicide and Its Social Context 111

Chapter 4. The Logic of Lies: “False Accusation” and Legal Culture 153

Chapter 5. Objects, Conflict and Routine Violence 188

Conclusion 221

Character List 228

Bibliography 231

viii

Note on Conversions and Conventions:

Length: 10 fen= 1 cun; 10 cun= 1 chi (12.5 inches)

Capacity: 10 ge= sheng (32 fl oz); 10 sheng= 1 dou; 10 dou= 1 shi/dan

Weight: 16 liang= 1 jin (20.9 oz); 120 jin= 1 dan/shi

Area and Distance: 1 mu= 1/6 acre; 1 li= 1/3 mile

Monetary units: 1 liang = 1 “tael,” a unit of silver currency used in large transactions; 1 wen = 1 “cash,” a unit of currency in copper coin (the nominal exchange rate was 1 tael= 1,000 cash, but the actual market rate in nineteenth-century

Sichuan varied from 800-1,800 cash) and; 1 chuan = 1 “string” of cash conventionally

= 1,000 cash, although the actual number of coins per string varied in practice.

Chinese documents rarely mention women by their given names and instead identify woman by her husband’s surname followed by her surname followed by the term shi. So, Liu Mou Shi is Mrs. Liu née Mou.

During the Qing, age was counted in sui. An individual was one sui at birth and aged a sui every year at New Year. The difference between sui and Western

“years old” was one to two years.

ix

Midway through February, in an alley in the center of the city, some garbagemen found another dead woman. She was about thirty and dressed in a black skirt and low- cut white blouse. She had been stabbed to death, although contusions from multiple blows were visible about her face and abdomen. In her purse was a ticket for the nine a.m. bus to Tucson, a bus she would never catch. Also found were a lipstick powder, eyeliner, Kleenex, a half-empty pack of cigarettes, and a package of condoms. There was no passport or appointment book or anything that might identify her. Nor was she carrying a lighter or matches. (Roberto Bolaño, 2666)

x

Introduction

The 350 legal cases from the ming’an [“cases of unnatural death”] category of the Ba County archive that survive from the final decade of the nineteenth century create a textured picture of social life and state-society relations at the grassroots near the end of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912). Analyzing these cases closely enhances our understanding of the lives of ordinary people in the last decades of the old regime by untangling the webs of social relations, practices, and norms that bound people together and gave their actions meaning. At the same time, it illuminates the role that local courts played, even at the end of the dynasty, in settling disputes and in enforcing the normative forms of authority that underpinned social order.

The present study lays bare the power structures that animated local communities and shows how diverse authorities disciplined their constituents, were challenged locally by competing notions of order and responsibility, and interacted with state power. Previous studies of violence in the Qing have largely focused on episodic outbursts of mass violence. 1 While the best of these uncover the social realities undergirding violent acts, few explore the mechanisms and motivations

1 For representatives of the best of these studies, see Elizabeth J. Perry, Rebels and Revolutionaries in North China, 1845-1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983); Joseph W. Esherick, The Origins of the Boxer Uprising (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).

1 animating quotidian acts of interpersonal violence.2 Such micro-level violence – in the form of homicide, suicide, rape, property destruction, and brawling – has received much less attention.3

This project is about the role such violent acts in ordering, disciplining and building local communities. Violence was a regular part of local life.4 While its modes are largely universal and familiar, the particular articulation of each act provides insight into social organization. Every murder is different and deeply expressive. The examination of these routine horrors thus opens the way to a crisper understanding of local life. Just as an autopsy reveals the way an individual lived as well as how they died, so interpersonal violence exposes social practice and local customs. Moreover, this research reveals a crucial role for death in local communities. Death was often an opportunity, opening new avenues for both contestation and mediation. Indeed, death could be a windfall for the living, a chance for economic gain and the settling of scores.

The legal cases considered here add to our understanding of mortality at the local level. Of course, the passing of an individual could be a personal loss and an important ritual and spiritual moment, but it also had a legal and, often, an instrumental role to play. Homicide and suicide in particular were stark ruptures for any family or village. Such abrupt changes in individual lives throw into relief

2 An important exception is William Rowe, Crimson Rain: Seven Centuries of Violence in a Chinese County (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006). 3 Instances of irregular violence include state-sponsored violence as well as popular actions such as the White Lotus Rebellion, the Taiping Rebellion, “anti-foreigner” riots, lineage feuding and a host of other periodic disturbances on a variety of scales. 4 This study focuses on actual, physical violence does not consider psychic, structural or systemic violence. For a general theoretical overview, see Bruce B. Lawrence and Aisha Karim, eds., On Violence: A Reader (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2007).

2 accepted understandings of the world. Captured by the court’s mediating brush, they also often reveal unarticulated realities. The quotidian can be found in the exceptional.

As William Taylor writes in his study of homicide in Mexico: “the patterns of behavior in these dramatic events and the nature of the trial records suggest norms, desires, and aspects of everyday life that are ordinarily undocumented because they are taken for granted.”5 In a word, violence often exposes the local face of power. In these acts, one sees the tensions within family, lineage, local community, and state.

While the current project is not a microhistory, it does share that genre’s recognition “that every event embodies a kind of existential moment in which the course of history intersects with individual action.”6 Likewise, it is “devoted to social relationships and interactions among historical persons who, in contrast to analytic categories, actually existed and who experienced life as a series of events.”7 However, while microhistory developed in the study of Europe in part as a reaction to the superabundance of source material, the Qing poses a different challenge. There are millions of pages documents describing the period, but the material available for studies of local, quotidian dramas are far fewer.

Sources

5 William Taylor, Drinking, Homicide, and Rebellion in Colonial Mexican Villages (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1979), 4. Emphasis added. 6 Richard D. Brown, “Microhistory and the Post-Modern Challenge,” Journal of the Early Republic 23, no. 1 (April 1, 2003) 19. 7 Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero, eds., Microhistory and the Lost Peoples of Europe: Selections from Quaderni Storici (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), ix.

3 The Ba County collection held in the Sichuan Provincial Archives is the largest and most complete historical record of any county in China outside Beijing.8 From the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911 to the 1950s, these records were largely forgotten

(except when they were moved to a temple outside Ya’an to escape Japanese bombing). While the archive was rediscovered in 1953 and moved to Sichuan

University, work on the collection’s 113,000 files [juan] did not begin in earnest until the 1980s. Philip Huang and Madeline Zelin first introduced these resources to

Western scholars in the 1980s and a number of important scholarly works based on them have since been published.9 Yet, the richness of these holdings continues to outstrip their use by Western academics.

Catalogued according to dynastic reign period, the Ba County materials are further subdivided into six sections: Administration, Economy, Military, Culture and

Education, Foreign Relations, and Law. This last category, Law, is by far the largest, with over 99,600 files comprising roughly 88 percent of the archive’s entire collection.

While the archive’s holdings for earlier reign periods are relatively fragmentary, records from the nineteenth century are substantially more complete.10

8 For a general introduction to the archive see, Ma Xiaobin and Liu Jun, 2004: Sichuan Qingdai dang’an pingshu,” in Li Shigen, ed., Sichuan Qingdai dang’an yanjiu (The Study of Qing Archives in Sichuan), (Chengdu: Xinan jiaotong daxue, 2004), 23-34. 9 In particular, see Madeline Zelin, “The Rights of tenants in Mid-Qing Sichuan: A Study of Land- Related Lawsuits in the Baxian Archives,” The Journal of Asian Studies 45, no. 3 /9may, 1996) and Philip Huang, Civil Justice in China: Representation and Practice in the Qing (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). For other examples of scholarship employing Ba County legal cases, see Mark Allee, “The Status of Contracts in Nineteenth-Century Chinese Court,” in Contracts and Property in Early Modern China, eds. Madeline Zelin, Jonathan K. Ocko and Robert Gardella (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004); Matthew H. Sommer, Sex, Law and Society in Late Imperial China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000); Bradly W. Reed, Talons and Teeth: County Clerks and Runners in the Qing Dynasty (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). 10 For a more complete breakdown of the archive’s contents, see Yasuhiko Karasawa, Matthew Harvey Sommer, and Bradly Ward Reed, “Qing County Archives in Sichuan: An Update from the Field,” Late Imperial China 26, no. 2 (2005), 114–128.

4 The county [xian]-level government office [yamen] was the court of first instance in the Qing judiciary. County-level case files typically include plaints and counter-plaints, magistrates’ responses, summons and warrants, runners’ reports, coroners’ reports, transcripts of court hearings, contracts and other documents submitted by litigants, as well as magistrates’ final decisions. To be sure, many of the surviving files are incomplete. Moreover, these legal records do not offer direct access to the late Qing subject. While testimony was recorded using the first person voice, a scribe massaged commoners’ speech into formal testimony.11 Nonetheless, local legal documents grant access into frequently obscured or simply unavailable aspects of

Chinese society.12 Their narratives hold a wealth of insight into the pitfalls and possibilities of life under the Qing during the nineteenth century.

The Setting

Under the Qing, the empire’s territory expanded enormously, incorporating areas never before fully integrated. Xinjiang, Manchuria, Taiwan, Tibet, and Yunnan all came under greater Qing control during this period. A similar process was also repeated in the great internal frontier of Sichuan. The need for this internal

“colonization” was largely predicated on the mid-seventeenth century devastation that accompanied the transition from the Ming to the Qing. Much of this destruction has been traditionally credited to the “murderous rebel” Zhang Xianzhong, but it seems

11 An exception to this mediation can be found in cases of “fighting words.” In these cases, language itself was of central importance to the court and one finds direct transcription of local (and often colorful) language. 12 Local legal cases, as opposed to those at the central level, tend to exhibit a messiness that is often lost at higher levels. The bureaucracy shaped cases to conform to institutional expectations and interests. The formal order that seems to exist in Beijing’s records is often absent at the local level.

5 clear that battles between the Ming and Qing armies, and the attendant ruin of local agriculture, bear at least as much responsibility for the mayhem. However one apportions the blame, the devastation is shocking. In his study of migration and settlement in Sichuan, Robert Entenmann writes:

It is difficult to assess accurately the extent of demographic decline in Sichuan during the Ming-Qing transition. From the early 1640s to about 1680, the population suffered nearly continuous warfare. Famine, disease and dislocation increased the death toll. Moreover, the province was hardest hit in its most populated and productive areas (although devastation was uneven). The lack of early Qing population figures makes any estimate of population loss approximate at best. There is sufficient evidence … to suggest that most of Sichuan’s inhabitants perished during this time.13

Entenmann concludes that two-thirds to three-fourths of Sichuan’s population may have been killed, leaving only about one million inhabitants in the province by

1680, with most of these living on the harsh and unproductive periphery.14 Even before 1680, the province had been so severely depleted that by 1669 21 districts had been abolished and absorbed into other administrative units due to their now sparse populations.15 Local elites were almost entirely eliminated in areas under Zhang’s control, further lessening the province’s ability to recover.

In response to this cataclysm, the newly sovereign Qing actively promoted the resettlement of Sichuan – a course of action that not only helped to stabilize the province but also served to release pressures in more densely populated regions.

13 Robert Eric Entenmann, Migration and Settlement In Sichuan, 1644-1796. Thesis (Ph. D.)--Harvard University, l982, 59. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid, 54.

6 Sichuan’s population may have fully recovered by the 1730s, bringing increased stability to the region and the Qing as well as broadening the new dynasty’s tax base.

Migration into Sichuan continued past this early stage (during which the government offered tax benefits, land, and even oxen as encouragement) as population pressures and violence led to a fresh round of resettlement. Together, these two waves of migration, which included large numbers of settlers from both central and south

China, fundamentally altered the province and radically rearranged the definition of

“Sichuanese.”

By the end of the eighteenth century, the pressures facing the province had reversed. No longer underpopulated and able to serve as a release for pressures in other parts of the empire, Sichuan itself began to experience intense demands for land as well as concomitant social stresses. Entenmann argues that as the frontier began to close and even less desirable land was settled, weak administrative control and a growing population without skills or farmland led to a dramatic increase in salt smuggling, counterfeiting, and banditry.16

If this was the long-term demographic situation in Sichuan, the province was also defined by a bi-polar power struggle between its leading cities of Chengdu and

Chongqing.17 More than simply competing centers of political, economic, and cultural power, these cities also represented the central nodes in different trade and transport networks. Chengdu was part of a north-south axis along the imperial highway that

16 Ibid, 261. 17 For histories of Chengdu see Kristin Stapleton’s Civilizing Chengdu: Chinese Urban Reform, 195- 1937. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2000 and Wang Di’s Street Culture in Chengdu: Public Space, Urban Commoners and Local Politics, 1870-1930.

7 extended through Xi’an all the way to Beijing. Chongqing, on the other hand, was situated along an east-west route that led through Wuhan and on down the Yangzi.18

The latter route flourished, and by the early nineteenth century the county court listed 109 extra provincial native-place associations and merchant guilds.19 In the second half of the nineteenth century, commerce – especially in salt, opium, and foreign goods – continued to expand along this riparian road, particularly following

Chongqing’s opening as a treaty port in 1891.

Chongqing was also a seat of administrative control. The position of Ba

County magistrate was officially recognized as an “important post” [yaoque] by the central government, for the county qualified for three of the four criteria used to rate counties throughout the empire: “frequented,” a center of communication and commerce [chong]; “difficult” [fan], with a great deal of official business; and

“troublesome” [nan], with a violent and crime-prone population.20 Indeed, due to the overlapping of administrative posts in the county seat of Chongqing, the city was also home to the Chongqing Prefect and the East Sichuan Circuit intendant. These two superior courts, literally housed next door to the Ba County magistrate, ensured an added degree of informal oversight. Only experienced officials were appointed as magistrate, a position officially held by nine men during the period of this study.21

18 The name Chongqing dates to 1188 CE during the Song, but the first references to the region reach back to around 2200 BCE and Chongqing would eventually, around 375 BCE, became part of the Kingdom of Ba. During the Ming (1368-1644) and again in the early Qing, the city walls were rebuilt and extended. The city walls had taken their final form, more or less, by 1760-61. For a general history of Chongqing, see Wei Yingtao, Jin dai Chongqing cheng shi shi [Modern urban history of Chongqing] (Chengdu: Sichuan daxue chubanshe, 1991). 19 Wei, Jin Dai Chongqing Cheng Shi Shi, 409. 20 The remaining criterion that Ba County did not carry with that of “wearisome” [pi], with a large amount of overdue taxes. Xun Zhou, Shu Hai Cong Tan, (Wenhai chubanshe, 1966), 82. 21 Baxian zhi minguo [Ba County Gazetteer, Republican Period], 231.

8 By 1900, Ba County had an estimated population of 990,474.22 The population of Chongqing is difficult to determine earlier than the late nineteenth century, but

Mary Lee McIsaac notes that “an increase in the number of its wards [fang] from eight to 29 between the Ming and mid-Kangxi period suggests a dramatic growth during this period.”23 The earliest population figures available are from 1824 when the population was thought to be 65,286 people in 17,750 households. Wei Yingtao suggests that

Chongqing’s population reached 214,000 by 1900.24 By 1897, the US consulate in the city was estimating the population had reached 250,000 to 300,000.25 And it continued to grow, with the Municipal Police Department estimated Chongqing's 1937 population at 475,968.26

22 Wang, “Chengshi renkou yu chengshi jingji, shehui zuzhi,” 319. Wei Yingtao puts the population at only 904,100. Wei, Jindai Chongqing Chengshi shi, 395. 23 Mary Lee McIsaac, The Limits of Chinese Nationalism: Workers In Wartime Chongqing, 1937-1945. (Thesis (Ph. D.)--Yale University, 1994), 32. 24 Wei, Jindai Chongqing Chengshi shi, 396. 25 United States. Dispatches from the US Consulate in Chungking, 1896-1906. The consulate opened in 7/1/1896, but closed on 3/20/1901 due to the outbreak of the Boxer Uprising and reopened in early 1905. Consequently, the records have many gaps. 26 He Yaozu. Chongqing yaolan, 19.

9 27

27 Reproduced from J.E. Spencer, “Changing Chungking: The Rebuilding of an Old China City,” Geographical Review 29 no1 (1939), 48. The original maps are from an eighteenth century edition of the county gazetteer.

10 28 28 Ibid, 49.

11 Despite the difficulties in precise measurement, it is clear that Chongqing was a fairly large city.29

Beyond the sheer number of people living in Chongqing, its particular geography limited the city’s options for growth and resulted in the cramped living conditions that characterized the city. Situated on a neck of land between the Yangzi and Jialing rivers, an expanding Chongqing had nowhere to go. This, along with the city’s rocky and hilly disposition, gave the city a unique feel: “probably few other cities in China have been so densely built over, there being no parade ground, even of ordinary proportions.”30 One can only imagine the crush of humanity on Chongqing's spit of land. This density resulted in a narrow warren of streets:

Many so-called streets were only slits between high walls; often a street was nothing more than a narrow flight of stone steps, many of them cut from the living rock. On these confined thoroughfares the open shop fronts displayed every sort of activity and occupation. Weaving, tailoring, brass working, blacksmithing and a thousand other trades were carried on in public view. Innumerable food shops and itinerant ‘truck shops’ carried about on shoulderpoles tempted the hungry…. Over all these mingled smells there was an inescapable odor from hundreds of open, unscreened latrines to be found on every street or byway.31

29 For comparison, according to William Rowe, Hankow’s population in 1890 could have been 800,000 and Lu Hanchao puts all of Shanghai county’s population in the mid-nineteenth century at 540,000, though this would rise incredibly quickly. Rowe. Hankow: Commerce and Society in a Chinese City, 1796-1889, 40; Lu Hanchao. Beyond the Neon Lights: Everyday Shanghai in the Early Twentieth Century, 26. 30 China. Imperial Maritime Customs, I. Statistical Series: no. 6. Decennial Reports on the Trade, Industries, etc. of the Ports Open to Foreign Commerce, and on Conditions and the Development of the Treaty Port Provinces, 1882-1891, p109. Hereafter this series will be referred to as “Decennial Reports” with dates for the appropriate volume. 31 Service. Golden Inches: The China Memoir of Grace Service, 35. These narrow streets were five to 15 feet wide, while the business streets ranged from eight to twenty feet in width. Later, as part of the city’s modernization drive, the select streets were widened to 40 to 60 feet and were equipped with sidewalks as well as topped by electric and telephone cables. These changes also saw traditional stores that opened directly onto the street replaced by “modern” ones closed to the street, though “open-faced” shops prevailed on the smaller streets. Spencer, 56-57.

12 Imposed on top of this physical topography was a social geography that marking off a Lower City from an Upper City roughly along the ridge that bisected the city. The Upper settlement, where much of the modernizing would occur in the 1920s, was dominated by the well-to-do. The Lower City, in contrast, was packed with tenements along with a crush of temples, warehouses, shops, and a busy waterfront. It was here that “the city’s workers – mostly porters, water carriers, freight haulers, sedan chair bearers, boat hands, peddlers, prostitutes and beggars in pre-war days – lived in simple bamboo and wood structures which they built into the cliffs and along the water’s edge.”32 Seasonal fluctuations in the water levels of the rivers offered the poor additional space at times. In the winter when water levels were at their lowest, many of the most desperate would construct temporary houses on the exposed riverbed. However, they would have to be on guard for the spring runoff, which could appear suddenly and claim the lives of those not quick enough to abandon these meager homes.

Outside the city, the rest of Ba county was hilly and lush, and the rivers continued to play major roles in local life. Madeline Zelin has described a strict division between the city and its hinterlands in the nineteenth century, with the former being dominated by extraprovincial guilds and the latter characterized by widespread peasant poverty and tight control exercised by landlords who squeezed the peasants as much as they could. The county was a major producer of dry grains, including wheat, barley and corn, as well as cash crops such as cotton and hemp. Illicit trade in opium and salt was also widespread. Zelin argues that a pattern of widespread rural poverty

32 McIssac, 37.

13 and limited commercial development was not broken until Chongqing was opened as a treaty port in 1891.33 The stark depiction of rural life is echoed in Wei Yingtao’s calculation that, due to steady population growth, by 1875 the amount of arable land per person had fallen to just 1.7 mu, far below the 4 mu that was the minimum required for a sustainable livelihood.34

Law

This entire assemblage was governed under the Great Qing Code [Da Qing lü li]. The Code owes much to the Ming code, which was carried over almost in its entirety, as well as to earlier iterations of dynastic law. The code is composed of statutes [lü] and sub-statutes [li]. While the former were infrequently amended or abolished, the sub-statues continued to evolve and instruct the magistrate in the administering of justice. The seeming consistency in the statutes has given past observers a false sense of an unchanging code; the sub-statues reveal the dynamism of the system. The Qing Code’s official priorities were protecting status and gender divisions along Confucian lines and clearly defining the crime so as to leave little room for independent action or misinterpretation by the magistrate.35

The Code only officially prescribed the “Five Punishments” [wu xing] of beating with a light stick (five degrees: 10 to 50 blows); beating with a heavy stick

(five degrees: 60 to 100 blows); penal servitude (five degrees: one to three years); life

33 Zelin, “The Rights of Tenants.” 34 Wei, Jindai Chongqing Chengshi shi, 397. 35 The second theme is a result of Legalist philosophy’s interest in developing a universal system free from the corrupting influence of personal interest and connections. Derek Bodde and Clarence Morris, Law in Imperial China: Exemplified by 190 Ch’ing Dynasty Cases (Translated from the Hsing-an Hui- lan), With Historical, Social, and Juridical Commentaries. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), 23.

14 exile (three degrees: at distance of 2000 to 3000 li, and military exile); and death

(three degrees: decapitation, strangulation and “death by slicing”).36 Exile to Xinjiang was an innovation of the Qing’s that saw tens of thousands of forcibly relocated to the

Qing’s new territory as a vast penal colony scheme designed to relieve pressure on the

Qing core. Fines and imprisonment were not among the Five Punishments, although fines were often issued in lieu of lesser punishments, suspected criminals could be detained for long periods of time during the trial process.

The Code was brought to life by the state’s agents who carried out its vision of order, with the local magistrate as the primary local enforcer of law. The local magistrate was kept in check by a robust system of review and appeal in which local cases of a more serious nature were continually kicked up to a higher authority for evaluation. In death penalty cases, the emperor himself would review the evidence before making the ultimate decision. This system of oversight ensured that the local magistrate pursued with some vigor cases that would as a matter of course be reviewed by his superiors. This was coupled with a performance-based system of reward and punishment: a magistrate’s record was reviewed each year by his superiors and he was awarded merits or demerits affecting his career prospects based on his performance.

Despite the clear importance of maintaining law and order, magistrates faced enormous obstacles in carrying out this mandate. Classically educated magistrates were often adrift in the particularities of the vast Qing code, and law enforcement was

36 Bodde and Morris, Law in Imperial China, 77. The actual number of blows of the bamboo was far fewer than those stipulated in the code. For example, a beating of 50 blows with the light bamboo would result in 20 actual blows and 100 blows of the heavy bamboo would get you 40 lashings.

15 only one of many assignments that troubled the magistrate. Further, the rule of avoidance, under which a magistrate could not serve in his home province, ensured that magistrates frequently could not speak or understand the local dialect, and were often ignorant of local conditions. Many magistrates were unwilling to spend the time required to develop an understanding of the law; “as a result they had to rely almost exclusively upon their private secretaries for the administration of justice.”37 This dependence in the court was mirrored by the magistrate’s dependence on his runners outside of the court.

One must be wary in assessing the role of the county runner. This essential but much maligned segment of local government has often been negatively portrayed by historians who have uncritically absorbed the biases of their official sources. Bradly

Reed’s work moves beyond these excoriations of “yamen vermin” [yadu] and attempts to see them as essential rather than parasitic, moving away from the ideals of local administration to actual practice. In doing so, Reed finds that “although they operated outside of the statutory system, and often in direct violation of the legal code, yamen clerks and runners exhibited a remarkably consistent degree of organization and rationalization in the form of internally formulated and regulated rules and procedures.”38 It was these runners who were tasked with the detection and apprehension of suspected criminals, as well as with parts of the criminal investigation and ensuring security for the yamen and in the surrounding community.

In addition to this layer of security, all subjects in the provinces of China

Proper were theoretically organized into baojia units of mutual security and

37 Qu, 127. 38 Reed. Talons and Teeth: County Clerks and Runners in the Qing Dynasty, 5.

16 surveillance. This system, which was frequently in disarray and often the subject of reformers’ exhortations, was based on household registration records. “The main idea behind the pao-chia [baojia] system was that one’s activities could hardly escape the eyes and ears of one’s neighbors, and if the neighbors were organized and a register of their households kept, it would be difficult for strangers and lawbreakers to hide among the law-abiding residents.”39 This, of course, was the formal, official system of justice, a system that was paralleled by an informal system in which local elites, religious sect leaders, linage elders, guild leaders and others took the lead in dispute resolution and the dispensation of justice.

Overview

Chapter One introduces the social geography of the county, emphasizing the social use of rivers and roads, as well as legal cases for which claimants drew their own maps and submitted them to the court as evidence. Chapter Two examines both female and male suicide. Chapter Three considers homicide. Chapter Four examines the role of false accusations and perjury in the legal culture of late Qing Sichuan.

Chapter Five exposes ritualized processes of local disputation.

Together, these chapters offer a vivid and unprecedented picture of life in late-

Qing China. This study employs death to illuminate the webs of social life in the county. Despite the frequent opacity of the actual event (suicide, homicide or other violence), these acts explode into view the surrounding social connections and cleavages, revealing how both death and violence were instrumental in local life.

39 Qu Tongzu, Local Government, 150.

17

1. Spatial Aspects of Social Life

Introduction

This chapter considers the spatial dynamics of the county by focusing on two aspects. The first is how rivers and roads influenced the social interactions that occurred within them, creating distinct ways of life and shaping the variety of roles played by the state. The second part of the chapter examines how individuals employed maps to represent local space and argue at court. These “vernacular” maps forced local conditions onto the magistrate’s mental map and demonstrate locals’ lively use of the legal system. Moreover, these representations lay bare the negotiated nature of the court’s interactions with its subjects at the local level.

The Qing state is usually understood as playing a rather laissez-faire role at the local level, but this chapter will show the variety of roles it played in the county.

William Skinner’s foundational work in Sichuan suggests important spatial aspects of

Qing society, particularly his construction of macroregions and the core/periphery distinction in distribution of resources and reach of the state.40 The state’s penetration into the Qing countryside was not uniform and its relations with its subjects were influenced by the specific location in which these connections occurred. Imperial power was a patchwork laid over the Sichuan countryside. Lauren Benton reminds us

40 For more on Skinner’s models, see Skinner, The City in Late Imperial China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1977) and Skinner, “Marketing and Social Structure in Rural China: Part I,” The Journal of Asian Studies 24, no. 1 (November 1, 1964): 3-43.

18 that “empires did not cover spaces evenly but composed a fabric that was full of holes, stitched together out of pieces, a tangle of strings.”41 Consequently, a map illustrating actual state power would not be drawn with neat, straight lines; instead, this map would bend and twist with the social and physical contours of the landscape. The uneven presence of the state cannot be expressed in a bird’s eye view from the totalizing heights of Beijing. This view erases the particularistic expression of state power in the actual landscape. We must be wary of the straight lines the center draws.

The chapter first examines the role of roads and rivers, which had dynamic social lives. Both of these spaces hosted specific and dependent ways of life, personified in the boatmen who patrolled the waters and the “beggars” who haunted the roads. But in addition to their more static role as setting, roads and rivers also played an active role in defining the regular contours of state power in the county. In this aspect our cases illuminate the opposite roles rivers and roads could play, with the rivers expanding the scope of state interventions and the roads limiting it.

Our study then turns to consider “vernacular” maps produced for use in county court cases. These maps illuminate a process in which depictions of local realities were brought to the magistrate, who attempted to use them to solve a specific dispute.

Of course, these representations of local realities were not limited to maps (in fact, they were more often in the form of contracts) but this conjuring of local realities and arguing with them is particularly clear in cases with maps.

The magistrate of course possessed great power, but he was isolated by both the vastness of his territory and by his ignorance of local circumstances. As a result,

41 Lauren Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400-1900, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 2.

19 locals were able to influence the reality presented to the court by shaping the intelligence the magistrate received regarding local conditions. These maps make clear the process of translation – from distant local circumstances into clear, disputative representations of reality – that occurred as locals sought out state power and invited it into their disputes.

Physical Spaces: Roads and Rivers

On the Road in late Qing Sichuan

While roads were connective networks imbricated into the normal routines of life, they also formed discrete social spaces. Instead of simply transportation arteries, the roads that connected “places” were themselves places. They were a setting in which events happened, where some people lived and even died. This conception of roads as discrete places complicates conventional understandings of where meaningful events occurred, which are dominated by sedentary settings such as home, community, village, and city. Roads had a very active social life: things happened on them; people moved through their communities on them and used them to travel from one community to another.

As a social space, roads are characterized by movement. Movement in the late

Qing had two related consequences. First, it led to diminished oversight, by both family units and by the state. Second, movement provoked paranoia and fear from authorities and settled communities alike. This movement was not confined to Ba

County or Sichuan, but was an empire-wide phenomenon, one that played out on the roads.

20 As liminal spaces, roads were often occupied by individuals unmoored from their original social contexts. In a report to court, Zhang Shuanghe detailed his encounter with an elderly man who appeared at his inn seeking shelter.42 The old man,

Xiao Lianting, was very ill and Zhang took pity on him and gave him a room. Several days later, Xiao had grown so ill that he could not go out; he finally died in the middle of the night. Thankfully this is not all we know of Xiao’s story. He is rescued from this nearly anonymous death by an undated signed account detailing his misfortunes.

This account gives us entry into Xiao’s life and charts the downward path that put him on the road and eventually led him to Zhang’s door.

Xiao Lianting, aged 63 sui at the time of his death, was originally from

Shunqing in north-central Sichuan. In 1866, he traveled to Hanzhong, a city in

Shaanxi just across Sichuan’s northern border, to work as a farmer. For more than ten years, he grew chrysanthemums, which presumably were dried for use in tea and medicine. Xiao would hit the road and sell these goods with a partner, Wang

Hongshun. The two parted ways with Wang owing Xiao money. Some time later,

Xiao began to run short of money in Hanzhong and went looking for Wang in

Shunqing to collect the debt.

While Xiao was in Shunqing, an outbreak of an unnamed illness killed his son and left Xiao himself sick as well. Again he took to the road, only to discover that

Wang was now in Chongqing. So Xiao traveled to Chongqing, where his illness overwhelmed him. He slowly spent all of his money; eventually he even had to sell his clothing to maintain himself. In the end, he was left with nothing. Xiao wanted to

42 Baxian Dang’an [BXDA] 7693.

21 return home to die, but it was too far. He lamented that at the end he had nothing and felt ashamed. He signed his account: “Refugee Xiao Lianting.”43

In this account, the contours of Xiao’s disaster are clear. First, he set out from home to pursue economic opportunity, successfully at least for a while. Then poverty drove him to chase old debts, while disease killed his son and left him sick and suffering. Finally, alone, ashamed, and impoverished, he died. Economic opportunity, poverty, and disease all put Xiao on the road. Already by the eighteenth century, the road was envisioned as a dangerous place populated by “rootless rascals” or “bare sticks” (i.e. men without “roots” or “branches”), who threatened the stability of the state, the tranquility of the settled, and the purity of the family.

In his study of the sorcery scare of 1768, Philip Kuhn highlights the pervasive fear that surrounded people on the move. “Suspicion of soulstealing focused on wanderers: strangers, people without roots, people of obscure origins and uncertain purpose, people lacking social connections, people out of control.”44 Kuhn writes that the mass of travelers “had its effects on men’s consciousness.”45 Matthew Sommer has demonstrated the degree to which this paranoia was backed by the state in law, arguing that the “bogeyman of the Qing judiciary was the marginal man who stood outside of (and presumably opposed to) the family-based social and moral order that underpinned the late imperial state.”46 One key way of defining these men’s outsider status was in their relation to normative family structures. Here, Sommer contends that

43 Ibid. The term liumin, or “refugee,” literally means wandering person. 44 Philip A. Kuhn, Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 41. 45 Ibid. 46 Matthew Sommer, Sex, Law, and Society in Late Imperial China, 1st ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 96.

22 these men can be seen as “existing outside the mainstream pattern of settled households, the network of family and community relationships that the ideal

Confucian scheme depended on to enmesh and socialize individuals.”47 Their unsettledness made them unknown and in some ways “illegible” to normative systems of value and control. This illegibility was often conflated with dangerousness. In contrast to this common depiction of predatory hoards, however, Xiao’s story suggests how pathetic many of these rootless people really were.

These individuals were common, everyday outsiders. Lu Hanchao catalogues disparate individuals who became “beggars,” including those engaged in productive employment as “porter, errand runner, door guard, fortuneteller, storyteller, prostitute, barber, mourner-for-hire, debt-collector-for-hire, night watchman, or even police officer or picket.”48 These men and women formed a unique subaltern culture that existed alongside mainstream society.

In addition to these mundane figures, Lu describes the colorful world of jianghu, literally meaning “rivers and lakes” but connoting individuals who led an unorthodox and frequently picaresque lifestyle, which could include “vagrants of all sorts, including itinerant entertainers, quacks, swindlers, charlatans, tramps, hoboes,

‘knights-errant,’ and so on.”49 But where did these individuals, strange and common, come from? Xiao Lianting’s refugee tale explains how he ended up on the road, but not why. For that, we must look back to the High Qing, that paradoxical era of affluence and anxiety, to chart the development of the forces that put Xiao on the road.

47 Ibid, 98. 48 Hanchao Lu, Street Criers: A Cultural History of Chinese Beggars (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), xii. 49 Ibid, 14.

23 From 1700 to 1850, the population of Qing China roughly tripled, to about 430 million, while cultivated land only doubled, without any compensating improvement in labor productivity or urbanization rates.50 This worsening ratio of population to resources was accompanied by social developments led that to a surplus bachelor population who would never marry.51 These are the economic and social roots of the floating population. Economic necessity drove many from their home in search of work, as was the case for Xiao. As a Western observer noted in 1899: “Nothing is more common than to find that the father has gone to some distant region hoping to secure a bare sustenance leaving the wife and children to shift for themselves. This is not because he does not care for them, nor because he desires the separation, but because there is literally ‘no help for it.’”52 We see this again in Elizabeth Perry’s study of North China, in which she describes that community as “in a continuous state of transiency and flux.”53

In addition to these long-term economic and social trends, we must add environmental factors, for as Mike Davis has argued, we cannot accept environmental catastrophe as simply “natural” disasters. These cataclysms are also driven by historical factors such as the neglect of hydraulic control systems, deforestation, and greater integration into international financial systems. The late nineteenth century saw three global subsistence crises: in 1876-1879, and then again in 1889-1891 and

50 Pre-modern demographic figures are shaky. For fuller discussion of these trends, see Dwight Perkins’ Agricultural Development in China, and Ping-ti Ho’s Studies on the Population of China. 51 The precise causes and dimensions of this shortage of women are still debated but seem predicated on pervasive discrimination against girls in favor of sons as well as various survival strategies that led to disproportionately high infant and child mortality for females. 52 Arthur Henderson Smith, Village life in China. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), 317. 53 Elizabeth J. Perry, Rebels and Revolutionaries in North China, 1845-1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983), 54.

24 1896-1902.54 In the disasters of 1876-1879 and 1896-1902, Mike Davis estimates that between 19.5 million and 30 million people died in China.55

While these horrors were concentrated in North China, we can assume that their ripple effects, at least in terms of refugees, were also felt in Sichuan. These crises fell hard on an empire that had been rocked by massive internal rebellion by the

Taipings and the Nian as well as by Muslim rebellions in Xinjiang and Yunnan.

Sichuan was largely spared from this fighting, except for the final battles to exterminate the Taiping general Shi Dakai, but echoing its role in the early Qing, the province was a refuge for waves of displaced people. To give some sense of the scale of the mid-century disasters, Dwight Perkins has estimated that the population of the

Qing Empire declined from 410 million in 1850 to 350 million in 1873.56

Adding to these more distant troubles, Chongqing and Ba County were routinely hit by their own disasters. Customs medical reports catalogue some of the disasters and epidemics. There were floods in 1902, 1903, 1905 (“1,000 drowned”),57

1917 (“severe”), 1920 (“led to bad harvest”), 1921(“particularly bad”) and 1931.58

There were famines in 1921 and 1925, and a drought in 1914.59 While these records post-date this study, they do suggest the regularity with which the region was hammered by “natural” disasters. In addition to these calamities, Chongqing also

54 Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (London: Verso, 2002), 6. 55 Ibid, 7. 56 Dwight H. Perkins, Agricultural Development in China, 1368-1968 (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1969), 216. 57 China. Imperial Maritime Customs, I. Statistical Series: no. 6. Decennial Reports on the Trade, Industries, etc. of the Ports Open to Foreign Commerce, and on Conditions and the Development of the Treaty Port Provinces, 1902-1911, 271. Hereafter this series will be referred to as “Decennial Reports” with dates for the appropriate volume. 58 Decennial Reports, 1912-21, 245. 59 Ibid.

25 suffered from a variety of endemic medical problems. Remittent fever, a form of malaria, was “very prevalent during the spring, summer and autumn months.”60 The

Customs Medical Reports refer to this disease and tuberculosis as near constant problems. A report dated 1899 argues that “probably the most fatal and obstinate to treatment of all diseases is tuberculosis. In its varied forms it affects more than half the

61 people and is the cause of more deaths than any other disease.” A later report argues that remittent fever was even more deadly: “I believe that in Chungking more people both young and old die from this disease than from any other complaint.”62 In addition to these illnesses, cholera, influenza, smallpox, diphtheria, mumps and measles were chronic medical problems.

All of these dynamics contributed to the Qing’s existential crises of the nineteenth century, and created both waves of displaced people and a concomitant anxiety – popular, elite and official – regarding these unmoored masses. This fear, justified or unjustified, was focused on the roads, which were not only a way of moving people and goods through the county and beyond, but also the point of entry for disruptive forces from outside the people’s limited, known world. Common people, community leaders,63 and the court frequently described the anonymous dead on the roads as “beggars,” and whether or not they were actual beggars, these unclaimed corpses are striking evidence of people on the move.

60 China, Customs Medical Reports, 1896, 21. 61 China. Customs Medical Report, For the Half-year ended 31st October, 1899, 1. 62 China. Customs Medical Report, For the Year ended 31st March, 1899, 5. 63 “Community leaders” refers to a shifting cohort of locals who were recognized by the state as responsible for local order, and who could be called upon as a reliable local voice at court when order broke down. They included tax agents, local security chiefs, village heads as well as local notables. The term is imprecise and serves as loose shorthand for the normative voice of the local community.

26 Most of these anonymous dead occasioned no mourning relatives or inquiring friends. As Christian Henriot has written regarding bodies found in the streets of

Shanghai: “These were deaths that left no trace and made no noise.”64 Often,

“beggars” seems to be shorthand for all unknown people on the roads, and cases involving the nameless dead are often terribly succinct – all-too-brief accounts of sad, anonymous deaths. A nameless man is found dead from illness.65 An anonymous man comes to Chongqing for work and dies of dysentery.66

The ming’an files present 23 cases of found bodies.67 The vast majority of the dead, 20 out of 23, are male. Disease was the leading cause of death (15 out of 23), with five bodies exhibiting signs of violence. Most of the deceased were unknown, but five of the dead were identified. This small group suggests an interesting if sketchy profile of people dying on the road. One man was a street vendor, one a water porter, and three had come to Chongqing in search of work. The remaining dead were all unknown.

Christian Henriot has found a similar profile in Shanghai. “Many, if not most of those who ended up in the streets of Shanghai had come to the city with few resources, no privileged contacts or networks on which to rely, ill health or few physical reserves.”68 Henriot’s sample also contained a majority of dead males.

Perhaps most interesting for our current discussion, Henriot found that the corpses of

64 Christian Henriot, “‘Invisible Deaths, Silent Deaths’: ‘Bodies Without Masters’ in Republican Shanghai,” Journal of Social History 43, no. 2 (2010), 409. 65 BXDA 7775. 66 BXDA 7856. 67 BXDA: 7691,7692, 7693, 7701, 7702, 7709, 7715, 7737, 7750, 7755, 7769, 7775, 7784, 7795, 7826, 7827, 7831, 7840, 7855, 7856, 7870, 7884 and 7955. 68 Christian Henriot, “‘Invisible Deaths, Silent Deaths’,” 427.

27 infants and children “vastly outnumbered” those of adults.69 While this is perhaps not surprising given children’s vulnerability to disease, starvation, and survival strategies that sought to limit the number of children produced during crises, this finding does strike a discordant note with this chapter’s data, which include no children among the dead. Perhaps there was an even larger, invisible crop of dead bodies on the road, those of children.

