According to the Person, Place, and Season: A Preliminary Discussion of Medical Conceptions of Local Bodies, Seasonal Geographies, and Regional Disorders in Late Imperial China

Marta Hanson *

This is a rough draft of work in progress. Comments, criticisms, and citations are all welcome. But please do not cite without permission

Introduction

Since G. William Skinner’s development over the past thirty years of the

* University of California, San Diego, Department of History. 2 「疾病的歷史」研討會 macroregional systems model for analyzing change in China, anthropologists, sociologists, and historians have had to mute their claims for all of China and turn their attention instead to local cultures and regional histories (Skinner 1964-5). In Chinese Society in the Eighteenth Century, Susan Naquin and Evelyn Rawski for the first time synthesized much of this new scholarship for the long eighteenth century of the Qing dynasty (Naquin and Rawski 1987). They followed through on Skinner’s proposal to analyze Chinese history in terms of “an internested hierarchy of local and regional histories” and, therefore, to refine our generalizations of national processes in China by specifying macroregional cycles of development and decline (Naquin and Rawski, 138). Their depictions of the nine major regional societies of the Qing emphasized the cultural diversity and regional distinctiveness of the Qing Empire. Considerable scholarship has been done as well on the central significance of native-place associations to secure a sense of self and community in the business networks, urban cultures, and local societies of the Qing (Goodman, 1995; Rowe, 1984). My work developed out of this scholarship but shifted the focus to both Chinese medicine and cultural notions of regionally distinct local bodies (Farquhar 1994). I began with the premise that there was never one authentic system of traditional Chinese medicine (Sivin 1987) but rather many local medical literate traditions (Wu Yiyi 1993). Not only did these traditions change over time, but also there were diverse medical cultures which differed in practice according to gender and class, at any given time (Cullen 1993; Bray 1997; Furth 1999). Regional traditions sometimes also appealed to conceptions of corporeal differences. One of the most important new literate medical traditions of the Qing —the warm-factor disorder tradition (wenbing xuepai) — came into being, for example, not only through social networks of local physicians expressed in the prefaces of the medical compilations themselves, but also by appealing to a regionally resonant cultural notion of southern corporeal distinctiveness (Hanson 1997). Currently I am attempting to expand this initial research regionally, and further Marta Hanson 3 verify its conclusions methodologically, by synthesizing the extant medical sources on regional body types, geographic climates, and therapeutic emphases. Geography, lineage, and native place all influenced therapeutic emphases in Chinese medical practice. Chinese physicians tended to give regional, climatic, and physiological explanations for significant variations in medical practice. I am most concerned with working out, however, what these medical explanations reveal about how the Chinese conceptualized human variation before the twentieth century? The evidence in primary Chinese medical texts shows that physicians explained human variation in terms of differences in the environment (cold or hot, dry or damp, highland or lowland, northern and western or southern and eastern), social distinctions related to the person’s position in society (male or female, wealthy or poor, noble or base, young or old), and bodily attributes (a stronger or weaker body, fleshy or thin constitution, full or depleted vitality, tight or open pores). How, in short, did different medical cultures utilize, reinforce, and even construct notions of local corporeal distinctiveness, geographically distinct climates, and regional character to promote their medical practices over others?

Preliminaries

This paper has three parts. First, I set up my views concerning how to think about Chinese conceptions of human diversity. Secondly, I introduce basic concepts in Chinese cosmology and natural history that underlie medical conceptions of human difference. Finally, I give two examples from the Chinese medical canon, miasmic epidemic disorders and a culture-bound syndrome called gu poisoning, to illustrate my arguments regarding the intersections Chinese made between conceptions of disease, space, and ethnic difference. As an introduction, I suggest the following hypothesis: Only with the invention of 4 「疾病的歷史」研討會 evolution, came the invention of biological race. And without a temporal conception of evolution, the biological conception of a racial hierarchy could not have been conceived. The concept of evolution not only transformed all aspects of human thought in the western world during the nineteenth century, it made it possible to make “natural” a hierarchy of human difference based on a biological conception of race. Within the concept of evolution, the idea of recapitulation was one of the most influential. Recapitulation justified racial stereotypes and prejudice as rational reflections of a race-based hierarchy based in the evolutionary development of the human species. Ernst Haeckel pithily summarized the idea: “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” This phrase was used to distill the idea that the life cycle of a human being, that is its ontogeny, repeats in a specific sequence the evolutionary development of the entire human species, or its phylogeny, generally. With this conception of recapitulation it became possible to rank human variation on a scale of human development, one that placed with the rise of the slave trade in Europe and the Americas, a young African man at a lower stage in the evolutionary path of the human species, than say, a white child, particularly a boy. Before the influence of western evolutionary thinking in the late nineteenth century, the Chinese did not have a conception of race as biological or evolutionary. Without a temporal conception of human difference, the idea that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny makes no sense. By contrast, the Chinese had a conception that the biology of a single organism--plant, animal, or human--repeats or recapitulates the ecology in which it lives. Human variation was thus explained in terms of ecological resonance, not biological determinism. Certainly the Chinese differentiated between the civilized and the uncivilized, just as their European counterparts have done since antiquity. Becoming Chinese, however, was a fundamentally cultural process. Sinification transformed the simian barbarian into a human and, therefore, into a Marta Hanson 5

