CHAPTER 3 Social Practice and Judicial Politics in “Grave Destruction” Cases in Qing Taiwan, 1683–1895

Weiting Guo*

In recent years, a growing number of scholars have remarked on the importance of religious belief and practice in Chinese legal culture. We now have impor- tant studies of the dynamic interrelation and “distorting mimesis” between human legal practice and divine justice in various dimensions.1 Scholars of Chinese religion have also explored how popular beliefs and practices were manipulated, regulated, standardized,2 or “superscribed”3 by the state and its agents. However, this scholarship has tended to focus on the relationship

* I want to thank Professor Madeleine Zelin for her generous support and insightful sugges- tions to my article. I also appreciate Jonathan Ocko, Pengsheng Chiu, Yanhong Wu, and Taisu Zhang for their valuable advice. 1 Among others, Paul Katz’s Divine Justice: Religion and the Development of Chinese Legal Culture (New York: Routledge, 2009) represents the most comprehensive work on the interplay between Chinese law and religion. For other studies that also explore the mutual influences between human and divine justice, see, e.g., Valerie Hansen, Negotiating Daily Life in Traditional China: How Ordinary People Used Contracts, 600–1400 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); Timothy Brook, Jérôme Bourgon, and Gregory Blue, Death by a Thousand Cuts (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008); Chen Dengwu 陈登武, Cong renjianshi dao youmingjie: Tangdai de fazhi, shehui, yu guojia 从人间世到幽冥界: 唐代的法制、社会、与国家 [From Human World to Underworld: Law, Society, and the State in Tang Dynasty] (Taibei: Wunan, 2006); Chen Dengwu, Diyu, falü, renjian zhixu: zhonggu zhongguo de zongjiao, she- hui, yu guojia 地狱、法律、人间秩序：中古中国的宗教、社会、与国家 [Hell, Law, and the Order of Human World: Chinese Religion, Society, and State during the Middle Age] (Taibei: Wunan, 2009). 2 See especially James Watson, “Standardizing the Gods: The Promotion of T’ien Hou (‘Empress of Heaven’) along the South China Coast, 960–1960,” in Popular Culture in Late Imperial China, ed. David Johnson, Andrew J. Nathan, and Evelyn S. Rawski (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 292–324. 3 Prasenjit Duara coined the term ‘superscription’ to describe how the state utilized the frame- work of popular symbolisms while adding new meanings to these symbolisms. Prasenjit Duara, Culture, Power, and the State Culture, Power, and the State Rural North China, 1900–1942 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988); Prasenjit Duara, “Superscribing Symbols: The Myth of Guandi, Chinese God of War,” Journal of Asian Studies 47, no. 4 (1988): 778–95.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi ��.��63/9789004288492_005 Social Practice and Judicial Politics 85 between the divine and mundane worlds, orthodoxy and heterodoxy, and for- mal and informal institutions. We have yet to explore the way in which popular beliefs were negotiated in adjudication, and the ways in which the violation of popular beliefs could be both overlooked and sanctioned in social and judicial practice. The goal of this chapter is to rethink the way we approach the inter- action between religion and law by examining certain aspects of the process of negotiation in cases involving the religiously and culturally charged issue of grave desecration.4 Records preserved in the Danxin Archive (Danxin dang’an) and various other local sources from Qing-ruled Taiwan provide rich documentation for a study of “grave-destruction” (huifen) or “uncovering graves” ( fazhong) cases. The tomb is one of the most consecrated and vulnerable sites. In China its sanctity was derived primarily from the cult of the ancestor, which influenced the way in which the deceased were imagined, and from ideas of fengshui or geomancy, which accorded transformative significance to the siting tomb itself. Because of its association with both geomancy and the corpse, disruption of the tomb could entangle kin and offenders in intense social conflicts. Maurice Freedman and subsequent anthropologists commented on the importance of geomantic disputes and the competition over geomantic sites, often referred to in Chinese as “stealing other’s geomantic sites” (qiang fengshui).5 Melissa Macauley drew attention to the practice of “body-snatching” of corpses as a unique feature of Chinese legal practice that frequently resulted in legal

4 Actually, disputes involved grave destruction were not uncommon in late imperial China. Many local gazetteers and legal handbooks provide vivid account of grave disputes particu- larly since late Ming period. Some grave disputes even triggered power struggles among local actors, officials, and the state. Timothy Brook discussed a Nanchang grave case that disturbed the imperial court and a wide range of higher officials. See Timothy Brook, The Chinese State in Ming Society (London: Routledge Curzon, 2005), 1–13. 5 Maurice Freedman, “Geomancy,” in Proceedings of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland for 1968 (London: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 1969), 5–15; Maurice Freedman, “Chinese Geomancy: Some Observations in Hong Kong,” in The Study of Chinese Society: Essays by Maurice Freedman (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1979), 189–221. For the exploration of normalization and indigenization of geomantic order in local society through a historical anthropological approach, see Chen Jinguo 陈进国, Xinyang, yishi, yu xiangtu shehui: fengshui de lishi renleixue tansuo 信仰、仪式与乡土社会：风水的历史人类学探索 [Belief, Ritual, and Rural Society: The Anthropology of Fengshui in Fujian, China] (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chuban- she, 2005). For other comprehensive studies on Chinese geomancy, see Stephan Feuchtwang, An Anthropological Analysis of Chinese Geomancy (Vietnam: Vithagna, 1974); Ole Bruun, Fengshui in China: Geomantic Divination between State Orthodoxy and Popular Religion (Copenhagen: nias Press, 2003).