As in Henriot’s study, the city was the primary site for anonymous dead bodies. Fourteen of the 23 bodies were found in the city’s wards. While many of these cases provide only a brief account, some offer more details. For example, in 1891, the security head for the Renhe ward [fang] of Chongqing, Yan Yutian, reported: “this month on the twenty-ninth day at the beat of the first watch [roughly 8:00 p.m.] I was inspecting the neighborhood when I found the corpse of a female beggar who had died by the side of the road in Donghua Daoist temple alley.”70 Yan estimated her to be about 50 sui and noted that she had no injuries or family.

There is no evidence that Yan attempted to discover who this woman was. Her death on the street marked her as out of place and disconnected from whatever family she may have had. Without family to step forward and offer explanation or demand investigation, she and her death made little impression. Jia means both home and family in Chinese, and to be homeless was to be without a family. In this sense, the

“homeless” were not simply without a place to live or means of sustenance, they were cut free from the social webs that anchored people in society. There was no way for

Yan to fix the dead woman into her correct social space. She was adrift. Following

69 Ibid, 415. 70 BXDA 7691.

28 Yan’s recommendation, the court declared that she had died from disease and ordered her buried.

Disease was not the only cause of death on the road. Instances of violence demonstrate the peculiar nature of roads as anonymous space with reduced oversight.

Here, as in the case above, we see that the local court played a limited role in cases of anonymous death. Without a family to bring the court into these fatalities, the roads could exist as sites of nameless death and life.

In a case from 1896, community leaders reported the murder of a nameless man.71 After establishing that the man was unknown in the village, local leaders thoroughly described his stab wounds and the scene: the man wore blue pants; blood was found on both hands; there was a single knife wound on his lower abdomen; the corpse was on its side; a sheath for a double-edged knife was found at the scene. The court accepted and passed a report of the death up through official channels.

Here, we might consider the relationship between family (or local connections), death, and the oversight or protection of the county court. In this case, a man was murdered – there is no doubt of that – and there was essentially no investigation. There was a distinct vulnerability to being on the road. Without kin to claim the body, bring a suit, demand justice, or take vengeance, this death was simply left unscrutinized. This suggests the very real power local communities had over those

“beggars” who passed through their communities, as well as their autonomy in the face of official ignorance.

71 BXDA 7692

29 Further, it strikes a clear counterpoint to communities’ apprehension of drifters. In fact, it seems drifters may have had much to fear from settled communities as well.

One is reminded of Skinner’s core/periphery divisions, suggesting the limitations of consistent state power.72 Indeed, there were islands of regular Qing control scattered throughout the empire – an archipelago of authority in a vast sea of local life.

Without an advocate, there was no one to provide the magistrate with actionable intelligence. Whatever the state’s abstract interest in maintaining a monopoly on legitimate violence may have been, the county court was powerless and unaware without an invitation (in the form of a court document) from a member of a local community to activate the very real power of the magistrate. On the road, a man was on his own. It was through settled communities and family that one appealed to and interacted with the state. Without these ties, “beggars” existed largely below the state’s gaze.

In another instance of violence, the liminal space created by roads was clearly demonstrated when a man strayed from the road and onto someone else’s land. This transgression cost are man his life. Moreover, the violent reaction of his killer exposes the discrete understandings of and expectations for different types of social space.73

The amount of paper and investigation generated by this case, in contrast to the previous anonymous murder, reinforces the importance of local ties as a catalyst for

72 Currently it is unclear how far people would travel in order to bring their complaints to court, but I suspect that at a certain distance from the county seat, state power began to weaken relative to local forces, which dominated in peripheral areas. This radius would be further impacted by the “friction of terrain” such that mountaintop village escaped beyond the reach of the court much faster than those along rivers. 73 The Qing Code does not explicitly address the issue of trespassing, but it did give residents the right to kill without penalty individuals who entered their home at night without “good cause.” Though clearly not a direct parallel, this statute does indicate a clear legal division between public and private space.

30 official action. With family to push the case, the court got involved and investigated the murder. While this conflict was not a clash between an anonymous outsider and the local community, it too lends itself to a spatial reading.

Multiple and competing interests are present in this case and all pressed their demands at court. In 1896, Peng Chen Shi, aged 87 sui, filed a plaint in which she accused Zhang Shaofu of beating her grandson, Peng Changsheng, and causing his death. The subsequent court case presented two framings of this death. The first, Chen

Shi’s, described the violence as a result of open spaces and closed space. In this reading, her grandson innocently wandered from the communal space of the road and into the private space of Shaofu’s rented land. Cheng Shi testified:

My son is dead. I rely on my only grandson, Peng Changsheng, who works as a hired laborer, to live. One night early in the previous twelfth month, Changsheng was walking along the road in Dating ravine. Because the road was not clear, he walked into the fields and trampled some straw. This Zhang Shaofu burst out, grabbed Changsheng, and accused him of stealing the straw. [Shaofu] called Zhang Dengshou, Zhang Mao and others to beat and break [Changsheng’s] bones. My grandson’s right foot, left hand, and both shoulders/upper arms were all badly injured.74

Zhao Shaofu presented a different version of events and deployed the figure of the “rootless rascal” to justify his violence. He castigated Changsheng as a “ruffian”

[liupi]. This variation on “rootless rascal” implied both movement and a consequent disconnection from fixed, stable society. In his counter-plaint, Shaofu reported:

I work as a farmer on rented land. Last winter went away on business and was not at home. On the night of the first day of the twelfth month, the ruffian Peng Changsheng illegally stole the straw I use to feed my

74 BXDA 7692.

31 ox from the piles I had inside my walls. He was surprised while grabbing the straw by my employee Tao the Youngest. Changsheng tried to escape but the ruffian was unable to get away.75

These competing framings of the encounter both had spatial dimensions. First, for Cheng Shi, “because the road was not clear” her grandson left one kind of space

(the road) and entered Shaofu’s. Here, trespassing was a spatial transgression: the unsanctioned moving from one kind of space to another. This violation was met with lethal violence. Even though the land’s physical boundaries were not clear, the social meaning that activated the violent retaliation for Cheng Shi’s grandson’s violation was.

Second, Shaofu’s explanation of the case drew on the widespread paranoia regarding those on the road in the late Qing. It is not an accident that Shaofu described

Peng Shi’s grandson as liupi. This slur carried the weight of this paranoia, and conjured a specifically spatial understanding of the threat, despite the fact that the

“ruffian” was a member of the local community. The term liupi stands in stark contrast to available derogatory terms that tied the offender to the local land, such as local bandit [tufei] or local ruffian [tugun].

As Kuhn has already suggested, this paranoia was quite common. In one account from Shantou in Guangdong Province, a woman recalled the fear generated by the rootless during her childhood: “We had an orange garden, on which we depended for the support of the family, and it had to be watched constantly to protect it from

75 Ibid.

32 thieves. It was a mile from our house, and my father took great care of it.”76 The roads were a source of danger. The pervasiveness of this fear of the roads is suggested in the folk saying: “If you have money, don’t take in marriage a living man’s wife; if you want land, don’t choose roadside land.”77 Large numbers of unknown and possibly dangerous individuals moved along them.

In these spaces, individuals were loosed from the strict oversight that ideally controlled Qing society. This freedom had very dangerous consequences, as it removed a person from familial or community protection and, moreover, could render one largely invisible to the magistrate’s gaze.

Rivers Run Through It

Much like the county’s roads, rivers also presented particular social environments. Chongqing was the central upstream node in a vast transportation network that extended through present-day Wuhan and down to Shanghai. Rivers were, and are, a central feature of life in the city as well as in much of the county. The ming’an cases present a picture of death and life on the river and highlight the variety of ways in which the county court could enter the daily lives of individuals, suggesting different faces of the Qing state present at the local level. These multiple presences are important given our reflexive understanding of the Qing state as relatively light on the ground. This examination of rivers as social space also stresses the divisions that

76 Adele Marion Fielde, Pagoda Shadows: Studies from Life in China (London: T. Ogilvie Smith, 1887), 109. 77 This proverb comes from the 1935 gazetteer of Wangdu County, Hebei as quoted by Matt Sommer in “Qingdai xianya de maiqi anjian shenpan: yi 272 jian Baxian, Nanbu yu Baodi xian [The Adjudication of Wife-Selling in Qing County Courts: 272 Cases from Ba, Nanbu, and Baodi Counties],” in Ming Qing Falü Yunzuo Zhong de Quanli yu Wenhua [Power and Culture in Ming-Qing Law], eds. Qiu Pengsheng and Chen Xiyuan (Taipei: Lianjing Chuban Gongsi, 2009).

33 separated individual actors, forcing us to consider peoples as individual historical actors and not faceless aggregations. These river cases caution us against overly simplistic binaries between state/society, city/county and reified notions of “non- elites” by illustrating the complexity of interactions along the rivers.

This complexity was certainly at work in a David-versus-Goliath dispute over lost cargo in which the China Merchants’ Steamship Company accused a handful of boatmen of stealing cargo. Founded in 1873, the China Merchants’ Steamship

Company was a part of the “self-strengthening” movement of the late nineteenth century, and was established to compete with foreign shipping companies.78 The company, founded in part by the eminent Qing statesman Li Hongzhang,79 was not only a major commercial operation, but was also backed by a modernizing state and some of its most powerful officials. In the following case, this embodiment of “self- strengthening” vigorously pursued a small group of petty boatman over a few items of cargo. In 1896, Liu Wanshun testified:

I am a boatman from downriver. Usually I pilot a boat to make a living. This month on the fifth day, I loaded 164 items on a China Merchants’ Steamship Company’s Chongqing office passenger-cargo boat. On the afternoon of the sixth, I set sail. Because the waters had been rising without subsiding, the boat was hit by a giant, sandy wave at Wugui Rock and capsized. Luckily, we ran into a group of small boats who hurried to our rescue. Finally, they were able to crowd around [my boat and save me]. At the inventory, the passenger-cargo boat only had 150 items, I still owed 14 items. I looked along the river but they were not there. The goods were destroyed by the water or were at the bottom of the river or were washed away. I don’t know what happened and I

78 Hao Yen-P’ing and Wang, Erh-Min, “Changing Chinese Views of Western Relation” in Cambridge History of China, volume 11 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 192. 79 Li, a leading figure of the “self-strengthening” movement, played an important part in the suppression of the Taiping rebellion, signed the Treaty of Shimonoseki ending the first Sino-Japanese War in 1895 and was crucial in ending the Boxer Uprising in 1901.

34 didn’t think the China Merchants’ Steamship’s representatives would bring me to court!80

The five boatmen who saved Liu confirmed his story and echoed his surprise that the company had accused them of stealing the missing goods. After being summoned by the court, the heads of the local small boatmen’s association

[xiaochuanhui] appeared at court. These two men, Zheng Qiaoke and Zhou Zhu’er, reiterated Liu’s story and explained that they had handed over the cargo to the company item by item, and even helped guard the goods. The association heads expressed shock that they were in court. Their account was followed by the corroborating, and somewhat indignant, testimony of eight of Liu’s fellow boatmen.

Finally, the court heard from Liu Bing, the company’s representative, and at this point an interesting triangle of unequal powers emerged. Liu Bing represented a company founded by the man who just the year before had signed the Treaty of

Shimonoseki ending the war with Japan. Zheng Qiaoke and Zhou Zhu’er were present as the local heads of the small boatmen’s association. The vast difference in standing between these two organizations was reflected in the names of their representatives.

The unextraordinary formality of Liu Bing’s name contrasted strongly with that of his adversary, Zhou Zhu’er, who was known, even at court, by a common name which means “son of a pig.” Zhou’s crude name was in keeping with those of his fellow boatmen, including Waterdog Liu and several men who were simply known by their surnames followed by a number indicating their birth order. One might imagine the

80 BXDA 7890.

35 scene at court as the China Merchants’ Steamship Company’s Li Bing squared off against “Son of a Pig” Zhou.

The conflict between the boatmen and Liu Bang seems the very definition of asymmetrical power relations. It is telling that this dispute was even heard in court, rather than being settled through informal channels. These early encounters in court gave Liu Wanshun an opportunity to tell his tale. However, we should not overly romanticize the leveling power of the court; several of the boatmen were detained and

Liu was ordered beaten with the light bamboo. During the four months of the case, Liu spent a considerable amount of time in chains and faced repeated interrogations.

Finally in his statement, Liu admitted to “negligence.” The court chided Liu: “You personally accepted an important responsibility [but] you did not take the ship as important.”81

While it is unclear why this case is in the ming’an files, these records illustrate at least two faces of the state in local society, and introduce the river as a social space.

The China Merchants’ Steamship Company used the river as both an economic and a political space. Most obviously, the rivers were a transport route allowing for the movement of goods, facilitating profit making and the growth of the national economy. Politically, the river was a space in which the company furthered its goal of national “self-strengthening.”

The river was also the tie that connected the Qing’s rural interior to the modernity of the coast. Here, the company acted as an agent of the imperial state in competition with foreign powers, both of whom were using transportation

81 Ibid.

36 infrastructure to penetrate the interior. According to Albert Feuerwerker, by 1894 the company had 76 vessels in service along the Yangzi.82 Transporting goods along the river was a symbolic act in a political movement that hoped to demonstrate the fitness and modernity of the Qing state and, thus, its rightful place among the great powers of the modern world.

This dispute with the China Merchants’ Steamship Company also shows the state as a set of different agencies with different responsibilities working toward different goals. This differentiation is further highlighted in the following case. In

1895, court runners Luo Qing and Zhang Sheng reported the assault, and subsequent death, of boatman Peng Xingshun, aged 40 sui, by a household employee of a member of the river inspection committee.83 In the case that followed, Zhong Xing, a runner from the court charged with patrolling the waters, testified:

I am a river inspector. On the night of the thirteenth of this month, at Huang’s teahouse by Nanji Gate outside the city, I heard boatman Wang Hongshun from Yudong Stream say that on the nineteenth day of the fourth month, Peng Xingshun was transporting goods on the river and at the Lanni Bank a river inspection committee agent along with a soldier from the barracks seized Peng’s cargo. There was a raucous argument in which Peng was injured. He went home in his boat and on the ninth day of the fifth month he died from his injuries.84

The man suspected in the case, Li Fu, aged 27 sui, confirmed much of the above account. In his defense, he stressed that Peng would not obey his instructions.

82 Albert Feuerwerker, The Chinese Economy, 1870-1949 (Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, 1995), 69. 83 BXDA 7849. 84 Ibid.

37 Li did not mention a fight, but he did admit that there was a heated argument. Finally, he claimed he had no idea why Peng died.

Adding to both these depictions of the death – one by the accused and one in the form of teahouse gossip – Peng’s widow, Peng Wang Shi, and his brother claimed that Li had attempted to “extort” money from Peng, demanding 1000 wen, and that he was beaten only after he had refused to pay. They further reported that Peng had to be helped home, suggesting the severity of his injuries. Several days after the encounter, they said, he was spitting up blood and was unable to get out of bed, and finally died six days later. The court had Li detained and ordered him to pay Wang Shi 4000 wen.

Three days later a medical examination reported that Peng had died of illness and not from injuries sustained while fighting with Li. Appearing at court again, Wang

Shi retreated from her earlier claims and admitted that Peng died from illness. The court, not missing a beat, corrected itself and ordered Li to pay Wang Shi a mere 500 wen, and released the body for burial.

In his testimony, Li recounted his work for the river inspection committee. He admitted to collecting 800 wen from one boatman and 1000 wen from another, though he claimed he had to turn the money over to his superior. Li further admitted to attempting to collect 1000 wen from Peng. Since Peng would not pay, Li testified that

“as in the past” he hit Peng once to encourage payment. Then, still according to Li, his companion, the soldier Yu Jiang, also hit Peng, knocking him to the ground. At that point, Peng gave them 500 wen. Li explained that this time he did not share the money with Yu and spent it all himself. Though the exact nature of these monies is not entirely clear, this last statement suggests that the money beaten out of Peng was not a

38 local tax or customary fee, but simply lined Li’s pocket. This understanding is strengthened by the return of the 500 wen to Peng’s widow. Taxes or legitimate fees, one assumes, would not have been returned.

The court sentenced Li and Yu to be beaten with the light bamboo, publicly pilloried for ten days, and then imprisoned while wearing the cangue for three months.

Moreover, the court ordered that all boatmen should be made aware of the verdict. As a final coda, the court records note that Li Fu fell ill while wearing the cangue. He recovered and eventually both Li and Yu were released.

In this case, the state consisted of a variety of agencies and actors with different responsibilities and interests, illustrating the range of ways in which ordinary people in Ba County encountered and experienced the Qing state. They could even fight a lawsuit against one state agency (the company) in the venue provided by another (the county court). The obvious resistance to demands for payment seen in the above case illustrates the degree to which the state, in some of its incarnations, was deeply resented (i.e., greedy runners gave the Qing a bad name). However, the punishment of the runners by the court suggests that the state was also active in militating against the more deleterious actions of its agents.

The complexity of the state as a local actor was, of course, mirrored in the diversity of desires that motivated the populace, and we now turn to complicating the easy shorthand of “boatmen” as a monolithic unit of analysis. A case from 1897 illustrates the cleavages that existed amongst these men. Boatman Jin Chang reported that his boat capsized while carrying cargo.85 Crewmember Zhou Fenglin ended up

85 BXDA 7931.

39 with the goods and hurried off to Chongqing without Jin to secure payment and, in

Jin’s estimation, to steal his money. Zhou received five ingots of silver, ten strings of cash, and 400 loose cash for the cargo. Zhou, for his part, claimed he was going to return the money, but was robbed while staying at an inn. The court rejected Zhou’s account and threw him into jail, where he contracted dysentery and died. While the earlier case involving the China Merchants’ Steamship Company presented boatmen as a relatively cohesive group, complete with their own association, this case stresses the tensions that could divide them.

These cleavages were also present at the very bottom among the motley society that existed at the waters’ edge. The following case recounts the events surrounding the drowning death of a 14-sui boy.86 In his initial plaint from 1894, boatman Liu Yuqing, aged 18 sui, described how he and his brother, Liu Zongji, 14 sui, were transporting vegetables on the river when their mooring line inadvertently broke a water bucket belonging to Wang Shuting. Wang, a water porter, demanded that Zongji compensate him for the bucket, which was essential to his livelihood.

Zongji offered 20 wen but this did not satisfy Wang, so Zongji went aboard the boat to get more money. As he did so, according to Yuqing, Wang jostled the boat just as a surge of water nearly capsized it. Zongji panicked. In his attempt to save the boat, he lost his footing, fell into the water, and drowned.

Wang, aged 36 sui, corroborated this account, but added that he did not know why Zongji fell into the river. The court ordered Wang beaten with the light bamboo

86 BXDA 7835.

40 for causing a loss of life over such a “trivial matter” [xigu]. While Wang was in the reformatory [zixinsuo] he fell ill, but he recovered and was eventually released.87

Just as we saw “the state” dissolve as a unitary notion at the local level, the preceding cases stress the very real divisions between individual actors. In these cases, actors along the rivers turn to and engage the county court in their disputes. At court, just as “the state” could be a motley assembly of agendas, locals too were often at odds. Conflict was most frequently between “non-elites” and we must remind ourselves not to think of “non-elites” or “boatmen” or “peasants” or any other aggregated social unit as historical actors. Individuals had individual needs and wants that they pursued, sometimes jointly, sometimes singly. As Jane Burbank reminds us,

“the court was a realm where peasants appeared as individuals – as a plaintiff, a defendant, a witness….”88 The strength of legal records is that they foreground individuals and complexity. So, in addition to seeing individual needs, wants, and conflict, we also begin to see how the complex matrix of these desires constituted local society. Individuals clashed with each other and with different units of state power at the local level, and some of this occurred at the county court, where all of these actors availed themselves of the yamen’s power to further their own interests.

Negotiated Space: Maps and the Court

87 Perhaps not surprisingly, there are many cases in which prisoners fall ill while in detention, including a number of fatalities. Dysentery and malaria seem to be the most common ailments. The Qing legal system officially did not count detainment as a form of punishment. Officially, imprisonment as punishment would have to wait for the “modern” legal system; in practice, it seemed a common method of discipline. 88 Jane Burbank, Russian Peasants Go to Court: Legal Culture in the Countryside, 1905-1917 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 14.

41 In historical studies, maps are often discussed as tools of hegemonic state power. The center names and knows its lands. Clearly, Beijing possessed enormous power when it chose to focus it, though this power usually remained diffuse at the local level.89 However, local actors in the Qing actively sought to tie their interests to that power, creating an exchange of power and meanings that drew state power into local communities.

This section considers maps found in local court records and examines the relationship between the county court and the local communities it oversaw. Previous studies of maps in imperial China have failed to consider the instrumental use of maps in local courts. In The History of Cartography, Cordell Yee discusses maps in political culture, mapping as government measurement for managing and controlling space, artistic aspects of maps (particularly representation, style and production), and the

Westernization of mapping, while in the same volume John Henderson contributes a chapter on traditional Chinese cosmological thought.90 Nowhere does this encyclopedic work examine the role of vernacular maps produced for use at court.

Yee admits that “maps studied [in his chapters] were generally products of a highly educated elite.”91 These elites, and Yee’s study, focus on the aesthetic, religious and political aspects of mapmaking, leaving the role of maps in legal disputes unexplored. Yet the sheer number of maps in the archives suggests that court use may

89 For descriptions of this focused power see Philip Kuhn’ s Soulstealers and Jonathan Spence’s Treason By the Book. 90 J. B. Harley and David Woodward, The History of Cartography, Volume 2, Book 2: Cartography in the Traditional East and Southeast Asian Societies (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1995). 91 Ibid., 228.

42 have been the dominant form of popular cartographic usage in Qing China.92 They certainly seem to have had the widest impact. While only a handful of people ever saw the beautiful Jesuit maps produced for the Qing emperors, rougher sketch maps seem to have been produced regularly even for relatively petty disputes, revealing a hidden, popular social life for maps.

Court cartography also illustrates the give and take between the court and locals, laying bare individuals’ attempts to exploit state power by shaping the local circumstances known to the state. This translation project served specific needs – the court’s backing to legal claims – and the maps in these cases illuminate the process by which local actors invited the state into their communities. Through the power of the court, abstractions of land and social circumstance gained reality and force, marking both the physical and the social terrain.

A case from 1897, for instance, introduced a map as part of a long-running feud over property borders.93 The dispute pitted Wu Youheng, 45 sui, against Zhou

Yuanqi, 48 sui, and dated to a land sale during the reign of the Jiaqing Emperor

(r.1760-1820). In his testimony, Zhou summarized his position by stating that his family had acquired land during the Jiaqing reign that led to a shared border with Wu.

A dispute over the felling of bamboo was the immediate cause of the court case, and a settlement at court dispatched a court clerk to fix the borders with the help of the community leaders. The magistrate ordered the disputed site mapped so that he could

“see” it and rule on the rival claims. The state attempted to render territory knowable

92 In addition the maps found in the Ba County archive, I have also encountered a great number of maps from land disputes in the Danshui-Xinzhu Archive from Taiwan. 93 BXDA 7782.

43 through mapping in order to project power over it. However, this did not settle the matter.

According to Zhou, Wu did not respect the court settlement and continued to violate the property lines. In the midst of this litigation, Zhou’s eight-sui son, Zhou

Dongyang, died. At the time of his son’s death, Zhou was being held in chains by the court for his continued instigation. Zhou seized the opportunity presented by his son’s death to accuse Wu’s sons, Wu Gui and Wu San, of poisoning Dongyang. In his plaint, Zhou stated:

My wife, Yuan Shi, and my eight-sui son, Zhou Dongshang, were at home as usual. Suddenly, this month on the night of the eighteenth, Dongyang cried out that he was having stomach pains. My wife feared his food had something bad in it. She asked him to come tell her what he had been doing. Dongyang said he hadn’t eaten; he had only had dried beef with Youheng’s sons, Wu Gui and Wu San, while they were playing. And Wu Gui had given him a ball of sticky rice to eat.94

This accusation was a clear escalation of the conflict, ratcheting it up from a simple land dispute to a homicide case. Wu quickly submitted a counter-plaint denouncing Zhou’s claims as pure fabrication. In that document and elsewhere, Wu argued that his sons were not playing with Dongyang because they lived far apart; that his sons would not play with Dongyang because they were much older; and, finally, that no one saw them playing together. The accusation seems to have been Zhou’s final card to play in a case in which he seemed to be slowly losing ground.

A map of landholdings was entered as evidence in this intractable conflict.

[Map One] A first question is: Who produced this map? Official procedures for the

94 BXDA 7782.

44 creation and use of maps at court are not clear. Huang Liuhong’s magistrate’s handbook, Fuhui Quanshu, offers no guidance for the production or use of maps.95

The Qing Code offers no help either. However, a report from community leaders included in the case reads in part: “Your honor personally interrogated [the parties], issued a vermillion rescript, inspected the map, and established the boundaries."96 In this case at least, it is clear that the magistrate ordered the map.

The map has no single orientation and makes no reference to the four cardinal directions. Instead, it is oriented around the center of the map, as if the viewer were standing in the landscape. This is the world as the individual might confront it, not a fully realized abstraction of the space. It is an accurate description of meaningful relations between known objects and markers, not an imperfect abstract depiction of the earth’s surface.

A map is “an interpretive abstraction of the material space.”97 Within this space, our map focuses on dry fields [tu] and rice paddies [tian]. In addition, the map depicts streams, bridges, paths, woods, graves [fen], defensive earthen mounds [tubao] and an empty weir. The undulating contours of the fields and path suggest a description of the topography. The trees in particular are rendered with an artistic flourish reminiscent of

Chinese landscape painting. The map is at once crude (compared to contemporary scientific maps) and cultured (drawing on a rich artistic tradition).

95 Liuhong Huang, Fukkei zensho (Tōkyō : Kyūko Shoin, 1973). 96 BXDA 7782. 97 Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997), 53.

45

Map One: BXDA 7782

The map is principally concerned with delineating landholdings and is instrumental: the map a tool used to describe holdings in order to support claims made at court. It is particularly curious then that although the land is divided into discrete

46 parcels, the map does not indicate ownership of those lands. By itself, the map is open to a host of interpretations. This suggests that the map could not stand alone as a description of local landholding patterns. The map required an interpreter with local knowledge to move the magistrate through the terrain. While the lands are fully bounded, the interpretations one could derive from them are not.

Presumably, the litigants’ land contracts were also examined as evidence.

These documents “walked” the reader through the space of the holding with specific language about the boundaries of fields, “to the east it extends to Zhang San’s field, to the west it extends to the main road, etc.” Locally informed interpreters (the middlemen/witnesses listed on the contract, usually local worthies) were necessary to make sense of the explicitly local terms of the contract.98 Our map appears as an extension of, or appendix to, the contracts that provided the main evidence about who owned what, though they were not included in the court documents. These documents would have to be read all together and explained by local people.

One could consider our map a failure because it does not make clear its principal concern: ownership of land.99 On the other hand, perhaps the map does succeed in its intent. This map cannot be fully divorced from the local context in which it was created precisely because it is incomplete as it stands. The key to this map is a local interpreter. That voice could come from yamen staff who visited the site or from the locals themselves, but this design prevents the usurpation of meaning by

98 For detailed descriptions of such contracts, see Christopher M. Isett, State, Peasant, and Merchant in Qing Manchuria, 1644-1862 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006). 99 Thongchai has defined mapmaking as follows: “The cartographer observer surveys the geographical terrain (A) with specific objectives for each kind of map. Then, by cartographic methods, he or she conceptualizes it (B), transforms the data into mapping form (C), and the map is produced.” In his terms, our map can perhaps be seen as a failure because it fails in step A by not making its “specific objectives,” land ownership, clear. Thongchai, Siam Mapped, 53.

47 the court, and forces a state/society dialogue rather than encouraging imperial monologues.

It is interesting that it was the magistrate, in his frustration, who sent the clerk out to map the site – as if drawing a map would settle the matter once and for all by fixing information on paper and thereby imposing clarity on the ground – but the locals stayed in the conversation by yielding still-encoded maps. In our next case, the maps themselves become the subject of contention as locals compete to have their representations of the local order ratified at court. We must remember that “a map may not just function as a medium; it could well be the creator of the supposed reality.”100

The next case is a contest to create that reality.

In 1896, a long-standing dispute found its way to the courts, with one party dating the conflict to a land sale in the reign of the Jiaqing Emperor. The case concerned responsibility for hydraulic control in the coal-rich mountains of the county.101 Ding Jitian, 54 sui, reported that he had inherited a coal mine from his ancestors and that the land deed clearly marked the boundaries of his property. His troubles began when his neighbor rented his land to Li Yushan. The dispute arose as the Dings dug a new channel for the stream, diverting it around a spring located on

Li’s rented land. Since the middle of the stream was the agreed boundary between their holdings, this was effectively an attempt to move the boundary and encroach on

Li’s land. In the end, the magistrate used a map to establish the borders, restoring the original boundaries and ordering both parties to stay on their respective sides of the

100 Thongchai, Siam Mapped, 56. 101 BXDA 7704.

48 stream. During the case, both Ding and Li accused each other of acting like a

“hegemon.”102

This case presents a series of competing maps and gives us a clearer picture of how maps were generated and used at court. Moreover, the maps themselves become the object of contention, with competing maps supporting competing claims. The rival maps are direct extensions of the rival plaints, each being drafted to tell a particular story. The first map in this case was produced by the court clerk Li Chengxi. Chengxi reported to the court that he had gone to the village, a distance of roughly eight miles, on orders from the magistrate and produced a map in consultation with community leaders. On this report, the magistrate wrote: “Your report is noted. The map is filed.”103

Offering only the vaguest sketch of the land and claims, the map in question offers little to clarify the dispute. [Map Two] Much like the map in the preceding case, land ownership of individual properties is not indicated on this map either. In fact, the only labels that appear on the map, the four cardinal directions, are incorrect.

There are two directions labeled South, with the one on the right-hand side appearing to have been changed from North. Beyond this problem of orientation, the lack of labels again requires a translator to describe the contents of the map to the magistrate.

Moreover, the locals had already shaped the production of the map since it was drawn on the basis of local input. It was extremely unlikely that Chengxi would have an accurate understanding of local geography and landholdings to render a map and so he had to go to the village and consult with community leaders.

102 Ibid. 103 Ibid.

49 The map shows the stream, the central concern of the case, running down the center of the view, while a dotted line representing a path meanders back and forth.

Mine entrances are on both sides of the water, as are two structures. The hillside is dotted with tufts of grass, and the vaguest outline of the hillside is suggested. This is all the description offered by the map. Our frustration with the haziness of Chengxi’s map was seconded by Ding and his supporters.

50

Map Two: BXDA 7704

In a plaint filed three days after Chengxi submitted his map, Ding offered a meticulous description of the site and appended his own, detailed map. [Map Three]

This map was apparently drawn by Ding himself. Following the main text of the plaint

51 is a small notation stating: “A single map drawn by the plaintiff himself is attached.”104

Map Three: BXDA 7704

This map, mirroring the geography conjured by the written plaint, clearly describes the landscape and Ding’s concerns within that space. It is a richly drawn scene. In addition to the four cardinal directions (with North supplanting the erroneous second South of Chengxi’s map), the map further describes the setting by referencing the “inner mountains” [neishan] and “outer mountains” [waishan]. These are not absolute directional markers like East, West, North and South; rather, these terms

104 BXDA 7704.

52 express a relational understanding of the landscape, expressing a specifically local conception of the mountains’ orientation.

In addition to more-fully orienting the reader, the map also clearly marks the objects of contention. This map could stand on its own within the context of the case, masking its partiality with its seemingly neutral and comprehensive presentation of the land. However, like everything in this case, the cartographic evidence did not go unchallenged. In a subsequent plaint, Li Yushan criticized both Li Chengxi’s and

Ding’s maps. This plaint came nearly a month after Ding’s and followed a written agreement signed by all parties stating that the matter was settled. The intractability of the litigants drove the magistrate to frustration. He wrote on Li Yushan’s plaint: “The case was already interrogated clearly and decided. Do not use pretexts to disrespectfully re-open the case.”105

Philip Huang has speculated that the legal system in Ba County transitioned from a simple, relatively well-functioning arrangement primarily serving small landholders (typified for Huang by Baodi County in North China) to an unwieldy and highly differentiated one that was overwhelmed by clever and cynical litigants, frequently large land owners (as seen in Huang’s depiction of Danshui-Xinzhu in

Taiwan). In this latter system, “multiple court sessions were common, judgments were frequently contested, and lawsuits often ran on for years, sometimes even decades.”106

From the magistrate’s response, it seems that Huang’s theory may be correct. Ba

105 Ibid. 106 Philip Huang, Civil Justice in China: Representation and Practice in the Qing (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 138.

53 County’s landholders were certainly willing to engage in complicated litigation, even in the face of the magistrate’s explicit consternation.

Map Three (Detail): BXDA 7704

54

But despite the magistrate’s clear displeasure, the case went on. In fact,

Yushan’s plaint noted that he had also attached a map [Map Four]. In terms of composition, this document strikes a middle ground between Chengxi’s first map and

Ding’s submission. In fact, it looks a lot like Chengxi’s map with clear labels. The concise statement on the plaint does not make clear who drew the map – particularly when compared to the note in Ding’s plaint clearly stating that his map was produced by the plaintiff. Since it was submitted to the court in the same manner as Ding’s map was and not reported internally as Li Chengxi’s map was, it appears that Li Yushan had this map produced.

It is clear, however, that this final map was part of a rebuttal to Ding’s claims and a denunciation of clerk Li Chengxi’s incompetence. In the plaint, Li Yushan argued that the map drawn by Li Chengxi was “vague.”107 Further, he argued that

Ding had produced a “fraudulent map.”108 The miniaturized and abstracted representations of space have themselves become objects of contention. The case was no longer simply concerned with actual landholding conflicts. It had also become an argument over representations of space. And these representations helped determine who really owned what.

The arguments made by both Ding’s map [Map Three] and Yushan’s [Map

Four] are clearer when they are put in dialogue. First, Ding’s map offers a broad sense of the two properties. The notes at the top of the map indicate the general orientation of the holdings, marking the land to the south as the Liu’s (Li’s landlord) and the lands

107 Ibid. 108 Ibid.

55 to the north as Ding family lands. Between these two notations, the map declares that the stream forms the boundary between the two properties. Farther down on the map, the mining operations of both families are marked. The picture the map draws is of two clearly defined and distinct holdings separated by an unambiguous and agreed- open natural marker: the stream. To further emphasize this understanding, the note on the lower left of the stream remarks that its waters flow freely and do not block the

Li’s mine. Everything is clear and there seems little ground for contention.

Yushan’s map, however, suggests a different situation. His map also makes clear the general lay of the land. On the left, the entrances to Yushan’s mines are noted, the old mine at the top and the new mine at the bottom. The map marks the left- hand side of the stream as the Li’s land and the right-hand side as the Ding’s. The writing in the stream states that the middle of the stream was the agreed-upon border.

The Ding’s coal mine is labeled on their side of the stream. The map indicates that the hillsides on both sides are planted with dry fields.

So far, Yushan’s map does not seem to differ from Ding’s map. However, the source of the conflict can be found in the small, secondary stream that curves off into the Li’s side and around a structure marked as the Yushan’s mine’s dam. According to

Yushan, this small tributary, which does not appear on the other map, was Ding’s attempt to unilaterally alter the borders and usurp land that rightfully belonged to

Yushan. Next to this channel he wrote: “The Ding family has jumped over the border.

[We want] this new separate water channel immediately readjusted and [seek] repayment.”109 In Yushan’s map, it was Ding’s new channel that threw the parties into

109 Ibid.

56 conflict. Thus, the map mirrored and supported the arguments presented in the written record.

Taken together, the two maps present very different pictures of the same supposed reality. Ding’s map emphasizes stability while Yushan’s suggests change.

What they do have in common is that they both make arguments and each presents its argument as an accurate reflection of the objective situation on the ground. The magistrate was left with two competing depictions of reality.

In this dispute within the dispute, the ability to convincingly construct the world on a page and argue with that map – in order to have the magistrate recognize that representation – had become as important than the actual situation on the ground.

Presumably, this third map was the most accurate – it certainly contains the most information and detail – but here the representation and the reality are reinforcing. Of course, these maps did not carry some sort of arbitrary power entirely divorced from reality, but in court these abstracted renderings of the world could carry as much meaning as the “real” landscape. The world had been fully translated into a simplified picture for the court. On that basis, the court issued its ruling – a decision that would leave the court and have an impact on the real landscape.

57

Map Four: BXDA 7704

Our final case is slightly more puzzling and comes from an entirely different sort of conflict. This case concerned the alleged murder of Luo Hongsheng, whose

58 death resulted from a fight at the market.110 Luo was demanding repayment of a debt from Carpenter Ran when Xie Jiu intervened. As the argument escalated, they came to blows. Xie immediately fled but was later captured. He then testified that he had intervened because he thought Luo was being “unfair” to Ran. Xie’s role in the fight is complicated by the fact that he seems to have been acting at the behest of the market’s security agent, who apparently asked Xie to break up the fight between Luo and Ran.

Whether or not Xie felt he was acting in a semi-official capacity, the court adjudicated the case as a simple homicide resulting from an affray. As part of this investigation, the court attempted to determine precisely the blows struck and received by each party. Further, the court investigated the scene of the fight and, it seems, had a map produced as part of this investigation [MAP FIVE].

This case hints at a wider role for maps at court, and suggests a broader use of maps in a range of conflicts beyond land disputes. Unfortunately, the case offers little

110 BXDA 7711. This case also appears in BXDA 7698 and is discussed in greater detail in Chapter Three.

59

Map Five: BXDA 711

60 explanation of the map or its use at court. In fact, the numerous structures that populate the map were not mentioned in the case. Thus, we have a very detailed map with an unclear relation to the case. However, despite the seeming incongruity between the map and the contents of the case, it is clear that the homicide produced a map. In response to a report from court clerk Deng Yutang, the magistrate wrote:

“Your report is noted. You should gather the parties together, draw a detailed map, and submit it for me to look at.”111 Here again, while the court clerk drew the map, it seems to require both local knowledge to produce it and a translator present at court to interpret the map and give it meaning. In other words, local actors continued to shape the knowledge that was the basis for the court’s judgments.

What purpose did the map serve? In this case, as in the others, the map was part of an attempt to fix subjects and their holdings in space. Qing courts exhibited a strong interest in spatially defining their subjects. This desire is evident in the detailed information litigants were required to enter in their plaints. Following name and age, the first piece of information the court collected was where the subject lived permanently and where s/he was residing during the court case. This information, part of a generic questionnaire at the beginning of each plaint form, referenced the individual’s security and tax units, the closest market town to the village, and its distance from the county seat.

These are notions of space intimately connected to power. In all of the cases considered here, this was the power of the state to mediate disputes and alter the landscape – physical and social – on the litigant’s behalf. While power clearly resided

111 Ibid.

61 at court, it was only brought to bear once locals had sought it out and only on the basis of local information and knowledge. We see the use of maps in addition to oral testimony and contracts as evidence, in order to make local spatial knowledge comprehensible to the magistrate. Cordell Yee has written that maps “worked in tandem with language to communicate something about space and place.”112 He is referring to the heavy use of text within traditional Chinese maps, but this dynamic was also at work in court, where maps served as another kind of proof and worked in tandem with testimony.

Here, then, is the magistrate’s gaze, as he uses maps to “see” and judge spatial relations within his county without ever leaving his yamen. People brought their self- serving maps to him, but he also sent out his own clerks to produce presumably more objective maps. His challenge was how to get beyond the walls of his yamen in order to make informed judgments and project power. Like other tools at his disposal, maps were a way for the magistrate and his staff to project control over distance.

The court formed only one element of the legal culture in Ba County, though it was clearly the most powerful. As is the Russian Empire, however, in this legal culture

“people knew that the law could be used; they knew many of its protections and rules….”113 The use of maps in court cases reveals active local participation in this culture. Here, at the very end of the Qing, people still turned to the state as arbiter and sought out its authority. In this process, locals transmitted and translated local realities for disputative use at court. Indeed, “the state had no unmediated access to local

112 Harley and Woodward, The History of Cartography, 228. 113 Burbank, Russian Peasants Go to Court, 30.

62 ‘truth,’ and hampered by its own regulations, could resolve nothing without that truth.” 114

Maps sometimes “armed local litigants with new and creative ways to lie, falsify, and misrepresent the lay of the land and to turn the state’s own regulation to their own purpose.”115 These documents were another tool litigants could add to their toolbox when engaging with the court. All of these factors suggest a great willingness to use the court and a fairly sophisticated understanding of its procedures and possibilities. In these conflicts, local actors took a variety of steps to control the information that flowed to the court. These findings suggest a contentious legal culture that mirrored the vigorous social life of the county.