Chinese. The distinction between Chinese and Other was based on cultural assimilation of those on the periphery into the central Chinese polity and not, as in the western conceptions of race, on a linear model of evolutionary stages of the development of the human species. Broadly speaking my research examines the intersections of disease, space, and Chinese constructions of identity both of themselves and of minority peoples. My work on Chinese medical texts engages the central question of Chinese conceptions of the other, and particularly for the period 1600-1900, whether or not there was a discourse on race in China before the twentieth century. This is in fact the subject of this paper. I see two problems with the academic discussion over the past decade about race in pre-twentieth-century China. First of all, the scholars writing on race in early modern China have often used the western biological conception of race as a catchall category and project it onto Chinese discussions of human difference. This methodological problem is comparable with the common fallacy in medical history to impose biomedical conceptions of disease onto the past and other cultures. Secondly, historians of China have not yet examined systematically Chinese indigenous conceptions of human variation. Chinese used an ancient idea of resonant local qi, to explain variations in flora, fauna, as well as people. To understand the concept of local qi, one must first grasp three related concepts central in Chinese cosmology and medicine: qi, yin-yang, and the five phases.

Basic Cosmological Concepts

The concept of qi, although untranslatable into English, can be understood as simultaneously the “stuff that makes things happen” or “the stuff in which things happen,” and “what makes things happen in stuff,” depending on context. In Chinese 6 「疾病的歷史」研討會 cosmology, the world began with Undifferentiated Qi (with a capital Q), and first divided into a polarity of complementary classes called yin -yang, both considered to be aspects of Qi. Yin-yang structured dualities such as female/male, night/day, and cold/hot respectively. Although yin and yang are opposite in quality, they were always viewed as a complementary pair which both structured sequences of change within a systematic framework and whose polarity defined the framework itself. All things in the world were considered to be differentiated manifestations of qi (with a lower case q) which despite their multiplicity could be classified as either yin or yang, depending on their dominant aspect. In medicine, this two-part division was further divided into three aspects each to rationalize the pattern of illness in the body from the outer to the inner aspects of the body. All of the myriad symptoms of illness in the human body were thus also considered to be manifestations of qi. Five Phases is another combination of entities like yin-yang, to identify complementary aspects and sequential processes of change. This five-fold classification into Wood, Fire, Metal, Water, and Earth represented not the actual elements or materials of Wood, Metal, and Earth, but types of activity or processes. For example, the Wood of Five Phases did not represent the material wood, but rather the processes associated with wood, such as growth and flexibility. Like yin-yang, Five Phases systematized an orderly progression of change seen as transformations of qi. The Five Phases of qi relate to each other in a spatiotemporal sequence of mutual interaction: Wood corresponds with the east and spring, the segment of growth and acceleration in the seasonal cycle, and so on. As early as the Han dynasty, the Chinese rationalized cultural differences between people living in different regions within the Chinese empire in a taxonomy based on the Five Phases. The Five Phases linked local climate, land, and customs with disease constructs and therapeutic approaches characteristic of each of the five regions. We see this most clearly in the earliest comprehensive Chinese treatise on medicine called the Marta Hanson 7

Inner Canon of the Yellow Emperor. Traditionally, the Chinese considered this medical text to be the founding canon of Chinese medicine passed down from the legendary Yellow Emperor since unrecorded antiquity. Scholars now concur that the Inner Canon is a collection of inter-related short essays from different medical lineages at different times, compiled in the first century before the common era from sources most likely written over the course of the previous century. The entire treatise si structured as a dialogue between the legendary Yellow Emperor and his ministers, the most prominent one being a man named Qi Bo. In a chapter of this text titled “On Different Treatments and Methods” (“Yifa fangyi lun”), the Yellow Emperor asks his principal interlocutor, Qi Bo, the following question: “Why is it that different treatments can be effective for curing the same disorder?” Qi Bo responds, “This is due to differences in the land.” The rest of the passage proceeds to describe how the different qualities of land in the five regions--east, south, center, west, and north--account for differences in eating habits, local customs, diseases, and therapeutic responses. The southern region, for example, had characteristically low land, soft soil, and vaporous mists. The low land and climate combined to produce acute cases of rheumatism due to accumulation of dampness and heat in the body’s circulation tracts. According to the authors of the Inner Canon, acupuncture, one of the disciplines best known in the west, developed in southern China specifically to treat the Damp - and Heat- Factor disorders considered prevalent in the south. Several other chapters in the Inner Canon evoke a spatial division between the north and west on one side of center, and south and east on the other, to explain differences not only in the longevity, but also in the constitutions of people who lived in these regions. Those living to the north and west outside of the central states (zhongguo) in the Yellow River Valley, had generally stronger constitutions because of higher land and a cooler climate. People who lived in the southern and eastern regions beyond the 8 「疾病的歷史」研討會