Conclusion

Our discussion has stressed the variety of roles the state could play in some spaces (rivers) and its seeming absence or limited role in others (roads). While we might expect regular state power to fade over distance, rivers collapsed this distance, both with ease of travel and the particular roles the rivers played – including as economic space (taxes), as political space (for demonstrations of “self-strengthening”), as military space, etc. Conversely, roads seem to have exhibited a particular dynamic that led to the faster falling away of normal state authority than the absolute distance from centers of Qing power might suggest. While the cases presented here are not

114 Valerie Kivelson, Cartographies of Tsardom: The Land And Its Meanings in Seventeenth-century Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 49. 115 Ibid.

63 sufficient to map the exact contours of regular state power, they do illuminate the fluid and episodic presence of the state in the county.

Moreover, our discussion of “vernacular” maps has suggested yet another spatial dimension to state power. These maps describe a conversation between the court and local disputants, one that had a strong spatial component. In these cases, state power was first activated by locals who invited this authority into their conflict in hopes of leveraging this power to their benefit. These actors then mapped competing local realities and argued with them, bringing local circumstances into the courtroom.

This allowed the magistrate to “see” beyond his narrow confines and project power across the county.

These interactions can be seen as a folding of the map, erasing the distance between the disputant and the court. Throughout our discussion, the fluid nature of the county’s spatial dynamics has been clear. Space was collapsed (along rivers), stretched

(on roads), and erased (by the map). A true map of the county’s animated landscape would reflect all these influences.

64

2. Suicide and Social Practices

Introduction

In 1896, a woman named Zhou Ma Shi, aged 50 sui, reported to the county court the death of her son.116 In her initial plaint, Ma Shi, a resident of Chongqing, claimed that her son, Zhou Xuexiang, aged 18 sui, was raped while drunk and later killed himself by ingesting opium. Ma Shi stated that on the 22nd of the previous month Xuexiang, who had been apprenticing in the cotton business, returned home to change his clothes and then headed out drinking with a group of laborers. In her subsequent testimony, Zhou Ma Shi chronicled her son’s final hours, saying he went out drinking with three men, one of whom, Zeng Hengqing, recognized Xuexiang as

“naïve and young” and “forced” him to get drunk. Then Xuexiang, who was so drunk the others had to help him walk, and his companions went to the opium bar of Zeng’s employer, Zeng Jishan, to smoke opium.117

116 BXDA 7881. 117 “Opium den” as a translation for yanguan, although widely used, is loaded with associations of a “sick” China and Oriental squalor and it fails to accurately portray opium and its use in the Qing. It is perhaps best to think of an “opium bar.” Although one can safely assume that people are consuming alcohol at a bar, the term is value neutral in that it encompasses a wide range of establishments. While there are dank, seedy bars, there are also expensive, chic bars. “Bar” implies the activity occurring in the establishment, but does not suggest the character of the patrons. For these reasons, I have translated yanguan as “opium bar.”

65 According to Ma Shi, that night, while he was sleeping off the effects of his indulgences, Xuexiang was raped and robbed by Zeng Hengqing. The next day, wakening from his stupor, Xuexiang ate opium and killed himself.

This case illuminates both the potential that suicide records have to deepen our understanding of the social worlds of the late Qing as well as their limitations. The case gives us entry into life on the margins in Chongqing. Community leaders described how the opium bar owner He Hou Shi, following the seasonal inundation of the rivers, erected a series of sheds and shacks in a temporary encampment outside the city walls as part of a seasonal migration among the city’s poor. When the water levels were low, a shantytown sprouted on the river’s exposed mudflats, but when the waters rose, these settlements migrated to a high-water “campground” where Hou Shi’s opium bar was located.

This mean and temporary settlement was a known center of vice and economic opportunity. This shantytown and jungle sustained its own marginal population of petty urbanites and rural transplants: the barber who shaved heads in the camp;

Xuexiang himself, coming to drink and be merry; opium bars and their customers; and a myriad other figures populating this muddy world. Here is an opportunity to observe the world of the city’s small traditions. As Joseph Esherick has noted: “just as the

Industrial Revolution produced a proletariat in Europe, so had China’s ‘Commercial

Revolution’ [since the Ming] produced a lumpenproletariat of boatmen, carters, and coolies to move the goods and provide the services for the growing urban areas….”118

118 Joseph W. Esherick, Reform and Revolution in China: The 1911 Revolution in Hunan and Hubei (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 23.

66 While legal cases exhibit a powerful potential to unveil these worlds,

Xuexiang’s death also demonstrates the perhaps essential unknowability of many suicides. What really happened that night? Xuexiang cannot tell us. All we have are the representations of interested parties at court. These are surely partisan versions competing for the favor of the court’s approval and power. As we examine the contexts of these deaths and the interpretations they generated, we must remember this competition for meaning.

In the wake of the act, competing meanings were proposed at court: one side of the family saw it this way; the other saw it that. This was not pointless quibbling, it was a contest with consequences. The parties at court, frequently relying on cultural tropes and types, proffered their respective versions of the death, and the court, employing its own investigatory techniques and with a seemingly genuine interest in and commitment to finding out what happened, bestowed its mantle of authenticity on one version. A verdict may not have been accepted by all parties and could provoke further contestation in the form of violence or continued court action, but the rendering of a decision at court fixed the official meaning of each death, and these meanings could bring punishment or reward.

As Emile Durkheim argues in his foundational work on the subject, suicide, in large part, is socially determined – that is, the specific causes, practice, and social meaning of self-murder are generated by the particular circumstances of the site in which they occur.119 We can use these deaths to illuminate the social contexts and mores that animated life at the end of the Qing. Just as a recent spate of suicides by

119 Emile Durkheim, On Suicide, ed. Alexander Riley, trans. Robin Buss, (New York: Penguin Classics, 2007).

67 factory workers at Foxconn’s sprawling River Rouge in Guangdong illuminates the tensions of uneven development, migrant labor, and troubling working conditions in contemporary China, a study of suicide in the nineteenth century exposes aspects, some little examined, of social life in the late Qing.120

Our investigation of suicide brings us closer to understanding lived experience and illuminates the webs of social ties and expectations that bound members of local communities in Ba County. In our cases, we will see the limits of “marrying out” as an end to rights and responsibilities, as well as the strategies open to natal families; the existence and seeming acceptance of a variety of “families;” employer responsibilities toward employees that extend beyond simple economic relations; and a brawling enforcement of economic obligations. The cases show a remarkable degree of flexibility in social practices as well as the county court’s enforcement of these norms, despite their clear absence from formal law.

Before turning to the cases, we must sketch a few boundaries for our examination. First, this study does not make broad generalizations about “Chinese culture.” Instead, it focuses closely on the case materials. Differing cultural attitudes toward suicide, human life, and the individual all have been posited as holding the key to understanding differences between suicides in the “West” and in “China.” Suffice it to say, at least from a generalized “cultural” standpoint, one could find a number of bulwarks against suicide as well as celebrations of it. For Confucians, suicide was unfilial inasmuch as it destroyed the body and life given from parent to child. This same understanding informs the Qing code’s hierarchy of capital punishments –

120 David Barbosa. 2010. “After Suicides, Scrutiny of China’s Grim Factories.” New York Times, June 6.

68 decapitation was a more severe punishment than strangulation expressly because it violated that the body’s “somatic integrity” and insulted the ancestors. For Buddhists, a host of injunctions to preserve life could also militate against suicide. Combining these two themes, the late-Qing jurist Huang Liuhong writes: “The human body is not only a bequest of one’s parents but also a result of countless cycles of reincarnation.

That anyone can be degraded enough to destroy it with his own hands… is something

I detest most vigorously.”121 Yet broad-brush cultural arguments offer little heuristic insight; we will instead focus on individual acts.

Second, we must briefly consider the utility of suicide as a lens for social- historical study. While certainly not an everyday occurrence, suicide was part of the warp and woof of life in the late Qing – one that through direct or indirect experience, storytelling, and memory, reached more people than we might first imagine.

Moreover, the disruptive quality of suicide forces into stark relief the common understandings that animated the quotidian. As E.P. Thompson writes, “One way to discover unspoken norms is often to examine the untypical episode or situation.”122

Suicide also generated paperwork at court and consequently produced fine-grained details of life. These small episodes, as David Johnson argues, can lead to a better understanding of the worlds we are investigating because “thinking about a particular event or state of affairs or person brings with it a consciousness, sometimes focused,

121 Liu-Hung Huang, A Complete Book Concerning Happiness and Benevolence: A Manual for Local Magistrates in Seventeenth-Century China, (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1984), 357. 122 E.P. Thompson, “History and Anthropology,” in Making History: Writings on History and Culture (New York: New Press, 1994), 205

69 sometimes vague, of the whole world within which it existed.”123 In this way, the smallness of these deaths can help to illuminate the vastness of the Qing.

Third, inasmuch as this research only examines successful suicides, it necessarily suffers from a survivorship bias. These few deaths cannot offer a comprehensive description of suicides, even in this place at this time. Successful suicides represent only a small percentage of all attempted suicides. These

“unsuccessful” attempts are largely lost to the historian. Thus, the deaths found in the ming’an files are only an echo of a larger, and largely invisible, trend of suicides.

Finally, suicide begs the question: Why did they do it? In these legal cases, the only person who would have been able to answer that question is dead, and few left any explanation. We are left instead with representations, a shattered mirror of other people’s understandings of the event. Moreover, our interpreters are frequently not disinterested observers but stakeholders – emotionally and frequently financially – in the event. Driving someone to commit suicide was a crime punishable by one hundred strokes of the heavy bamboo in the Qing, so to accuse another of this crime carried with it power and a potential for economic reward.124 Suicide sometimes presented the indebted with an opportunity, through their death, to erase their family’s debts.

Moreover, some of the legal cases that followed suicides can be interpreted as acts of extortion by the family of the deceased. Families might demand remuneration for their loss and, when refused, bring the suit to court. This, in some ways, mirrors practices

123 David Johnson, Spectacle and Sacrifice: The Ritual Foundations of Village Life in North China (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2010), 7. 124 Yunsheng Xue, Du Li Cun Yi Chong Kan Ben (Taibei: Cheng wen chu ban she, 1970), 199.00. The punishment was increased to strangulation if it was a younger relative who pushed an elder relative to commit suicide. If the pressure was motivated by either theft or sex, then the punishment was increased to beheading.

70 surrounding land sales and wife sales. Far from being purely economic, all of these relationships bound the two sides in a web of expectation and obligation.

The contexts of these suicides and their social meaning, as voiced by those in court, describe the social worlds of late nineteenth-century Ba County. A world away,

Walter Johnson has argued that “legal testimony has a partisan purpose and cannot be taken as a transparent account of what happened in a given situation. But because partisan, it is meant to be convincing, to quicken a common understanding of the possibilities inherent in a particular situation.”125 He further argues that even lies presented in court are useful to the historian because those fabrications must be credible in order to be effective, and so must describe acts, situations and characters that are seen as possible by the audience.

Though what actually happened may be lost, there are social worlds to be discovered in these court records. As Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero write, “the value of criminal records for history is not so much what they uncover about a particular crime as what they reveal about otherwise invisible or opaque realms of human experience.”126 These cases introduce a wider cast of characters into our understanding of suicide as well as the social landscape of the late Qing. In Matthew

Sommer’s words, legal sources are perhaps “as close as we will ever get to the ‘voice’ of the illiterate in late imperial China.”127 Moreover, these voices illuminate the social

125 Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 183. The locus classicus for this argument is Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth-century France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987). 126 Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero, History from Crime: Selections from Quaderni Storici (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), vii. 127 Matthew Sommer, Sex, Law, and Society in Late Imperial China, New ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 26.

71 webs that bound the men and women of these communities. No one was free to move as they pleased. They were bound by custom and by law. These men and women were not adrift in anomie; quite the opposite in fact. It was the ties they could not escape that are illuminated by their deaths.

The Cases

This chapter examines 64 suicides found in the ming’an files of the county court archive. These cases are particularly powerful in exposing the practice of suicide at the end of the Qing, and allow us to see a range of suicides and responses before they are further filtered into types and weighed down with meaning.

Of our sample of 64 suicides, 33 were committed by men and 26 by women, a perhaps surprising division given contemporary China’s unique predominance of female suicides and the existing scholarship’s bias toward female deaths.128 In terms of age, 19 of the dead could be considered “young,” six “old,” with two somewhere in the middle and 32 unknown.129 And of these dead of “unknown” age, 11 were women

– ten of whom were already married at the time of death. Overall, 25 of the dead were married, six single (with one engaged), and four widows; for the remaining 24, martial status was unclear. Of these 24, 23 were men. From these numbers, it is clear that women who killed themselves tended to be married. To push the numbers a little harder, it seems that many of the men whose marital status was unclear from the

128 For a discussion of suicide in contemporary China, see Phillips, Liu, and Zhang, “Suicide and Social Change in China,” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 23, no. 1 (March 1999): 25–50. The question of female suicide will be considered later in the chapter. 129 For these “unknown” ages no attempt was made to approximate age from their life circumstances. If their age was not immediately clear, it was designated “unknown.”

72 records were in fact unmarried (or at least away from home), given the absence of their spouse in the legal record. So, it appears that married women and single men killed themselves. Thus, women who killed themselves were more explicitly fixed in society. They were married, for better or worse, while their male counterparts exhibit a greater variety of social attachments.

The occupations of the dead were only occasionally recorded. Given the time and the place, we can assume that many of these individuals were agricultural workers. In fact, one might suggest that farming formed a default occupation, and that perhaps jobs were only noted when they failed to conform to this presumption.

Recorded occupations included: laborer, apprentice in a “handicraft” shop, tailor, barber, shopkeeper, bucket maker, cotton worker, baker, medicine shop assistant, etc.

This reads as a litany of regular working people. Perhaps not surprisingly, women were never presented as having “occupations,” despite their integral contributions to the family economy.130

The data show that most people killed themselves at home, with only three deaths occurring in public or away from home. Interestingly, the city and surrounding countryside seem to be equally represented on the rolls of suicides. Historians of

Europe have largely debunked the notion of cities as particularly violent places.131

130 In China’s Motor, Hill Gates discusses in detail women’s contribution to household incomes and their exclusion from our understandings of productive work. A false dichotomy is frequently drawn between the family and the economy. In most instances, these units overlapped. 131 For the debate about Europe, Eric Johnson has grouped the major proponents of violent city theory into five categories. First, the “Conservative Political Argument” was promulgated by conservative forces within the modernizing societies which attacked these processes in defense of their own interests, which were frequently based in the countryside. Second, the “Marxist Argument” shares this negative view of cities by seeing them as the main site for bourgeoisie capitalism and it associated miseries. Third, the “Classical Sociological Argument” blames the shift from community to society that it associated with urbanization. Fourth, the “American Sociological Argument” adds empirical data to the

73 However, while about one in four residents of Ba County lived in the city, fully half the suicides occurred there. We find a nearly perfect balance between the city and the countryside, with 25 cases occurring in the villages while 26 occurred in the city.132

This reflects the situation in reported cases. While there has been no research on this topic, it does certainly seem possible that beyond a certain distance from the county seat these deaths would be handled by non-state authorities given the sheer difficulty of bringing matters to court from remote areas.

Historians of Europe have thoroughly challenged the assumption that urbanization axiomatically brings isolation and anonymity and therefore crime. Clive

Emsley argues that “urbanization did not destroy the ability of groups bound by work, ethnic, religious or other ties, from existing as communities; nor did it leave the new urban dweller as an isolated individual among a society of strangers.”133 Here, parallels with experiences in China come quickly to mind. Qing urban dwellers, rather than finding themselves lost and alone in their new settings, were usually bound up in a web of native-place and work relations that constituted well-developed sub- communities within the city. These ties were the key to urban survival; as much research has shown, one’s fate in the city was intimately tied to the exploitation of these communalistic ties.134

Classical Argument while basing its conclusions on the highly particularistic American experience as the basis for its normative claims. Finally, the “Recent European Historical-Cultural Argument,” represented by Foucault among others, which is generally opposed to the modernization process. Eric A. Johnson, Urbanization and Crime: Germany, 1871-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 8–12. 132 There were eight cases in which the location was not clear. 133 Clive Emsley, Crime and Society in England, 1750-1900 (London: Longman, 1987), 86. 134 See Bryna Goodman’s Native Place, City and Nation: Regional Networks and Identities in Shanghai, 1853-1937, Elzabeth Perry’s Shanghai on Strike and Gail Hersatter’s Workers of Tianjin for further elaboration of these ties.

74 One sees a similar situation in England. Industrialization and urbanization changed communities, “but the experience was not so shattering that people, especially poor immigrants spreading to cities or sprawling open villages, ceased to live in, and to perceive themselves as part of, communities.”135 Lingering in the background of many of these understandings is a notion of an ideal rural community.

But, at least in Europe, “violence was always just as prevalent, and often more so, in the countryside as it was in the city, and big cities were no more violent than smaller ones.”136

The data further indicate no strong seasonal bias. Spring saw the most suicides with 19 deaths (10 women and nine men), followed by summer with 15 (eight women and seven men), winter with 13 cases (11 men and two women), and autumn with 12 six women and six men).137 Also, the cases exhibit no annual pattern during our (brief) period.138 The method of suicide shows a much clearer bias.

Consuming lethal amounts of opium was the method of choice in 39 of the cases, followed by 12 hangings, four cut throats, two drownings, one leap off a cliff, and one case of arsenic poisoning.139 Opium was a very common cash crop and therefore widely available to those who decided on suicide. Interestingly, one finds no

135 Emsley, Crime and Society in England, 97. 136 Johnson, Urbanization and Crime, 234. 137 Here, I am using a rough and ready approximation of the seasons: Winter is defines as months 12, one and two in the lunar calendar; spring is months three, four and five; summer is months six, seven and eight; and fall is months nine, ten and eleven. I use this system rather than the traditional ritual markings of the seasons in order to better capture the agricultural realities and imperatives of Sichuan. 138 Suicide cases per year: year 15 of the reign of the Guangxu Emperor had five cases; year 16 had 12 cases; year 17 had six; year 18 had three; year 19 had seven; year 20 had ten; year 21 had four; year 22 had five; year 23 had zero; year 24 had two; and year 25 also had two. 139 The strong predominance of opium as the killer of choice is echoed in contemporary China’s heavy favoring of chemical pesticides as method of suicide. This suggests an interesting arc in China’s history: from opium to chemical pesticides.

75 correlation between gender and method of suicide.140 However, one does see a strong gender bias in the alleged reasons and circumstances of the suicide. Of our sample, 19 cases can be broadly classified as “family related” and all of the dead in this group are women. Another 25 cases can be seen as stemming from economic troubles, and 23 of the dead in this category are men.141 These divisions are crude and elide the artificiality of the separation between family units and economic units, but this gendered difference is mirrored in the existing scholarship, which exhibits an almost exclusive focus on female suicide.

Female Suicide

Family Order

Susan Mann has written that “marriage was the ladder of success for women in late imperial China.”142 While there is no denying this, one must also recognize the hazards involved in climbing this ladder, where no rung was more perilous than the first. Young women and girls entering marriage faced a structural imbalance that left them vulnerable. The role women were supposed to play was not static – the ideal type evolved – and the family unit itself was also fluid. As Margery Wolf suggests, “the

Chinese family is cyclical.”143

140 Female suicides: 20 opium, four hangings, one cut throat and one drowning. Male suicide: 19 opium, eight hangings, three cut throats, one drowning, one leap off a cliff and one use of arsenic. 141 There are five cases where the reasons are not clear, and the remaining ten cases are a motley assortment of suicides following fights, thefts and other transgressions. 142 Mann, Susan. “Grooming a Daughter for Marriage: Brides and Wives in the Mid-Qing Period,” in Chinese Femininities, Chinese Masculinities, eds. Susan Brownwell and Jeffrey Wasserstrom (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2002), 93. 143 Margery Wolf, Women and the Family in Rural Taiwan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1972), 170

76 Moreover, the family, the quintessential sphere for female actors in our period, was principally constructed as an economic unit rather than as a vehicle for personal happiness or fulfillment. Hill Gates writes: “Marriage was the principal means through which female workers and reproducers were recruited as permanent members of, and workers in, jia [household or family].”144 While this characterization may coldly eliminate non-economic facets of the family unit, it does expose the economic innards of the jia.

Frequently, however, women remained caught between the competing claims of their natal and married families and, despite talk of women “marrying out,” natal families could still lay claim to their daughters and through them make demands on their new families. This complicates notions of the jia as a discrete, foundational unit of society. Jia remained nebulously linked to the other families they interacted with.

The ebbing and flowing of these ties, as well as their occasional exploitation and competition, was an important part of life. The suicide of Zhu Gan Shi illustrates these fluctuating webs of relations and the in-between status of new brides in the late

Qing.145 In this case, the enmity and tension between the two sides of her family is quite clear, though what actually happened is slightly murkier. The two sides presented conflicting versions of events and the court wove its own tale of events – a version that the two sides officially endorse in the end.

Zhu Gan Shi’s husband, Zhu Qingsan, testified that they were married two years before her death and that her mother, Gan Cui Shi, repeatedly had asked to

144 Hill Gates, China’s Motor: A Thousand Years of Petty Capitalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 121. 145 BXDA 7666.

77 borrow money from Zhu during those years. He claimed he didn’t “make a fuss” over it, but was surprised when Cui Shi visited his wife at their home while he was out of town (accompanying his brother’s corpse back to their native place) and “coerced” his wife into lending her more money. He alleged that this caused Gan Shi to become

“desperate” [qingji] and eat opium.

Zhu returned home, found Gan Shi ill, and called for a doctor to treat her, but to no avail. She lingered for three days and then died. Zhu further claimed that his mother-in-law and other members of her family, including her nephew Liu Yinxi, destroyed his property and demanded money from him. According to Zhu, when he did not pay them, Liu brought the case to court demanding 50 liang of silver to “clear up and pay back” the debt incurred by Gan Shi’s death.

The tension between the two sides of Gan Shi’s family was exacerbated by the very real value of the young woman. Bride prices made acquiring a new wife a serious investment from which the groom’s family expected returns.146 However, the natal family could also profit from a daughter’s death if they could prove that she had been driven to suicide. This created a potential economic incentive that cast suicide as a possible opportunity for economic gain. Gan Shi’s death became an unexpected opportunity for income. Her whole life suggested that Gan Shi, at different points in her life, was seen by her natal family as a source of income: bride price, “loans,” and finally some sort of death price. While this may have been crude profiteering, it may have also reflected an attempt to recover the expenses the family incurred in feeding and raising her, particularly given the strong virilocal tendency of marriages which

146 For more on brideprices, see Gates, China’s Motor, 121-147.

78 resulted in daughters being thought of as having “married out.” This economic incentive was perhaps exacerbated by the court’s clear disinterest in prosecuting individuals for false accusation and false testimony.

According to the Qing code, those who made false accusations should be punished according to the crime named in their accusation, with the punishment increased by two or three degrees.147 A false accusation of driving someone to suicide officially carried a penalty of 100 stokes of the heavy bamboo.148 However, we see few cases of the court punishing false accusation. From popular use of the court, it seems that people may have known this was the case and so used – and abused – the court freely as a site of dispute resolution. This would represent a sophisticated popular understanding of the court and its possibilities.149

Perhaps seeking to exploit this opportunity, Gan Shi’s mother, Cui Shi, presented the case in starkly different terms. She argued that Gan Shi and Zhu’s marriage was an unhappy one, characterizing her daughter as “vexed” and “harboring resentment” and adding that Zhu was “often suspicious and despicable.”150 After Zhu told her that her daughter “met with disaster” and killed herself by ingesting opium,

Cui Shi says she scolded him and that he then beat and kicked her, injuring her badly.151

The court was not moved and responded with its own, different version of events. In this account, the conflict between Gan Shi’s two families stemmed from a

147 Xue, Du Li Cun Yi, 336.0. 148 Although the penalty for driving one to commit suicide already carried a punishment of 100 strokes of the heavy bamboo, the Code also states that the penalty is limited to 100 strokes and so cannot be increased in this case. 149 For more on false accusation, see Chapter Four. 150 BXDA 7666. 151 Ibid.

79 dispute over the size of the funeral, with Cui Shi pushing for a large ceremony. In the end, all parties accepted the court’s version in their signed settlements. Regardless of the outcome, the case surrounding Gan Shi’s death illustrates the tensions possible between the two sides of the family, and the ways economic concerns, be they loans or funds for a funeral, could exacerbate these cleavages. The conflict, at its base, was largely about financial responsibility and the expectations and social practices that tied the two sides of the family – through the woman – together. A web of relations extended between these two families. These expectations led Cui Shi to ask for money

(possibly) and to demand a proper funeral for her daughter. Social practice cast a wider web of entanglements than the narrow confines of the law, and many of these entanglements are exposed following suicide. Moreover, these customs were backed by the court, which ruled without reference to any statute or sub-statute found in the code.

These social expectations can also be seen in the suicide case of Zhou Runxiu from 1891.152 Her brother, Zhou Liancheng, aged 28 sui, described the circumstances of his sister’s marriage and characterized the life she married into:

Last year my sister, Runxiu, had illicit sex. Matchmaker Li Huishan’s brothers made an agreement to marry her to Wu Huosan, the son of their older sister’s husband, Wu Qiaogui. After they were married, we began to realize that Qiaogui’s wife, Li Shi, simply had a shrewish temper. She disliked and scolded my sister until she couldn’t stand it and still she [Li Shi] repeatedly reprimanded her….This was because my sister was pregnant.”153

152 BXDA 7696. Interestingly, Zhou has a proper given name, rather than simply being referred to as Zhou, daughter of so-and-so. 153 Ibid.

80 Sadly, in his subsequent testimony, Zhou Liancheng made no mention of either his sister’s sexual history or her pregnancy. Instead, he added a detailed accusation of an assault on his sister by her mother-in-law, saying Li Shi beat Runxiu with a bamboo stick. Zhou further claimed that it was Wu Huosan who told him about

Runxiu’s beating as he explained her death.

Wu Huosan, aged 22 sui, subsequently filed a counter-plaint in which he stated that he and Runxiu, whom he refers to as Zhou Shi, were engaged as children and that they were happy even though they had not had any children yet. He reported that

Runxiu consumed opium on the seventh of the previous month and that she lingered until finally dying on the seventh day of the following month. Wu stated that he had hired a doctor to try and save his wife and that Runxiu’s mother had come and seen the treatment she was receiving. Further, he alleged that Zhou Liancheng and others assaulted Wu’s father and damaged their property.

Despite this, Wu Huosan and his father agreed to “help” by contributing 20 liang of silver for Runxiu’s funeral rituals and also arranged for another 20 liang in compensation back in the village. This payment followed an explicit agreement by all parties that her death was of her own doing and could not be blamed on anyone. The court found that the deceased was not driven to take her own life – a criminal offense

– but still sought a payment from her husband’s family to the deceased’s natal family.

While failing to meet the legal burden of proof for a criminal act, social practice – again backed by the court – demanded compensation for Runxiu’s death.

As Margery Wolf suggests, the conflict surrounding a wife’s entry into a new family is the archetypal family conflict and, not surprisingly, appears frequently in our

81 cases. The tension between the two sides of the family, evident in a number of cases, suggests that though girls may “marry out,” natal families continue to track their children and are present to demand restitution and justice in the event of suicide.154 On the one hand, this can be seen as simple economic opportunism, and there was surely some of that at work, but the court’s role in particular suggests the weight of social custom being brought to bear. After all, the court continued to intervene despite its explicit declaration that no law had been broken. This reading of the cases implies a wider web of reciprocity – relationships that are most clear the moment they were monetized following a suicide.

Family Disorder

If the preceding cases illuminated social practices surrounding dominant marriage practices, the following cases examine disordered households and the strains they could exert on custom and practice. Zuo Shi Shi’s death exposes the realities of life on the margins and the strategies employed to assure survival.155

When Zuo Shi Shi hanged herself, her son, Zuo Guilin, was forced to offer an explanation. He reported that his wife, Zuo Chen Shi, along with her ex-husband,

Yang Chengzhang, had gone to his mother and demanded money to pay for the debts they had run up smoking opium at an opium bar in Zhongxing market. The background for this convoluted tale only began to become clear when Zuo Chen Shi’s father, Chen Zhankui, explained the backstory to this affair. Chen Shi had been

154 Also see: BXDA 7848, BXDA 7752, BXDA 7790, BXDA 7819, BXDA 7822, BXDA 7847, BXDA 7854, BXDA 7883 and BXDA 7970. 155 BXDA 7653.

82 married to Zhu Xingfa at a young age, but because of Zhu’s poverty, he married Chen

Shi off to Yang Chengzhang. There was some altercation and “further misfortune,” the details of which are not given in the case records, which led to an earlier court case that had ordered Chen Shi to return to Zhu.

However, Chen Zhangkui alleged that Zhu would disappear for days, leaving

Chen Shi without anything to eat. This dire poverty lead to Chen Shi being married off again, this time to Zuo Guilin, whose first wife had already died.

Poverty drove these marriages – Zuo Chen Shi was married and remarried to fit the economic circumstances – and it seems that the bonds of reciprocity we saw in the preceding section were broken. Moreover, faced with serial marriages and adultery, the court did step in, and Yang Chengzhang was ordered beaten with the light bamboo for “stirring up trouble,” a seemingly informal and ad hoc punishment that did not explicitly hold him liable for the suicide. In this case, there was no semblance of the normative family unit. The state did little about it, intervening to punish only the most glaring offender. Local society here seems rather freewheeling, perhaps to the detriment of its members. Compare these lives to the idealized

Confucian order. This is what life could look like: a woman’s second husband tried to extort money to pay for opium debts from her third husband’s mother, causing her to commit suicide.

We also see the alienation of communal expectations in the death of Xiong Li

Shi. In this case, as in the above, hints at the market for buying and selling marriages, a crime punishable by 80 strokes of the heavy bamboo. In his testimony from the tenth month of 1891, Xiong Jiqi reported:

83

In the… eighth month [of last year], I took Li Fu Shi’s daughter, Li Shi, as my wife. In the second month of this year, I went out of town to do business. While I was away, Li Shi was influenced by Li Dejiu, who encouraged her to move into the house of his mother, Li Fu Shi, and have an affair with Luo Shoulin. All of the sudden, she married Shoulin. In the sixth month, I came home. Li Dejiu conspired with Security Group Head Zhang Qingyuan to kidnap me to force me to break my marriage contract Then on the 22nd day, I caught Li Shi and Luo Shoulin on the same bed smoking opium. At that time I wanted to start an investigation. Security Group Head Zhang Qingyuan stopped me from doing it and we came to an understanding – [after all] he is the night watchman. Li Shi took some opium to intimidate me. Li Shi began to show the effects of the poison and died. Qingyuan took Li Shi’s corpse and carried it on his back to my relative’s house. My mother, Zhong Li Shi, at that point, came to court.156

The account offered by Zhang Qingyuan, Luo Shoulin and Lishi’s mother, Li

Fu Shi, made no mention of an affair between Luo and Li Shi. Instead, Zhang testified that “on the 22nd day of the sixth month, Luo Shoulin was at Li Fu Shi’s house collecting debts. Jiqi came into the home and discovered Luo Shoulin there.”157 Li Fu

Shi’s version is a little more revealing in that it suggests that Xiong had already agreed to divorce Li Shi, but that he was now reneging on this decision for some unmentioned reason. Fu Shi testifies:

The deceased, Xiong Li Shi, is my daughter. In the eighth month of last year, after consulting a matchmaker, Xiong Jiqi took her as his wife. After they were married, there were no problems. In the second month of this year, Xiong Jiqi went off trading. I moved my daughter in with me at my house and we took our meals together. In the sixth month, Xiong Jiqi came home, but we didn’t hear from him. Finally, someone went looking for him. Then on the 21st, he came to our house and said he was unwilling to divorce Li Shi. On the 22nd, Luo Shoulin came to

156 BXDA 7713/7714 (This single case spans two archival files). 157 Ibid.

84 my house to collect debts and Jiqi ran into him and [then] said that my daughter and Shoulin were having an affair. We had an argument.158

In this confusing account, Xiong left on business, his wife moved in with her mother, and it seems there had been an agreement to end the marriage. In fact, a divorce document signed earlier by Xiong Jiqi is included in the case materials. Here one can glimpse a more negotiated form of marriage in the late Qing, and, from this perspective, marriage does not appear as the solid bedrock of society. Instead, it was something to be haggled over and deployed to one’s best advantage. In this case, social expectations still existed but they seem divorced from marriage. That is, marriage was only a strategy for optimizing one’s chances. And this strategy could be abandoned or altered in favor of more advantageous configurations.

One can see the variety of social arrangements at the time. Economic imperatives sent Xiong off for business. Debt, perhaps, drove Li Dejiu to break a marriage in order to sell Li Shi off to Luo. There were many ways to make a buck or acquire a family. Arrangements were frequently non-normative, but these constellations of social relationship cannot be considered unusual. At the local level, deviation, of one sort or another, seems the norm. Idealized visions of the family failed to satisfy the realities of lived experience. And so they were bent, twisted, and sometimes broken.

By the late Qing, people were frequently on the move. Men in particular were frequently driven from their homes and families by economic imperatives. These migrations left communities with many female-headed households and a heightened

158 Ibid.

85 potential for the non-normative. For example, in the twelfth month of 1890, Tang

Rongfa, aged 67 sui, came to the court after his daughter-in-law, Ai Shi, killed herself.159 In his plaint, Tang described the circumstances surrounding Ai Shi’s death:

My only son, Guilin, was married as a child to Ai Xingfa’s daughter, Ai Shi, as his wife. They lived together for two years. In the seventh year of the reign of the Guangxu Emperor, Guilin left to do business and did not return. Ai Shi was left behind at home. In the thirteenth year, Xie San began living in my home’s shed. I saw that he was often behaving lawlessly. Indeed, I feared this would bring calamity. I ordered Xie San to move to another shed. Xie San harbored anger. Suddenly, this month on the eighth day, he brazenly, along with a bunch of people, came to my house and falsely accused my daughter- in-law, Ai Shi, of borrowing his chest and mirror. Ai Shi did not borrow it and was unwilling to give him [the chest].160

Tang reported that on the night of the ninth, Xie San returned with a group of people to “insult” [lingru] Ai Shi, which caused her to become “desperate” [qingji] and kill herself by ingesting opium. Interestingly, Tang made no reference to the roughly two years that passed between Xie San’s move into the shed and events that led to Ai Shi’s death. Moreover, Xie San’s “lawlessness” was never named or explained. In fact, Xie San, in his testimony, made no reference to anything before the night of the ninth. He said he went to shame her, they argued and she killed herself.

The court ordered him beaten with the light bamboo, but did not specify his crimes.

Economic necessity drove Guilin from the house, leaving his aged father and wife behind. Xie San moved into this disordered household. While the exact nature of his transgressions is beyond our ability to recover, we can certainly imagine the threat he posed to a stable, normative household. There was an opportunity, however, to

159 BXDA 7677. 160 Ibid.

86 create a new, unsanctioned shadow household, one that seemed to exist for two years.

What was it that caused Tang to force the dissolution of this new household? We cannot know. However, the endurance of this arrangement suggests that it was within accepted social practice, if far from ideal behavior. It fulfilled some needs and suggests the existence of a variety of types of families and social units. While these may have been distortions of the normative family, they were not necessarily unusual or unwelcome.

Conclusion

We have seen how both “normal” and “abnormal” families could be the setting for suicides. In these situations, the structural imbalances in family roles exerted the greatest pressure on women. In explaining footbinding, Hill Gates has suggested that families went to substantial lengths to bind their members to the unit’s larger, corporate needs. For Gates, “footbinding” (although it was many other things as well) was a mechanism of labor discipline, employed to teach the playful child that obedience in unpleasant tasks was inescapable. Even one’s own body was not one’s own.”161 Gates ties the productive capacities to the needs of the “patricorporation,” but one can also see another dynamic at work, one that is less tied to ideal-types of social units.

The family was certainly a powerful force in local society, but this unit was just one manifestation of a web of social ties and expectations that dictated behavior and disciplined its members. Sometimes these forces are seen as natal families

161 Hill Gates, “Footloose in Fujian: Economic Correlates of Footbinding,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 43 (2001), 146

87 reached across and make demands on their married daughters and their new families; at other times, they manifest themselves in the ways these same natal families demanded justice and restitution for the mistreatment of their daughters; or they might be seen in disordered, female-headed households. One can also begin to see when these bonds were broken, representing only another ideal that could be jettisoned as required.

MALE SUICIDE

While female suicide has been explored by many scholars, male suicide has attracted much less attention. Even less prominent are discussions of male suicide among non-elites. Here, away from the exploits of great men, what did suicide look like?

In the fourth month of 1891, Liu Mou Shi, aged 76 sui, a grandmother and a widow, filed a plaint claiming her grandson, Liu Xuexing, aged 17 sui, had been driven to suicide by a gang of men pressing him to pay a debt.162 She reported that Liu had been accused by Guo Heshang of owing 350 wen and that he had been pushing her grandson to repay it. Then, according to Mou Shi, one day behind Yuantong temple, Guo and three other men seized Liu Xuexing and beat him. He was then held against his will in Li Laoqi’s riverside teahouse while his attackers drank tea. At this point, her grandson became “desperate” [qingji] and ran and threw himself into the river and drowned.163

162 BXDA 7694. 163 Ibid.

88 Our documents suggest that men, for the most part, killed themselves because of money: they owed money, had stolen money, or had determined they had little prospect of getting any money. These economic circumstances provoked conflicts that drove men to take their own lives. However, these cases also illuminate the practices and expectations that bound normal working people. These included a near familial relationship that developed between employer and employee as well as the seemingly common practice of extra-legal detainment as a means of debt recovery. These cases illuminate social expectations in action, matrices of custom and practice operating below the law but with the seeming complicity of the local court.

Personal Ties and Economic Relationships

Some of these conflicts, and their resolutions, suggest that economic relationships bound individuals in a deep web of customary, personal relations that could not be reduced to simple market exchanges. For example, in the ninth month of

1894, Qi Yang’an, aged 32 sui, filed a plaint at court alleging that his elder brother, Qi

Yangtai, had killed himself over the loss of 3000 wen left as deposit to rent land and a house that his landlord and sometime business partner, Chen Gaofa, would not return.164

In the plaint, as well as testimony given on the same day, Yang’an described a three-year-old business relationship that existed between his brother and Chen and argued that the crumbling of this relationship was the impetus behind his brother’s suicide. Specifically, he claimed that Chen’s failure to return the deposit resulted in

164 BXDA 7821.

89 Yangtai’s inability to put down a deposit for a new dwelling. This cash-flow shortage left Yangtai without a place to live and few prospects, and drove him to take his life.

In a counter-plaint, which Chen filed jointly with his brother (who was also a member of the local security authorities [baozheng]), Chen claimed to have already returned the money:

In the eighth month, Qi Yangtai rented (dian) a section of my good land. In the middle [of the land], there is a house with a tiled roof – whoever is renting the land from me lives there. The land is called Mandarin Orange Terrace. I take a rental deposit of 3000 wen, the annual rent is 600 wen. The rental contract is clear evidence [of this]. Last month on the 18th day, Qingtai returned the land, saying he had rented Liu’s farm instead, so I refunded his 3000 wen deposit, all according to our contract. This month on the 20th day, he moved away and that was the end of it.165

Chen then professed ignorance of the causes behind Yangtai’s death and, in his subsequent testimony, repeatedly stressed that the medical examiner had ruled it a simple suicide for which no one could be blamed. Chen further suggested that

Yangtai’s brother, Yang’an, wanted a lavish funeral for his brother and that this was the true motive for his spurious accusation that Chen had provoked the suicide.

Further, Chen said he had already “helped” by giving the family the wood for

Yangtai’s coffin. Yangtai’s neighbors, Wang Zhengshan and Liu Shaoyang, testified that Yangtai had received money from Chen and that they had no idea why Yangtai killed himself.

165 Ibid.

90 It is interesting that despite the difference in social status,166 the implied backing of community leaders, a lack of evidence, corroborating testimony, and an alternative theory of the plaintiff’s motivation, Chen still made a payment, in the form of the coffin, to Yangtai’s family. Why did he do this? Indeed, while the court ruled

Qi’s death a no-fault suicide, it specifically acknowledged Cheng’s voluntary payment of the coffin, as did the settlements signed by Yang’an and Chen. Yangtai’s death was not legally Chen’s fault, and he seemed to feel no blame or guilt, but custom seemed to dictate that the death still required remuneration from the dead man’s former landlord. These expectations can be seen in other cases as well.

In the seventh month of 1896, a widow named He Bao Shi, aged 52 sui, filed a plaint alleging that her son, He Yinsheng, had killed himself after being beaten by his boss, Yu Qingyun. Four days later, the court heard testimony from all parties. Bao Shi reiterated her claim:

My husband died many years ago. I had three sons in total. My eldest son has left home; my second son helps Li Ditang as a laborer. The deceased, He Yinsheng, is my third son. Last year he came to Chongqing to be Yu Qingyun’s apprentice at his bakery. There were no problems; I never thought [it would come to this]. This month on the eighth, my second son, He Chun, called on Yinsheng to tell him to return home, but he didn’t see him. Then on the ninth, I, along with my nephew He Yunting, went to see the situation at the shop. We asked Qingyun about my son, but he just hemmed and hawed, arousing our suspicions. We forced him to go to the local security head and explain. Then Qingyun started to talk and admitted that on the fifth, he had beaten my son and that afterward Yinsheng had taken opium and died. He had ordered my son’s body to be privately buried so that I would not find out what had happened.167

166 Chen’s position as the landlord and the fact that his brother is baozheng suggest unequal social standing in the community. 167 BXDA 7878.

91 Her nephew, not surprisingly, confirmed her story. More tellingly, community leaders described their attempts to settle the matter out of court. Testifying at court,

Bao Shi’s landlord, Li Ditang (also her second son’s boss), and three local security officers [baozheng] explained that they had attempted to broker a settlement. After hearing from Bao Shi, they had urged Qingyun to give her 10000 wen in order to mollify her, but Qingyun had said he was only willing to pay 5000. Then, once the money had been agreed on, Bao Shi had demanded a further 3000 to pay her travelling expenses. At this point, negotiations had broken down and Bao Shi brought the matter to court.

Qingyun, for his part, testified that prior to the suicide, Yinsheng had gone out and had an argument with some people, though he does not specify who they were or what the cause was. In Qingyun’s view, this fight led to his suicide. Further, Qingyun said he had hired a doctor to treat Yinsheng, but that they were unable to save him.

Much of the remaining case record details the back and forth deliberation over payment, all carried out under community leaders’ oversight. Finally, on the 24th, Bao

Shi testified that she had received 10000 wen from Qingyun and was now satisfied.

Community leaders testified to this and Qingyun confirmed it as well. In its judgment, the court recorded that Qingyun had “voluntarily helped” with the funeral expenses.

Given the heavy negotiations and the fact that Qingyun was detained for at least part of the trial, “voluntarily helped” does not seem like the most accurate description.

Rather, it seems that Qingyun was compelled to fulfill certain normative expectations about an employer’s responsibility to his employee.

92 We can see these expectations again in the suicide by hanging of a barber, Yu

Changshou. Yu’s younger brother, Yu Xingfa, and Yu’s workmate brought the case to court in the fifth month of 1895. They claimed not to know why Changshou hanged himself, but asked his boss, surnamed Jia, to pay 8000 wen in compensation because of Changshou’s long tenure as an employee (he had worked for Jia for 18 years).

Given that Changshou was only 24 at his death, he had worked for Jia nearly his entire life, beginning as a six-year-old apprentice. Jia agreed to pay.

This example suggests that long service changed the nature of the relationship between employer and employee from a purely economic one to one that entangled both parties in a wider web of expectation and mutual responsibility. This change in relative status was reflected in the legal treatment of employer vis-à-vis employee when they were bound by a long-term contract. Such a contract legally changed the status of the laborer such that any violence against the employer would be punished as if the attack had occurred between superior and inferior members of the same household, resulting in a more severe punishment.168 Legally, the relationship moved from independent, contractual associations to an explicitly familial, and hierarchical, bond. The legal treatment of acts of violence illustrates the unequal burden placed on the subordinate employee in such a relationship. But the suicide cases examined here show that a reciprocal burden of paternalistic responsibility was still imposed on the employer. We can see this burden at work in other cases as well.

168 By the end of the eighteenth century, short-term agricultural laborers were treated by law as status equals of their employers; for a fuller consideration of this development, see Philip C. Huang, The Peasant Economy and Social Change in North China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985).

93 In the first month of 1891, Chen Yuanxing, Chen Huanzhang and Chen

Runtang came to court following the suicide of their nephew, Chen Zhangsheng.169

Zhangsheng, whose parents were dead, had worked in Huang Yongshun’s shop. The uncles claimed that their nephew had accused Huang of cheating him and that the two had argued. This dispute, in their view, led directly to Zhangsheng’s suicide. Huang, not surprisingly, had a different understanding.

He testified that he had employed Zhangsheng but made no mention of any argument. He said that he did not know why Zhangsheng ate the opium that killed him, other than that he had “encountered disaster” [yuxie]. He further testified that he had dutifully reported Zhangsheng’s condition to community leaders, but was unable to save him. Huang calculated the remaining wage owed to Zhangsheng at 5000 wen and agreed to pay it to his uncles, and further offered to pay the burial expenses as well.170 The court accepted this offer, and again enforced compensation payment in a no-fault suicide.

In another case, the court intervened despite an agreement to drop the matter that was signed by both parties. In his plaint from the twelfth month of 1891, druggist

Shen Changsheng reports that on the morning of the 15th day, just after breakfast, Peng

Dong and his brother, Peng Xiang, had come to his medicine shop and shouted to

Shen’s wife that Peng Dong was suffering from stomach pains. 171 Peng Dong seemed in bad shape and they offered him some tea, but within an hour he had collapsed on the floor. Peng Xiang demanded medicine and prevented Shen’s wife from leaving.

169 BXDA 7684. 170 Ibid. 171 BXDA 7726.

94 Finally, they called on the local security official to help. After questioning, it became clear that Peng Dong had argued with his boss, Liao Yufeng, at a different medicine shop where Peng served as an apprentice. He then ate opium in order to commit suicide. Later that night, Peng Dong died.

That same day, the dead man’s master, Liao, submitted his own plaint explaining that Peng Dong had become his apprentice nearly four years earlier.

However, Liao said that the previous month he had discovered that Peng Dong had been stealing supplies and that Peng had admitted to selling them to rival druggist

Shen Changsheng. Consequently, Liao had fired Peng. Aside from that, Liao denied any knowledge of or responsibility for Peng Dong’s suicide.

Then on the 18th, the dead man’s father, Peng Dongxuan (63 sui), filed a petition summarizing the case thus far. In this document, he declared that his (fourth) son had committed suicide of his own accord and that it could not be blamed on anyone. This peacemaking petition was the result of a mediated settlement that had been finalized on the same day. The case file contains the settlement contract, also dated the 18th, signed by Liao Yufeng, Peng Dongxuan, Peng Xiang and Shen

Changshang, and witnessed by 11 other men.172 In this contract, following the urging of the witnesses, Liao and Shen agreed to “help” the dead man’s family by each providing one liang of silver for his burial expenses. In other words, even though Peng

Dong had stolen from Liao and been fired, Liao was forced to provide compensation for his employee’s suicide. Four years of service seems to have inalterably changed

172 There are actually two copies of the mediation contract submitted to the court, one produced for each side.

95 the relationship between Liao and Peng, and even the latter’s later transgression could not erase the former’s obligations.

Shen’s motivation is murkier. He never admitted to buying stolen goods from

Peng and there is no mention of this in any of the documents other than Liao’s accusation. Still, there seems to be an understanding that a connection exists between the two men that necessitated payment from Shen. The circumstances suggest that Peng blamed Shen as well as Liao for his predicament and thus staged his suicide at Shen’s in order to implicate him. Shen also submitted to expectation, and again the court backed this settlement.

These cases involve work in shops – work of a kind that bound the parties as apprentice and master, a special and legally recognized relationship. The Qing Code states: “In the case of everyone who strikes the master from whom he is receiving instruction add two degrees to [the penalty] for ordinary persons.”173 The code goes on to explain that this relationship does not only include to Confucian scholarship but that it also extended to “common persons who are studying arts or trades.”174 But as we have seen, these ties that bind extended to landowners and their hired laborers, and there are also cases that suggest this same relationship was enforced in the case of debts.175 In terms of relative legal status, the same logic applied to master/apprentice as to long-term employer/employee and master/servant relations. These payments may have been a strategy to curry favor at court or to placate the deceased’s relatives, but

173 Xue, Du Li Cun Yi, 311.00. 174 Ibid. 175 BXDA 7748, the details of which are discussed in the following section regarding debt.

96 they suggest that social practice created an expectation of remuneration, and that this expectation was backed by the court.

Customary practice dictated how the more powerful or superordinate person in a relationship should behave toward the weaker/subordinate member of that dyad. The original basis of the relationship might be economic (employment, tenancy, apprenticeship, money-lending), but there was a clear expectation of paternalistic obligation, especially when the weaker party had suffered terrible misfortune. In a similar vein, Philip Huang emphasizes the asymmetrical nature of land sales, in which buyers were seen as the winners and sellers as losers. He shows that both lawmakers and local courts expressed considerable sympathy for the “losers” in these transactions.176

We know that over the eighteenth century the legal treatment of many agricultural laborers changed so that by the end of the century they were treated as the status equals of their employers. But the cases examined here suggest that even at the very end of the dynasty, these long-standing normative expectations of reciprocity and paternalism remained strong. Moreover, the local court played a vital role in helping people resolve these disputes, enforcing normative expectations that the powerful would help the weak under these circumstances. In other words, “the state” – insofar as the Ba County court was “the state”—was still functioning quite effectively to fulfill one of its most important traditional roles, and in these situations ordinary people still looked to the magistrate for help.

176 Philip C. Huang, The Peasant Family and Rural Development in the Yangzi Delta, 1350-1988 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990).

97 Detainment and Debt

What did indebtedness look like at the end of the Qing? In the following convoluted case, one sees the survival strategies in operation along the margins, including remarriage and adoption, as well as the crushing pressures of debt and the tensions of family division.177 Debt and division split the family against itself. Here, the ideal of the patricorporation met the realities of economic distress.

In testimony dated to the eighth month of 1892, Tang Mingwan reported:

In the second year of the reign of the Guangxi emperor, I was adopted by Tang Yihe along with my mother [who he took as his wife]. The adoption and the marriage went off without problem. Last fall, I, along with Chen Zongli, went out and rented Wang Ji’an’s land for 50 liang of silver. Last winter, my [adoptive] father died. Tang Mingdu and others came to the house and wanted to split the [family] property, but they failed. They [then] counterfeited a fake contract, and falsely accused my father of borrowing 20 liang of silver from them. They brought the accusation to court and implicated us. The court runners came to the village and directed that I be detained.178

Tang Mingwan later testified that when his cousins and uncle brought him and his mother to court to demand repayment, they had no money and so his mother became “desperate” [qingji] and hanged herself. Mingwan framed the case as a dispute over family division, not as a matter of debts, and he garnered support from his maternal cousin, Zhao Yuanlin, as well as his landlord, Wang Ji’an.

By contrast, the plaintiff’s paternal cousins, Tang Mingdu and Tang Minghua

(along with their father, Tang Linhe, though he played a secondary role in the case), presented the dispute primarily in terms of debt. They testified: “Last year, Tang

177 For a detailed discussion of household division in the Qing, see David Wakefield, Fenjia: Household Division and Inheritance in Qing and Republican China (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1998). 178 BXDA 7748.

98 Mingwan’s father, Tang Yihe, contracted to borrow from me, Tang Mingdu, 80 liang of silver, and [from me], Tang Minghua, ten liang of silver. We asked for it back repeatedly but he would not give it to us. This previous winter, Yihe died.”179 At this point, the dispute was still presented as stemming from debts. However, they subsequently accused Zhao Shi and Mingwan of plotting to take control of the family property and referred to Mingwan as “Chen Jinshan’s son,” a reference to his status as an adopted son. Despite the widespread acceptance of adoption in the Qing, the cousins attempted to use Mingwan’s background to cast him as an impostor.

Community leaders testified that they had tried to mediate. They did not mention debts at all, focusing instead on the division of the family property. The court, however, saw this conflict in terms of debt. Its summation of the dispute framed the case as follows:

Tang Zhao Shi’s death was caused by hanging herself, and no one can be blamed. Tang Mingwan’s father owed Tang Mingdu 80 liang of silver. According to Tang Linhe’s testimony, because he [Mingwan] was bitterly poor he was unable to repay the debt. Every year, whatever profit he made, he without fail returned to pay down the principle. One can well perceive that Tang Mingwan’s father’s family, being so bitterly poor, had only a relative’s, Wang Ji’an’s, fields, which they had pawned for 50 liang of silver. Other than that, they had no other property. We can already get the general idea [of the situation].180

The court ordered Tang Mingwan to repay to Tang Mingdu 2000 wen, and, within ten years, a total of 20,000 wen to “dispose of the matter,” though it is not clear where this number came from.181

179 Ibid. 180 BXDA 7748. 181 Ibid.

99 Debt was a familiar cause of suicide and a seemingly endemic part of life.182 In some cases, debt led to instances of “kidnapping.” The goal of these private detainments was to force payment; detainment, legal or extra-legal, seems to have been a regularly employed strategy for recovering debts. As in so many histories that employ legal sources, it is only in those instances where this strategy failed, in our cases resulting in suicide, that we encounter the practice. In these cases, the deceased’s family often presented the event as a kidnapping, while those instigating the abduction frame their actions as some sort of semi-official detainment. Petitioners’ characterizations of kidnapping were, in part, an element of the fairly routine repertoire of exaggeration employed to gain the magistrate’s ear and secure a hearing at court. In such cases, however they were framed, the court primarily weighed in to settle the underlying economic dispute, leaving the nature of the detainment unexamined.

Regardless of how the abduction was framed, in these cases one sees a rough- and-tumble practice of debt collection. This practice was not sanctioned in law; in fact, the legal code explicitly forbade aggressive dunning.183 Kidnapping someone in order to recover funds was punishable by a set number of strokes of the heavy bamboo, determined by the amount of the money in question. Yet the practice endured and frequently was not punished or even denounced when it appeared before the court, regardless of whether it was presented as quasi-legal detainment or as outright kidnapping.

182 Also see: BXDA 7832, BXDA 7871, BXDA 7907, BXDA 7946. 183 See Xue, Du Li Cun Yi, 273.00 and 312.00 for examples of the Code’s opinion on this practice.

100 On the fifth day of the fourth month of 1891, Liu Mou Shi, aged 72 sui, submitted a plaint regarding the suicide of her 17-sui grandson, Liu Jialiu:

This month, in the afternoon of the third day, I encountered Guo Heshang who snarled at me saying my grandson, Liu Jialiu, owed him 350 wen, and he was pressing for repayment of the debt. [Guo] forced [Li] behind Yuantong temple and ordered my grandson beaten repeatedly. Rao Liushi, Peng Zhengwen and Wang Sanmao held him at Li Laochi’s teahouse and drank tea. At that point, my grandson became desperate (qingji) and ran to number three dock and threw himself in the water and drowned.184

Her explanation of the situation is clear. The debt led to the “kidnapping” and beating that directly resulted in the suicide death of her grandson. The causality is quite clear, as is the seeming guilt of the “kidnappers.” This version was supported by her son (the deceased’s uncle), Liu Kaiwen. However, subsequent testimony from the

“kidnappers” suggests an alternate reading of the conflict.

The accused kidnappers, Ran Liushi, a boatman, Peng Zhengwen and Wang

Sanmao, who both sold sugarcane, testified that they had met Liu Jialiu at the teahouse and were casually drinking tea together. They claimed that they were preparing to leave when Liu went outside to “relieve himself,” and that they were not able to prevent his death since they had no idea he was going to kill himself. Liu’s death, in this rendering, was an awkward and unexpected end to a pleasant afternoon at the teahouse. Teahouses were well-known sites of dispute resolution, so perhaps they were meeting to settle their conflict.185 Whatever they were doing there, the owner of

184 BXDA 7694. This case was briefly summarized on page 24. 185 For a full discussion of the social role of teahouses, see Di Wang, The Teahouse: Small Business, Everyday Culture, and Public Politics in Chengdu, 1900-1950 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008).

101 the teahouse, Li Laochi, made no mention of a beating or of Liu being held against his will. In his testimony, Li laid out a story similar to the one described by Rao, Peng and

Wang – Guo joined the others at the teahouse and then, within an hour, Liu threw himself in the river.

Community leaders reiterated the story that Liu Kaiwen had told them, but they also described the settlement they tried to broker. Local security head Liu Jinyi testified that he, along with other community leaders and neighbors, brokered a signed agreement in which Liu Mou Shi was paid 15000 wen. The court recognized this settlement, and the wild claims submitted by Liu Mou Shi were ignored.

This self-murder lays bare an interesting aspect of the social power of suicide.

Through his death, Liu Jialiu converted his family’s debt into a payoff, moving his family from the red into the black. It was a potent sacrifice and, perhaps, a powerful weapon of the weak.186 A similar turning of the economic tables can be seen in other instances of “kidnapping” as well.

While it is not entirely certain that a kidnapping took place in the above case, it seems that the dunning process described in the case was not unusual. In the suicide of

Zeng Yuanchun, the kidnapping is also unclear.187 His wife, Zeng Zhang Shi, at first claimed her husband had been abducted by his creditors over a debt of 50 wen. In her initial plaint, she stated: “[My husband] was detained at [Zhou’s] store. They demanded the money and tried to force him to pay, and they would not release him.”

186 The term “weapon of the weak” comes from James Scott. I do not intend to posit the strong class connotations of Scott’s own interpretation, particularly given the apparently low standing of all the parties involved in this case. Instead, I use the term to highlight the potential for forms of positive action “hidden” within diverse social practices. See, James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987). 187 BXDA 7806.

102 She later testified: “ [Zeng] was privately detained at [Zhou’s] home, and they would not release him.”188

Zhang Shi’s claims were, perhaps not surprisingly, supported by her son, but

Zhou, community leaders, and others involved in the case made no mention of the alleged kidnapping. In this telling, Zeng seems to have gone to Zhou’s house willingly. There is no attempt to disguise the fact that Zeng was there; in fact, Zhang

Shi went to see him there after he “fell sick “– Zhang Shi claimed that he had eaten opium in a first, unsuccessful suicide attempt – and he was later found there dead after eventually succeeding in killing himself, this time by cutting his own throat.

By the end of the case, there is no mention of kidnapping. The settlement signed by Zhang Shi and her son does not refer to kidnapping at all. This, of course, does not necessarily mean that it never occurred. There are two likely scenarios. The first is that Zeng Yuanchun was kidnapped because of the money he owed. It is possible that Zhang Shi told the truth, but that Zhou and his accomplices were able to marshal community leaders to simply deny that it had ever occurred. This would be a productive deployment of social capital in order to avoid further charges at court. The second scenario is that the kidnapping never occurred and Zhang Shi made it up.

Why would she do that? Here, we return to Walter Johnson’s insight that even lies told at court are useful to the historian because they must be plausible both in the eyes of the court as well as in terms of local circumstances to have their desired influence on the proceedings. If the kidnapping never occurred, we can suggest that

Zhang Shi could have used the accusation to add to the guilt of her antagonists. She

188 Ibid.

103 would have to draw on her knowledge of local practices and been aware that in a situation like this – the non-payment of debt – kidnapping was a tactic employed to compel payment. It was part of the social landscape that she could exploit to construct an advantageous account of her husband’s death.

A similar murkiness surrounds the “kidnapping” in a case in which theft, not debt, was presumed to be the underlying cause, further strengthening the sense that detainment was not an unusual part of social practice and dispute resolution. After Li

Zhengyou’s death, the three men hired to detain Li described the circumstances surrounding the abduction and subsequent suicide.189 Yuan Tai, Zhang Sheng and Liu

Kunshan testified:

I, Yuan Tai, am a night watchman in the village. We, Zhang Sheng and Liu Kunshan, are security guards [xiaojia] in Xiema market. We do not serve as runners at the court. This month on the sixth day, Zeng Dexuan hired us to detain into custody. Li Kunshun’s son, Li Zhengyou. He said that during the previous winter sacrifice,190 Li, along with Zeng Yizheng, carried off his food and grains. On the eighth day, community leaders mediated a settlement according to which Li paid two dan of foods and grains, 8,200 cash, and eight hundred cash in port money [kou’an qian]. This money was to be delivered to Chen Bingnan who would leave it at the village office. We certainly did not demand the money. On the ninth, Li Zhengyou returned home, and on the eleventh we heard that Li Zhengyou had the night before, in the middle of the night, hanged himself at home.191

In their description of the “detainment,” it sounds rather official. The three men hired were apparently some sort of security officers, and much of the language they employed mirrors that used by court runners. The amount owed was coolly

189 BXDA 7738. 190 The winter sacrifice [la] was held three days after the winter solstice in the twelfth lunar month. 191 BXDA 7738.

104 calculated and the “payment” was to be handled properly and deposited with a formal office. The general impression is that this was an acceptable practice that was being carried out with at least tacit approval from the village authorities.

Li Zhengyou’s father, Li Kunshun, told a different tale. He stated that his son never stole anything and that, in fact, it was Zeng Yizheng who stole from his uncle.

Li insisted that Zeng Dexuan had demanded 13000 wen to pay his son’s debt and that

Li had paid 9000. Li’s son was released, but became “desperate” [qingji] and killed himself.192 In this telling, the problem was not the kidnapping per se; rather, the problem was the false information that served as the basis for the abduction. The process was fine – it just had the wrong man.

Li expressed no shock or surprise that someone would be kidnapped for owing money. In fact, despite his conviction that his son has been falsely accused, he worked through the system. He did not sound the alarm; instead, he brought his son clothing and arranged to pay what he could. He gave the payment to Chen, who then deposited it at the village office. Again, this suggests that this was acceptable behavior – if misdirected in this instance. In this case, it seems community leaders were aware of kidnappings and made no effort to intervene. Even the court did not punish this kidnapping, and instead instructed that payment be made to Li.

These cases suggest that detainment was an acceptable social practice to recover outstanding debts. Further, although the Qing legal code explicitly forbade this practice, the court did not intervene, ruling only on the economic disputes that were the basis for these “kidnappings.” We have also seen how this practice could be seized

192 Ibid.

105 and manipulated by debtors to turn the tables on their creditors. Suicide, at least in some instances, was a way out of debt not only for the individual, but also for the family unit. Death could transform debt into profit, and despair into hope.

These customs, particularly when coupled with the picture of personal ties that developed around economic exchanges, gives us a rare view on the disparate practices that held local society together. These ties could support a “survival ethic” but they could also be brutal in their economic demands. A simple reification of complex human relationships into either market-based exchange or some sort of moral economy fails to capture the complexity of the social webs that bound individuals to one another.

Conclusion

Officially, Qing courts were committed to getting to the bottom of suicide cases. Qing jurist Huang Liuhong writes: “During my tenures of magistracy I strictly ordered all village headman and local elders to report suicide cases with accurate descriptions and to designate them as such.”193 Huang devotes several pages in his magistrate’s handbook, Fuhui quanshu, to the subject of suicide. Song Ci’s Xiyuan ji lu, completed in 1247, served as a guide to court medical examiners [wuzuo] down to the Qing, and explained how to determine if suicide was the cause of death.194 In the section on suicides by edged weapons, Song writes: “ begin by asking the original informant what sort of person the victim was. Was the suicide committed early or late

193 Huang, A Complete Book, 358. 194 Ci Song, Xi Yuan Ji Lu : 5 Juan (Beijing: Falü chubanshe, 1958). The bulk of the discussion of suicide comes at the end of juan 3 and at the beginning of juan four in discussions of drowning and wounds from edged weapons.

106 in the day…. It is always necessary to examine the marks with great care.”195 These few citations point to the official importance attached to the resolution of suicide cases. Clearly, however, the practice of the courtroom deviated from these idealized norms.

In the slippages created by this deviation, we can study the social meanings and worlds of suicide in the late Qing. Most studies of suicide are founded on a void, one created by the death of the individual. But in many of our cases, the suicidees are active participants in the process and negotiation of their own deaths.196 Opium’s dominance as the weapon of choice in Ba County ensured that suicide was frequently a process rather than a single act. Opium overdose was a lingering and unpleasant death: “symptoms [of opium overdose] may include slow breathing, nausea, vomiting, constricted pupils, moist, cold bluish skin, and uncontrollable drowsiness. Drowsiness can turn into coma and respiratory failure, resulting in death.”197

This slow suffocation appears as a microcosm of our entire study of self-death.

Death by opium kick-started the social machine: families intervened (or not); doctors were called (or not); community leaders may have arrived; and various meanings for the act began to coalesce – all while the suicidee was still present to perhaps influence this process. It was, at least theoretically, reversible, which enlarges the possibility of suicide as a threat, or as a simulacrum of death. This process or performance of suicide by opium offered a social death. It was a performance that reified the immanent currents of society, sent the community into action, and exposed the roles and

195 Ci Song, The Washing Away of Wrongs : Forensic Medicine in Thirteenth-century China, trans. Brian McKnight (Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 1981), 127. 196 I would like to thank Tom Mullaney for this formulation. 197 Drugtext, http://www.drugtext.org/library/books/recreationaldrugs/opium.htm (2010).

107 expectations that undergirded local life. In this process, issues can find redress – the seriousness of the complaint to clear and perhaps changes can be proposed. Or the foundational cleavages of the community are exposed and nothing changes – it is what it is and nothing can change it. Despite this process, the cases in our study all began with an actual death.

These deaths were then reinterpreted during the court case. At court, a suicidee’s intent was given a name: qingji. Time and again, in the moments before they kill themselves, individuals are described as becoming “greatly distressed”

[qingji]. The other term frequently found in the records is yuxie, “to encounter disaster.” Xie has medical and spiritual connotations, as both an environmental influence that causes disease and as a ghost or spirit that brings disaster. Interestingly, xie also means heretical, irregular and abnormal, evoking an idea that people who killed themselves had fallen out of the normal and acceptable and become polluted.

But more than yuxie, it is qingji that encapsulates the moment of crisis that leads to suicide. The consistent repetition of this term in the case records suggests that this phrase had become a stand-in or placeholder for a range of human sentiment.

“Great distress” appears as a form of shorthand used by court scribes as they distilled and compiled testimony to signify whatever emotional process led the person to kill her/himself. In a way, it distilled the quintessence of suicide; it spoke for that moment of fateful decision. Since that moment is otherwise lost to historians, we too must rely on qingji and talk around these deaths.

Not knowing the intention behind these acts, it is very difficult to portray them as either heroic or futile. What does remain, and what we can see, are the social

108 customs that existed within the community and the practices and expectations that emerged in the wake of acts of self-annihilation. Local society in Ba County is hard to pin down. Much like our acts of suicide, non-elite life is frequently a void in the historical record. Historians attempt to conjure these lives nonetheless, and the case records of suicide cases allow us, to some extent, to achieve this prestidigitation.

One aspect of local life that comes to the fore in these cases is the skillful use of the courts by everyday people. Barbers, bakers, and barkeeps all came to court to press for the enforcement of their expectations. And the court followed through. While our time frame is not broad enough to allow for discussions of change over time, we might remember Janet Theiss’ insight that “the perpetual lowering of standards [of gender norms] in the last decades of the dynasty suggests not a fixation with orthodoxy but rather a desire to maintain and even enhance the vitality of the state’s normative presence in society at all costs.”198 While we cannot say on the basis of Ba

County that the state had fallen so low, we can see that the local state was invested in conflating its authority with that of customary practice. The role the state plays in our study may very well echo Theiss’ assertion of a desperate attempt by the state at continuing relevance – but it was still relevant. At this basic level, the court, and thus the state as it existed at the local level, continued to carry out its basic function as arbiter and enforcer.

Because the county court put its weight behind customary practices, moments of enforcement offer glimpses of the customs that sustained and disciplined local communities. Perhaps most clearly, what they reveal is the complexity of familial

198 Janet M. Theiss, Disgraceful Matters the Politics of Chastity in Eighteenth-Century China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.), 216.

109 relations. These relations do not simply reflect the needs of the Chinese family or the

Confucian family or the patricorporation or the uterine family or any other model.

Social practice and organization were fluid in the face of economic realities.

110

3. Killers Among Us: Homicide and Its Social Context

This project began as a desire to study homicide in Ba County, until a paucity of germane materials in the archive – and a wealth of other exciting cases – altered the course of the project. But where were all the murders? Given our assumptions that late

Qing society was fairly violent, one would expect a higher body count in the ming’an files. While this slighter profile of murder in the county is itself thought provoking, the cases that can be found in the records offer compelling insights into local society.

Homicide cases can reveal both the meaning of violence in local communities and the axes along which it was deployed. Moreover, “violence also occurs where social constraints break down. Seeing where and under what conditions those constraints broke down allows a greater understanding of what the social constraints were and how they functioned.”199 This chapter suggests that homicide was largely the outcome of specific types of conflict and that, in the bulk of cases, murder was committed in generally foreseeable circumstances. This suggests not a wilding, anarchic violence loose in the county, but a purposeful, meaning-laden deployment of lethal force. Violence was a tool and was used, for the most part, along knowable lines.

199 Roger A Deal, Crimes of Honor, Drunken Brawls and Murder: Violence in Istanbul Under Abdülhamid II (İstanbul: Libra Kitapçılık ve Yayıncılık, 2010), 11.

111 This chapter looks out beyond the courtroom to consider the social context of the crimes committed. In doing so, our investigation does not stress the role and performance of the court but focuses on the people who populated the county.200 The chapter begins with an overview of homicide cases found in the records. This quantitative snapshot suggests a profile for homicide in the county. Next, the chapter engages in qualitative analysis of homicide cases along two broad thematic lines. First, economically motivated homicides are introduced and examined, with particular attention to the role of debt and land transfers as powder kegs for violence. Finally, murders committed in the wake of smaller crimes or other transgressions are explored.

In these types of crimes, violence was retaliation, on the part of either the victim or the victim’s family. The cases accordingly illuminate a realm of private justice.201 While this realm is readily apparent in many homicides following the commission of smaller crimes or offenses, private justice was also at work in instances of economic dispute. In response to criminal offenses, private justice is simply revenge or retribution. But in economic conflicts, we can see this violence as ensuring the inviolability of debt and the sanctity of economic agreements. In both types, violence had a performative aspect, serving as a didactic tool for demonstrating the dangers of default. On the other hand, in some cases involving homicides in the wake of other misdeeds it was the original offender who escalated from a more minor offense to homicide.

In both categories, however, one can see how wrongdoings frequently snowballed into acts of murder. In both economic conflicts and post-offense clashes,

200 For a discussion of the role of the court and the legal culture that surrounded it, see Chapter Five. 201 In this chapter “private justice” stands in contrast to state/public/official justice carried out at court.

112 transgressions could take on their own momentum. This tendency toward escalation was perhaps tied to the frequently public nature of these disputes.202

This public-ness could have weighty implications for reputation and honor.203

Affronts to reputation could be inherent in the offense, as was the case with adultery, or they could arise in the course of subsequent altercations. For example, an outstanding debt leads to an argument in the market, and this public clash imperils both actors’ reputations. A fight breaks out, intensifying both the physical stakes and the potential damage to reputation. In this fraught atmosphere, violence could quickly get out of hand and someone could be killed in a seemingly petty dispute.

Finally, the chapter concludes by considering the relationships between parties involved in these acts of violence. Here we can see, in part, the social meaning of violence as well as communities’ own standards for resolving disputes and policing themselves. Violence played a key role in the social life of Ba County. It was the stick, but it was also the carrot.

Violence, and even lethal violence, was a known outcome for acts that affronted the community’s sense of propriety. But the same violence that punished transgressors was also available to members of good standing who needed it.

Violence, in some ways, marked acceptance into the community. Those within were defended by it while those outside were punished by it. This returns us to the question

202 We should remember that a private or personal sphere of action, in the modern sense, did not exist in the Qing. In some ways, all things were public. 203 This chapter uses reputation/public persona and honor somewhat interchangeably, with reputation/ public persona being the outward expression of internal honor. The chapter does not use the term “face,” which smacks too strongly of a peculiar Asian cultural artifact whereas the tendencies that constitute “face” are largely universal. Substituting “honor” or the like for “face” stresses the rather generic concern for public reputation.

113 of the public-ness of disputes. Ultimately, public altercations were a trial in which one’s relationship to a community was decided.

The Cases

Homicide rates are a significant measure of any community’s “resting temperature” of violence. What sort of profile do Ba County’s cases present? There were 90 “homicide” cases in the files.204 From this, we must subtract cases of false accusation in which it was clear that no murder took place, of which there were 17.

However, we cannot assume that this number represents the total of false accusation cases, since divining the “real” number would require us to know accurately what actually happened in each of these cases, which is impossible.205 We cannot know what happened beyond what the documents tell us, and these documents are flawed, partial representations of reality. Moreover, the legal system’s apparatus and ideologies can also distort our view of local realities. We must try to heed the cautionary words of Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero:

Although historians often masquerade as participants in the judicial process, they cannot passively accept the schema of roles and results assigned by the dominating ideology of the criminal justice system. Instead they seek to discover opportunities in a disturbing moment of the past to identify other ideologies, values and lives often masked or obliterated by the hegemonic vision of criminal records. Thus, even as he snitches on the dead, the historian’s fundamental obligation is to respect them in their own terms rather than in those of the judicial record that brings their experience to view.206

204 These cases do not exist as a separate subset in the archival file; rather they have been labeled as such by me. 205 For a discussion of false accusation, see Chapter Five. 206 Muir and Ruggiero, History from Crime, vii.

114 Given this warning, we can subtract only the more glaring examples of false accusation, leaving us with 73 homicide cases for the decade under study.

Of these, 39 were animated by economic conflicts, particularly disputes over debts and land transfers. Economic conflict as a source of violence is not surprising; one can well imagine how economic need drove individuals to violence. However, we must remember that although these cases may have hinged on an economic dispute, additional motivating factors could comingle with financial imperatives. In the case of land transfers, we must remember that in this predominantly agrarian society land held important non-economic value. It was seen as one’s patrimony and afforded individuals a degree of respect as a full member of the community. This sense of reputation could also be present in other “economic” conflicts as well. Our heuristic shorthand can blind us to the multi-causality or simple contingency at work in these clashes.

Twenty-two homicides were committed in the wake of some other, smaller crime or offence. In these cases, murder was a response to an affront. The precipitating challenges could be petty, such as name calling, or they could be grave, such as rape.

In other cases, the perpetrator of the initial crime also committed the resulting homicides. For example, a thief might get caught red-handed and kill his discoverer.

In addition to economic and criminally related homicides, a third category of murder was family related. In a large number of cases, the conflict can loosely be described as family related. This is a broad and rather nebulous rubric, but these cases are held together by the central role that family members played either in the acts of violence or in bringing them to court. Consider a case in which an uncle claims his

115 niece was murdered by her husband,207 or one in which a man beats his brother to death over outstanding debts.208 In these cases, violence and conflict occurred within the family, illustrating the tensions within this foundational unit.

Gender, another essential building block of local society, is also an instructive lens through which to view these crimes. In 12 cases, women were involved in violence. There are two cases in which the murderer was female and seven cases in which the victim was female. In the remaining cases, violence against women (rape or beatings) played an important role in the conflict that led to murder. In all other cases, the main actors in the homicide (victim or killer) were male.

The absence of violence against women in the record reflects, in part, the enormous degree to which such violence was routinized. The Qing Code permitted wife beating as long it was not excessive: “As for the husband striking the wife, if he does not break [her bones], there is no punishment.”209 The Code further stipulated that even if a husband did fracture his wife’s bones while beating her, his punishment should be reduced two degrees from that for an assault by a non-relative. The flip side of this was increased punishment for wives who assaulted their husbands. Moreover, the Code allowed for the murder of adulterous wives and their lovers: “Whenever a wife or concubine commits adultery with another, and (her own husband) catches the adulterous wife and the adulterer at the place [in the very act] of adultery and immediately kills [both of] them, there is no punishment.”210 If the husband did not

207 BXDA 7752. 208 BXDA 7862. 209 Xue, Du Li Cun Yi, 315.00. 210 Ibid, 285.00.

116 kill his wife, she was still to be punished with 90 strokes of the bamboo for fornication.

Structural inequality not only erased many forms of violence against women from the social category of criminal violence, the records also report that the victims of murder were only rarely small children (two cases). The rest were adult males.211

These figures sketch an unsurprising profile of individuals likely to be involved in homicidal violence: working-age males. These men were likely to engage in violence

(1) to solve economic disputes; (2) to resolve family conflicts; or (3) in the wake of other transgressions.

Moreover, the extant records, when they are clear on the matter, suggest a method of choice. Beatings (both with and without weapons) were the most common method of murder. In 23 cases, the victim was clearly beaten to death. In 11 cases, stabbing was the cause of death. Two individuals were buried alive. There was also one poisoning and one drowning. The predominance of beatings as the cause of death suggests that many of these fatalities were brawls that got out of hand rather than premeditated homicides.

Finally, we can place Ba County into a crude comparative perspective. Our figures suggest a rough homicide rate of 8.1 per 100,000 persons.212 By comparison, in

2004, the People’s Republic of China had a reported homicide rate of 2.2 per 100,000

211 The difference here between a “child” and an “adult” is tenuous in this case. In general, individuals who appeared employed fulltime or women who were married were counted as adult however old they might have been. 212 73 homicides for an estimated population of 917,765.

117 persons.213 The Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan and Thailand, also in 2004, all had comparable homicide rates as Ba County.214 How does late-nineteenth-century Ba County compare with its contemporaries? From 1855 to 1905, France had a homicide rate of

0.8/100,000,215 while the UK in 1870 had a homicide rate of somewhere between

1.5216 and two.217 At that time, Corsica had the highest murder rate in Europe at

14/100,000.218 In Asia, Japan in 1900 had a homicide rate of 1.3.219 Finally, the USA reported in its Vital Statistics a rate of 1.2,220 although some scholars had estimated it as high as nearly 8.0.221 In this light, Ba County seems to be a fairly violent place. But what did this violence look like and what did it mean? For answers, we must turn to the cases themselves.

Economically Motivated Homicides

It is perhaps not surprising that economic conflict was a common cause of homicides in the county. After all, many people were barely getting by. Yet the actual contours of this violence clarifies our muddy sense of economic strife and reveals how economic pressures manifested themselves first as disputes and then as violence. Our cases highlight the particular importance of debt and land transfers as sources of

213 The Guardian, “Global Homicide: Murder Rates Around the World | News | Guardian.co.uk”, October 13, 2009, http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2009/oct/13/homicide-rates-country- murder-data. 214 Ibid. 215 Pieter Spierenburg, A History of Murder: Personal Violence in Europe from the Middle Ages to the Present (Cambridge: Polity, 2008), 168. 216 Randolph Roth, American Homicide (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009). 217 Spierenburg, A History of Murder, 168. 218 Ibid. 219 Nihon Tokei Nenkan [Japan Statistical Year-book] (Tokyo: Nihon Tokei Kyokai: Mainichi Shinbunsha, 1949). 220 United States. Bureau of the Census, Vital Statistics Rates in the U.S., 1900-1940 Sixteenth Census of the U.S. : 1940 / (Washington: U.S. G.P.O., 1943). 221 Roth, American Homicide, 4.

118 conflict. Moreover, the descriptions in the case files often describe processes of local dispute resolution that divulge dynamics of local life and social organization.

Debt

Indebtedness was clearly a source of violence in local communities. The strain manufactured by these economic imbalances drove people to desperate and sometimes perplexing acts. In the tenth month of 1897 local authorities of a village 20 miles outside Chongqing reported to the court the murder of a two-year-old girl.222 The girl’s grandfather, Jia Yuanshun, owed ten ounces of silver and his creditor had been pressing for repayment. Confronted with these demands, Jia apparently went berserk and stabbed his granddaughter to death with a kitchen knife.

The local authorities expressed their horror at this assault on a child. They condemned Jia’s actions, saying that they, in contrast to Jia, “fervently think human life is weighty.”223 But they offered no explanation for his heinous act. Jia himself likewise failed to explain his actions. In his testimony, he did not describe how he went from deeply troubled by his financial situation to brutally murdering his two- year-old granddaughter. The court records do, however, show that he petitioned the court to release the girl’s body to him for burial, a request that was granted.

This enduring sense of family responsibility on Jia’s part may seem wildly at odds with his actions. However, even as an accused at court, Jia continued to act as the head of the family, and the court did not deny him his prerogative as such to mediate the family’s interactions with the legal system. Moreover, the court in turn reinforced this prerogative, as well as the authority of the normative family structure, by

222 BXDA 7930. 223 Ibid.

119 provisionally sentencing Jia to be flogged with the light bamboo, the least severe corporal punishment in the Qing code. Jia escaped with this light flogging because his position as family head reduced the severity of any crime he committed against junior members of the family.224

While underlining the continuing legal and social power of the normative

Confucian family structure, this case also describes the grievous pressures debt could inflict on people at the end of the Qing. It was Jia’s debt that led him to murder his own granddaughter. The immediacy of this motivating force propelling him to murder overshadows abstract and subsequent considerations of Confucian-style authority.

Crushing debt drove Jia to commit a heinous act. This impression of the alarming power of debt is further strengthened by other instances of violence, even where it fell short of murder.

In a case from 1890, a petty clerk contrived a wild plan to exploit the death of his eight-sui son to escape from under the debt owed to his brother-in-law.225 The clerk, Mu Zaizhi, reported to the court that his son had gone out of the house after breakfast and never returned. This led to a frantic search that failed to yield any trace of the boy. The next day, the child’s body was discovered in a stream. His hands were bound with rope, suggesting that he had been murdered. Mu claimed that his brother- in-law, Qu San the Southerner, held a grudge against him and was the most likely suspect.