Central states, where the land was lower (i.e., closer to sea level) and the climate hotter, had more delicate and weaker constitutions. This form of analogical reasoning, commonly termed “correlative thinking,” evolved a conception of ecological resonance based on differences in local qi. The spatial and temporal quality of local qi accounted for regional, cultural, and even ethnic difference. Local qi united traditional conceptions of the environment, climate, and disease with a notion of self deeply rooted in native place. In the fourth century B.C.E., for example, the famous philosopher Mencius wrote: “Where one dwells transforms one’s qi, just as food transforms ones body.” Should one have to dwell elsewhere would invariably effect a change in one’s qi, just as the food of a different region effects one’s digestion. This conception of local qi was based on an idea of ecological resonance, not biological determinism. The local qi of your native place, in other words, influences whom you become, but it does not determine your destiny. The local qi of a different place, should you have to move, could equally have an effect and change you. This conceptualization of local qi represents a fundamentally contingent and non-essentialist understanding of the relationship between ecology and human biology. Chinese physicians also used the conception of local qi to fashion both the spatial contours of Chinese ethnic identity and their perceptions of ethnic difference. They often used it to bolster ideas of Han Chinese superiority vis -à-vis the minority populations living along their frontiers. They used it as well to reinforce stereotypes of regional differences between the Chinese themselves.

Examples from Medicine

The Chinese directly associated at least two types of disease constructs with a specific ethnic minority. These were miasmic fevers of the southern tropics and a Marta Hanson 9 special culture-bound syndrome called gu poisoning. Physicians associated these disorders with the tropical regions of China’s southernmost frontier and the minority peoples that lived there. Both disease constructs simultaneously expressed Chinese fears of these indigenous populations and defined their difference from them. Miasmic fevers expressed their failure to assimilate completely the aboriginal populations of the sub-tropics, collectively called the Man, since at least the Tang dynasty (618-907). Gu pois oning also expressed Chinese fears of the other at this time, but more specifically that of retaliation for conquest through sorcery and the magical use of poison. In this final section, I give only a few examples of each disease construct to illustrate this argument. I then conclude with a more general hypothesis that indigenous Chinese conceptions of human variation, especially their conceptions of the ethnic other, were spatial. They did not integrate the temporal dimension of evolutionary conceptions of race until the beginning of the twentieth century, by which time such ideas had been introduced to China from Europe. Instead of a Great Chain of Being from lowest to highest on a linear evolutionary path of development, the boundary between Chinese and other was one between the civilized and the uncivilized, the agrarian and the non-agrarian, between, in other words, the simian or animal-like minorities and the human, cultivating and presumably cultivated, Chinese. We see this boundary transgression in the following examples first in the conflation of the Man peoples with the miasmic environment of the sub-tropics. In the second example, we see a slight variation with the magical transformations of Miao women who transgress the boundary of the human and animal worlds by changing into black birds or sheep and by harnessing the power of insects to carry out gu poisoning.

Miasmic Diseases of Lingnan 10 「疾病的歷史」研討會

The subtropical region of the far south encompassed by most of modern-day Guangdong and Guangxi provinces was referred to as Lingnan, or south of the Ling mountain range, since at least the Tang dynasty (618-907). Lingnan, a region bordered by mountains and high plateaus to the north and formed by the drainage basins of three major rivers, had aboriginal groups with different culture that the dominant Han Chinese also found difficult to control. In the central government, civil and military officials who committed infractions or crimes were often banished to the frontiers of the empire. The farther away from the center of the Chinese polity, the more severe the punishment. The most punitive category was exile to a miasmal area (yanzhang) in the southern tropics, since it combined in the calculus of punishment geographical and cultural isolation with a mortal threat to health. I quote from Edward Schafer, one of the most famous western historians of Tang culture:

Disgraced politicians were banished to a distance proportional to the degree of the disgrace —the more heinous the crime, the further south they were sent, even to the hot, infected lands of Hainan and Annam, where they were given a minor and unattractive post, with a minimum of the amenities with which they were familiar. This degrading transfer was often accomplished in stages —first a minor post in Hunan, say, then on to Lingnan. The opposite was also true: the unfortunate functionary could be gradually rehabilitated, and proceed northward, post by post, down the temperature gradient to the capital and even the court.