224 The legal recognition of familial hierarchy was one of the Qing Code’s strongest Confucian strains, though it should be noted that deference to elders and family heads is not the exclusive purview of Confucian morality or the Imperial legal system. For more on family relations and sentencing, see Ch’ü T’ung-Tzu [Qu Tongzu], Law and Society in Traditional China (Paris: Mouton, 1961), 15-90. 225 BXDA 7661.

120 As the facts trickled in, it became clear that Mu had borrowed 30 liang of silver from Qu’s mother and had not yet returned it. This set into motion an elaborate and vicious scheme to repudiate the debt. Mu subsequently admitted that his son had accidently drowned in the river three days before he reported the case. But in this tragedy, Mu saw opportunity. He went and bound his own dead son’s hands in order to make his accusation more convincing, and told a bold-faced lie by accusing Qu of having committed murder. This was not the first time that Mu had attempted to escape his debt. Earlier he had bullied and detained Qu and members of his family, and had even tried to rip up the debt contract.

Most egregiously, Mu and another man, Pockmarked Zhang Wu, kidnapped and severely beat Qu in an attempt to make him falsely confess to having murdered

Mu’s son. Zhang, Mu’s nephew, admitted to his part in the beating, saying even after being beaten with branches Qu still would not perjure himself. In his own testimony,

Qu described the ordeal that followed their initial argument over the outstanding debt:

“Mu Zaizhi then ordered me hung up and flogged. He wanted me to set up a contract for 120 liang of silver. Because I was unwilling, he again used private punishment to torture me, to force into confessing that I had drowned [Mu’s son].”226

Qu described how he was dragged before the magistrate to be formally accused. At court the first time, he was still so badly injured that he was unable to speak. Mu and others stepped forward saying he was a mute. Qu later reported that, while being held in court detention it took him three months to recover sufficiently to make his case and assert his innocence. Not only does this case suggest a

226 Ibid.

121 megalomaniacal sense of entitlement and outrageous impunity on Mu’s part, it also illustrates the potentially violent consequences of debt. Here, a relatively small debt between family members led to almost cartoonish scheming and violence. It was just these sorts of small-scale loans that seem to have had the highest potential for conflict.

In Baodi County, just outside Beijing, Philip Huang likewise has found that small-scale debt were a frequent source of conflict. He found that “small loans of up to

30 diao [equal to one chuan] were frequently made informally between kin, neighbors and friends or acquaintances, simply on a verbal promise to repay, often in a matter of days.”227 Huang contrasts the casual nature of these petty loans contrasts with the greater formality of larger loans, which frequently included a middleman or guarantor.

In his view, “the informality of such transactions, it seems, left much room for a breach of faith or at least misunderstandings” and could easily lead to disputes and even violence.228 Frequently, the line between debt conflicts and land disputes is unclear – the debt was often outstanding payment on land sales.

Land was also a major driver of conflict and violence in the county. In particular, outstanding rents or other payments drove conflict. Even as land was becoming increasingly commoditized, these economic exchanges remained, down to the late nineteenth century, a subject of ongoing contention and violence. A case from 1891 sketches the money-lending process as well as the mechanisms of local dispute resolution. In this case, a man named Cen Bingnan was beaten to death on his doorstep

227 Philip Huang, Civil Justice in China: Representation and Practice in the Qing (Stanford University Press, 1998), 33. 228 Ibid, 34.

122 over a debt of 1800 wen. Cen’s accused killer, Wang Yutian, explained the origins of the clash:

I am originally from Ba County. I am 30 sui. My father is dead. My mother is still alive and I have no older or younger brothers. I married a wife, Li Shi, [who] gave birth to one daughter. Ordinarily, I support myself with an opium bar that I opened…. Wang Huanbi owes me 1800 cash, which he has not repaid. I have taken from him two copper ladles Last year in the middle of the eighth month, my land was rented to Cen Bingnan to occupy and plow. He [Wang] called on Bingnan to honor the debt of 1800 cash…. I [later] received less than 1000 cash, the remaining 800 cash has not been made up. After that, I repeatedly demanded [payment]. Bingnan said that he wanted me to return the copper ladles before he would give me the cash. I returned the two ladles and he didn’t even give me a little money. He and I argued, certainly. After that, Bingnan hid himself and didn’t appear until this year on the third day of the second month.229

At least part of the conflict here stemmed from complicated practices of land use and rental. The increased commercialization of land over the course of the Ming and the Qing led to a progressively more vibrant and complicated market for land. In this system, rights to land use as well as actual ownership could be rented, sold, or

“conditionally” sold.

Conditional sales were perhaps the most common. In these transactions, peasants in need of cash could avoid permanently losing the land, frequently their only possession of real value, by conditionally selling it for less than the land’s full value –

Philip Huang estimates the conditional sale price at 70 percent of the total value.230

This sub-market price entitled the seller to recover his land if he repaid the buyer within a set period of time. These arrangements held out at least the possibility of

229 BXDA 7689. 230 Huang, Civil Justice in China, 36.

123 recovery and reflected a deep-rooted aversion to the full alienability of land. However, conditional sale was frequently only the first transaction in a peasant’s downward spiral. Indeed, in a largely agrarian society a peasant who had to even conditionally sell his land was already hard up. And without land, it became even more difficult for peasants to raise the cash necessary to recover their property. Many never did. Finally, conditional sales also permitted a final outright sale of the land with payment of the final 30 percent or so of the land’s value.

Conditional sales and their attendant delays in the transfer of cash invited subsequent haggling over fluctuations in the value of the land due to inflation or other factors. As land prices rose, sellers challenged buyers to pay the difference between the sales price and the current (now higher) value of the land. This process, called zhaojia, was laden with the potential for conflict. Aside from these conflicts, the buyer

“generally developed a strong proprietary sense over the land with the passing of years and years and came to take for granted his right to enjoy its use.”231 In addition to these conditional sales, land could be sold outright. These seemingly simple transactions could also prove contentious, particularly with disputes over boundaries.

Land could also be rented and land-use rights could also be resold to a third party.232

From this brief discussion of the types of land transactions and a highlighting of a few possible points of contention, it is easy to see why land deals ended in violence.

We must also be cognizant of the emotional charge surrounding land sales in an agricultural society. Land was one’s patrimony and could involve a deep sense of filial duty and obligation. Moreover, in many of these transactions, one party was on the

231 Ibid, 38. 232 For a thorough discussion of land transactions, see Huang’s Civil Justice, particularly 36-56.

124 way down both economically and socially. Obviously, these could be very fraught exchanges.

To return to our case, the debt obligation was transferred from the original debtor to Cen. Cen, being new to the debt, perhaps did not feel its weight with the same intensity as Wang. The relationship was further strained by the two copper ladles, which were laden with value both material and symbolic. Finally, according to Wang

Yuitan, this already tense situation was brought to a boil by an assault on his mother:

My mother ran into [Cen] on the street and said to him that we wanted the money. Shockingly, he was furiously harsh and unreasonable – beating and injuring my mother. Our neighbors worked to draw up a mediated settlement up till the sixth day but could not resolve [it]. Then on the ninth, my mother demanded the money from him [again]…. I returned home and heard that he had beaten my mother. I was overcome with emotion. 233

According to Wang, this led him to track down Cen and beat him with a wooden staff.

Wang admitted to hitting Cen repeatedly, but claimed that he had not intended to kill him.

In their testimony, the local authorities presented a slightly different accounting. While affirming the basic contours of the dispute and their role in attempting to mediate a settlement, they also mentioned a conflict that Wang and his mother had had with a vendor about their failure to pay for rice they had purchased.

Wang’s mother was beaten as a result of this altercation. The local authorities were able to resolve this conflict without troubling the court: Wang’s mother was

233 BXDA 7689.

125 compensated with 200 cash.234 However, the anger and frustration from this dispute perhaps spilled over into Wang’s conflict with Cen. His mother had been beaten twice in public. After the second attack, by Wang’s own account, he flew into a rage and beat Cen to death. The public nature of the attacks undoubtedly compounded Cen’s shame and rage. We can see the escalation of affronts beginning with unpaid debts, graduating to assault and peaking in murder.

Land Disputes

Chen Junxi, aged 65 sui, was also beaten to death in a conflict arising from unpaid debts, in this case originating in a land sale.235 Here, we see the mechanisms of land transfers and their discontents. Chen Zhiming, the deceased’s paternal cousin, described the transaction that would lead to violence: “In the middle of the twelfth month of 1891, I sold my land and Liu Yuchun contracted to buy it. The price was

413,000 cash. Excluding what I received, he still owed 100,000 cash. The original agreement said that the debt should be paid in full after the crops were harvested.

After the harvest, I asked for the money repeatedly but he never gave it to me.”236

In his testimony, Liu described the same mediated sale, confirming both the total purchase price and the amount of debt outstanding. He also acknowledged the ensuing argument in the fields that led to Junxi’s death. In both accounts, Liu was at work in the fields after breakfast when Zhiming arrived and began to demand the money he was owed. As the two argued, Junxi happened by on the road. As he came

234 Ibid. 235 BXDA 7811. 236 Ibid.

126 to his cousin’s aid, the argument became more heated and devolved into cursing. Liu testified that Junxi then hit him with a walking stick. Zhiming, perhaps not surprisingly, said that Liu first struck Junxi. But whoever struck the first blow, the fight caused Junxi’s death.

The tension generated by outstanding payments in land transfers can be seen in many cases. These cases suggest both the economic pressures exerted upon the late

Qing peasantry as well as the continuing tensions surrounding the full alienability of land. The complexity of land holding in the late Qing is further suggested by a case from 1900 in which the sale of burial grounds by one member of a clan led to his violent disciplining and murder at the hands of his relatives.237 Following this act of self-policing and private justice, the clan attempted to cover their actions by bribing the woman they had just made a widow. In his testimony at court, Xiang Bingzhi presented the clan’s opening account of the dispute:

The deceased, Xiang Bingchen, is my tangxiong [elder male cousin on the paternal side]. Last year in the middle of the eleventh month he secretly conspired along with Xiang Jieqi, who was the instigator, to privately sell off shady land on the burial hill to the Peng family. This year on the first day of the first month, a number of the clan sought to put this in order. At Xiang Jiehong’s house, they reprimanded him and chose to bring him back. On the third of that month, Bingchen, for some [unknown] reason, died.238

Bingzhi then accused Bingchen’s widow, Zhang Shi, of having listened to rumors and of being misled into filing a complaint at court. To further stress the clan’s benevolence and innocence, Bingzhi noted that the clan, because of the “bitterness” of

237 BXDA 7966. 238 Ibid.

127 widowhood and the presence of small children, contributed silver to Zhang Shi, and that there was a signed agreement testifying to this arrangement.

In this document, Zhang Shi stated that her husband had indeed died of illness and that the clan had given her 30 ounces of silver. Further, she pledged to drop matters and move on with her life. The agreement was signed with her name and mark, and was witnessed by nine community leaders and nineteen clansmen.

However, the clan’s official version of events was complicated by two factors.

The first was the autopsy conducted on Bingchen’s corpse. The resulting document squarely rejected the possibility that he had died from illness. After listing some general features of the corpse, the report noted: “it seems that there is an injury from being crushed with chunks of earth.”239 It also reported that there was blood dripping from both ears, both nostrils and the mouth. The corpse also presented ligature marks and other clear evidence that Bingchen had been bound. After detailing a variety of other wounds, the report concluded that he had been buried alive and that the cause of death was asphyxiation.

The second factor troubling the clan’s account was the accusation by both

Zhang Shi and one of Bingchen’s cousins, Xiang Jieqi, that he had been buried alive by the clan as punishment for selling off the burial grounds. In his testimony, Jieqi delivered his version of the events that led to Bingchen’s death:

The deceased, Xiang Bingchen, is my tangdi [younger male paternal cousin]. Last year in the middle of the eleven month, I was going to help out Peng Duanmao by selling him a grave on shady land within my property. We negotiated a price but hadn’t completed the transaction. Out of nowhere, this year on the first day of the first year, I

239 Ibid.

128 along with my brother’s son Xiang Fusheng went up to a gathering at the graves. We ran into Xiang Hexing, Xiang Yishun…. [and] they told us that Xiang Bingchen had privately sold nine large plots on the burial grounds. I responded that I had not sold [anything]. Xiang Hexing and the others did not permit [me to leave] and then bound me with fine linen and wanted to bury me alive.240

Jieqi then reported that he was only saved by his mother’s intervention: she pleaded with clan members to spare her son’s life. However, a relative then dispatched two men to escort Jieqi home and closed and locked him inside. Then, the clan ordered

Jieqi’s nephew to go and get Bingchen or be buried alive. Jieqi testified that his nephew “fearing punishment, went to Jiangjin and brought Bingchen back.”241 He continued:

On the third, I was again brought to the gravesite on the hill. Xiang Hexing and Xiang Yishun then said that Xiang Bingchen should not have privately sold shady ground in the ancestral tombs. Bingchen replied that he had not sold anything. Xiang Hexing and the others called Xiang Muchang, Xiang Dongshan, Leper (“Laizi”) Xiang, Xiang Liumen to bind Bingchen two hands behind his back. They chose a hole and placed him in the grave, used rocks and mud to hold him down, [and then] carried water and poured it in. [He] died right away.242

Other clan members eventually came forward and confirmed this account.

Bingchen had been taught a lesson, and equally importantly he had demonstrated for his fellow clansmen the penalty for failing to conform to the family’s expectations: his murder was a message. It was a performance. And it was private justice.

This case suggests the complexity of property relations at the end of the Qing.

Here, individual land holdings were not fully alienable because they were invested

240 Ibid. 241 Ibid. 242 Ibid.

129 with non-market value to the clan. The violation of this communal claim on the property provoked the brutal murder of Bingchen. This was a demonstration of the superiority of the communal claim to the land over an individual’s. The clan did not argue that the land was not legally Bingchen’s to sell. Instead, it asserted a violent claim to collective, extra-legal rights. This quarrel illuminates a powerful, alternative understanding of both land and ownership in the late Qing, and suggests the enduring strength on non-market forces on property holding and transfer.

While perhaps less representative of normative property relations than other cases we have examined, this extreme example lays bare the emotional content of landholding and its social meaning in a largely agrarian society. In addition to this emotional component, the clan was eliminating uncertainty regarding control over the land. In this regard, the clan appears to be working in similar ways to a European mafia.

In his study of a mafia syndicate in Sicily, Anton Blok writes: “People were dependent on kinsmen, friends, and powerful protectors for sheer physical survival. To right wrongs, settle conflicts, and to solve problems of various sorts, they could hardly turn to the police or to the courts.”243 Without these institutions, people turned to other arbiters. Frederico Varese, describing the rise of the Russian mafia a hundred years later, stressed that these organizations grew in the absence of “institutions that make a market economy work: a system of clearly defined property rights, a swift and

243 Anton Blok, The Mafia of a Sicilian Village 1860-1960: A Study of Violent Peasant Entrepreneurs (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), 210.

130 effective court system, and a credible police force that deters crimes.”244 This lack of institutional infrastructure – a situation also found in Ba – set the stage for a culture private justice.

While Ba County does not exactly mirror either Sicily or Russia, all of these settings exhibit a high degree of uncertainty. In these situations, individuals look to minimize their exposure to risk. Violence as an outcome of economic disputes reinforced the sanctity of economic agreements. Diego Gambetta writes: “the main market for mafia services is to be found in unstable transactions in which trust is scarce and fragile.”245 Individuals who could not appeal to the court or the police to get what they were owed may have found that violence, or the threat of violence, limited debtors’ willingness to default.

Violent Responses

Many of the homicides in the case records resulted from some earlier, motivating transgression, or at least the threat of one. These were not unprovoked assaults, but responses – reasonable or not – to perceived infractions. They were acts of retribution: attempts to recover items or honor, or simply to punish a transgressor.

In this way, they form the contours of the realm of private justice that existed below the level of the formal legal system. It was only when private righting of wrongs resulted in a death that the state’s justice was brought to bear. It was then that corrective justice became reclassified as criminal homicide.

244 Federico Varese, The Russian Mafia: Private Protection in a New Market Economy (New York: Oxford University Press, USA, 2005), 1. 245 Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia: The Business of Private Protection (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 17.

131

Theft

Theft, or at least suspicion of theft, motivated many of the conflicts that resulted in murders. These cases further illuminate the dynamics of private justice and official responses to its excesses. A case from 1890 makes clear how communities organized violence in response to thefts. Testifying at court, Yi Guangying, reported:

“The deceased, Yi Guangcai, is my younger brother…. Last month on the 25th day,

Guangcai, while at home took money, 800 [wen], and loaded it into a pocket on the inside of his clothing. He then headed off to Tiaodeng Market to buy rice.”246

Guangcai would never arrive at the market. On his way, he stumbled onto the property of Wan Xingyi. There, he was beaten so severely that he died of his injuries the following day.

The two men accused of this brutal attack, Zhang Yuanxing and Zhang

Haiting, framed the attack as a case of mistaken identity. They testified:

To make a living, we both assist at Wan Xingyi’s charcoal factory as hired laborers. The factory had been robbed by thieves many times, and they had not been caught. Then, last month on the evening of the 25th, this Yi Guangcai, who lives nearby, came to the factory to steal charcoal. We caught him. I, Yuanxing, picked up a hoe and hit him twice on the head. I, Haiting, picked up a wooden cudgel and hit him several times on the back, arm and belly. We had no idea he would go to Zeng Yuanyi’s property, fall to the ground, suffer all night and die from his injuries the next day.247

246 BXDA 7678. 247 Ibid.

132 The court never heard from Wan Xingyi, the factory owner.248 We must assume that his wealth and local power insulated Wan so well that a simple homicide on his property could not compel him to appear at court. However, the court did reach out in its provisional sentence to hold Wan, and the other higher-ups in the factory, partially responsible for Guangcai’s death. Moreover, the court took steps to limit the death’s impact on Guangcai’s family, particularly on his widow, Yi Zhang Shi.

After portioning blame, with the majority falling on Yuanxing, and ordering the faultless released and sent home, the court evaluated Zhang Shi’s condition and acted to shield her from cruelties of her new-found widowhood:

Yi Zhang Shi is truly bitterly poor and without ability to peacefully bury her husband. [We have] considered [the matter] and decided that Zeng Yuanyi and Qiu Zhushan [two landlords from Guangcai’s village] shall, while in the city, give 5000 wen each [to Zhang Shi]. [Further, we] order a runner to take Xiong Chengsan to the village and to instruct factory boss Wan Xingyi to give Yi Zhang Shi 20,000 [units not given, but one must assume wen] to pay the expenses for a peaceful burial and to show sympathy.249

This was a firm assertion of Confucian principles: affirming the social value of the widow as well as the filial duty to support older family members. Moreover, the court rebuffed Wan’s deployment of private justice. Although he was not directly responsible for the acts of violence that his workers engaged in, Wan was still called to account for the consequences of those actions. Moreover, the state compelled Wan to financially assist the family of his convicted employee, declaring: “Yet, Zhang

Yuanxing must accept and endure a family with two generations of old people without

248 Though the two Zhangs did report that the “factory head” brought Yuanxing to court. 249 Ibid.

133 anyone to depend on or to lean on. Wan Xingyi every month will give 1,200 wen until the day [Yuanxing] is released from jail.”250 This expression of an employer’s paternalistic duties to his employees can also be found in cases of employee suicide.251

But beyond declaring Wen’s obligation, by making Wan pay the state reaffirmed its exclusive prerogative to legitimate violence.

In fact, many homicides related to theft illustrate this tension, though these acts frequently say less about the abstract concerns of the state and local actors and more about the immediate need for security in the largely laissez-faire local worlds of the late Qing. Despite this tension, private justice was often quick and brutal. But violence was not always an assertion of local norms. Perpetrators of small crimes also resorted to violence, which sometimes ended in murder.

In 1898, Wu Zhou Shi reported the murder of her nine-sui adopted son,

Xisheng.252 In her testimony, she stated that a month before the crime she had locked the door to her home and gone back to her parents’ house. She had warned Xisheng to lock the door while she was away, but in the end it did not matter. She was later told by the daughter of a neighbor that Gong Laifeng had gone to her home and broken in.

While inside, Laifeng stabbed Xisheng on the neck and in the head, fatally wounding the boy.

This account gives us the end of the conflict, but not the beginning. Nor does it offer any hint of Laifeng’s motivation for such an assault. The same neighbors who originally informed Zhou Shi of her son’s fate also testified at court. They heard

250 Ibid. 251 See Chapter Two for further discussion of this phenomenon. 252 BXDA 7919.

134 Laifeng and Xisheng arguing over debts that Laifeng owed. But, according to

Laifeng’s own testimony, this conflict was not simply over debts held by Xisheng’s family. The immediate cause of the fight was Laifeng’s escalating criminality. He testified:

I am from Ba County. I am 21 sui. My father is dead, but my mother is still alive. I have no brothers. I am married to Li Shi, but we do not have any children. I am poor; many debts are pursuing me and weighing me down. Then, I borrowed money from my relative, Wu Zhou Shi, several times. Last month on the 26th, I walked over to their house to see if their house was locked. My relative, Wu Xisheng, lit some lights in the house. I smashed the lock on the door and went in. I grabbed some money, over 1,000, [but] Xisheng was holding back some money. I was nervous; I was afraid I would be seen by someone. I was very anxious. I picked up a kitchen knife and cut him twice across the cheek. I was really anxious, [so] I cut him again across the throat and then I let him go. I saw him fall to the floor. I went [farther] in and saw they had a sack of rice and 1,800 wen. I carried it home. At home, I thought to myself that I had stabbed and hurt [him, but] I was afraid to report it; I wanted to run away. Later that night, [Wu Zhou Shi], along with community leaders, came and captured me.253

The base motivation for all this was a drive to escape dire economic circumstances. During the trial, no one mentioned a previous grudge or lingering hostility. In fact, Zhou Shi’s repeated loans (and, one must assume, Laifeng’s repeated failure to pay her back) suggest an ongoing relationship between them.

Laifeng, already harried by debts, resorted to successively more transgressive acts. He moved from breaking in to the house, to theft, to assault, which became homicide (and not unpredictably so given the violence of the attack). These resulting acts all stemmed from his initial descent into criminality.

253 Ibid.

135 Laifeng must have known that Zhou Shi had gone away, and so he went to her house already thinking of stealing money or goods of value. But it seems that he did not count on Xisheng being at home. When Xisheng lit the house (perhaps in response to Laifeng’s rustling around outside), he escalated his transgression, smashing the lock and forcing his way inside. Once inside and confronted by Xisheng, he was committed. The boy, we can assume, knew who he was. They argued, further diminishing Laifeng’s prospects of a clean getaway – there were neighbors close by who overheard them.

These circumstances make Laifeng’s violence and desperation even more stark. He had very little chance of getting away with his offenses, but instead of cutting his losses (and crimes), he escalated again and attacked Xisheng. In his own testimony, Laifeng repeatedly stated that he was very anxious. While this may have been a strategic attempt to portray his actions as something other than cold-blooded, it was also perhaps an accurate description of the palpable stress that drove him as well as the grim realization that each of his actions only further doomed him. This case highlights a snowball effect in criminality. As things get out of hand, each act led to a greater transgression. In these cases, the criminal himself drove the escalation toward murder. But a similar tendency toward escalation can also be seen in another case, in which private justice was meted out by a Buddhist nun to her defiant pupil.

In 1900, a man and his mother brought to court their account of the brutal murder of his daughter, a Buddhist nun named Zhilu.254 In their account, the pair

254 BXDA 7985 (This case is continued in BXDA 7986).

136 described how he had sent his five-year-old daughter to live at Yueming Temple.255

Approximately 15 years after her arrival, things went very badly for Zhilu. According to her family’s testimony, Zhilu’s superior, the nun Deming, was having an affair, and as rumors of her misdeeds spread, Deming murdered Zhilu to cover her tracks. Zhilu’s father went to the temple looking for his daughter and was told by another young nun that Zhilu had been tied up, poisoned, beaten, had the lower parts of her body branded by a pair of fire tongs by Deming and others, and then the body had been secretly buried.

This shocking account was challenged by the autopsy conducted on the 20-sui nun. The coroner found extensive injuries from beatings (likely from a wooden object) and ligature marks, but no burns or evidence of poison. The examiner concluded that

Zhilu had died of the injuries she had sustained. Even though this new evidence proposed a less savage scenario, the young nun had clearly been brutally beaten to death.

This salacious tale of sex and murder in the temple was not refuted by a series of nuns brought to court to testify. In fact, although they rejected many aspects of

Zhilu’s family’s account, the nuns painted no less sensational picture of sex, scandal and violence in Yueming Temple.256 In her testimony, Deming presented this version:

I am from Ba County originally. I am 34 sui. My common surname is Ding. Both my parents are dead. I was seven sui when I entered Yueming Temple to become a nun; my father was already dead. This nun Dequan is my senior fellow apprentice. Nun Yuejiang is my

255 In the Qing, children were often given to religious orders for reasons of poverty as well as piety. 256 Though we tend to think of temples as rarified places of quiet contemplation and prayer, in Imperial China they enjoyed an equally rowdy reputation as sites of sex, violence and assorted heterodoxy. We need only remember the monk Lu Zhishen’s outrageous behavior in the classic Water Margin.

137 apprentice. The deceased, Zhilu, is [also] my apprentice…. Because Zhilu did not follow the monastic rules, last year [she] and this nun Qingtao were having an affair [and] they were found out by a nun. Qingtao was expelled. After this, Zhilu [became] very lazy; [she] wouldn’t keep within bounds. She frequently stole things and privately sold it with that Mou Yushun’s brothers.257

Deming claimed to have discovered this theft and expelled Zhilu from the temple. However, this was not the end of Zhilu’s interactions with the temple. The nun

Dequan, in testimony that exactly mirrored the accounts given by Deming and another nun, testified:

This year on the 27th day of the first month, Zhilu secretly returned to the temple and snuck in under my bed. I realized and shouted: “There’s a thief!” Then, along with a tenant farmer, Mou Yushun, [we] captured her and tied her hands to a temple column. Word reached Deming and she returned to the temple. Relying on He Bingyuan and others, [we] brought the temple together and [they] advised us to send Zhilu under guard to an empty building. For two or three days we regularly sent food. I had no idea she wouldn’t repent. She completely smashed the building’s window – she wanted to escape. When Deming saw this, she used a short hoe made from Oak to hit her several times.258

Zhilu’s ordeal would continue. On the second day of the second month,

Zhilu would quarrel with Mou over the stolen goods, and he too would beat her, this time using bamboo. At some point during her ordeal, she was brought back into the temple. Here she was offered food, but refused it and, apparently, vigorously cursed the nuns. This caused Deming to see red and again beat

Zhilu with the hoe. The availability of this hoe both in the empty building and

257 BXDA 7685. 258 Ibid.

138 back at the temple suggests that Deming was keeping it handy and indicates a degree of premeditation to these beatings. She may have been provoked by

Zhilu’s obscenities, but Deming was already prepared. She had also instructed

Dequan to tie Zhilu up back in the empty building.

Zhilu was held captive for well over a week. During this time, she was beaten repeatedly and had refused to eat. On the fifth, she died, and on the sixth a coffin was purchased. Deming, along with help from a tenant farmer, secretly buried the body on the night of the seventh. While Zhilu’s demise may not have been as scandalous as first reported by her father, it was by any account a vicious and brutal end.

There was more than simple economics at work in this murder.

Essentially, the public nature of Zhilu’s conflict with Deming made it an intolerable challenge to Deming’s reputation. The power of these sorts of challenges was also at work in the murder of Luo Hongsheng.

In 1891, Luo Yang Shi reported that her husband, Luo Hongsheng, aged 52 sui, had been murdered.259 According to Yang Shi, her husband had died of wounds sustained during a fight with Carpenter Ran and his relatives.

She testified that her husband had loaned Ran his tools, which Ran then lost.

Hongsheng, seeking to recoup his losses, demanded over 600 wen in compensation. Adding insult to injury, Ran had also broken into Hongsheng’s home and stolen an article of clothing.

259 BAXA 7698. This case also appears in BXDA 7711, and is considered in Chapter One.

139 Later, Hongsheng saw Ran at the market and demanded both the money and his clothing. An argument ensued, and according to Yang Shi, Ran called his relatives

Xie Jiu, Xie Jinshan, and others to help him.260 A fight broke out and Hongsheng was injured. He died from his injuries later that night.

This was his widow’s account of events but there were, of course, others. In their testimony, the local authorities suggested that Hongsheng had killed himself by consuming opium. This possibility was eliminated by a routine examination of the corpse, which determined that he had died of his injuries. Carpenter Ran, who described the dispute as being solely over debts, attempted to place the blame for

Hongsheng’s death squarely on Xie Jiu by saying that only Xie Jiu had beaten

Hongsheng. Ran’s testimony made no mention of a physical altercation between Ran and Hongsheng. In this telling, Ran had only heard of the fight later in an opium bar where he was sleeping.

This case suggests several possible motivations animating the conflict. As in the above cases, there was an accusation of theft. However, this conflict also witnessed the violation of trust between friends (we must assume that Hongsheng and

Ran had been friendly, given that the former lent Ran his tools), as well as a public confrontation in the market, which was fanned by the presence of Ran’s relatives. A private disagreement between two individuals became a public altercation, slowly escalating from talking to cursing to fighting. That it exploded in the marketplace added pressure for individuals to defend their public personas, their reputations.

Assaults on reputation often became violent.

2 In his testimony, Ran reported that he had changed his surname from Xie to Ran when he was young, though he did not say why.

140

Policing Reputations

Public reputations required defending, and this, sometimes, required violence.

In 1900, a simmering dispute boiled over into bloodshed, illustrating the frequently mundane nature of clashes that eventually led to murder. In this case, name-calling and seemingly juvenile hazing escalated into violence. Changshou testified:

I am 15 sui. My parents are both dead, and I have no brothers or a legal wife. My grandmother, Hu Shi, is now 70 sui. Usually I scavenge to live. I live close on the same street with the deceased, Li Si. I knew him – we have the same last name, although we are not related – but we didn’t get along. In the past, because Li Si often called me by my infant name, Changshou, I would understandably curse him, but he wouldn’t stop. I was angry, but I didn’t let it out. On the morning of the fourth day of the tenth month, Li Si joined others and went out the city through the far gate to Liujia Bend to burn offerings to their ancestors. I invited Zeng Jishan, Liu Haishan, Bo Ronghua, and this Wu Laoyao and Luo Zhankui also came with us to Gongsan Garden where we burned money for the dead. We headed back and near Guanyin Rock I saw Li Si coming along. I remembered that Li Si often cursed me and made me mad. With my left hand I grabbed Li Si’s queue and punched him once with my ‘stone’ fist. Then I used my left foot and kicked him once. I had no idea how serious his injuries were. Wu Laoyao and Luo Zhankui hit him on the back. I don’t remember clearly. All I can say is that I vented my anger and then each of us went home. The next morning Li Si died.261

Changshou’s account suggests a minor assault in response to a minor slight.

But given that Li Si died the next day from his injuries, we might assume the

Changshou’s memory, as he himself suggested, was not completely accurate. Wu

Laoyao and Luo Zhankui also testified, giving a slightly clearer depiction of the fight than Changshou’s, and in these accounts there was something of a brawl.

261 BXDA 7676.

141 In his testimony, Laoyao, who sold sugarcane for a living, claimed that

Changshou had gone to Guanyin Rock looking for Li Si, knowing that he frequently went there to sell sugarcane. He added that three of Li Si’s friends had helped him fight off the attack. This account suggests a premeditated brawl between six individuals, rather than the small, chance encounter that Changshou conjured. The other witness, Zhankui, an apprentice in a medicine shop, said that he had gone out of the city in order to burn offerings to his ancestors, suggesting that the encounter with

Li Si was accidental.

Even in testimony more congruent with Changshou’s account, Zhankui reported that Li Si’s three friends helped him fight off the attack. Zhankui’s version attempted to paint his role in the most favorable of terms. He noted that he and Laoyao only joined the affray to break it up, and that he had left the city with his mother and had only run into Changshou as the assault was already under way.

Whatever the exact circumstances, this case again shows how petty disputes could snowball into homicide. Once again, we can see the role of public reputation, and the need to defend it, playing out as local violence. This is not surprising, although the degree of violence and the pettiness of the affronts can be shocking.

In another instance of public violence and assaults on reputation, a petty dispute over vegetables flared into violence that left a pregnant woman dead. In a plaint from 1896, Zhang Yiting described the murder of his wife.262 The 35-sui Yiting reported:

262 BXDA 7815/7818 (The relevant records span two separate case files. The first file also contains scraps from other cases.).

142 I am an apprentice in Tianxiang Building on Chaoyang Street. I have only my widowed mother and my wife, Yu Shi, in my house. This year in the middle of the day on the 29th of the fourth month, my wife, Yu Shi, was at the front gate [of our house] when the vegetable vendor Zhang Ba came out of the Chen family’s house. He saw my wife and used obscene language to try to seduce her, but my wife was not won over and rightfully put him in his place. This enraged him and he beat my wife on her chest and belly, and he pushed her to the ground with the palm of his hand and kicked her. My wife’s stomach was already sticking out because she was four months pregnant. At dusk, she was lying on the ground when a neighbor… helped her.263

Yu Shi died later that night. In subsequent testimony, Yiting slightly altered his story, now saying that he had witnessed the attack himself and ran to the scene along with another man, Li Songbai. Moreover, he described a much more heated argument between his wife and Zhang Ba. Songbai also testified that the two men had run to intervene in the shouting match. He added, however, that Yu Shi told him that the conflict started because she had not wanted to buy vegetables, which led to a row. In this testimony, there was no mention of Zhang Ba sexually propositioning Yu Shi. The spark that set them to fighting was completely banal. Nonetheless, violence ensued.

In his own testimony, Zhang Ba did not deny that he had beat Yu Shi, though he argued that he was acting in self-defense. His account offered the same explanation for how the fight started. He stated:

I am from Bishan County [west of Chongqing]. I am 30 sui. My father and mother are both dead, and I have no brothers. My wife, Lu Shi, is alive, and we have one daughter…. I sell vegetables for a living….[On the day of the attack], I was carrying vegetables on a pole and selling them on the streets. I came along the street to Zhang Yiting’s front door. His wife, Yu Shi, called out saying she wanted to buy vegetables. We had already settled on a price when Yu Shi became suspicious about the vegetables she had selected. [She thought] something was wrong

263 BXDA 7815.

143 with her selection. I considered upbraiding Zheng Yu Shi that it was not so. Zheng Yu Shi cursed me and I cursed her back. Zheng Yu Shi wouldn’t listen and pounced on me. She grabbed my clothes and head and made a lot of noise. I couldn’t get away. In a moment, I became angry and desperate. I used my foot and kicked her to scare her off. I had no idea she was pregnant. She loosened her grip and fell to the ground. Zheng Yiting returned; he had run into Li Songbai. Together they came to help, but not in time.264

In their report to the court, the local authorities supported this version of events, testifying that the clash began with a dispute over vegetables rather than from Zhang’s come-ons, although they almost certainly learned of events second hand. In fact, there are only two possible origins for Yitang’s tale of sexual impropriety. The first scenario is that Yu Shi told her husband after the attack that Zhang had propositioned her. In that case, it is possible that this was an accurate account of the conflict’s roots, but it is also possible that Yu Shi misled Yitang, possibly because she was embarrassed by the pettiness of the dispute that led to her injuries (and the potential harm done to the baby she was carrying). Or perhaps she wanted to ensure a more severe set of consequences, legal or extra-legal, for Zhang Ba. A second possibility is that Yitang himself conjured the tale of inappropriate advances to ensure that Zhang Ba would be severely punished for murdering his wife and his unborn child.

In either scenario, it seems that the public nature of the dispute and the violence called for a robust response. The precipitating offense here was rather slight, but there were also cases in which the initial transgression was quite serious. Assaults on reputation, both individual and collective, required responses, and the greater the challenge often the more severe the response. These instances of private justice

264 BXDA 7818.

144 highlight the complexity of human action. On the one hand, we may see actions as motivated by the need to police public reputation. On the other, the actor may well have simply felt motivated by the offending act itself, with no conscious reference to reputation.

This complexity was further intensified following acts of sexual violence.265

The partial records of a case from 1898 stress both the density of motivations and the heightened intensity in such circumstances. Following the rape of Zhang Li Shi,

Zhang San Wu’er, aged 50 sui, brutally stabbed to death her attacker, Zhang

Yingyuan.266 All involved were related.267 Sadly, no testimony from the case survives, so the participants’ explanations are lost, but we can assume from the extant records that two motivations may have been present. The first, and most easily recognized, is sheer horror at the act. The records report that San Wa’er felt a “surge of anger” after witnessing the attack on Li Shi.268 After this, San Wa’er recruited Li Si’er (perhaps a relative of Li Shi’s) to help him murder Yingyuan.

A second, if more slippery, possibility relates to public reputation. The assault on Li Shi was not only an attack on her; it was also an affront to her family’s

265 Matthew Sommer has demonstrated the fixation that developed in the Qing surrounding the sanctity of sexualized bodies, and the increased feeling that these bodies, male and female, were under assault. 266 BXDA 7927. 267 The men, including the rape victim’s husband, are all described as “xiaogong tangdi.” Xiaogong refers to the length of mourning required (five months) and was both a ritual and legal description of the closeness of relations. Tangdi means “younger paternal cousin.” The combination of the two is slight confusing because paternal cousins usually fell within a “closer” mourning relation, that of dagong (seven months of mourning). However, the impact in the case is the same, they were fairly closely related, a fact which increased the severity of both the crime and the punishment. For further elaboration of family structure and its legal ramifications, see Qu, Law and Society in Traditional China, 15-20. 268 Exactly how San Wa’er came to witness the rape, or how the rape occurred at all, is not clear from the extant records.

145 reputation. Li Shi belonged exclusively to her husband, Zhang Laoyao.269 By violating this understanding, Yingyuan threatened the family’s reputation as a place of order and uprightness. This reputation was held collectively, such that all family members would feel slights against the common honor. By custom, family reputation could be policed collectively; hence Zhang San’s murder of the rapist.

In other cases, the affronts were dealt with individually. For example, in 1897,

Xu Xinyuan, 45 sui, was stabbed to death by his landlord in the house they shared.270

At first, none of the several people who lived in the house offered any explanation for the brutal murder. Each of these individuals rigorously confined themselves to describing the general contours of the situation, pleading ignorance as to specific motivations for the crime. The dead man’s cousin explained how the two of them had traveled from a county northwest of Chongqing (Xichong County) on business, reporting that “[I] along with him [Xinyuan] trade precious jewels in Chongqing’s parade grounds to make a living.”271 The cousin also described how Xinyuan had rented parts of the upper floors of Gao Yutang’s building for them to live in, along with Xinyuan’s two apprentices.

As for the murder, Xinyuan’s cousin testified: “On the morning of the ninth day of the sixth month, [one of the apprentices] came to me and said that his master had been murdered that morning while in bed.”272 The cousin then alerted the authorities. The same apprentice offered a few more details: “I…was upstairs and

269 Another possibly illuminating aspect of this case is that “laoyao” refers to the youngest of a group or family. Perhaps San Wa’er was acting to defend to youngest/weakest member of the extended family group. 270 BXDA 7896. 271 Ibid. 272 Ibid.

146 heard my master crying: ‘Save me!’ I hurried downstairs and saw my master lying on the bed not speaking.”273 His landlord’s wife, Gao Zou Shi, was also at Xinyuan’s side and attempted to save him. In her account, Zou Shi repeated nearly the same tale, adding only that her husband had gotten up and left the home at some early, unknown hour.

As details emerged over the course of several bouts of testimony, blame gradually coalesced around the still-absent Gao Yutang. He was now presented as the known killer, although there was still no comment on his possible motivation for murdering a tenant of nearly ten years with whom he was not known to have any conflicts. The artifice of this collective ignorance was finally shattered in Xinyuan’s cousin’s fourth official testimony. The sudden clarity that descended on all involved seems to have been provoked by Yutang’s return.

At this point, a full ten days after their initial testimony, the cousin reported that Xinyuan had been having an affair with his landlord’s wife, Zuo Shi. With fresh lucidity, Xinyuan’s cousin testified that, on the morning of the murder, one of the apprentices had told him: “Xu Xingyuan was having an affair with Gao Yutang’s wife.