Exile thus meant removal from the Chinese center and displacement to the peripheries to live among non-Han peoples. The theory of resonant local qi explained miasmas as a specific manifestation of the hostile environment of the tropics where poisonous vapors, malignant mists, and malarial rains constantly assaulted the well being of northern visitors. Official discourse blamed the government’s difficulty in gaining control over this region on the deadly effect of miasmas. The mists and vapors of the tropics were Marta Hanson 11 considered not only noxious but also the main barrier to Han conquest and colonization. One of the first stories that links Han conquest with deadly miasmas is that of the famous Han dynasty general Ma Yuan. According to his official biography in the History of the Former Han dynasty, after Ma Yuan and his solders defeated the Yue people (Viet in Vietnam) along the border of modern-day Vietnam from 42-43 C.E., many of the Han soldiers died after returning to the capital from a miasmic epidemic disorder that they had brought back with them. The first record of this case in a medical text dates to the early fourth century about 310. The southern aristocrat Ge Hong (281-341) attributed the origin of a disease, which he called the captive’s sores (luchuang), to the same expansionist campaign that Ma Yuan led in the early 40s of the reign (r. 25-55) of the Martial Emperor Guang Wudi. It is interesting to note that this story of Ma Yuan’s soldiers and captives bringing miasmic epidemic disorders, or captive’s sores, back to the capital was reinterpreted during the Ming dynasty in the early fifteenth century as the origin myth of smallpox in specialized treatises on smallpox. This finding suggests that physicians may have made the later association between the cases of “smallpox” of the Ming and the earlier “miasmic epidemic disorders” and “captive’s sores” of the Eastern Han dynasty shortly after the failed attempt to recapture the border region of northern Vietnam during the Yongle reign (1405-1427). In such a political context, this new association suggests that physicians began to think that the fetal poison that they believed produced smallpox in their children had its origin in the miasmic qi of the region where the Man people lived, a region no longer under direct control of the Chinese state. Medical texts from the Tang dynasty are another early source on southern miasmas. At this time physicians began to write special disease monographs for officials, scholars, soldiers, and other travelers to Lingnan. They argued that the treatments developed in the north were not effective for the miasmic diseases in the far south. From a 12 「疾病的歷史」研討會 biomedical point of view, these southern miasmic diseases were most likely malaria, yellow fever, or dengue fever, certainly debilitating diseases prevalent in the tropics. From a cultural perspective, medical descriptions of miasmic diseases expressed a world in opposition to the Chinese cosmology anchored in the seasonal cycles of agrarian life. One late Tang Administrator Liu Xun, a military administrator in Guangzhou in Lingnan, wrote in Lingbiao Records of the Strange (Lingbiao luyi, ca. 900) about the pestilential quality of the environment: “The mountains and rivers of Lingnan are twisted and overgrown; the stagnant vapors are not easily dispersed or diffused. Therefore there is a great amount of mist and fog that cause miasmas. When people come in contact with it, many get sick, their abdomen swells and their illness turns into gu poisoning.” The hostile mountains and waterways of Lingnan embodied the non-agrarian space in which miasmic qi accumulated and spread through fog and mists. Liu Xun expressed an important shift in explanation of gu poisoning, also associated with the southern tropics, from the malevolence of the inhabitants to the inhospitability of the environment. He argued that the geographical and climatic conditions of the region with the pestilential vapors or miasmas caused the greater prevalence of gu poisoning, which he understood to be a swelling of the abdomen, and not as previous Chinese argued because of the cruel character of the “barbarians” who lived there. (I will return to this example when I discuss gu poisoning). By the twelfth century, the Chinese had completely domesticated the landscape of south China to the borders of Vietnam and the southern coastline. Nevertheless, in the Chinese imagination, the distinction between agrarian north central China and non-agrarian southern tropics remained important, if not in fact real. One Song poet, Yang Wanli, wrote about Lingnan as having a climate foreign to Chinese from the north: “There are dense mists in the mountains and poisonous exhalations in the waterways. These are neither smoke nor fog nor clouds. Northerners do not recognize the southern Marta Hanson 13 miasmas.” In the twelfth century during the Southern Song (1126-1278), two officials wrote a medical text titled Formulas for Protection of Health in Lingnan. Although written in the twelfth century, the prefaces clearly indicate that it was modeled on Tang medical texts on the same topic which are now no longer extant. They intended this text to protect Chinese traveling to the south. They portrayed the Lingnan region as the land of climatic excesses and cosmic imbalance.