He got caught and killed.”274 The two apprentices then confirmed this revelation in new testimony. Zou Shi herself, finally, came clean:

I am originally from Ba County. I am 42 sui. When I was a child I was married, through a matchmaker, to Gao Yutang as his legal wife. I’ve given birth to two daughters. We get along well, there’s no ill will. In 1897, to my surprise, my husband, Gao Yutang, rented to Xu Xinyuan the adjoining rooms [in our house] to live. My husband [later] left on business and was not

273 Ibid. 274 Ibid.

147 at home. As a result, Xu Xinyuan tried to seduce me. I didn’t give in to him. My husband’s luck did not follow him into business; he lost money in business. Xu Xinyuan’s [apprentices] add big amounts – every month [they pay] 1,800 wen. Later on, Xu Xinyuan and I again committed adultery, and not just once. My husband didn’t know.275

She then explained how her husband learned of the affair. In her account,

Yutang discovered the pair in the middle of the night but only returned at daybreak to attack and murder Xinyuan. In his own account, Yutang said he knew of the adultery before the attack, which occurred on the ninth day:

On…the afternoon of the eighth day of the sixth month, I returned home from being away. I ran into Xu Xinyuan coming out of my wife’s room. [He] appeared very flustered and I knew that they were having an affair. Then I interrogated my wife. She was not able to hide it and she said that in the fourth month she started having an affair with Xu Xinyuan. I was angry and cursed my wife. I said I was going to capture Xu Xinyuan and deliver them together for an investigation. On the morning of the ninth, I went and grabbed a sharp knife and went to Xu Xinyuan’s room. I saw Xu Xinyaun was already up. I cursed him and said that he should not have had an affair with my wife. I grabbed him – then he wanted to escape. I used the knife to cut him once on his left rib and on his right side.276

Yutang then described each wound and his victim’s vain attempt to defend himself, adding that he had not meant to kill Xinyuan, only to injure him.

The exact relationship between Zou Shi and Xinyuan remains unclear. It appears that there was an economic angle to their sexual encounters. Zou Shi stressed the economic troubles her family was having as well as the crucial importance of the rent that Xinyuan and his fellows contributed. She may not have been contractually

275 Ibid. 276 Ibid.

148 obligated to sleep with him, but the financial circumstances entangling the pair put her in a position where she perhaps could not refuse his advances.

But perhaps she did not want to. She and Yutang were married as children, which could have had an adverse impact on the couple’s later sexual life.277 Growing up as essentially brother and sister is known to inhibit the development of an adult sexual relationship. Moreover, Zou Shi and Yutang both said that the husband was frequently away on business. These factors allow for the possibility of a consensual relationship. It is also possible that Yutang knew about, or even encouraged, the affair. Husbands did sell their wives into prostitution when faced with dire circumstances. In this case, perhaps the shame simply became too much to bear.

Yutang’s humiliation was both personal and public. He was forced to “see through” the sham of his family and bear the disgrace of a cuckold. In the end,

Yutang confessed that the entire incident had forced him to “become disillusioned” with his family. Moreover, Zou Shi’s affair was commonly known, adding to his shame. Yutang responded violently to Xinyaun’s criminal provocation. It was murder as a reply to a heinous transgression, one that played out publicly.

Anton Blok has writes that “ violence often has the character of theater and performance in which things are ‘said’ as much as they are ‘done.’”278 In other words, violence can be a form of communication. Yutang’s acts were a performance of his honor, a public declaration of his continuing status as a man. In many of the acts of

277 For more on this topic, see Arthur P. Wolf, Sexual Attraction and Childhood Association: A Chinese Brief for Edward Westermarck (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995). 278 Anton Blok, Honour and Violence (Cambridge: Polity, 2001), 111.

149 violence considered in this chapter we see this performative aspect of violence. And in many cases, it was honor that was being performed.

Conclusion

Perhaps the most striking feature of homicide in Ba county to emerge from these legal cases is the degree to which homicidal violence was concentrated among people who knew each other, and in many cases were rather close. Of the cases detailed in this chapter, only two cases did not involve family or friends in the violence that led to the murder.279 This perhaps helps to explain why so many of the cases seem to be accidental homicides (as opposed to premeditated ones): these were deaths that largely resulted from affrays.

This routine violence was largely contained within social circles. This is evident in acts such as a grandfather killing his granddaughter; cousins defending cousins; clan disputes; friends helping friends in brawls; or nuns murdering a member of their order. The centrality of these ties is obvious in family-related cases but also apparent in many of the cases involving murder in the wake of other wrongdoing.280

Even in economic conflicts, the single largest type of case, we can see this principle at work. In the Qing, many economic agreements – debts, land transfers, employment, etc. – were social relationships as well. We have seen a paternalistic expression of this dynamic at work when an employer was held responsible for the murderous actions of an employee and was further required to support the murderer’s

279 BXDA 7678 and BXDA 7919. 280 Although the two cases not involving close relationships fell into this category.

150 elderly parents.281 Paternalistic obligation was also enforced when an employee committed suicide. Again, the boss was required to compensate the family of the deceased.282 This relationship was also frequently visible between creditor and debtor.

We can remember Zhou Shi’s repeated loans to Laifeng – it was a relationship, not a single interaction. This principle is also at work in the practice of zhaojia, where individuals returned to the (conditional) buyers of their land to demand more money.

Interpersonal violence here occurred within the confines of normal, archetypal relationships. A vision of peaceful communities shattered by violence introduced by outsiders seems far from the mark. There was, of course, anonymous murder. An unknown man was found hacked to death.283 A nameless thief was beaten to death.284

And we must imagine that there was a shadow reservoir of unreported deaths, many of which might have fit the above profile. However, it seems that reported deaths required someone in the community to care about the deceased. Without this, he could be just another body on the road.

In the end, much of the violence uncovered in these homicides reveals the self- disciplining of the community. We can imagine countless mundane instances in which this must have occurred. Our cases, however, document this phenomenon only when it got out of hand or was contested by other members of the community. We see the abnormal; the routine is lost to us. Nonetheless, the “everyday” homicides found in the legal record indicate that violence ran along knowable fault lines and that it largely flourished within the community. Most murderers knew the man they killed.

281 BXDA 7678, discussed earlier in the chapter. 282 For a fuller discussion of employee suicide, see Chapter Two. 283 BXDA 7649. 284 BXDA 7880.

151

152

4. The Logic of Lies: “False Accusation” and Legal Culture

Introduction

In reading the ming’an files, one is astonished by the regular use of deceptive claims at court and the magistrate’s willingness to continue hearing cases once the flimsy false accusation at their heart had been exposed. These practices are especially surprising given the apparent risks of lying at court. The Qing Code states:

In the case of anyone who falsely accuses another of an offense punishable with strokes of the light bamboo, sentence him to the penalty of the offense of which he falsely accused [the other], increased by two degrees. If the penalty is exile, penal servitude, or strokes of the heavy bamboo (regardless of whether it has been executed and the accused has gone to the place of punishment or not), add three degrees to the penalty for the offense falsely complained of. Each penalty is limited to 100 strokes of the heavy bamboo and exile to 930 miles. (Do not increase to the extent of strangulation.)285

Despite the threat of these punishments, the regular resort to lies constituted a common legal strategy deployed by a range of litigants.

In the false accusations of homicide found in the ming’an files, Qing subjects used an accusation of violence to gain entry to the court as a site of mediation. The court was not interested in hearing petty economic disputes. Philosophically, the court considered litigation a sign of poor governance and unruliness. And practically, late

285 Xue, Du Li Cun Yi, 336.0.

153 Qing magistrates were overwhelmed with legal cases. Given these twin concerns, one needed a hook to get the court’s attention.

Twenty-five cases in the ming’an files include false accusations of homicide.

These lies, one would think, posed an even risker proposition for their tellers since homicide was a capital crime and the Code mandated even more severe penalties for these falsehoods: “If the offense which was the subject of the false accusation is punishable with death, and the sentence has already been executed (then, according to whether the original law imposes strangulation or beheading), sentence [the accuser] to death.”286 With these claims, individuals literally put their lives on the line.

However, the pursuit of what actually happened can be very dangerous when using legal documents, but scholars cannot know what actually happened outside the courtroom and must concentrate on the information that made it into the legal record.

It is particularly important to remember that the court was a site of contestation, and that, as the Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero remind us, “although historians often masquerade as participants in the judicial process, they cannot passively accept the schema of roles and results assigned by the dominating ideology of the criminal justice system. Instead they seek to discover opportunities in a disturbing moment of the past to identify other ideologies, values and lives often masked or obliterated by the hegemonic vision of criminal records.”287 Applying the label of “false accusation” perhaps reinforces this hegemonic vision, but doing so provides a way to uncover the strategies individuals deployed in the late Qing to make this power serve their own needs.

286 Ibid. 287 Muir and Ruggiero, History from Crime, viii.

154 When referring to someone making a “false accusation” or even “lying,” these terms are used not in relation to the truth of what actually happened but only regarding the claims they made at court. It is these claims that interest us; they reveal the ways in which individuals, including the rural poor, attempted to use the legal system to their benefit. These were legal strategies.

Moreover, the examination of false accusation cases illuminates both social practice and Qing legal culture.288 In particular, through these conflicts we see how the county court interacted with locals. In Ba County, the magistrate exhibits a surprising willingness to adjudicate and turn a blind eye toward the false accusations that landed a case in court. Looking beyond the confines of the court, these cases also demonstrate how locals engaged with the legal system, suggesting a broader legal culture surrounding the court and evoking a social world in which legal knowledge was generally present or at least widely available for purchase. The sample of false accusation cases in the ming’an files suggest that this legal culture was broadly dispersed both geographically and in terms of social standing.

Rural peasants are well represented in the following cases, with individuals coming from up to 43 miles outside Chongqing to press their disputes. With litigation masters selling their talents and inns catering to petitioners, the concentration of legal

288 Sally Engle Merry defines legal consciousness as “the ways people understand and use law, ” which she argues develops through individual experience. I would push this one step farther in defining legal culture. This culture moves beyond the realm of individual experience to encompass understandings of the law and its use that exist in the community more generally, even removed from direct experiences of the legal system. This broader scope allows us to include ideas about the law derived from second- hand experience: from rumor, from gossip, from scandal, from stories etc. Paul Katz argues that Chinese legal culture consists of three components: “structural (legal institutions), substantive (laws), and cultural (values, ideas and practices, including religion and rituals).” My use of “legal culture” is largely focused on how the last of these sites interacted with the first two. See Paul Katz, Divine Justice, 13.

155 knowledge and culture would no doubt have been most dense near the court, but the fact that even peasants from fairly remote regions brought their claims into this arena suggests that legal culture was not the exclusive domain of the city. Moreover, the geographic pervasiveness of this legal culture was mirrored in the range of social classes engaged in legal combat. It may have been true in the nineteenth century (as it is today) that the rich and powerful had greater access to legal remedies. Yet, the host of lowly tenant farmers and barbers in the legal records shows that manipulation of the legal system was not a monopoly of the wealthy.

False accusation cases frequently illuminate the routine local practices of mediation that defused most conflicts outside the courtroom. In many cases, a dispute reached the court only after several failed attempts at mediation, which are documented in the case record. Often individuals who were not happy with the outcome of local interventions pushed their disputes into court. False accusation could be a means of appealing to a higher authority, of escaping the confines and constraints of local society.

Two broad types of false accusation can be seen in the court records. The first type can be described as “compassionate” and features relatives who sought a form of justice for the dead, often acting in clear defiance of their local community. These relatives may not have been present at the death or funeral and so sought an official court investigation rather than accept simple local resolution. The second type,

“profiteering,” was a form of false accusation whose primary goal was financial gain.

In these cases, death was an unexpected opportunity for an economic windfall. By agitating at court, these litigants hoped to secure a payoff from the death of a relative.

156 In discussing both types, however, we must remain cognizant of mediating influences in the legal process. In particular, we must highlight the usually invisible but important role often played by “litigation masters” [songshi], or less generously

“litigation hooligans” [songgun]. This illegal class of “lawyers” sold their literacy and institutional expertise to individuals availing themselves of the legal system.289 They helped litigants plan strategy, wrote rough drafts of plaints, and coached their clients’ testimony. Litigation masters are almost always invisible in the court records, so one can only speculate about how often they actually played a role.290 Despite this uncertainty, we can say that these “hooligans” attacked official cultural hegemony with commodified literacy and disciplinary expertise, and could be hired by non-elites to disrupt social hierarchy.

In her study of litigation masters, Melissa Macauley described them as power brokers and middlemen.291 In this sense, they resemble the mafia in Anton Blok’s classic study,292 except that instead of selling violence (or the threat of it) songshi trafficked in expertise. Macauley writes: “ Officials and local superordinates found that litigation mastery and its frequent attendant abuses shifted significant legal power out of local hands and, moreover, understood that the power could be turned against

289 We should also note that many magistrates employed a legal expert to advise them on legal matters. This “assistance” could result in the advisor playing a leading role in the court’s legal duties. Despite the formal illegality of songshi and the official primacy of the magistrate, it seems that many legal hearings were deeply guided by unofficial legal experts. 290 Probably the most readily available and cheapest form of coaching came from court clerks who were paid to fill in the plaint forms, and would probably exert more effort to help in exchange for a tip. But again, that kind of intervention was largely illegal and so one can only speculate based on the language and narrative strategies used in plaints (for example, when a peasant’s plaint cites the Qing code) that some kind of assistance was involved. 291 Melissa Macauley, Social Power and Legal Culture: Litigation Masters in Late Imperial China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 3. 292 Blok, The Mafia of a Sicilian Village.

157 their [officials and elites] interests.”293 That being said, we must remember that both sides in a dispute tended to hire someone shape their litigation.

All studies of local legal culture in the Qing must be mindful of the potential influence of the now invisible, expert hand of the litigation master. Behind the seemingly sophisticated legal strategies of non-elites, songshi may have been at work.

Moreover, a poor litigant could receive various mundane kinds of assistance from court clerks, innkeepers and others who gained knowledge of the legal process through their quotidian contacts with the court. All of these shaping hands extended the reach of legal culture at the end of the Qing.

Exploiting Death: “Profiteering” False Accusation

In a plaint filed in 1895, tenant farmer Cheng Bingtang, 38 sui, described how he had fallen behind on his rent in part due to flooding. 294 As a result of the disaster, he wanted his rent deposit returned. There was no accusation of violence in this initial plaint – this was a rent dispute pure and simple. In 1894, Chen had sublet land from

Wang Fengshan, but flooding wiped out his crop, leaving him in debt. Chen filed a plaint stating:

This summer at flood season the water rose. The seedlings were wiped out. The entire large field was soaked. You can still find the piles of mud now. During the autumn harvest, [Wang’s] workers [took my grain as my final rent payment]. I wasn’t left with a single grain. Relying on local leaders, Li Juefu, Yang Jingqi and others, my rent was dismissed. The community discussed it: if you don’t have grain, then you don’t pay rent. At that time, [Wang] delivered [some of my deposit]. [But] there remained 40 [liang] from my original [cash] deposit. I have repeatedly demanded [this money], [but he] delays to

293 Macauley, Social Power and Legal Culture, 148. 294 BXDA 7918.

158 this day…. This has forced me to move house. Farming is cruel and bitter to me.295

The magistrate wrote on this initial plaint that Chen should have his deposit returned but that he did not want the case heard in court. Chen’s second plaint, filed almost three months later, complained that his deposit had still not been returned as ordered by the magistrate’s rescript. He then further accused his landlord, Wang, of coming with a gang of family members to intimidate him into signing a statement releasing his claim on the deposit. Finally, on top of all these economic grievances, Chen added that an employee of Wang’s had killed his infant son during the clash at his home. Chen reported:

Qiu Biaoting [Wang’s employee] led over twenty people to my house. They for some reason cooked up this statement. They forced me to sign [this statement saying] that my deposit was not valid. They [then] crowded into my house and threw all my furniture and other household items outside. You can go and see the damage. They tied up my wife, Guo Shi, and caused my one-sui child to be thrown to the ground. His face and eyes received serious injuries. He bled and [then] died.296

Now we have an alleged homicide (which explains why this case is found in the ming’an category), although the accusation – which was later proven false when Chen admitted that his son had died of illness – came only after the magistrate had explicitly said that he did not want to hold a formal hearing about what had been presented as a purely economic dispute. Chen’s desire for a court hearing was evidently heightened by the failure of local mediation to offer him an acceptable solution. An accusation of homicide guaranteed that Chen’s case would be heard at court.

295 Ibid. 296 Ibid.

159 To counter these allegations, Wang filed his own plaint. In this document, he detailed the economic dispute, but made no mention of the death of Chen’s child – an incident that, if true, would certainly seem to require some explanation, refutation, or at least obfuscation. Further, He Xingfa, who had initially assisted Chen in renting

Wang’s land, also filed a plaint in which he stated that Chen’s young son had in fact

“died from some illness.”297

This document again paints the dispute in purely economic terms, clearly laying out the terms of the rental and the consequences of Chen’s inability to recover his initial deposit on the land. As Chen himself reported: “I rely on the deposit to pay a deposit”298 – meaning that he first had to recover the monies deposited on Wang’s land before he could move and put down a deposit on a new piece of farmland, leaving him trapped in his dispute with Wang. Chen was unable to extract himself from this economic relationship despite concerted local attempts at mediation.

Even in his first plaint, Chen had reported that the community had intervened on his behalf, but that Wang had still not returned his deposit. Chen again stressed the failure of community mediation in his second plaint, but it was not simply that the community could not help him; it actively worked against him by witnessing the public pledge in which Chen (apparently against his will) had renounced his right to the deposit.299 With this act, a segment of the local community deployed its authority to block Chen’s claim.

297 BXDA 7918. 298 Ibid. 299 Six witnesses signed the pledge.

160 In their own report to the court, local community leaders related the basic contours of the quarrel, highlighting their own engagement as it intensified from a simple rent dispute into something more protracted. In fact, the local warden, security chief and village head had visited Chen’s home following his accusation of trouble caused by Wang’s men and the death of his son. They reported that they saw Chen’s things strewn about outside his house and that his son had indeed exhibited injuries on his “face, eyes, upper arms and hands.”300 They also reported that the boy had died the next morning.

Local leaders reported that even before this visit to Chen’s home, they had attempted to mediate the conflict a total of four times. They interceded on Chen’s behalf, arguing that the flood constituted what contemporary insurance companies might deem an “act of God,” which entitled Chen to rent relief. The failure of their interventions to produce an amicable settlement led to the legal case, which had been driven into the court by Chen’s false homicide accusation. Chen was able to continue to push his case by injecting violence into the dispute to keep the court’s attention, though he quickly dropped the murder charge once he no longer needed it. This strategizing suggests both a fairly wide scope of judicial engagement and a keen understanding of how to use the court to one’s advantage. Shockingly, despite the dire dictates of the Qing Code, Chen was not punished for his misrepresentations.

In fact, Chen was rewarded for his stubborn and illegal litigiousness because, in the end, Wang appeased Chen by giving him silver. The first reference to this assistance comes during testimony at court in which Wang states that he had “helped”

300 BXDA 7918.

161 Chen by giving him ten ounces of silver. In testimony from the same hearing, Chen also reported that he was given this money as a result of local mediation. Finally, in signed settlements, both Chen and Wang noted that local leaders had “clearly calculated” the monies owed, and that Chen was given the ten ounces of silver in addition to this amount. But this “help” came as a direct result of Chen’s forcing a court hearing by making a false homicide accusation.

Even though this settlement was mediated by community leaders, the court’s intervention was crucial in motivating the agreement. We cannot say that the parties were “bargaining in the shadow of the law”301 since the dispute was already in court, but the court’s involvement was crucial in achieving a mediated settlement. It was the prospect of a formal court hearing that compelled Wang to agree to a financial settlement out of court. Indeed, it was Chen’s false accusation of homicide that drove the case into court and allowed for its resolution. Chen was thus able to engage the authority of the state to resolve a conflict that was proving intractable at the informal level.

In this one case, we see an almost complete reversal of the court’s stated policies. Instead of discouraging litigation, particularly over small matters, by severely punishing tricksters who attempted to manipulate the court through false accusation, here the opposite occurred. Moreover, Chen was hardly a savvy urbanite. He was a relatively poor tenant farmer whose home registration was a distance of 43 miles from

301 Robert H. Mnookin and Lewis Kornhauser, “Bargaining in the Shadow of the Law: The Case of Divorce,” The Yale Law Journal 88, no. 5 (April 1, 1979): 950-997. Mnookin and Kornhauser explored how the anticipated outcome of a future court case led to pre-courtroom settlements. In this way, the legal system exerted influence even before a dispute reached the court.

162 Chongqing. Chen, a country bumpkin, made his way to the big city and successfully gamed the system.

This case also illuminates the limits to local efforts to diffuse the conflict.

Because he was unsatisfied with the results of village-level mediation, Chen chose to opt out and appeal to a higher authority. His false accusation seems to have been a rejection of more routine systems of resolution. This overturning of normal networks of authority makes the court’s decision to hear the case even odder. But this was not the only example of false accusation going unpunished and the court rewarding the plaintiff.

In 1895, Li Yuting, 35 sui, claimed his mother had been beaten to death by his landlord’s son.302 Li testified: “I rent Zhou Xuansan’s house and land to live [on] and farm. In my spare time I work for other people as a manual laborer. I only leave behind my mother and my younger brother to protect the house when I am working elsewhere. This month on the fifteenth, my landlord’s …wife, Zuo Shi, asked my mother, Long Shi, to her house to wash the mosquito net.”303 Li then stated that his landlord’s son, Zhou Ziyuan, had beaten his mother because the net was still dirty and that his mother had died from her injuries.

This account of a brutal and petty attack on an elderly woman was countered four days later by a plaint from Zhou Xuansan that was also signed by community leaders. This account dismissed Li’s story, saying that his mother had died in an accident: the wall where Long Shi was working was old and had collapsed on her, a sad coincidence that was widely known in the community. Community leaders added

302 BXDA 7863. 303 Ibid.

163 a second plaint of their own in which they further backed Zhou’s account. Finally, an official coroner’s examination concluded that Long Shi had indeed been crushed to death.

In testimony delivered at a hearing four days after his initial plaint, Li stated that his mother “stepped on a stone collapsing [the wall and] crushing her.”304 After backpedaling from his earlier accusation, he furthered testified that Zhou, whose son he had just accused of beating his mother to death, had “helped” him with 24,000 wen to pay for burial expenses. Although both Zhou and community leaders openly questioned Li’s honesty, the court did not punish Li for his falsehoods. Instead, it endorsed Zhou’s gift, noting that Li was quite poor. Whatever the motivations behind

Zhou’s gift, it is clear that by involving the court Li was able to extract 24,000 wen from his landlord. Instead of punishing Li for his scheming, the court sanctioned it.

Li was another rural non-elite who showed surprising agility in working the system. His home village was 37 miles from Chongqing and he was a tenant farmer who also had to hire himself out as a laborer in order to make ends meet. Despite this lowly standing, Li must have known enough to suspect that he would not be punished for his lies, at least not to the full extent mandated by the law. We must assume that individuals would not act in such a way as to risk capital punishment.

Perhaps Zhou’s “help” was an expression of paternalistic obligation from superior to an inferior, a bond that dictated compensation to the weaker party even for a no-fault death. These ties are also seen in suicide and homicide cases and between employee/employer as well landlord/tenant, and suggest that these economic relations

304 Ibid.

164 imbricated one in a more nebulous, ongoing social relationship. 305 But Li’s case complicates our understanding of paternalistic obligations in local society in that it was Li’s obstinate, daring and technically illegal litigation strategy that opened Zhou’s wallet. The landlord’s “help” was evidently a contingent paternalism that depended on the involvement of the court, which Li had sought out and activated with his accusation. In this case, Confucian-style paternalism was set in motion by the willful machinations of a tenant farmer.

Accordingly, this expression of moralism appears less like a guiding principle then a defensive strategy deployed by Zhou to stave off greater intervention by the state into local disputes.306 His “help” was an attempt to return to the authority of the local community by means of both a financial settlement and an appeal to shared, normative values. While this may not constitute “bargaining in the shadow of the law,” the mere possibility for further court intervention evidently produced an out-of-court settlement. Payment was a strategy that minimized the court’s formal role – a strategy that dovetailed with both the court’s abstract notions of good governance and its immediate concerns with getting out from under mountains of litigation. This small encounter suggests another way in which the dominant moral system could be deployed.

While this help was perhaps Zhou’s strategy to escape from the formal legal system, we must remember that it was the farmer’s tactics that brought the dispute to court in the first place. In Li’s actions, we can see a sophisticated use of legal

305 For more on these non-market ties, see Chapter Two and Chapter Three. 306 The state deployed its own paternalism in describing county magistrates as “father and mother officials.”

165 strategies. Li’s false accusation was used to gain entry to the court and access its authority. The attention of the court then worked to force a settlement, moving the dispute back out of the formal legal system. In this one case, we can see both contestants (one powerful and one weak) actively working the system to their benefit.

Li’s actions appear to have been driven by a desire for financial compensation, and can be seen as “profiteering.” But it was not only the weaker party in land relations who could resort to false accusations in order to secure payment. Landlords too could use lies to force their disputes into court. A clash between a landlord and his tenant lasting nearly four years is one instance of such legal manipulation.307 In this case, false accusation was instrumental and served to get the dispute into court.

This protracted case had two phases. The first began in 1887, when Sun

Guofeng, age 40 sui, filed a plaint accusing his mother’s tenant, Chen Rongan, 50 sui, of falling behind in his rent and “allowing” his son to beat Sun’s mother. The feud escalated until finally, according to the plaintiff, the Sun family’s cook was beaten to death. However, the day after he filed his initial plaint, Sun signed a document renouncing his previous statement and claiming that the cook had in fact died of illness. In this new document he admitted that he should not “fabricate” plaints submitted to the court.

This swift reversal was followed by signed statements from others involved in the case, including community leaders. The following day Chen filed his own plaint detailing the dispute from his perspective. He claimed that there had been no problem in paying the rent and that the deceased cook, Tang Xingfa, had committed suicide for

307 BXDA 7660.

166 unrelated reasons. Chen stressed that Sun was of dubious moral quality and that Tang had been stealing his grain. Finally, Chen accused Sun of bilking his family for money and causing trouble, and reported that community leaders were already involved.

At this point, the conflict seemed on its way to resolution. However, roughly three years later, Chen was back in court, claiming that his landlord was still harassing him and that Sun had changed his name in order to continue his false accusations.

Most egregiously, Sun had kidnapped Chen’s son and demanded a ransom of 30 liang of silver for his release. Neighbors, witnesses and community leaders all supported

Chen’s account: they admitted that the local community had been unable to broker a resolution and noted that this had driven Chen to court.

Unfortunately, the records do not contain the case’s conclusion (if there was one), but in the documents that survive, we see how the homicide accusation fell away almost immediately, whereas the economic dispute – and the larger court case – continued. As with the previous example, Sun’s bald accusation of murder served to get the dispute into court; it was instrumental.

Sun’s actions suggest that he was engaged in a profiteering form of false accusation. The cook’s death was an opportunity and excuse to further his claims in an ongoing economic dispute. The rapidity with which the murder accusation was dropped – within a single day – is rather shocking. The accusation had offered the thinnest possible veneer of violence, yet the case continued. Once involved, the court continued to hear the economic complaints. Since there is no conclusion in the records, we cannot know if Sun was punished, rewarded, or simply dismissed. But, the duration of the case shows that Sun at least succeeded in having the court hear his

167 dispute. The second phase of the case, in 1890, lasted a full six months before the records disappear. Bold-faced lying was not without its benefits.

It is also important to stress the relationship that constrained the two sides.

This was a dispute between landlord and tenant, and it was the landlord who first pressed the case. However, once the dispute reached the court, it was the tenant, Chen, who turned to the court for relief. In this case, it was not because the local power structures scuttled his chances for a favorable outcome – indeed the community leaders seemed to support him – but because a single, relatively powerful individual308 obstinately pressed his demands, apparently even resorting to private justice in detaining Chen’s son.309 Melissa Macauley has noted that: “one does not encounter many cases of tenants taking on their landlords. The presumption of an ongoing economic relationship would have militated against tenants routinely resorting to litigious attack.”310 But evidently there were exceptions. Once a dispute had moved into the court, its power was available to both sides.

Macauley’s observation seems predicated on the existence of stable and ongoing economic relations. In Chen’s dispute the ongoing clash had upset any sense of harmony in the relationship. Yet surprisingly, Chen and Sun remained locked in this economic relationship for at least four years. Clearly, theirs was not an entanglement that could be easily escaped. Despite the fact that this relationship was clearly fraught with tension, neither party cut ties. Even though land may have been commodified, there remained extra-economic constraints that continued to shape economic

308 Guofeng was a “doctor” as well as a landlord, suggesting that his family had at least some means at their disposal, and particularly compared to a tenant farmer such as Rongan. 309 For more on private detainment, see Chapter Two. 310 Macauley, Social Power and Legal Culture, 166.

168 relationships. Why didn’t Chen rent a different field and release himself from Sun’s torments? We cannot know this, but clearly the relationship, even when damaged, was not easily discarded.

In a slight variation on the seemingly crude profit seeking found in the above cases, the plight of an old man adds shades of grey to our discussion of “profiteering” false accusation. In 1890, Zeng Yuanfa, 62 sui, filed the following plaint:

I rely on my son, Zeng Mingtang’s physical labor for support. This year in the first month, Tan Sangao’s people hired my son to work for his landlord Rao Zanting’s family as a hired hand. They gave an annual wage of 160 chuan. I can prove this matter. Late on the 29th day of the fourth month, Sangao and his man Stonemason Liu carried my son [home] – by the time he entered the house, he was already dead. I summoned the community leaders and my neighbors to examine my son’s body. His fingers were black. Zanting claimed he had died of cholera.311

The father then claimed that he had been pressured into accepting terms for the burial, although he conceded that it had been done properly. He also admitted that his son’s employer had paid him his son’s wages for a full year. But despite all this, Zeng remained unsatisfied.

This plaint was followed the next day by an account from community leaders.

In this document, the authorities reported that Zeng’s son was a long-term laborer

[changgong], a status that diminished his formal independence and increased his employer’s responsibility for him.312 The community leaders’ account continued, saying Zeng’s son had killed himself for unknown reasons and had died at home.

311 BXDA 7658. 312 Long-term contract workers were legally considered part of their employer’s household and as such were penalized more severely for violations against them, mirroring the Confucian hierarchy that supported the head of the family.

169 Moreover, they noted that Zeng had been paid his son’s wages as well as funeral expenses, and that he had signed a statement confirming the death as a no-fault suicide.

However, despite the community’s best efforts, Zeng had persisted in his

“troublemaking.”

The community leaders’ involvement had begun immediately after the death and included drafting a document signed by Zeng in which he absolved the deceased’s employer, Rao Wang Shi, of any wrongdoing or further responsibility. This document was attached to a plaint from Wang Shi, who also stated that Zeng’s son had died at home and that his father had been paid his wages as well as funeral expenses. The signed agreement, which was witnessed by six men including the scribe, declared that

Mingtang “had encountered misfortune while returning home and killed himself by consuming poison.”313 The document also stated that Zeng’s family was poor and consequently unable to provide for a proper funeral. As a result, the community would provide him with a year’s worth of his son’s salary for funeral expenses. From other documents it is clear that the burden of paying this debt fell to Wang Shi’s family.

Despite the weight of the employer’s account backed by the community leaders and his own signed agreement, Zeng continued his case at court by filing another plaint. In this document, he claimed that he had never received his son’s wages. This was the crux of the case: a matter of money. Zeng’s initial plaint did not carry a bold accusation of violence or other wrongdoing. Instead, it inserted uncertainty into the account and suggested the possibility of foul play. This muddying of the waters was sufficient to gain the court’s attention.

313 BXDA 7658.

170 If Zeng vigorously pushed his case and the court accepted it, it seems to have been at least in part because of Zeng’s desperate position. At the outset, Zeng made clear that he relied on his son’s support to make ends meet; his son’s death cast his own survival into doubt. Both he and the court looked to routine mechanisms of local support, in this case the employer’ obligation to look after employees and their families, to safeguard his future. Still one can imagine Zeng attempting to maximize the payoff for his son’s death. He would no longer draw regular support from his son’s labor, so he needed a large final payment to survive. The audacity of Zeng’s accusation is reinforced by the vast asymmetry in the power relations between Zeng

(the poor father of a tenant farmer) and the landlord family he challenged. Moreover,

Zeng brought his case to court from a distance of nearly 25 miles. In this conflict, a poor villager sought redress by making a flimsy accusation against a landlord in a distant county seat.

Zeng’s actions could be viewed as simple profiteering, but the precariousness of his situation – an old man without other means of support – softened the impact of his actions. Returning to our other instances of “profiteering” false accusation, we must consider abject desperation as motivating at least some of these other litigants as well. The death of a relative offered an opportunity – and perhaps a lifeline – for those in dire circumstances.

In these instances of “profiteering” false accusation, it was typically the weaker party in an economic relationship that brought the dispute to court. In the single instance in which a landlord brought his tenant to court, the tenant farmer was able to make use of the court to seek redress from the harassment he experienced at

171 the hands of his landlord. In this case, the tenant appeared to have the backing of the community leaders. But in the main, these cases suggest that false accusation was primarily a “weapon of the weak”314 that sought to force compliance with customary norms and, perhaps more importantly, financial compensation for perceived wrongs or damages.

In these cases, as well as suicides,315 one can see the court acting to support the weaker party even in situations that were explicitly no-fault deaths. This practice seemingly parallels the US legal system’s mandating of payment in civil wrongful death suits even when criminal charges have been dismissed. We should be hesitant to declare this civil justice, but must stress the expanded scope and flexibility these practices offered magistrates. But first one had to get the dispute before a magistrate, and false accusation could be the price of admission.

Seeking Justice from Afar: “Compassionate” False Accusation

While the previous section highlighted false accusation as a tool for seeking financial compensation or even profit, this section stresses another reason for making false claims at court. In the following cases, falsehoods had a “compassionate” cast in as much as they were produced as part of an effort to find justice for a deceased family member. Frequently, one family member had been separated from another, often due to economic necessity, and thus was unable to exercise regular oversight and protection of relatives. In these cases, social expectations generated by family ties had been weakened by everyday obligations. Consequently, family members would

314 Scott, Weapons of the Weak. 315 See Chapter Three for a discussion of suicide.

172 intervene after the fact through the irregular channels of the court. These false accusations were expressions of familial responsibility and, perhaps, post-mortem attempts to perform the protective role that was an essential element of kinship bonds.

In 1890, Zhang Xingshun, 34 sui, filed a plaint reporting that his landlord’s family was stealing from him.316 While he worked in Chongqing as a barber, his younger brother, Zhang Dafa, had remained in their home village roughly 37 miles outside the county seat. One evening on his way home, Dafa spotted his landlord’s uncle cutting bamboo on the lands Xingshun had rented. When Dafa tried to stop him, a fight broke out. Xingshun claimed that his brother was stabbed during this altercation and later died from his wounds.

In a counter-plaint filed the next day, community leaders presented a different account. They stated that there had been a fight, both physical and verbal, between

Dafa and one of the landlord’s relatives, Bao Rongting. However, they claimed that

Dafa died from illness and not from injuries sustained during the fight. They further explained that the situation had been mediated locally with Dafa’s father. This settlement included a proper funeral, which had been funded in part by Bao. Xingshun was not aware of any of this, they claimed, because he had been away in Chongqing.

In subsequent testimony, Xingshun confirmed the community leaders’ account, now reporting that his brother had died of illness and making no mention of a stabbing. He described the altercation between Dafa and Rongting in exactly the same terms as the community leaders had presented it: a verbal argument with some wrestling. In this case, distance caused uncertainty: at the time of his brother’s death,

316 BXDA 7859.

173 Xingshun had been 37 miles away and was unsure of exactly what had happened.

Consequently, he used the court to intervene rather than trust local reports and local mediation. He had become alienated from his own local contexts. Even though he continued to have responsibilities back in the village, he resided in Chongqing.

Xingshun’s sojourning in Chongqing provided money to rent land but his absence made the family vulnerable to local predation.

The Xing’an Huilan [Conspectus of Legal Cases] presents several cases like this in which lies spoken as attempts to ensure justice for family members were treated by courts as less pernicious than “normal” false accusation cases, suggesting that the state was sensitive to this other type of lying and that it should be treated differently.317 Given that the aim of the Conspectus was to provide guidance for magistrates in adjudicating tricky cases, the attention given to compassionate false accusation suggests that these cases were singled out as deserving special sensitivity.318 After all, the individuals in these cases were attempting to seek justice for family members, a pursuit generally supported by official Qing ideology.

A similar family dynamic animated a dispute from 1890 in which a woman accused her granddaughter’s mother-in-law, Li Zhu Shi, of causing the girl’s death.319

The plaintiff, Old Zhou Zhang Shi, reported that her granddaughter’s father-in-law had died just after the girl was married. Following his death, Zhu Shi began to harass and mistreat the girl. Zhang Shi claimed that this abuse caused the girl’s death (from

317 Xing an Hui Lan San Bian (Beijing: Beijing gu ji chu ban she, 2004), 1712. 318 These compassionate cases also account for the majority of the cases presented by Bodde and Morris. See, Derk Bodde and Clarence Morris, Law in Imperial China: Exemplified by 190 Ch’ing Dynasty Cases (Translated from the Hsing-an Hui-lan), With Historical, Social, and Juridical Commentaries (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967). 319 BXDA 7651.

174 illness), though she did not explain how the two were connected. Zhang Shi also complained that Zhu Shi had failed to inform her promptly about her granddaughter’s death and of giving her a cheap and unworthy burial. Finally, Zhang Shi alleged that

Zhu Shi had had her and her daughter-in-law both bound and beaten.

Zhu Shi’s family, responding to this pile of accusations, claimed that the girl had been chronically ill since her marriage nearly three years earlier. They further stated that they had agreed when the girl’s relatives wanted to take her to see a doctor and even paid the costs for the medicine. Family members later testified that Zhang

Shi had been included in every stage of her granddaughter’s illness and burial. Finally, they alleged that once they were at the temple, Zhang Shi went berserk and “ran around like crazy” smashing windows and tools. At this point, they sought redress through community mediation.

Mediation should have augured well for Zhang Shi since the man leading this local effort, Zhou Tongxing, was related to Zhang Shi, but local attempts at settlement were largely ineffective. Although they began immediately after the girl’s funeral, these efforts failed to prevent Zhang Shi from bringing the case to court. Unable to find satisfaction at the local level, Zhang Shi sought out intervention from the court. In order to do so, she needed the power of a false, if vague, homicide accusation. The court, however, offered her no escape either, finding that the girl had died of “blood stasis.”320

320 “Blood stasis” [gan xue lao] refers to tuberculosis or a host of blood disorders. For more on the subject see, Gunter R. Neeb, Blood Stasis: China’s Classical Concept in Modern Medicine (London: Churchill Livingstone, 2006).

175 Despite the court’s unwillingness to accept Zhang Shi’s narrative, this case suggests the ways in which family members could use litigation to press for proper treatment of dead relatives. At its root, this case stemmed from a dispute over the proper burial of the dead girl. Zhang Shi pressed her demand for better treatment while the girl was alive. Then, following her granddaughter’s death, she intensified her demands by making a violent pubic scene at the funeral. Finally, finding no redress, she took her complaint to court. In order to access this venue, she had to claim that the mother-in-law’s treatment had somehow led to the girl’s death. This vague accusation ensured that her dispute was heard.

It seems that Zhang Shi also engaged in an individual form of “rough music”

(or charivari) to shame the deceased’s in-laws. E.P. Thompson defined rough music as

“a rude cacophony, with or without more elaborate ritual, which usually directed mockery or hostility against individuals who offended against certain community norms.”321 These rites were found across Europe and were a conservative force that enforced normative local values. Charivari was “very much in the service of the village community,” serving to clarify rights and duties borne by different individuals.

When it worked, excessive violence was eschewed.322 Charivari “was basically a rite of intolerance employed in communities that were deeply threatened by any manifestation of difference. Charivari resolved conflict and furthered it.”323

Zhang Shi’s actions may not perfectly reproduce the European model in that she acted as an individual rather than as part of a collective, but there is a parallel. Her

321 E P Thompson, Customs in Common (London: Merlin Press, 2009), 467. 322 Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France: Eight Essays (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975), 107. 323 Edward Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 111.

176 actions, like rough music, were a public performance of her displeasure that served to shame and humiliate her adversary. This emotive act was a precursor to her engagement of the legal system. Indeed, the performance of displeasure continued at court. In his study of late medieval legal culture, Daniel Smail writes that “part of the reason why certain people chose to invest in litigation lies in its publicity. Hatreds and social sanctions of all types are useless unless they are advertised to a general public, and the courts of law were geared toward publicity.”324 In this way, litigants used the courts to gain emotional satisfaction. But the plaintiff first had to gain access to the court in order to use it as a stage. This was where false accusation came in.

A similar compassionate form of false accusation was at work in a case from

1900. Yang Jinyuan, 31 sui, filed a plaint claiming that his younger sister, Yang Shi, had been beaten to death by her husband, Wang San.325 According to Yang, the friction between the couple was driven by Wang’s laziness and Yang Shi’s frequent criticism of his sloth. Wang San’s mother, by contrast, argued that Jinyuan was trying to profit from his sister’s death and that everybody knew the girl had died from illness.326 She further claimed that Jinyuan was not present for his sister’s death because of his own mother’s funeral, suggesting that he was overcompensating for his ignorance of actual events. She noted that community leaders had already been

324 Daniel Lord Smail, The Consumption of Justice: Emotions, Publicity, and Legal Culture in Marseille, 1264-1423 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 132. 325 BXDA 7974. 326 Acts of compassionate false accusation were frequently countered with accusations of profiteering, linking to two in Qing society as well as in this discussion.

177 involved in the dispute, in part because Jinyuan and others had allegedly broken into her home and smashed things.327

The autopsy report that followed supported Yang’s assertions in concluding that the girl had died of disease. Despite this contrary evidence, Jinyuan persisted in his accusation of murder. This perseverance prompted testimony from Wang San, who described the circumstances of his wife’s death:

We were married three years. During that time she frequently fell ill, of this there is no doubt. This year, last month, my wife suddenly fell ill. The doctor treated her without success. On the sixth day of the month, she died as a result of the illness. At that time, we notified her mother, Yang Mou Shi, who came to our house and saw [everything].328

In addition to the participation of his wife’s mother, Wang furthered claimed that the burial had been cleared with community leaders.

Despite the seeming lack of contention surrounding the girl’s death, according to Wang, Jinyuan had arrived the next day at Wang’s house and smashed things.

Wang responded to this violence by calling on community leaders, who were unable to mediate a settlement. At court, these leaders buttressed Wang’s account by filing a plaint detailing both the conflict and their interventions.

Faced with this comprehensive rebuttal, Jinyuan backed off his claim slightly, admitting that there were no injuries visible on his sister’s corpse. Finally, after much court wrangling, Jinyuan admitted that his sister had not been killed: “In fact, she died

327 This was perhaps another performance of rough music. 328 BXDA 7974.

178 from illness and there was nothing else to it.”329 In this same court session, the deceased’s other natal relatives testified that the girl was often sick and had died of illness. That same day, Jinyuan signed documents ending the court case.

In this conflict, the separation of family members seemed to drive conflict and suspicion. Those no longer quite present in each other’s lives still felt familial obligations and perhaps a need to compensate for their failure to protect the deceased.

These instances of compassionate false accusation stand in stark relief to cases in which the main motivation seems to have been financial compensation. In these compassionate cases, falsehoods seem to have been told in an effort to discover the truth through official investigation and to obtain justice for their dead. Relatives wanted to draw in the authority of the state and use its power to conduct an investigation that was less beholden to local power structures. It is certainly possible that those engaging in “compassionate” false accusations simply relied on the trope of the concerned relative to mask their desire for profit, but clearly both “profiteering” and “compassionate” forms were strategies for advancing one’s case at court. This strategizing suggests a sophisticated understanding of how and where to bend the legal system to one’s advantage. Conversely, these cases also sketch a wider sphere of engagement for the court in local dispute resolution. Despite official injunctions, magistrates did demonstrate a willingness to interject the legal system’s authority into the rather petty disputes of Qing subjects.

Manufacturing the Truth

329 Ibid.

179 The charge of false accusation was predicated on the ability to determine what actually happened in a given conflict. Without this baseline, no accusation could be deemed false. But in many cases, the sequence of events was obscured or contested. In these instances, the court played its role as arbiter – first establishing an official narrative and then affixing value to people’s actions by judging them good/legal or bad/illegal. In this way, we can consider the court as a center for the production of truth: not absolute truth, but legal truth. Bestowing this mantle on one version of a conflict was not arbitrary, but magistrates had to base their decisions on the available evidence, which often included flawed, incomplete, and disputative accounts. Once fixed, the official narrative could have powerful, even fatal, consequences. Sally Engle

Merry writes: “Law works in the world not just by the imposition of rules and punishments but also by its capacity to construct authoritative images of social relationships and actions, images which are symbolically powerful.”330 While the courtroom is a site of domination, the power of the law’s “images” does not vanish outside the courtroom. Instead, “legal words and practices are cultural constructs which carry powerful meanings not just to those trained in the law or to those who routinely use it to manage their business transactions but to the ordinary person as well.”331

In cases where the “truth” was murky, this truth making is visible in court records. Magistrates often relied heavily on those in positions of local power to make their decisions. So while the court could be a site of resistance, legal truths often

330 Sally Engle Merry, Getting Justice and Getting Even: Legal Consciousness Among Working-Class Americans (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1990), 8. 331 Ibid.

180 reinforced normative power structures. As Merry has observed, “law creates structures of legitimation for relations of power that already exist, acting in a conservative fashion to support existing systems of power and control;”332 in Ba County, this could be done through labeling claims “false accusations.”

A case from 1890 illustrates the role of existing power structures in manufacturing “false” accusations. Wu De’an, 41 sui, filed a plaint claiming that his nephew had been beaten to death. Wu stated:

When my sister was young she was married to Cheng Huitang and gave birth to a son, Pinsan. When he was only two, my sister died from illness. Huitang took a second wife, Lin Shi, and had two more boys: Cheng Er (who became a Buddhist monk) [and] Cheng San. Huitang followed [my sister] in death. Lin Shi then plotted to dominate the family mill. In a hundred ways she was ill willed and petty to my sister’s son [and] particularly cheated the weaklings in her family. To me and others and [even] to her kin she was distant, particularly in her treatment of my nephew. Her heart was wicked and she plotted murder. Last year on the thirtieth day of the twelfth month, she had the audacity to order Pinsan bound and beaten and he fell to the floor. In protest, he went on a hunger strike and died, and she ordered him secretly/privately buried. The family didn’t find out that any of this had happened until later on.333

This version of the conflict was contested the very next day in a plaint submitted by the deceased’s mother, 74-sui Cheng Xie Shi, the deceased’s mother. She accused De’an of blackmail and presented the conflict in starkly different terms. In her version, her grandson Pinsan had been given his inheritance of over 120 ounces of silver, but he had squandered it. After his own wife died, Pinsan had become reckless and wild in his behavior. In her

332 Sally Engle Merry, Colonizing Hawai’i (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 264. 333 BXDA 7650.

181 subsequent testimony, she elaborated on his irresponsibility, saying he smoked opium until his debts “overflowed” and that he would “stop at nothing.”334 She further described how, even though Pinsan and his half-brothers had divided their father’s household and lived separately, Pinsan was dropped off in a sedan chair at Xie Shi’s house and died there.

Community leaders repeatedly weighed in on Xie Shi’s side, stating that they had seen the body and that Pinsan had been properly buried. In the end, the court accepted their version of events. But it is impossible to know for certain what actually occurred. Perhaps it was the family and Xie Shi who were making “false accusations.” Maybe a family that now saw him as superfluous and a drain on their resources had murdered Pinsan. We cannot know, but we can say that the court, in its ruling, bestowed the mantle of truth on Xie Shi’s version of events. The opacity of events limits us to comparing representations of reality without ever fully knowing their objective truth. We must be wary of unconsciously replicating the biases and power imbalances that may have existed in a given situation.

B.J. ter Haar’s study of the White Lotus lays bare the dangers posed by the historian’s uncritical acceptance of labels used by figures or institutions of authority to denounce less powerful groups or individuals. He writes: “Labels form a kind of closed system, always accurate for those who apply them, and providing justification for actions against the labeled phenomena.”335 A similar

334 Ibid. 335 B. J. ter Harr, White Lotus Teachings in Chinese Religious History (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999), 14.

182 naming power exists in court records, where “false accusation” can serve to label an individual to be punished. This is precisely the point of naming an individual as “criminal.” And in this conflict, we see the power of the court to name and create truth as well as the power of local actors to shape the truth presented to the court. If Xie Shi was able to have her version of the truth accepted and sanctioned by the court, she was able to do so as a result of her ability to marshal family authority and local community leaders. Her use of these tactics serves to highlight the means by which judicial truth was created and the degree to which this process was framed by existing power relations.

In another case that suggests acts of “truth” making, a tailor claimed that his cousin-in-law had been murdered.336 Zhong Maolin, 26 sui, filed a plaint in which he reported:

I am a tailor. This year in the first month, I went to Jiangjin337 to practice my craft. My wife’s uncle, Guo Liang, died of illness in the fourth year of the reign of the Guangxu emperor. He left behind [his son] Liuyuan. The next year [Liuyuan’s] mother, Huang Shi, remarried to Zou Guirong as his legal wife. Liuyuan followed his mother to live in Zou’s home and was raised there for ten years. Suddenly last month on the 23rd, Liuyuan died. I was not informed. Guirong’s servant secretly buried him. This month on the 11th, I returned and went to Guirong’s to call on him. Guirong blurted out that Liuyuan had been beaten to death by someone. I was shocked. I asked all around. It seems that Guirong’s sons, Zou San and Zou Qi, had argued [with Liuyuan] on the street, and they beat him to death. I reported this story to the [community leaders] for investigation.338

In this document and others, Zhong presented himself as an interested family member and advocate. He argued that shifting family dynamics left Liuyuan vulnerable to his

336 BXDA 7652. 337 Jiangjin is southwest of Chongqing also on the Yangzi River. 338 BXDA 7652.

183 stepbrothers’ predation. However, Huang Shi and community leaders submitted their own plaint that offered a radically different picture.

In this account, Liuyuan, who was 15 sui, had gotten into an argument with another boy while playing. When he returned home he was “admonished” by his mother. Liuyuan then “timidly” swallowed a large amount of opium and died the following day. The local community contributed 15 strings of cash to the funeral expenses, and produced a public burial notice. This notice is included in the court file and it carefully details the cause of death, the monies given, and an explicit statement that all family members –both those present and absent – should accept the death and get on with their own lives without causing trouble. This document was signed by several family members and included the names of twenty-two witnesses. This public fixing of the terms of Liuyuan’s death seems to represent an effort to anticipate

Zhong’s complaints and render them null.

Describing his own motivations, Zhong said he had misgivings about the death that would not go away. Zhong’s reservations challenged the local community’s agreed-upon understanding of Liuyuan’s death. In the end, however, the court upheld this local truth, and Zhong was ordered flogged with the light bamboo. It is interesting here both that Zhong was punished for false accusation, a rarity in our cases, and that the punishment seems rather ad hoc since it deviates from the prescriptions the Code.

The beating seems less an official verdict than an informal expression of the magistrate’s displeasure with Zhong for causing trouble.

In this case, false accusation was not a winning strategy. Zhong’s beating was in part a result of the united stand of the local community, including both family and

184 community leaders. These local power structures influenced the court’s understanding of the situation. Not knowing what actually happened, we are free to focus on the processes that led to the court’s decisions and to stress the influence of asymmetrical power relations in the magistrate’s crafting of a legal truth. The court here added its weight to this asymmetry, reinforcing normative social relations – and local power holders’ privileged place within them. For like everywhere, these disputes were

“fundamentally struggles over the definition and shape of social relationships. They concern the duties and obligations of marriage and family life, the shape of relationships between friends and lovers, the meaning of being a neighbor. Although property claims often become involved as a means of talking about the way people have behaved, the central issues are the obligations and expectations of social relationships.”339

Conclusion

This examination of false accusation has exposed the sophisticated strategies

Qing subjects employed to get their day in court. Individuals resorted to bold and potentially dangerous accusations to further their claims. Such maneuvers suggest that they had a reasonable expectation that their falsehoods would succeed in gaining the magistrate’s ear without provoking severe punishment. Strikingly, we find a wide range of individuals engaging in this behavior, including the rural poor. Further, the frequent successful use of this strategy exposes the county court’s expanded sphere of engagement. Instead of turning away cases based on hollow accusations, magistrates

339 Merry, Getting Justice and Getting Even, 13.

185 went out of their way to rule on the rather petty disputes that lay at their core. Just as commoners pushed up to get into the court, magistrates for their part seemed interested in reaching down to expand their role in the county. The legal system thus became a conduit through which the state reached out into local society, even as this medium was also accessed by locals. It was a system of exchange. Given the number of non-elite and rural actors actively (and illegally) pursuing their interests at court, we must begin to imagine an enlarged and rowdy legal culture at work in the county. This wider web of legal action tied local communities, local leaders as well as common peasants, to the authority of the state, in as much as the county court was the face of the state at the local level.

In this way, the study of false accusation allows us to see an important aspect of the exchange between state and society, charting how the state became engaged in local disputes. In his study of appeals to the Roman curia, Charles Duggan, notes that

“the process was activated from the periphery, not from the center, by litigants not by judges.”340 In the use of false accusation, we can see late Qing subjects similarly drawing the power of the center into their local disputes.

While this venture may have served to release some individuals from the grip of local authorities, it also bound the Qing population more closely to the authority of the state. Here, at the very end of the nineteenth century, the state continued to play an important role in defusing local conflicts. Late Qing subjects continued to seek out the

340 Charles Duggen, “Papal Judges Delegates and the ‘New Law,’” in Cultures of Power: Lordship, Status, and Process in Twelfth-Century Europe, ed. Thomas N. Bisson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 195.

186 authority of the state, and would resort to cunning and even illegal strategies to do so.

In this account, the state continues to hang on to its local authority.

187

5. Objects, Conflict and Routine Violence

Introduction

This chapter uses things – everyday items – to expose processes of local disputation. Often in the course of disputes one party, along with a group of relatives or friends, descended on the home of their adversary and carried off or destroyed property, occasionally assaulting the victim as well. These clashes were sufficiently routine parts of local disputes that such “ritualized” smashing and looting can be seen in many legal cases. These individuals were not acting randomly, but were drawing from a shared social script. Occasionally, their clashes generated lists of objects damaged or stolen during the affray.341 Such catalogues, in turn, lay bare routine practices of local violence. They also reveal secondary fronts in local disputes that ran parallel to the formal court process, providing insight into the performance of local conflicts.

In these conflicts, the objects themselves were props for emotive displays in public.342 These community-level, ritualized acts of violence were subsequently absorbed into the formal state system of dispute resolution, influencing the court’s ongoing consideration of the original conflict. Disputes at court were not static

341 This property would be listed in an appendix to a plaint from the victim seeking redress. 342 The public-ness of these performances stands in contrast to those made within the formal confines at court rather than in regard to some stringent notion of a public/private divide.

188 snapshots of social conflict, but one expression of an often ongoing clash. While the court case might be distant and periodic, the quarrel continued to have an active – and often violent – daily life in the local community. The court, then, was a forum for dispute resolution that was exploited in concert – simultaneously – with a range of other strategies, including local mediation, private justice, and outright violence. This multiplicity of dispute-resolution practices was an essential feature of disputation in the Qing.343

Smashing Things

The lists of destroyed items included in some case files lead us out of the court and back to the village, exposing ritualized dispute practices in local communities.

This chapter employs a rather loose definition of ritual that emphasizes Durkheim’s conceptualization of its constructive aspects: “it is by uttering the same cry, pronouncing the same word, or performing the same gesture in regard to some object that [rituals] become the necessary way for achieving group cohesion.”344 The groups strengthened by this cohesion were nested inside still larger groups, with ritual serving to divide as well as unify. In short, ritual was a social tool. David Kertzer, elaborating on this Durheimian approach, writes: “What is important about rituals, then, is not that they deal with supernatural beings, but rather that they provide a powerful way in

343 “Multiplicity” should not be confused with “parallel” given the clear hierarchy of power in which state force was ultimately dominant. 344 Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (New York: Free Press, 1995.), 272.

189 which people’s social dependence can be expressed.”345 In this view, the lived experience of ritual is its key element.

These processes are laid bare in a case of almost Shakespearian tragedy from

1891. That year, 47-sui Jin Wu Shi filed a plaint accusing Peng Zifa of beating her teenage son to death.346 In response to this accusation, the magistrate ordered an investigation.

Five days later, a court report penned by the magistrate described the crime scene: “Jin Wu Shi has reported the location where her son, Jin San, also known as

Peng Changshou, died. The spot is called the Big Field. It has [a building consisting of] three thatched huts connecting in a row. In the middle is the central room, on the left side is Peng Zifa’s marital bedroom, and on the right side is the kitchen.”347 In addition to this depiction of the crime scene, there was also an initial examination of the body:

[The corpse] is facing upward, the facial expression is serene; both eyes are slightly open; the mouth is [also] slightly open; the ribs have a line of three wounds on the left side; the first wound runs obliquely for two cun two fen in length; the second wound is one cun and seven or eight fen; each wound is uniformly three fen wide; they are purplish red in color; they are all wounds from a bamboo rod. The belly is flat; the two legs are extended together; the left and right arms each have one wound; each [wound] runs obliquely for one cun and eight or nine fen in length; they are all purplish red in color; they were made by a bamboo rod. On the back of his left leg there is an oblique wound two cun eight fen in length and one cun five fen wide; it is discolored black and blue; it was made by a wooden cudgel.348

345 David I. Kertzer, Ritual, Politics, and Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 9. 346 BXDA 7728. 347 Ibid. 348 Ibid.

190 The coroner’s report concluded that the deceased died from these wounds. Wu Shi followed this examination with a request to bury her son, which was granted. At this point in the case, we have only the cold facts of the corpse but not the context that led to the individual’s death. Without this narrative, the corpse remains an inert object. It required animation, which came the same day in testimony at court.

Wu Shi spoke first: “The deceased, Jin San, also known as Peng Chengshou, is my son. Because my husband died, my family is very poor. Getting food every day was extremely difficult until, after discussing it with my relatives, I gave Jin San up in adoption to Peng Zifa, who took him as his heir.”349 She then left to work as a casual laborer in Jiangbei. But earlier this month, her brother-in-law, Jin Wenming, came to

Jiangbei and told her that Zifa had beaten her son to death after he had trampled on the neighbor’s graves while driving an ox and that Zifa was planning on concealing the circumstances of her son’s death from her. She returned home to examine the body, but, she reported, Zifa would not let her inside his home to view the body, locking himself inside until she called village leaders for help.

This account, not surprisingly, was supported by Wu Shi’s brother-in-law’s testimony. Her own lineage leaders also supported her story, though without the same degree of detail. They testified that they had overseen the adoption, which had gone smoothly, and that Wu Shi later reported to them the beating death of her son at the hands of Zifa. These lineage representatives went with village leaders to see the corpse

349 Ibid.

191 and reported that it showed severe wounds.350 They then came with Wu Shi to court to report the matter.

The deceased man’s wife, Peng Xu Shi, testified next. After establishing her relationship to those involved, Xu Shi noted that Zifa was not in court, the first explicit reference to his absence.351 She did not explain this but simply narrated her version of the events leading to Jin San’s death: on the fourth of the same month, Jin

San was working the ox in the field when the animal trampled on the Du family’s graves destroying them. The Du family was Zifa’s landlord. That night, they told Zifa what had happened and he flew into a rage, beating Jin San with a bamboo cudgel.

When Xu Shi and Zifa’s wife, Peng Yu Shi, tried to protect Jin San, Zifa beat them as well. Terrified, Xu Shi fled outside to hide and less than an hour later, her husband was dead. The next day Jin San was buried, Xu Shi alleged, because Wu Shi was bound to come and want to see the corpse and they hoped to prevent her from discovering the cause of his death. This speculation conformed to Wu Shi’s allegation of a cover up by Zifa.

Eleven days after this testimony, Zifa’s wife, Yu Shi, filed her own plaint. In this document, she described a very different clash:

Jin Wu Shi, along with [her husband] Pockmarked Jin the Fourth, had given her young son, Jin San, in adoption to my husband, Peng Zifa, as his son. We changed his name to Peng Changshou. The adoption contract was clear and witnessed. This year [he turned] 17 sui and we have already taken Xu Shi as a daughter-in-law without any problems.

350 The two individuals representing the clan Wu Shi married into, Jin Hongfa and Jin Dexuan, refer to themselves as zuzheng, or lineage representatives, and the village leaders are, in this case, the baozheng, the security head, and the jianzheng, the warden. Another village leader, the xiangyue, a village head, testified along similar lines. 351 The list of individuals involved in the case [shendan] also noted that Zifa was not present.

192 Out of nowhere on the third, Changshou was cutting the grass and somehow encountered disaster, whereupon he came back home and hanged himself. Then his birthmother, along with Pockmarked Jin the Fourth, with the backing of their neighbors, demanded six strings cash. Then on the 12th, Pockmarked Jin the Fourth and six others… repeatedly came to the house smashing things to bully and intimidate us. My husband fled and hid.352

Not only did this testimony offer an explanation for Zifa’s absence, it also fundamentally altered the terms of the conflict, depicting Zifa as the victim and denying the homicide charge. Moreover, it shifted the crux of the conflict away from

Jin San’s death and onto his birth family’s behavior following his demise, altering the case from an accusation of homicide to one of bullying and intimidation.

This recasting of the conflict was followed by dramatic news of Zifa’s arrest.

A brief report from village leaders in a nearby market town announced that they had detained Zifa and turned him over to court runners. Following his capture, Zifa filed his own plaint, reiterating his wife’s claims regarding the Jin family’s attempt to extort money for the burial. Moreover, Zifa alleged that a village leader, Wu Yuanyi, had conspired with the Jin family to intimidate and bully him.

To add further specificity to his accusations, Zifa appended a list of 14 items stolen by his tormentors: over eight dan of food grains; four dan eight dou of sorghum; over one dou of green peas; blue wadded cotton quilts for three beds; a man’s gown, underpants and undershirt; a tin vessel for tea or wine; over 120 jin of cured meat; over four dou of glutinous rice; over two dou of rice beans; over two dou of soy beans; two burlap mosquito nets; four hoes and rakes; silver ornaments worth three liang eight in cash; and a range of household items such as pots bowls and a

352 Ibid.

193 table. The list also notes that various other odds and ends were damaged but not included on the list.353 These allegedly stolen items were mainly foodstuffs and other things found in the kitchen, with the exception of the silver, which may have just been a target of opportunity in the melee. This list is basically an inventory of the contents of a fairly prosperous farmer’s house.

The precision of this accusation seems to have had its intended effect. The magistrate’s rescript on Zifa’s plaint ordered the careful investigation of the cause of

Jin San’s death, particularly whether he died of his injuries or from hanging. The magistrate then brought the parties back to court to testify yet again. While Wu Shi and her family reiterated their account, Zifa now dramatically altered his story:

I am a Ba country native and I am 48 sui. I am married to Yu Shi, but we had no sons or daughters. I adopted Jin Wu Shi’s third son, Jin San, as my heir. We changed his name to Peng Changshou and arranged for him to marry Xu Shi. Because he was born outside our family I had to repeatedly warn him about his errors, but he would not change. Last year on the third day of the twelfth month, I was returning from the market when Yang Lao told me that while tending the ox my [adopted] son had trampled and destroyed the Du family’s grave/tombs and that he wanted to tell the Dus. Because I was drunk I lost control and picked up a wooden cudgel and beat my son on the back of his left thigh. [Then] I was afraid and fled.354

Yu Shi then echoed her husband’s account, with both of them dropping any mention of intimidation by the Jin family. As a sad coda to having drunkenly beaten his

353 Ibid. 354 Ibid.

194 adopted son to death, Zifa languished in jail for a month after his confession before finally dying in custody.355

But what does the list of things submitted by Zifa tell us about the conflict?

What role do mosquito nets and soybeans play in this conflict? In Zifa’s inventory of stolen property and damaged goods we can see a key aspect of local dispute resolution; here is informal justice at work. The Jin family worked as a group to punish Zifa, whom they blamed for the death of their relative, and extract compensation. Moreover, Zifa’s testimony to the effect that village head Jin Yuanyi assisted or oversaw this violence suggests a normative role to these acts, casting them as regular village practice. This was a collective enterprise, yet another aspect of the many mutual aid and responsibility systems that animated local life. Property violence and intimidation both exacted a financial penalty on Zifa and publicly shamed him into paying “burial expenses.” This confrontation also perhaps served as an emotional vent for angry family members who continued to live in the same community as Zifa.

As we have seen in many disputes, social bonds were not easily broken; thus rituals that allowed for the controlled expression of violence and the de-escalation of community tensions could be powerful instruments of social cohesion. In his study of ritual performance in North China, David Johnson claims a central place for village ritual life in our understandings of rural society.356 But historians must also account for ritualized performances that did not take place on stages or during festivals. The performance of outrage, of grief, of accusation can be seen in this account of the Jins’

355 BXDA 7736. This file is the continuation of the same case and contains both the jailor’s requests for a doctor to treat Zifa, which were approved, as well as a report announcing Zifa’s death. 356 Johnson, Spectacle and Sacrifice.

195 assault on Zifa’s home. The soybeans and the mosquito nets were props for this ritual.

The destruction was a public notification of conflict and discord.

Natalie Zemon Davis writes: “…we may see [crowd] violence, however cruel, not as random and limitless, but as aimed at defined targets and selected from a repertory of traditional punishments and forms of destruction.”357 Davis is describing

“religious riots” in sixteenth-century France, which she defines as violent actions, in word or deed, which are explicitly informal and unofficial. For Davis, this violence exposes more than simple class tensions or social pathology – these acts lay bare the

“fundamental values and self-definition of a community.”358 Moreover, she sees violence as both normal and perennial. Violence in Ba County played a similar – and regular – role, running along lines that expressed shared norms and values.

In another practice from the Qing, widows were often “seized in adultery”

[zhuo jian] in order to separate them from property that they were entitled to control only by virtue of their chastity. Matthew Sommer has described this practice as having a “ritual quality” in that “there seems to have been a well-known, established way of doing things.”359 If a widow’s in-laws suspected her of adultery, they would stalk her and try to catch her with her lover (in flagrante delicto if possible). The in-laws would then beat the couple, tie them up and immediately drag them off to the magistrate.

This was another regular and ritualized form of violence that expressed the local norm

(patriarchal control of property) while it exploited a state-sponsored value (widow chastity).

357 Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France, 154. 358 Ibid, 186 359 Sommer, Sex, Law, and Society, 197.

196 In addition to the well-documented range of ritual that punctuated important events such as birth, marriage, death and festivals, we can add minor local disputes, which also exhibited a ritualized petty violence.360 These little rituals were unmoored from regular religious or lifecycle calendars and could burst forth at any time. In an attempt to move beyond the strict confines of formal ritual, Catherine Bell has plotted the “characteristics of ritual-like behavior.”361 Among these, “performance” is most salient to our current discussion.362

Bell argues that “performances seem ritual-like because they explicitly model the world. They do not attempt to reflect the real world accurately but to reduce and simplify it so as to create more or less coherent systems of categories that can then be projected onto the full spectrum of human experience.”363 In our cases, participants performed in order to dramatize their claims. By attacking Zifa’s home, the Jin family asserted the simple legitimacy of their claim and their notion of local order. They reified the conflict into stark categories of right and wrong. Of course, while highlighting the performative or ritual-like aspects of these conflicts, we should remember that they carried multiple meanings.

Performative assaults on property and persons are seen in other cases as well, for instance the following one from 1890. Following the death of his concubine Gan

360 For further discussion of ritual in China, see Arthur P. Wolf, Religion and Ritual in Chinese Society, edited by Arthur P. Wolf. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974); Arthur P. Wolf, Marriage and Adoption in China, 1854-1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1980); James L Watson, Evelyn Sakakida Rawski, and Joint Committee on Chinese Studies (U.S.), Death ritual in late imperial and modern China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); and Kenneth Dean, Ritual Alliances of the Putian Plain (Leiden: Brill, 2010). For a general overview of ritual see Catherine Bell Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 361 Bell, Ritual, 138–169. 362 Bell’s other characteristics are formalism, traditionalism, invariance, rule-governance. 363 Ibid, 161.

197 Shi, Zhu Qingsan found himself embroiled in a conflict with her family, who held Zhu responsible for Gan Shi’s suicide.364 At one point, Zhu reported that the deceased’s relatives “swarmed” his house, beat him, and smashed and made off with his property.

Moreover, they demanded payment of 1000 ounces of silver before they would drop their agitation. Zhu appended a list of items lost in this assault. His catalogue had 58 entries, including eight “red” contracts for land sales (that is, officially-endorsed contracts that served as deeds to land); a jade ring; a gold hair clasp; two silver bracelets; a range of men’s and women’s clothing; two chiming clocks; a silver bracelet; a gold ruyi (an S-shaped ornamental object that was a symbol of good luck); two pairs of gold earrings; a gold bracelet; and a gold ear pick.365

In another plaint, filed roughly two weeks after the first, Zhu complained that

Gan Shi’s family had stolen things from him on a second occasion, this time while he and his wife were not at home. He attached another list of items stolen from him. This list had 16 entries: a gold bracelet; a gold ring; a gold ear pick; an ivory opium case; silk underwear; a bloodstone chop; a water pipe; a copper stove; a gold hairpin; a gold ruyi; a jade bracelet; a gold-leaf folding fan; a large copper ink stone from Suzhou; a silver opium case; a gold staff; and ten silver flowers. He further admitted to having already paid his antagonists 50 taels of silver. More than just ritual, this violence could produce immediate material benefits. In this way, assaults could resemble aggressive dunning or outright extortion.366

364 BXDA 7666. 365 Ibid. 366 See Chapter Two for a discussion of kidnapping as another form of dunning.

198 A desire for vengeance also motivated some of these attacks. If Gan Shi’s family truly believed that Zhu had caused her death, then these were acts of retribution.

As such, these acts conformed to customary understandings regarding the proper performance of vengeance. The anthropologist Robert Redfield has noted that

“retaliative force is stylized by custom into a sort of ritualistic revenge, and something like the legal process.”367

Redfield’s discussion concerned “primitive” societies that had not developed codified systems of law yet had built informal systems that exhibit a “legalistic point of view.” In particular, he posited the development of “unwritten codes of indemnity” that target objects of local value in order to constrain escalating interpersonal violence.

Ritualized smashing and looting in Ba County served a similar end and likewise proceeded along known and regular routes.

367 Robert Redfield, “Primitive Law” in Law and Warfare: Studies in the Anthropology of Conflict, ed. Paul Bohannan [New York: The Natural History Press, 1967), 12.

199

200 Full List of Items Appended to Zhu Qingsan’s Plaint [BXDA 7666]

These ritualized collective acts of looting, smashing, and extortion did not constitute a parallel legal system per se, but they did serve to enforce norms and impose consistent consequences for proscribed actions. Malinowski writes that the central function of law is to “curb certain natural propensities, to hem in and control human instincts and to impose a non-spontaneous, compulsory behavior….”368 Violent smashing and looting played a similar role.

The practices at work in Ba County served to punish wrongdoers (from the community’s perspective) as well as to provide an emotional release for the injured party. This was a rough and rowdy informal justice: one that also held the possibility for abuse, for the strong to take from the weak and for the desperate to extort the secure. Such acts of revenge illuminate the organization of local communities, for

“revenge obeys basic social laws, conforms to ethical mandates, considers its usage with cunning, consults the calculus of power, flows through well-worn channels, pays homage to cultural etiquette.”369

Instances of smashing things expose the extended ties that held communities together (the individuals coming together to commit these acts) as well as the disciplinary force of the community (the group acting against the alleged transgressor). While these acts of “rough music” (or charivari) may not have been as codified in Sichuan as in early modern Europe, we can still see them as parallel acts of

368 Bronislaw Malinowski, Crime and Custom in Savage Society (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner & co., 1926), 64. 369Jonathan Rieder, “The Social Organization of Vengeance,” in Toward a General Theory of Social Control (New York: Academic Press, 1984), 159.

201 community policing.370 E.P Thompson writes: “Rough music belongs to a mode of life in which some part of the law belongs still to the community and is theirs to enforce.”371 In this mode, community justice was enacted on the spot.372 In Ba County, informal, extra-legal clashes played a similar role. These conflicts allowed for didactic violence and the enforcement of community standards. Often, however, these clashes were not simple collective statements of standards but a contest in which the meaning of abstract norms was being inscribed on actual events. These conflicts were values made visible.

Smashing things lays bare the regular role of violence in local life. Violence had a prescribed and routine presence in the community, and indeed could drive social organization since one had to ensure the ability to call on stout fellows when the occasion arose. It is likely that one practical reason for son preference among rural people in the Qing was that the raw manpower provided by sons was necessary to defend one’s interests; without sons one might easily be victimized by the predatory behavior of others.373 Sons (and male relatives in general) enlarged the body of men available for violence. Indeed, one could not rely on state interventions to secure one’s property or defend one’s home.

Elizabeth Perry has described the essential work performed by the ubiquitous surplus males in the endemic violence of North China.374 She notes that the same

370 Rough music in early modern Europe is described at greater length in Chapter Four. 371 E P Thompson, Customs in Common (Merlin Press, 2009), 530. 372 We should not take an overly romantic view of these practices as they could easily be deployed against innocents who simply inhabited marginal spaces in the community or to beat down non- conformists of a variety of stripes. Indeed these acts often policed sexual norms. They were at least as often a conservative force as a “progressive” one. 373 Arthur Wolf suggested this idea in private conversation. 374 Perry, Rebels and Revolutionaries.

202 people, often dismissed as “marginal men,” played crucial and recognized social roles

– often violent ones – that fostered the local community. Violent predation on rival communities “need not be seen as the domain of solitary individuals, forced into asocial behavior by their lack of communal bonds.”375 Instead, these men and their violent acts were integral parts of local society, and their deeds represented a form of

“collective action.”

The state’s limited presence at the local level opened room not only for these forms of collective action, but also for the rise of powerful local figures. Indeed, the local bully is a stock character in depictions of local life in the Qing. In the following suicide case, Cheng Xingfa protested his mistreatment at the hands of Wang Gui, the sub-district head runner.376 Wang had opened an opium bar next door to Cheng’s home and used the proximity to start an affair with Cheng’s wife. The authorities had already intervened and punished Wang (including forbidding him from associating with Cheng’s wife), but he persisted in bullying Cheng. Cheng’s complaint that day was that Wang had stolen things from his home. He pleaded that in the past he had

“feared [Wang’s] wickedness but didn’t have the courage to accuse him at court.”

Since Wang had already been implicated in a separate legal case, however, Cheng had found the mettle to bring forward his own accusation.377

Cheng included a list of 19 items allegedly stolen by Wang: a pair of gold rings; a silver ear pick; a black lined coat; an oilcloth woman’s shirt; man’s sateen mandarin

375 Ibid, 63. 376 BXDA 7881. The primary dispute considered in this case was the suicide death of a young man and is described in detail in Chapter Two. The conflict between Cheng and Wang appears in the file as a minor complaint involving some of the same individuals. It was not directly related, but Cheng seized on the suicide case as an opportunity to accuse Wang. 377 Ibid.

203 jacket; a chest; a pot; a silver hair clasp; a silver ruyi; a woman’s blue shirt; a man’s lined black coat; a cotton-waded bedspread; a crib; a pair of silver earrings; silver flowers; two pairs of blue underpants; two blue men’s shirts; a mosquito net; and a cabinet.378

The theft of this motley catalogue proved a point. This raw display of power mirrored Wang’s earlier usurpation of Cheng’s wife – first Wang threw Cheng out of his marital bed and then he stole his bedspread. Through this brazen theft, Wang asserted – and publicly performed – his dominance over Cheng. No wonder Cheng was afraid of him; local authorities had already proven ineffective in controlling Wang.

This, of course, was Wang’s point: structures of formal authority were unable to countermand the neighborhood clout brought to bear by Wang. Ironically, this street power was enabled in part by Wang’s position as court runner – he was empowered by the state even if he did not exclusively bolster its authority.379 This performance of power asserted the primacy of day-to-day social reality on the ground over distant efforts by the state to order local life.

Yet there are different degrees of fluidity in the performance of ritual. In his study of contentious political action, Charles Tilly develops a notion of a spectrum of

“repertoires” present in these acts, ranging from “no repertoire” to “rigid repertoire.”380 These distinctions attempt to capture the degree to which one performance predicts the forms of subsequent routines. For our purposes, the concept

378 Ibid. 379 It should be noted that these actions also conform to the classic trope of a corrupt and abusive runner. For a fuller discussion of runners, and court staff in general, see Reed’s Talons and Teeth. In general, Reed tends to challenge this stereotype. 380 Charles Tilly, Contentious Performances (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 15.

204 of repertoire allows us to think about the connections between distinct performances of violence in local disputes. The similarities that we see from one occurrence to the next suggest that individuals were reading from the same social script.

The cases from Ba County exhibit a “weak repertoire,” where “some repetition occurs from one episode to another, because habit and limited imagination make repetition easier than innovation.”381 The assaults in these ming’an cases are not carbon copies of each other, yet they do display important similarities and possess a ritual-like quality.382 In each case, individuals rallied neighbors and kin to descend on the home of their adversary. Once there, they stole or broke household items, often beating the owner as well and making demands for greater cash payments.

Due to their public nature, these clashes formed a spectacle that broadcast the accused’s affronts, shaming him in his community while proclaiming the authority of the perpetrators. Each of these assaults also led to a court hearing, which formed yet another stage on which to enact the conflict. Such theatrical clashes had both economic and an emotional components. They were simultaneously constructive (of close kinship bonds, identities and values) and destructive (of broader community bonds and property). At the same time, they were public performances of outrage that served to shame and punish the attacker’s target.

Moreover, these assaults took place within a dynamic matrix of dispute resolution. The practices found in Ba County perhaps differ from those at the heart of previous studies in that they did not replace formal state action or serve as a call for

381 Ibid. 382 Interestingly, the victim’s recorded responses also suggest a keen awareness of the roles being played in these disputes, forming a call and response from the two sides embroiled in the conflict.

205 government intervention.383 Instead, these violent acts occurred at the same time as both state-led attempts at resolution and local informal mediation. This simultaneity is key to understanding disputing in Ba County. Individuals worked concurrently on multiple fronts to solve conflicts, employing the layered authorities of personal connections and family, the community at large, and the state. Of course, informal violence could be a risky strategy, as it opened perpetrators to official sanctions.

Finally, these acts stress the importance of properly locating violence within local communities. Writing about religious violence in early modern France, Davis notes: “But the rites of violence are not the rites of violence in any absolute sense.

They simply remind us that if we try to increase safety and trust within a community, try to guarantee that the violence it generates will take less destructive and cruel forms, then we must think less about pacifying ‘deviants’ and more about changing the central values.”384 Violence was not outside the community; rather, it was a constituent part of the community. Danger often came not from “rootless rascals” or other outsiders, but from the heart of the community itself.

If we can hazard a connection between these alleged acts of violence and village ritual more generally, we can also connect them, as collective acts, to other aspects of local life. Collective organization of crop watching ensured order and relied on extended ties and networks for success. Philip Kuhn noted that crop-watching organization existed as a “purely nonofficial effort, based on local initiative and

383 For a key characterization of E.P. Thompson’s and others’ interpretations of the political nature of crowd actions, see Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France, 161. 384 Ibid, 187.

206 management.”385 Both Joseph Esherick and Kenneth Pomeranz have stressed crop watching as a tool for both promoting security and defusing class tensions within the village.386 Crop watching was foundational in the organization of village violence. It was a building block that allowed for the militarization of the local community to defend its interests or attack other communities.

Elizabeth Perry has described how this practice involved family organization as well as that of neighbors or even hired guards.387 She further notes, “collective action implies organization, but this may be variously based upon kinship, settlement, class, friendship, occupation, or a number of other ties.”388 Perry’s and many others’ interest in these ties resides in their potential for organizing larger eruptions of violence. Indeed, these small-scale communal ties have been explored mainly in connection to their “revolutionary” potential. Our investigation, however, takes a broader view, returning to the quotidian use of community bonds in informal dispute resolution.

Claiming Things

Lists of destroyed or looted objects expose attempts to mark territory and claim authority over individuals. The things listed in the following case from 1894 became powerful symbols for controlling contested representations of reality and the social

385 Ibid, 154. 386 Esherick, Origins of the Boxer Uprising, 65-66; Kenneth Pomeranz, The Making of a Hinterland: State, Society, and Economy in Inland North China, 1853-1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 88-105. 387 Perry, Rebels and Revolutionaries, 81. 388 Ibid, 49.

207 roles attached to those realities. In effect, the things themselves stood as markers of local truth – they were costumes for the roles being played.

In this particular case, three men reported the death of their nephew, Deng

Guomo. This case was complicated by the suicide of Guomo’s wife, Wu Shi, who killed herself soon after her husband’s death. Indeed, this second death would itself become a subject of contention. In their initial plaint, Guomo’s uncles claimed that his tenant, Jin Yimei, who had been sleeping with Guomo’s wife, had caused their nephew’s death.389 This plaint was followed by one from a neighbor, who described the circumstances of Guomo’s death. The neighbor explained that Guomo had rented some of his property to Yimei, who had opened an opium bar, and that the two men, along with Wu Shi, all lived together.390 Earlier that month, the neighbor saw Guomo, who appeared “terminally ill,” lying by the edge of his property. Later that afternoon, the neighbor’s tenant came to the market and said that Guomo was lying dead at the edge of his property. The neighbor returned home and called local leaders to investigate. Wu Shi had quickly ordered him buried, which struck the neighbor as odd since he could not figure out why she had not waited longer. It is peculiar that the neighbor did not stop to help Guomo though he appeared to be dying – suggesting that perhaps Guomo was prone to passing out in strange places, which accords with subsequent accusations of his opium addiction.