Lingnan is called the region of scorching heat. It borders the ocean. Its land is low and soil infertile. Because it is a region of scorching heat and has infertile soil, the hot yang qi regularly releases. [Since] the earth borders the sea is low, the damp yin qi accumulates. Thus these two [aspects of] qi combine to produce alternating Cold and Hot disorders. [Since] the yang qi regularly releases, during all four seasons there are flowers, there is never frost or snow during the winter, and for more than half the year there is scorching heat.

This passage portrays a region without clear distinctions between the four seasons and where the continuous interplay between yin and yang is forever unpredictable. In other sections of the text, the authors admonished Chinese officials, soldiers, and merchants not to eat the local foods and warned that they need to fortify themselves against the southern miasmas. The conceptions of southern miasmic diseases presented in this medical text not only distilled Chinese fears of the southernmost climate, they provided a metaphor for talking about the antipodes of Chinese civilization. Prescriptions for Health in Lingnan continued to be printed well into the Qing dynasty. Sections of it, especially the chapter on miasmic disorders, were even published separately up into the early twentieth century. By the twelfth century, we also find a conflation of the miasmic environment of the southern tropics with the people the Chinese called Man, the collective name for the aborigines of Vietnam. In several cases one finds the far southern miasmic qi named 14 「疾病的歷史」研討會 after the Man people. The character for Man was also used to refer to the land or the region in which this minority group lived. In addition, several four character phrases in Chinese that refer to the southern subtropical climate combine the characters for miasmic qi and the Man people: “Miasmic rain and Man mists” (Zhangyu Manyan), “Man winds and miasmic rains” (Manfeng zhangyu), “Man clouds and miasmic rains” (Manyun zhangyu), “Man mists and miasmic rain” (Manyan zhangyu), and “Man mists and miasmic fog” (Manyan zhangwu). The Man had settled along the southernmost border of the Chinese empire from at least the third century B.C.E. In the Chinese imagination, they gradually became conflated with the climate and land of the region itself. The association between a disease and an unassimilated ethnic group living at the southern frontier of Chinese civilization--which we find in the miasmic epidemic disorders, and later even smallpox--was most obvious from the Tang dynasty on in references to gu poisoning in the far south, and by the eighteenth century, among the Miao people of southern China.

Gu Poisoning and the Miao

Gu poisoning, a complex term that denotes a wide range of ideas and practices from food poisoning to black magic, like the concept qi, is best left untranslated. The image of insects inside a vessel in the gu character conveys a visual metaphor of a human body (i.e., the vessel) possessed by spirits (i.e., the insects). By analogy, a woman who seduced a man through magical means came to be thought of as practicing gu poisoning. During later periods, particularly during the Sui (581-617) and Tang dynasties (618-907), Chinese sources begin to associate gu poisoning with specific methods of magic attributed to minority cultures. One of the most important medical texts of the Marta Hanson 15 early Tang dynasty, completed at the end of the Sui in 610 was the Treatise on the Origin and Symptoms of Various Disorders (Zhubing yuan hou lun, comp. 610). The author Cao Yuanfang, for example, lists over 30 types of gu poisoning one of which was attributed to the Di and Qiang tribes of the western regions of the Chinese empire. The disease construct called gu poisoning in Chinese medical texts can be approached as a compass point toward sources of danger. During the course of the Tang dynasty, this compass point shifted to the far south. In a new book titled L’Aconit et L’Orpiment: Drogues et poisons en Chine ancienne et medievale, the French historian of Chinese pharmacy, Frederic Obringer, found that from the Sui-Tang unification the Chinese associated gu poisoning with the following three regions: Fujian province on the southeast coastline which at that time was the territory of a minority people called Min; the lake region around Poyang in the central Chinese region of Jiangnan; and in Lingnan or modern-day Guangxi and Guangdong, which thereafter became the central foci of gu poisoning in the Chinese imagination. Later during the Ming dynasty, a fourth region to the southwest in Sichuan province around Chengdu became associated with a less serious form of gu poisoning called “gold caterpillars.” Obringer argues that by at least the Sui and early Tang, when we have records, the Chinese associated gu poisoning with southern regions. But by the end of the Tang in the ninth century, and through the Song, Ming, and Qing dynasties that followed, the Chinese increasingly accused non-Chinese minorities of practicing this kind of gu poisoning sorcery. The An Lushan rebellion in the mid eighth century (755-763), did more than fundamentally change the political, economic, and social dimensions of medieval China, Obringer suggests, it contributed to the shift from the cosmopolitanism of early Tang to the greater xenophobia of the late Tang. Let us recall the quote cited previously by the military Administrator Liu Xun who wrote the Lingbiao Records of the Strange (Lingbiao luyi) around 900. He implicitly countered the prevalent ideas that linked gu poisoning with the malevolent intentions of 16 「疾病的歷史」研討會 the people who lived there by emphasizing instead the pestilential quality of the miasmas in the tropical environment. In his mind, the miasmas of the tropics not Man sorcery caused gu poisoning. The most striking development of the convergence of fears of gu poisoning and minority people living in the southern tropics occurred centuries later during the Qing dynasty and was directed toward the Miao, who overlap with modern-day Hmong peoples. Citations expressing fears of the Miao using gu poisoning to harm Chinese men began to increase in the early eighteenth century just after the major Miao rebellion of 1735-1736, and continued to develop during the Miao rebellions throughout the nineteenth century (1796-1911). This anxiety accompanied increasingly hostile Chinese confrontations with the Miao. In addition, Miao social structure, culture, and agricultural practices challenged the established structures of Chinese society. Chinese failed attempts to control the Miao, and discomfort about Miao culture, combined to inform a new interpretation of gu poisoning as a Miao form of magical practice. In the chapter on gu poison in a text from the end of the seventeenth century titled Zhang’s Comprehensive Medicine (Zhangshi yitong, 1695), the Jiangnan physician Zhang Lu (1617-1700) links gu poisoning with the Lingnan region:

Gu poisoning is found in parts of the south. If you eat in the homes [of people who live there] immediately take rhinoceros horn and stir [the food] with it. If [the food] develops white foam, it is poisonous; if there is no foam, it is not. In all the gu poison areas of Lingnan, if you suddenly become sick with bloody dysentery, whether the blood is black, or sometimes red, regardless of the amount, in all cases the afflictions are gu poisoning.

In the mid-eighteenth century, we find that Chinese scholars write all the first sources that associate gu poisoning practices with Miao women. Yuan Mei (1716-1798), a famous eighteenth-century litterateur, for example, recorded at least two stories related to Miao women and sorcery in his compilation of essays, What Confucius Never Marta Hanson 17

Discussed (Zi buyu, 1788). Both stories express fears that Miao women used magical means to kill Chinese children: the first details the alleged capture of a Miao servant women in Beijing who ate the brains of Chinese children; the second describes cases where Miao women in Yunnan were thought to have used children to feed their poisonous gu insects. The first story begins with a case of a child who falls ill inexplicably and dies before the end of his first year:

In 1735, a family in the capital had a boy who often suffered from Fright-Wind and died before reaching one year. When the boy was sick, there was a black thing like a large-horned owl that flew around beneath the light. The faster it flew, the more acute became the sound of the little boy’s breathing. Waiting until the boy’s qi was exhausted, the black thing then left. Shortly after, another child in that family also suffered from Fright-Wind.

There was a certain Mr. E, a brave Imperial Guardsman, who upon hearing of this was outraged. He grabbed his bow and arrows and waited to see the black thing arrive so he could shoot it. He drew his string, [the arrow] flew, and there was a cry of pain. Blood trickled on the ground. Following [the track of blood], [he] crossed over two thick walls, and arrived at the household of Minister Li of the War Ministry, where it disappeared beneath the furnace. Mr. E, holding his arrows, posted himself there.

Mr. Li being surprised came over to inquire [about his being there]. Mr. E, a relative of Mr. Li’s, explained why he [was there]. Minister Li gave an order to look beneath the furnace, and in a room beside it, [they] saw a green-eyed old woman with an arrow sticking out of her waist from which blood dripped. She looked like a female monkey. She was a Miao woman that Minister Li had brought back with him after he had served as an official in Yunnan. [She was] ancient and said she could not recall how old she was.

Suspecting her of sorcery, they flogged her for evidence. She said that she had possession of spells that by reciting she could change her body into a strange 18 「疾病的歷史」研討會

bird. Once transformed, she would wait until the second night watch to go out to eat the brains of children. She had harmed several hundreds. Furious, Li tied her up, put her in a pile of firewood, and burned her alive. Afterwards, a long period of peace reigned and no more children were sick with Fright-Wind.