Roughly a week later, Jin Yimei’s mother filed a plaint defending her son and accusing the dead man’s uncles of attempting to profit from their nephew’s death. She reported:

389 BXDA 7796. 390 There is a clear possibility that Guomo was selling his wife’s sexual services to Yimei.

208

My second son Yimei had married Long Shi and had four sons. In the past he had rented Deng Guomo’s house to live in. He paid a deposit of 27 taels of silver. He sells fruit for a living and he lived there over ten years without any trouble. How can I sing the praises of Guomo when he smoked opium? Last month on the 22nd, Guomo fell ill and he died at the edge of Cen Mingde’s property. It doesn’t have anything to do with my son. This Deng Taishun and others planned a swindle to get silver. They planned to take advantage of his death to demand payment of a debt. So they trumped up this case and falsely accused my son and Guomo’s wife, Wu Shi, of having an affair and other lies. Obviously, Yimei has a wife and has sons of his own. His relations with Guomo’s wife were just business. If they were having an affair we’d all know. But they’ve ridiculously falsely accused him of having an affair.391

In this plaint, Yimei’s mother drew a clear contrast between her son and Guomo. First, she claimed that her son sold fruit for a living rather than running an opium bar.

Second, she lambasted Guomo for smoking opium. Her simple narrative constructed clear types: family man with sons versus drug user.

On the same day, Guomo’s three uncles submitted a plaint expanding their previous accusations. In this account, they accused Yimei of covering his tracks. They reported that “Yimei feared punishment for his crimes” and had taken action.392 They alleged that he had his younger brother, Jin Si, pass opium to Wu Shi, who used it to commit suicide (adding the second corpse to this single case). Guomo’s uncles claimed that Yimei “sent his brother so he wouldn’t have to face Wu Shi in court.”393

In testimony that followed this expanded accusation, a clearer picture of the power relations between Guomo and Yimei began to emerge. This portrait was first sketched by the uncles’ testimony. They described their nephew as “simple” before

391 Ibid. 392 Ibid. 393 Ibid.

209 explaining how Yimei had moved in and opened an opium bar. He then expanded

Guomo’s house by building another room and forced the renegotiation of the rent.

Seeing that Guomo was “simple and cowardly,” Yimei next took up with Wu Shi. The description is one of Yimei’s expanding power over Guomo, a domination that did not even end with Guomo’s death, since Yimei allegedly took Wu Shi’s life as well.394 In his own testimony, even Yimei depicted Guomo as a weak opium addict.

This clear depiction was then muddied by Guomo’s aunt, who also lived with them and who testified that on the night before she died, Wu Shi had called out in the middle of the night. Wu Shi then allegedly revealed that Yimei, through his brother, had passed her opium to use in committing suicide. This was the origin for the claim that Yimei had seduced Wu Shi into suicide, though the exact sequence of events is still obscure. The testimony does not make clear whether Yimei actively drove her to suicide or simply facilitated her death. Nor do we know why she killed herself.

Perhaps she was racked with guilt regarding her alleged infidelity; perhaps she was aghast at having her good name smeared. Whatever the case, Guomo’s aunt, who had an interest in the outcome of the dispute, was the source for the claim that Yimei had assisted in Wu Shi’s suicide, an accusation that could not be verified. But, the formal accusation at court was only one arena where the friction between the parties played out. The multi-sited development of this conflict was further exhibited in a notice from the local community reporting Yimei’s return to the village.

Yimei had been ordered by the court to move out of Guomo’s home, but village leaders now accused him of stealing the contents of the house when he left.

394 This might also be explained if Guomo was a drug addict and Yimei his dealer.

210 They also complained about Yimei’s intransigence in the face of village mediation and his hampering of a proper burial for Wu Shi. Moreover, the uncles accused Yimei of making off with the contents of Guomo’s house and added that Yimei’s wife, Long

Shi, was also causing trouble by behaving like a “rude and unreasonable scorpion” and by shouting that she would have the uncles and others “put to death” for their crimes.395 The uncles reported that they and community leaders were “making an all- out effort to ensure law and discipline,” but it sounds as if they were having a hard time of it.

In addition to the complaint, the uncles appended a list of 14 household items that Yimei had allegedly absconded with: a blue wadded-cotton quilt; two blue women’s shirts; a set of blue undergarments; a silver ear pick; two wooden cabinets;

“all” of the pots, dishes and bowls; a light blue hemp mosquito net; a cotton woman’s vest; a silver hairpin; a pair of silver bracelets; two flat beds; and a copper water pipe.396

The looting of these objects was an extension of the conflict. Theft formed another mode of disputing, along with outright interpersonal violence and attempts at mediation both at court and informally. As Philip Kuhn writes, “Violence was a stream that ran through China’s rural landscape in certain well-defined beds: diked and controlled in the best of times, but at other times breaking forth to inundate local society.”397 Here, we see that conflict, when it flowed, could follow several channels at once, and that these could be parallel or intersecting. By focusing on the role of

395 Ibid. 396 Ibid. 397 Philip A. Kuhn, Rebellion and Its Enemies in Late Imperial China: Militarization and Social Structure, 1796-1864 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), 32.

211 material things in local processes of disputation, we more easily expose these processes. Moreover, an examination of the role of objects in disputes also allows us to see the ultimate object in many ming’an cases: the corpse itself.

A corpse could become an object of contention. For the body was evidence. It was an accusation. It was a source of outrage. It was an opportunity. The Dutch philosopher and anthropologist Annemarie Mol writes of the two “creatures” present during medical procedures. While witnessing a dissection, she noticed this twinning as the pathologist covered the corpse’s face with a simple white cloth: “One [of the creatures] is having its insides taken out and its organs are being cut into slices. The other is being accorded human dignity and treated with respect.”398 Encountering the body, there is a tension for the pathologist between these two – he is aware of both of these “creatures.” One is a person and one is an object. In considering the corpse as the object of contention, we must remember the twin presence of these two “creatures” and the tensions between them. The body simultaneously has multiple meanings.

In Ba County, the manner in which a corpse was treated could be a primary concern of a conflict. In a case from 1890, the corpse, much like the household items other cases examined in this chapter, was a ritual object. This case began when Liu

Luo Shi filed a plaint following the death of her daughter:

My husband is dead and I look after the family. Last winter, my second daughter married Li Fangqiao’s son, Jingxiu, supposedly as his second wife, but after they were married he made her his concubine instead. The ill will between them grew and grew. Out of nowhere, this month on the 20th, Jingxiu sent his servant to get in touch with me and told me that my daughter, Liu Shi, had suddenly fallen ill. That night I went to

398 Annemarie Mol, The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2003), 126.

212 his house. All I saw was them putting my daughter’s corpse into a coffin. I was overwhelmed and had to be helped to stand and was taken into the house. Jinxiu took advantage of my incapacitation and buried her [quickly].399

Luo Shi began by impugning Jingxiu’s character, accusing him of marriage fraud: she had believed that her daughter was joining Jingxiu’s house as a second wife but she was actually a concubine. She followed that plaint with testimony complaining her daughter had become Jingxiu’s concubine, citing this as the original source of tensions (though she noted that at time she “overcame her suspicions” and so avoided trouble). She concluded her plaint by saying that Jingxiu’s servant, Xiong the

Youngest, had also told her that Jingxiu had beaten her daughter to death.

Luo Shi then detailed how she came to suspect that her daughter had been beaten to death. She reported that she “interrogated” [pangjie] Jingxiu’s servant,

Xiong the Youngest, and he finally informed Luo Shi that her daughter had died after being beaten by Jingxiu. Luo Shi said she became determined to examine her daughter’s corpse for injuries.

Jingxiu’s father, Li Fanggu, challenged this account in his own plaint. He stated that Liu Shi had been his son’s concubine as was always intended, reporting that there had been no ill will after she joined his family. Fanggu then described a chronic ailment that plagued Liu Shi, claiming that she often fell ill with scarlet fever. He noted: “In the third month, her illness flared up and a doctor treated her. Then last month, on the 17th, Liu Shi’s younger brother, Liu Zaizhi, came to my home for a large banquet. Then on the 19th, Liu Shi’s scarlet fever suddenly came back…. The

399 BXDA 7664.

213 doctor’s medicine had no effect. Zaizhi had his hands on her shoulders when she died.”400 Fanggu noted that Zhaizhi and other relatives came and verified that Liu Shi had indeed died of illness. She was then buried, with proper ceremony and relatives as witnesses, according to Fanggu. Despite Fanggu’s proper conduct, “Luo Shi came to town and began listening to scurrilous talk,” which led her to court.401 The magistrate ordered the examination of Liu Shi’s body to determine the cause of death. This investigation produced an inventory of what Liu Shi was buried in that contained 28 entries, including a solid gold hairpin, a solid gold ruyi, a handkerchief, and a variety of garments.

This list was followed by a parallel report from a medical examination detailing the appearance of Liu Shi’s corpse. The coroner determined that Liu Shi had died of illness and described the body as follows:

23 years old, the body measures four chi two cun in length; it is facing upward; the face has already changed in color; the two eyes are slightly open; the two eyeballs are completely dull; [the corpse] is blue/green from top to bottom; the lips are completely dull and also blue/green; the mouth is slightly open; the gums are completely dull and the throat is blue/green in color; the fingers on both sides are stiff and there are red cholera blisters; the hands are slightly open with the left grasping the right across the breast; the hands are stiff and have red cholera blisters; the abdomen is not distended; the relatives have requested that we not examine the lower body [ i.e. sexual organs]…; the cause of death was certainly cholera.402

In these mirrored lists, we see how her body became another object to be ordered by the dispute. It was a thing that needed to be put in its proper place. Indeed,

400 BXDA 7662. 401 Ibid. 402 Ibid.

214 the entire conflict surrounding Liu Shi’s death can be seen as a question of putting things in their proper place. What was Liu Shi’s status? Where did she belong and how should she be treated? The conflict over her corpse also reflected this – it was a fight over the proper management of her dead body.

Luo Shi’s story of her daughter’s beating death at the hands of her husband suffered another setback when Xiong the Youngest testified that he did not in fact tell

Luo Shi that Jingxiu had beaten her daughter to death. In subsequent testimony, Luo

Shi altered her account, now saying that her daughter was married as a concubine, and not as a second wife as she had originally contended, and making no mention of violence of any sort. While she continued to claim that Jingxiu’s servant had come to tell her of her daughter’s illness, she no longer alleged that he whispered to her about a beating. Finally, Luo Shi claimed she was innocent of any “plotting.” With the accusation of violence excised, the dispute, at root, was about Liu Shi’s funeral. The fight was ultimately over the correct handling of her corpse.

Despite the seeming lack of performative violence up to this point, in the final round of testimony Jingxiu claimed that a gang of people was harassing him. He reported that on the day after Liu Shi’s death, “Zaizhi led a bunch of his relatives by sedan chair from Chongqing to my house to recklessly stir up trouble.”403 After appealing for local mediation, he had paid over 20,000 cash for “sedan fees.” This seems to have satisfied Zaizhi’s mob and they dispersed. Jingxiu said he had no idea

403 Ibid.

215 that Luo Shi would be incited by empty gossip.404 In this case, as well as others, rumor and gossip played key roles.

This talk was one form of communication, but the violence to property and persons found in the ming’an files also sent messages. In the above cases, both property crimes and interpersonal violence announced claims of authority. In the first case, Wang used smashing and breaking to express his continuing authority over the remnants of Guomo’s fractured household and his ability to act with impunity. The violence that surrounded Liu Shi’s death, by contrast, demanded proper treatment for the deceased.

Conclusion

By themselves, simple lists of objects tell tales about their owners and about life at the end of the Qing. The first thing one notes from these inventories is that they all describe fairly well-off households. The poor are not present on these particular rolls. This suggests something about local elites’ ability to rally extended kin and neighborhood networks to petty acts of violence. It may have been, as Elizabeth Perry has suggested, that the poor were fodder for these clashes rather than their targets. In a study of violence in the bachelor subculture of South China, James Watson has written that “the dominant form of violence…was not associated with invaders who came

404 In our cases, gossip was often related to informing. Contradictions were exposed between the story being told and the suspected, darker truth of the matter. In the dispute that began this chapter, Wu Shi heard from a visiting relative how her son had died. In the above case, Luo Shi claimed she had informants in Liu Shi’s household and Yimei complained about inciting rumors and hearsay. All of these instances, and the many others found in the ming’an records, reveal the paths of information transmission. Like a round of the child’s game “telephone,” where a sentence is whispered from one ear to another again and again, information passed in Ba County was not necessarily reliable, but it was often powerful.

216 from outside the local system. Rather, it was internal violence, exercised by agents of the landowning lineages…”405 The “agents” in question were the impoverished bachelor relatives of wealthy landowners. In Sichuan, as well as in North and South

China, we see a regular role for elite-led violence within local communities that involved mobilizing the poor for manpower.

Second, there is a surprising lack of obvious “foreign” objects (or copies of them) on these lists.406 Indeed, if one were forced to characterize these households from these very limited traces, one must say that they appear rather “traditional” – that is, there appears to be nothing shockingly new. This seems rather unexpected if we accept Frank Dikötter’s argument regarding diffusion and democratization of imported commodities.407 If these “modern objects” were both ubiquitous and highly valued, one might expect them to turn up in these inventories.

Examining the objects themselves more carefully, we can sketch a picture of their owners’ lives. While these objects do not represent a complete inventory of any individual’s processions, they can stand as a rough gauge of the household. The list from the case that started this chapter describes the house of a relatively prosperous peasant. The items allegedly sacked from his house were mainly agricultural goods or tools. From the quantities of foodstuffs held in this home we can infer a fair degree of economic success. In particular, the large amount of cured meat suggests this.

Although Sichuan is now famous for its cured meats, John Lossing Buck’s early

405 James L. Watson, “Self-Defense Corps, Violence and the Bachelor Subculture in South China: Two Case Studies,” in Zhong Yang yan jiu di 2 jie guo ji Han xue ui yi lun wen ji (Taipei, Taiwan: 1986), 219 406 Though one list did include two chiming clocks, which one would assume were foreign in design or at least inspiration. 407 See, Frank Dikötter, Exotic Commodities: Modern Objects and Everyday Life in China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).

217 twentieth century survey found that only 2.3 percent of the calories in the average

“farm diet” came from animal products.408 This suggestion of relative wealth squares with the homeowner’s adoption of a son, which would have required payment. The few silver trinkets on the list further suggest the owner’s relative affluence. These baubles clearly suggest that their owner had moved beyond the basic needs of survival and was able to afford occasional luxuries.

Despite these small indulgences, the household described above was the least wealthy of our examples. Indeed, its contents seem rather humble by comparison with the others. One litigant held officially-endorsed title deeds for eight parcels of land, a large number of gold and silver items, and two chiming clocks, the quintessential modern Western object. This household appears as the wealthiest of those encountered in this chapter, but the contents of the other households examined all describe prosperous households as well. Even the extravagant layers of cloth that wrapped Liu

Shi’s corpse for burial speak to this prosperity.

The disputative violence that these relatively wealthy households were willing to engage in exposes a crucial aspect in the organization of violence in the county.

Poor households did not engage – at least not as the primary participants – in these violent rituals. To be sure, poor households offered little to smash and carry away. But beyond this obvious constraint, it seems that wealthier households were in a stronger position to rally their kin and neighbors to acts of violence. This again suggests that

408 John Lossing Buck, Land Utilization in China, a Study of 16,786 Farms in 168 Localities, and 38,256 Farm Families in Twenty-two Provinces in China, 1929-1933 (Shanghai: The Commercial Press, 1937), 249–250.

218 violence was a regular part of local life, and one that was exploited not just by men on the margins, but also by those most firmly enmeshed in the community.

When placed into the larger context of the disputes, these inventories expose local dispute practices even as they reveal a routine role for violence in local life. The ritualized smashing of things was a vital part of the performance of local clashes.

These were acts of simplification in which right and wrong, good and bad were dramatized. This spectacle ran parallel to the one unfolding at court, where another contest was being staged. Moreover, acts of violence offered an emotional outlet to individuals confronting the loss of a loved one. These performances could have baser motivations as well; they were opportunities for economic gain, and they could be brute acts of vengeance. Yet at the same time, they were sites of community building, bonding, and policing as well. Marking the boundaries of acceptability, these assaults were public statements of accepted community standards.

In addition to these community-level roles, the assaults on property also linked with disputation processes underway at the county court. In his study of informal social control, Robert Ellickson writes: “One reason people are frequently willing to ignore law is that they often possess a more expeditious means for achieving order.”409

In Ba County, however, there was no stark choice between informal resolution and formal adjudication. Individuals exploited all available venues to pursue their interests and pursued them simultaneously. Conflicts did not move up from one level to the next, they advanced on all fronts, with the court proceedings often lagging behind the dynamic reality on the ground. The lists of objects contained in case files lay bare the

409 Robert Ellickson, Order Without Law: How Neighbors Settle Disputes (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 28.

219 complicated chronology that drove disputes, revealing the dynamism and fluidity of disputation in the late Qing.

220

Conclusion

This study of a single county in the Qing Empire during the 1890s has used instances of violence to lay bare the dynamics of local social life. Violence was a regular part of life in Ba County. We have seen how families, and other groups, used violence to discipline their members, and how local communities organized violence against outsiders as well as to punish locals who ran afoul of norms. Yet these actions formed only one side of the story. Violence was also an opportunity for individuals to advance their interests at court, if only by using the court’s authority to force an informal settlement. This negotiating of circumstances also makes clear the court’s dynamic role in county life. The state’s authority was actively sought out and brought to bear on local disputes, marking the continuing endurance and importance of state authority even at the end of the Qing.

The turbulent accounts featured in this project are only possible thanks to the rich archival material on which it is based. County court records offer thousands of snapshots of local life. While the authentic voices of Qing commoners may be lost to us, legal records (despite their mediated format) confront the reader with the potent immediacy of lived experience. In reading these accounts, our chorus of Qing voices is enlarged to include barbers, porters, and a motley band of petty subjects.

221 In order to take full advantage of these rich archival materials, the manuscript has adopted a number of historical lenses. Chapter One introduced the social geography of the county, emphasizing the social use of rivers and roads. Chongqing was the main upstream node in the Yangzi River network whose downstream terminus is Shanghai, and the opening section of the chapter examined the social life of the river by investigating economic disputes along its waters. The discussion then turned to the discovery of unclaimed bodies on the roads. Such discoveries confronted both the state and local communities with individuals who had become unmoored from their original social contexts: “bare sticks” [guanggun] who threatened the stability of the state, the tranquility of the settled, and the purity of the family. The chapter concluded with a look at legal cases for which claimants drew their own maps and submitted them to the court as evidence. These cases were primarily boundary disputes that had escalated into violence, with the resulting fatalities bringing these conflicts to court. But the maps provide a medium for perceiving how residents of Ba

County envisioned their surroundings and engaged state authority.

Chapter Two examined both female and male suicide. Female suicide in China has attracted considerable scholarly interest. But the imperial chastity cult, a principal focus of previous research, appears irrelevant from the standpoint of our case sample.

The suicides that took place in Ba County were not heroic acts of martyrdom for the sake of elite values, but desperate and pathetic acts applauded by no-one. Instead, the chapter focuses on the social webs that these cases expose. While the patriarchal family was certainly a powerful force in local society, in these cases one sees that the family unit was just one manifestation of a wider web of social ties and expectations

222 that dictated behavior and disciplined its members. Sometimes natal families reached across household lines to make pecuniary demands on their married daughters or in- laws; at other times, they might demand justice and restitution for the mistreatment of their daughters.

Turning to male suicide, a topic largely untouched by previous scholarship on

China, the local archive again revealed webs of connections and expectations that bound actors, notably those between employer and employee. This economic relationship took on the quality of familial obligation, suggesting that even at the very end of the dynasty market-based economic relations had not completely supplanted long-standing customary norms. The chapter also considered the practices of aggressive dunning and unlawful detainment. If the persistence of quasi-familial relationships in the workplace suggests strong communitarian bonds, then these rough- and-tumble patterns of debt collection revealed the brutal side of local practices that sought to enforce economic obligations rather than social connections.

Chapter Three considered homicide and, like the chapter on suicide, interrogated these cases as sources for social history. The chapter explored economically motivated violence, particularly the role of debt and its collection as well as land disputes. It then briefly compared homicide rates in Ba County with those in other parts of China as well as Japan, Western Europe, and the United States, in an effort to determine how violent this society was. The evidence suggests that homicide in Ba County was most often directed toward other members of the killer’s own community, rather than toward stereotyped outsiders of various sorts. In effect, violence was often an internal mechanism of control.

223 Chapter Four considered the role of false accusations and false testimony in the legal culture of late Qing Sichuan. Untruths formed a strategy deployed by a wide range of individuals in order to compel the court to hear their grievances. They also formed an integral part of the larger legal culture and thus illuminate the driving role that common people had in animating this culture. In these cases, individuals deployed explicitly illegal means to bring their grievances to court. Yet not only did the court not consistently punish these transgressions, it commonly ruled on the underlying conflict, frequently economic, that was the root of the dispute. These cases demonstrate the degree to which ordinary people were able to navigate and effectively

“game” the legal system by exploiting illegal but customary practices of deception. An examination of these strategies helps further lay bare the social role of the court at the local level.

Chapter Five exposed ritualized processes of local disputation. Key here were lists of damaged or stolen objects compiled by litigants and submitted to the court as part of claims for restitution. These acts of property destruction revealed another aspect of violence’s social life, as an emotive performance drawing on shared scripts.

Indeed, these cases highlight the ongoing local life of the conflicts one encounters in the court records. Courtroom battles were often accompanied by simultaneous acts of violence unfolding in the local community. Court records often present a static picture of disputes, failing to fully animate the dynamic processes of local disputation. Just as

Richard Cobb has used the clothing of dead Parisians to tell the stories of their lives,

224 this chapter employed inventories of everyday household items to unpack local conflict.410

As the project continues to develop, several angles require further consideration. Among them is spatial analysis. The plaints included in the hundreds of cases that form the basis of the dissertation include specific information detailing the individuals’ home location. In addition to their geographically specific tax and security units, the plaint form also includes the name of the closest market town and the village’s distance from the county capital. Using this data and Geographic

Information System (GIS) technology, it would be possible to map the spatial patterns of violence and crime in Ba County. This would allow us to see and analyze geographic patterns in homicides and suicides, as well as to measure the reach of the court’s power. Using the information contained in the case files, we can suggest the maximum radius beyond which state power was entirely replaced by local forces. At what distance did individuals no longer bring their cases to court? In these dark areas beyond the state’s everyday reach, conflict and violence no doubt continued, but disputes were not subject to routine government oversight.

In addition to this mapping, future research will consider in greater detail the differences between Chongqing and the surrounding countryside. Was violence in the city different from violence in its hinterlands? This line of inquiry will allow us to understand the distribution of the social forces at work in the county. In addition to this urban/rural divide, it will be useful to more fully consider the physical geography of the county. While Chapter One’s discussion of rivers is a nod in this direction,

410 Richard Cobb, Death in Paris: The Records of the Basse-Geôle De La Seine, October 1795 September 1801, Vendémiaire Year IV-Fructidor Year IX (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978).

225 subsequent work will engage more fully with the county’s dramatic topography and its consequences for local life.

Another of expansion will add incidents of assault to the study. While these cases fell outside the domain of the ming’an files, the petty and varied conflicts that found their way into assault cases add another dimension to our picture of routine violence in the late Qing. In particular, these cases will allow us to investigate two broad areas. The first is the use of “fighting words,” speech whose very utterance was seen as cause for violence. This examination will allow us to more clearly delineate the lines of local honor. In such cases, the court dropped its usual proscription against including obscenities in court records and recorded the language verbatim. These cases exist as some of the very few moments when actual local speech penetrated the mediating force of the court’s scribes, who tended to homogenize individual accounts into boilerplate reports. As such, “fighting words” cases present an opportunity to examine both actual speech and its consequences.

The addition of assault cases will also open the issue of collective violence.

Cases of public brawling and gang fighting promise to illuminate how kinship, work, and village ties were mobilized in acts of group violence. The need for social networks that could be deployed for armed conflict, whether protective or predatory, was an important part of local life. In these cases, one sees the organizing principles behind violence and can gain a stronger understanding of the webs of social relations and obligations that bound individuals.

The communities that comprised Ba County may not be laid naked before our eyes by legal records, but this archive does present a rare opportunity to peer down

226 into Qing society, and to unravel the complexities and concerns that drove life for

Qing subjects in late nineteenth century.

227

Character List

baojia 保甲 baozheng 保證 baozheng 保正 changgong 長工 chong 沖

Da Qing lü li 大清律例 fan 煩 fang 坊 fen 墳 gan xue lao 乾血癆 jia 家 jianghu 江湖 jianzheng 監正 juan 卷 kou’an qian 口岸錢 la 腊 li 例

228 lingru 凌辱 liumin 流民 liupi 流痞 lü 律 ming’an 命案 nan 難 neishan 內山 pangjie 盤詰 pi 痞 qingji 情急 shendan 審單 songgun 訟棍 songshi 訟師 sui 歲 tangdi 堂弟 tangxiong 堂兄 tian 田 tu 土 tubao 土堡 tufei 土匪 tugun 土棍

229 waishan 外山 wuzuo 仵作 xiaochuanhui 小船會 xiaojia 小甲 xian 縣 xiangyue 鄉約 xigu 細故 yadu 衙蠹 yamen 衙門 yanguan 煙館 yaoque 要缺 yuxie 遇邪 zhaojia 找價 zhuo jian 捉姦 zixinsuo 自新所 zuzheng 族証

230

Bibliography

Cases from the Baxian Dang’an [Ba County Archive, Sichuan Provincial Archive, Chengdu] are identified by file number. For example. BXDA 7693.

Allee, Mark A. “The Status of Contracts in Nineteenth-Century Chinese Court, In Contracts and Property in Early Modern China, eds. Madeline Zelin, Jonathan K. Ocko and Robert Gardella. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004.

Baxian zhi minguo [Ba County Gazetteer, Republican Period, 1939]. Reprinted in Zhongguo Difang Zhi Jicheng: Sichuan Fu Xian Zhi Ji [Compendium of China’s Local Gazetteers: Volume Containing the Gazetteers from Sichuan’s Prefectures and Counties]. Chengdu: Ba Shu shushe,1992.

Barbosa, David. “After Suicides, Scrutiny of China’s Grim Factories,” New York Times, June 6, 2010.

Bell, Catherine. Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Benton, Lauren. A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400-1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Blok, Anton. Honour and Violence. Cambridge: Polity, 2001.

--- The Mafia of a Sicilian Village 1860-1960: A Study of Violent Peasant Entrepreneurs. New York: Harper and Row, 1975.

Bodde, Derek and Clarence Morris. Law in Imperial China: Exemplified by 190 Ch’ing Dynasty Cases (Translated from the Hsing-an Hui-lan), With Historical, Social, and Juridical Commentaries. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967.

231 Brown, Richard D. “Microhistory and the Post-Modern Challenge.” Journal of the Early Republic 23, no. 1 (April, 2003).

Buck, John Lossing. Land Utilization in China, a Study of 16,786 Farms in 168 Localities, and 38,256 Farm Families in Twenty-two Provinces in China, 1929 1933. Shanghai: The Commercial Press, 1937.

Burbank, Jane. Russian Peasants Go to Court: Legal Culture in the Countryside, 1905 1917. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004.

Cobb, Richard. Death in Paris: The Records of the Basse-Geôle De La Seine, October 1795 September 1801, Vendémiaire Year IV-Fructidor Year IX. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978.

China. Customs Medical Report, For the Year ended 30th September 1896.

--- Customs Medical Report, For the Year ended 31st March 1899.

--- Customs Medical Report, For the Year ended 31st October 1899.

--- Imperial Maritime Customs, I. Statistical Series: no. 6. Decennial Reports on the Trade, Industries, etc. of the Ports Open to Foreign Commerce, and on Conditions and the Development of the Treaty Port Provinces, 1901-1911.

--- Imperial Maritime Customs, I. Statistical Series: no. 6. Decennial Reports on the Trade, Industries, etc. of the Ports Open to Foreign Commerce, and on Conditions and the Development of the Treaty Port Provinces, 1912-1921.

Ch’ü, T’ung-Tzu [Qu Tongzu]. Law and Society in Traditional China. Paris: Mouton, 1961.

Davis, Mike. Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World. London: Verso, 2002.

Davis, Natalie Zemon. Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987.

--- Society and Culture in Early Modern France: Eight Essays. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975.

Deal, Roger A. Crimes of Honor, Drunken Brawls and Murder: Violence in Istanbul Under Abdülhamid II. İstanbul: Libra Kitapçılık ve Yayıncılık,, 2010.

Dean, Kenneth and Zheng Zhenman. Ritual Alliances of the Putian Plain. Leiden: Brill, 2010.

232

Dikötter, Frank. Exotic Commodities: Modern Objects and Everyday Life in China. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.

Drugtext, http://www.drugtext.org/library/books/recreationaldrugs/opium.htm (2010).

Duggen, Charles. “Papal Judges Delegates and the ‘New Law,’” in Cultures of Power: Lordship, Status, and Process in Twelfth-Century Europe, ed. Thomas N. Bisson. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995.

Durkheim, Emile. On Suicide, ed. Alexander Riley, trans. Robin Buss. New York: Penguin Classics, 2007.

--- The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. New York: Free Press, 1965.

Ellickson, Robert. Order Without Law: How Neighbors Settle Disputes. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994.

Emsley, Clive. Crime and Society in England, 1750-1900. London: Longman, 1987.

Entenmann, Robert Eric. Migration and Settlement In Sichuan, 1644-1796. Thesis (Ph. D.)--Harvard University, l982.

Esherick, Joseph W. The Origins of the Boxer Uprising. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1987.

--- Reform and Revolution in China: The 1911 Revolution in Hunan and Hubei. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.

Feuerwerker, Albert. The Chinese Economy, 1870-1949. Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, 1995.

Gambetta, Diego. The Sicilian Mafia: The Business of Private Protection. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996.

Gates, Hill. China’s Motor: A Thousand Years of Petty Capitalism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996.

--- “Footloose in Fujian: Economic Correlates of Footbinding,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 43 (2001).

Goodman, Bryna. Native Place, City and Nation: Regional Networks and Identities in Shanghai, 1853-1937. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.

233 Harley, J.B. and David Woodward. The History of Cartography, Volume 2, Book 2: Cartography in the Traditional East and Southeast Asian Societies. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1995.

He Yaozu. Chongqing yaolan, Chongqing, 1945.

Christian Henriot, “‘Invisible Deaths, Silent Deaths’: ‘Bodies Without Masters’ in Republican Shanghai,” Journal of Social History 43, no. 2 (2010).

Hershatter, Gail. The Workers of Tianjin, 1900- 1949. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.

Ho, Ping-ti [He Bingdi]. Studies on the Population of China, 1368-1953. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953.

Huang, Liuhong. Fukkei zensho. Tokyo: Kyūko Shoin, 1973.

--- A Complete Book Concerning Happiness and Benevolence: A Manual for Local Magistrates in Seventeenth-Century China. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Huang, Philip. Civil Justice in China: Representation and Practice in the Qing. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996.

--- The Peasant Economy and Social Change in North China. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985.

Isett, Christopher M. State, Peasant, and Merchant in Qing Manchuria, 1644-1862. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006.

Japan. Nihon tokei nenkan [Japan Statistical Yearbook]. Tokyo: Nihon Tokei Kyokai: Mainichi Shinbunsha, 1949.

Johnson, David. Spectacle and Sacrifice: The Ritual Foundations of Village Life in North China. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2010.

Johnson, Christopher M. Urbanization and Crime: Germany, 1871-1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Johnson, Walter. Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999.

Jones, William. The Great Qing Code. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

234 Karasawa, Yasuhiko, Matthew Harvey Sommer, and Bradly Ward Reed. “Qing County Archives in Sichuan: An Update from the Field.” Late Imperial China 26, no. 2 (2005).

Katz, Paul. Divine Justice: Religion and the Development of Chinese Legal Culture. New York: Routledge, 2009.

Kertzer, David I. Ritual, Politics, and Power. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989.

Kivelson, Valerie. Cartographies of Tsardom: The Land And Its Meanings in Seventeenth-century Russia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006.

Kuhn, Philip A. Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery scare of 1768. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990.

--- Rebellion and Its Enemies in Late Imperial China: Militarization and Social Structure, 1796-1864. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980.

Lawrence, Bruce B. and Aisha Karim, eds., On Violence: A Reader. Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2007.

Lu, Hanchao. Street Criers: A Cultural History of Chinese Beggars. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005.

--- Beyond the Neon Lights: Everyday Shanghai in the Early Twentieth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

Ma Xiaobin and Liu Jun. “Sichuan Qingdai dang’an pingshu” (Qing Archives in Sichuan). In Li Shigen, ed., Sichuan Qingdai dang’an yanjiu (The Study of Qing Archives in Sichuan), Chengdu: Xinan jiaotong daxue, 2004.

Malinowski, Bronislaw. Crime and Custom in Savage Society. London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner & co., 1926.

Mann, Susan. “Grooming a Daughter for Marriage: Brides and Wives in the Mid-Qing Period.” In Chinese Femininities, Chinese Masculinities, eds. Susan Brownwell and Jeffrey Wasserstrom. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

Macauley, Melissa. Social Power and Legal Culture: Litigation Masters in Late Imperial China. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.

McIsaac, Mary Lee. The Limits of Chinese Nationalism: Workers In Wartime Chongqing, 1937-1945. Thesis (Ph. D.)--Yale University, 1994.

235

Merry, Sally Engle. Colonizing Hawai’i. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.

--- Getting Justice and Getting Even: Legal Consciousness Among Working-Class Americans. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.

Mol, Annemarie. The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2003.

Muir, Edward. Ritual in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

--- and Guido Ruggiero. History from Crime: Selections from Quaderni Storici. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.

--- and Guido Ruggiero, eds., Microhistory and the Lost Peoples of Europe: Selections from Quaderni Storici. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991.

Mnookin, Robert H. and Lewis Kornhauser, “Bargaining in the Shadow of the Law: The Case of Divorce,” The Yale Law Journal 88, no. 5, April 1, 1979.

Neeb, Gunter R. Blood Stasis: China’s Classical Concept in Modern Medicine. London: Churchill Livingstone, 2006.

Perkins, Dwight H. Agricultural Development in China, 1368-1968. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1969.

Perry, Elizabeth J. Shanghai on Strike: The Politics of Chinese Labor. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993.

--- Rebels and Revolutionaries in North China, 1845-1945. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983.

Phillips, M. R., H. Liu, and Y. Zhang. “Suicide and Social Change in China,” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 23, no. 1, March 1999.

Pomeranz, Kenneth. The Making of a Hinterland: State, Society, and Economy in Inland North China, 1853-1937. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

Redfield, Robert. “Primitive Law” in Law and Warfare: Studies in the Anthropology of Conflict, ed. Paul Bohannan. New York: The Natural History Press, 1967.

Reed, Bradly. Talons and Teeth: County Clerks and Runners in the Qing Dynasty. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.

236

Rieder, Jonathan. “The Social Organization of Vengeance,” in Toward a General Theory of Social Control. New York: Academic Press, 1984.

Roth, Randolph. American Homicide. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009.

Rowe, William. Crimson Rain: Seven Centuries of Violence in a Chinese County. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006.

--- Hankow: Commerce and Society in a Chinese City, 1796-1889. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984.

Scott, James C. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987.

Service, Grace. Golden Inches: The China Memoir of Grace Service. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.

Skinner, William G. The City in Late Imperial China. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1977.

--- “Marketing and Social Structure in Rural China: Part I,” The Journal of Asian Studies 24, no. 1, November 1, 1964.

Smail, Daniel Lord. The Consumption of Justice: Emotions, Publicity, and Legal Culture in Marseille, 1264-1423. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003.

Smith, Arthur Henderson. Village life in China. Boston: Little, Brown, 1970.

Sommer, Matthew H. Sex, Law and Society in Late Imperial China. Stanford: Stanford University, 2000.

--- [Su Chengjie]. “Qingdai xianya de maiqi anjian shenpan: yi 272 jian Baxian, Nanbu yu Baodi xian [The Adjudication of Wife-Selling in Qing County Courts: 272 Cases from Ba, Nanbu, and Baodi Counties],” in Ming Qing Falü Yunzuo Zhong de Quanli yu Wenhua [Power and Culture in Ming-Qing Law], eds. Qiu Pengsheng and Chen Xiyuan.Taipei: Lianjing Chuban Gongsi, 2009.

Song, Ci. Xi Yuan Ji Lu: 5 Juan [Collected Writings on the Washing Away of Wrongs]. Beijing: Falü chubanshe, 1958.

--- The Washing Away of Wrongs : Forensic Medicine in Thirteenth-century China, trans. Brian McKnight. Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 1981.

237

Spence, Jonathan D. Treason By the Book. New York: Viking, 2001.

Spencer, J.E. “Changing Chungking: The Rebuilding of an Old China City.” Geographical Review 29 no1 (1939).

Spierenburg, Pieter. A History of Murder: Personal Violence in Europe from the Middle Ages to the Present. Cambridge: Polity, 2008.

Stapleton, Kristin. Civilizing Chengdu: Chinese Urban Reform, 195-1937. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2000.

Taylor, William. Drinking, Homicide, and Rebellion in Colonial Mexican Villages Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1979. ter Harr, B. J. White Lotus Teachings in Chinese Religious History. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999.

Theiss, Janet M. Disgraceful Matters the Politics of Chastity in Eighteenth-Century China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.

Thompson, E. P. Customs in Common. London: Merlin Press, 2009.

--- “History and Anthropology,” in Making History: Writings on History and Culture. New York: New Press, 1994.

Tilly, Charles. Contentious Performances. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

United States. Bureau of the Census, Vital Statistics Rates in the U.S., 1900-1940 Sixteenth Census of the U.S.: 1940. Washington: U.S. G.P.O., 1943.

--- Dispatches from the US Consulate in Chungking, 1896-1906.

Varese, Federico. The Russian Mafia: Private Protection in a New Market Economy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Wang, Di. The Teahouse : Small Business, Everyday Culture, and Public Politics in Chengdu, 1900-1950. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008.

--- Street Culture in Chengdu: Public Space, Urban Commoners and Local Politics, 1870-1930. Stanford: Stanford University, 2003.

238 --- Kuachu fengbi di shjie: Changjiang shangyou quyu shehui ya jiu, 1644-1911 [Striding Out of a Closed World: Research on Society in the Upper Yangzi Macroregion,1644-1911]. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2001.

--- “Chengshi renkou yu chengshi jingji, shehui zuzhi” [Urban Population and the City’s Economic and Social Organization]. In Chongqing Chengshi Yanjiu [Studies of the Urban History of Chongqing], ed. Wei Yingtao. Chengdu: Sichuan Daxuechubanshe, 1989.

Wakefield, David. Fenjia: Household Division and Inheritance in Qing and Republican China. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1998.

Watson, James L. “Self-Defense Corps, Violence and the Bachelor Subculture in South China: Two Case Studies,” in Zhong Yang yanjiu di 2 jie guoji Hanxue huiyi lunwen ji [Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Sinology].Taipei, Taiwan: 1986.

--- and Evelyn Sakakida Rawski, and Joint Committee on Chinese Studies (U.S.). Death Ritual in Late Imperial and Modern China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.

Wei, Yingtao, Jin dai Chongqing cheng shi shi [Modern urban history of Chongqing]. Chengdu: Sichuan daxue chubanshe, 1991.

Winichakul, Thongchai. Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997.

Wolf, Arthur P. Sexual Attraction and Childhood Association: A Chinese Brief for Edward Westermarck. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995.

--- Marriage and Adoption in China, 1854-1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1980)

--- Religion and Ritual in Chinese Society, ed. Arthur P. Wolf. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974.

Wolf, Margery. Women and the Family in Rural Taiwan. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1972.

Xing’an Hui Lan san bian [Three Volumes of the Conspectus of Penal Cases]. Beijing: Beijing guji chubanshe, 2004.

Xue, Yunsheng. Du Li Cun Yi [Lingering Doubts After Reading the Substatutes]. Edited and punctuated by Huang Jingjia. Taibei: Chinese Materials and Research AidsService Center, 1970.

239

Zelin, Madeline. “The Rights of tenants in Mid-Qing Sichuan: A Study of Land Related Lawsuits in the Baxian Archives.” The Journal of Asian Studies 45, no. 3 (May, 1996).

Zhou, Xun. Shuhai congtan [Comments on the World of Sichuan]. Taipei: Wenhai chubanshe, 1966.

240