In this anecdote, Chinese fears of the Miao come to full expression in the image of an old Miao woman using sorcery to eat the brains of hundreds of children. She is of indeterminate age and form, more simian than human. Significantly, a Minister of War brought her to the capital from Yunnan, where he was likely assigned to suppress the Miao rebellions that had begun just twenty years earlier in 1735-6. Her sorcery, however, represents an even more insidious threat to the stability of the state than the rebellions in the southwest. Instead of attracting Han migrants and soldiers to the Miao way of life at the frontier, this Miao woman claims the lives of Chinese children at the political center of the Qing imperium. In the second story, Yuan Mei links Miao women directly with gu poison. The story states that Miao women are in charge of raising gu insects because the gu must be nourished only on yin qi (that is, female qi), otherwise they lose their power:

In Yunnan every household raises gu. The gu is able to defecate gold and silver to reap a fortune. Each evening, the [women] allow the gu to go out. The [gu insects] are as bright as lightening and spread in all directions. Everyone must shout in order to make the gu fall to the ground. There are many varieties including snakes and frogs. Everyone hastily hides their children, concerned that [the gu] will eat them. Those who raise the gu have a secret room. The women must feed them, because as soon as [the gu] see a man, they die. This is because they are accumulated pure yin qi [and the yang qi of a man kills them]. The gu, which eat boys, defecate gold; the gu, which eat girls, defecate silver. The Regional Commander of Yunnan, Hua Feng, told this story to me.

The gold-and-silver-defecating insects illustrate that Chinese scholars portrayed gu Marta Hanson 19 poisoning as a method for obtaining wealth through magical means. Most imp ortantly, Miao women possessed the ability to harness the power of gu and thereby secure wealth for themselves. The gu had power, however, that could extend beyond that of their original keepers and which they could use independently. In a description directly following this account, the gu hide in pears that the Miao women sell to children and, in that way, poison their victims:

In the autumn, the Miao women carry pears in cloth bags to sell to the children. Those who eat a lot get gu poisoning. After a long while, some of the children realized [how this happened]. Now when the [Miao women] are selling [pears], the [children] first ask: “Do you have gu poison in [your pears?].” If the response is, “No,” then no harm will come to the [children]. Many of the children of Zhong families (zhongjia) also raise [gu].

In an article on accounts of gu poisoning among the Miao, Norma Diamond argues that Chinese sources on gu during the nineteenth century emphasized the dangers of Miao women, instead of armed men, in order to discourage Han migrants and troops from fraternizing with them. Their worse fear was assimilation into the local culture through marriage. The dangerous power of Miao women to harm men and children through gu poisoning was used in literary and official sources to enforce the policy of Miao assimilation into Han culture and not the reverse. Yuan Mei’s two short anecdotes above highlight the association literati made between Miao women, gu poisoning, and magical power. This association continued to at least the end of the nineteenth century, as long, in fact, as the state had problems suppressing Miao rebellions. In response to rumors of increasing gu sorcery in the 1890s a Taoist monk, known only as Ranxi, wrote a medical treatise titled Ranxi’s Records for Expelling Gu (Qu gu Ranxi lu, a.p. 1893). He records two types of sorcery associated with Miao women: one in which they transform their bodies into sheep; and the other, in which they transform parts of other people’s 20 「疾病的歷史」研討會 bodies:

In Guangnan the Miao women can transform themselves into sheep. They go out night to harm people. There are those who can also use sorcery to change the bones and flesh of other people. During the Ming, a private secretary had his leg turned into wood by a Miao person. The officials investigated the matter and the Miao person, being afraid, turned the man’s leg back to normal.

The Chinese did not see the Miao, or any other minority group in the southern tropics, as civilized, or even fully human; rather they often perceived them to be more akin to animals. As in the story of the Miao sorcerer in the capital discussed above, they are more ape-like than human. Not being far from the animal kingdom in the Chinese imagination, sources from at least the Tang dynasty referred to the transformations of minority tribesmen into animals; characters referring to these minority groups similarly used graphs for animals. The source above on Miao women transforming into sheep similarly portrayed them as comparable to animals. But their crossing of the boundary between human and beast by magical means also signified that their power transcended the human world. This same account ends by giving another example of a comparable story that emphasized their magical power to transform parts of other people’s bodies:

An Admiral’s Assistant General suddenly lost his leg. He put out a placard summoning physicians who could to treat him for a thousand cash. One person [came forward] and used a leg made of paper to fix it to what it was before. As in the first story, this is [a kind of gu] technique. The Miao people are particularly good at making gu and using it.

In response to the Miao rebellions of the eighteenth century, the new association between gu poisoning and Miao women, in particular, expressed Chinese anxieties toward the sub-tropics and the power of the Miao people who refused to be assimilated Marta Hanson 21 into the dominant Han culture. Miao women formed the locus around which these anxieties were expressed because their more egalitarian position and greater freedom in Miao society challenged Han constructions of clearly delineated gender distinctions. Miao women were striking in their contrast to Han women: they were immodest, interacted freely with men, performed masculine activities, could own land, and had greater sexual freedom. In every aspect their way of life challenged the norms established for female gendered behavior in traditional Chinese culture. Not surprisingly, Chinese literati feared their power and expressed their anxieties through a dis course on gu poisoning. Diseases associated with non-agrarian spaces, such as miasmic diseases or gu poisoning, could not be subsumed within the dominantly agrarian Chinese cosmology. Whereas miasmic diseases represented Chinese fears of danger in the southern tropics of Lingnan from at least the Tang dynasty on, gu poisoning expressed Chinese anxieties generally toward people living along their southernmost borders, and most explicitly, Chinese and Manchu fears of their assimilation into Miao culture during the latter half of the Qing dynasty. The Chinese associated these disease constructs not only with greater virulence and danger than those understood within the agrarian cycle of seasonal change, but also with anxieties about maintaining spatial and thus ethnic boundaries. In conclusion, I would like to return to the hypothesis of my introduction: Only with the invention of evolution, came the invention of biological race. The Europeans imagined and therefore invented both. Western conceptions of race have a temporal dimension that one does not find in early modern China before the influence from western social Darwinist ideas in the late nineteenth century. Chinese conceptions of the other had instead a dominant spatial dimension illustrated in this paper first in the chapter “On different methods and formulas” of the Inner Canon of the Yellow Emperor (1st cent. B.C.E.), and more explicitly in the two disease constructs, miasmic disorders 22 「疾病的歷史」研討會 and gu poisoning. From the Sui-Tang unification in the sixth and seventh centuries into the early modern period both disease constructs became definitively, and almost exclusively, associated with the people of the southern tropics. The spatial dimension of Chinese constructions of ethnic difference appears to be more comparable with medieval and early modern European views of human diversity than the late nineteenth-century conceptions of biological race based on the new evolutionary model that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” Examining the Chinese medical record for discussions on differences in local diseases, seasonal geographies, and appropriate treatments “according to the person, place, and season” may well be a more fruitful approach to the question of how Chinese conceptualized human variation before Darwin and Haeckel were translated into Chinese than anachronistic projections of race and racism on to China’s pre-twentieth-century past. Marta Hanson 23

Works Cited in Introduction of paper for the Conference on Disease History Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan June 16-18, 2000 1. Bray, Francesca. 1997. Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China. Berkeley: University of California Press. 2. Cullen, Christopher. 1993. “Patients and Healers in Late Imperial China: Evidence from the Jinpingmei.” History of Science 31: 99-150. 3. Farquhar, Judith. 1994. “Multiplicity, Point of View, and Responsibility in Traditional Chinese Healing,” 78-102. In Angela Zito and Tani E. Barlow, eds. Body, Subject, & Power in China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 4. Furth, Charlotte. 1998. A Flourishing Yin: Gender in China’s Medical History, 960-1665. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. 5. Goodman, Bryna. 1995. Native Place, City, and Nation. Berkeley: University of California Press. 6. Hanson, Marta. 1997. Inventing a Tradition in Chinese Medicine: From Universal Canon to Local Medical Knowledge in South China, The Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Century. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania. 7. Naquin, Susan and Evelyn S. Rawski. 1987. Chinese Society in the Eighteenth Century. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987. 8. Rowe, William. 1984. Hankou: Commerce and Society in a Chinese City, 1796-1895. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 9. Sivin, Nathan. 1987. Traditional Medicine in Contemporary China: A Partial Translation of Revised Outline of Chinese Medicine (1972) with an Introductory Study on Change in Present-day and Early Medicine. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1987. 10. Skinner, G. William. 1964-65. “Marketing and Social Structure in Rural China.” Parts 1, 2. Journal of Asian Studies 24.1 (Nov.): 3-43; 24.2 (Feb.): 195-228. 24 「疾病的歷史」研討會

11. Wu Yiyi. 1993. “A Medical Line of Many Masters: A Prosopographical Study of Liu Wansu and His Disciples from the Jin to the Early Ming.” Chinese Science 11: 36-65.

Dates, terms, names, and titles Concepts, Names, and Titles Qi Zhang qi -miasmic qi Yin-yang Five Phases (wuxing) Man peoples Lingnan region Nam Viet or Vietnam Ma Yuan, general Ge Hong, medical author Liu Xun, military administrator Lingbiao luyi (Lingbiao Records of the Strange, ca. 900) Lingnan weisheng fang (Formulas for Protection of Health in Lingnan, ca. 1255) Cao Yuanfang, Medical author Zhubing yuanhou lun (Treatise on the Origin and Symptoms of Various Disorders, 610) Zhang Lu, medical author Zhangshi yitong (Zhang’s Comprehensive Medicine, 1695) Yuan Mei, litterateur Zi buyi (What Confucius Never Discussed, 1788) Li Zhongfang, Chinese government official Qu gu Ranxi lu (Ranxi’s Records for Expelling Gu, 1893)