Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768 Read Free Page B

excited crowd gathered. "What's a monk doing with this kind
of stuff?" These fellows must be up to no good. There were cries of
"beat them up" and "burn them!" Constable Ts'ai, as he continued
in his report, summoned his courage and told the mob to keep out of this; since Ch'ao-fan was a "real monk" (as shown by his certificates)
there was no basis for arresting him. Cheng-i, however, not only
lacked an ordination certificate (meaning he was only a novice, a
status readily obtainable) but also had with him Chu-ch'eng's traveling
box and its suspicious contents. Bound in chains, the young monk
was taken off to the yamen. Ch'ao-fan found his way to the yamen
to lodge a protest, but was then arrested himself and brought with
the others before the magistrate.

    The queue and the shaved forehead. At a barber's stall, a man is having
his forehead shaved in the prescribed manner.

    In the great hall, Chu-ch'eng and his companions, chained hand
and foot, knelt before the county magistrate, who sat at his high desk
flanked by his judicial secretaries.'' The questioning began: "How
many queues have you clipped?"
    The terrified Chu-ch'eng protested that he had clipped none. The
magistrate then presented Chu-ch'eng with the evidence constable
Ts'ai had brought in: four pairs of scissors, one cord for binding a
queue, and two short pieces of braided hair. "Are these, or are they
not, evidence of your queue-clipping?" Chu-ch'eng answered that
three of the scissors had belonged to his dead son, who had been a
leather-worker. The fourth he knew nothing of. The queue-plaiting
cord had, he said, been used to bind his hair in the days before he
had taken vows and shaved his head. Afterward, he had no use for
it but kept it with his gear. For the braided hair, he offered no
explanation.
    An unsatisfactory confession, this, from a prisoner whose guilt was
presumed in advance. Now began the customary courtroom torture.
Attendants dragged Chu-cheng over to the chia-kun, or "pressing
beam." We are not told whether this was the regulation ankle-press,
a device for crushing the ankles by slow degrees, or an equally fearsome instrument that inflicted multiple fractures of the shinbones. A
nineteenth-century observer describes the ankle-press as "a sort of
double wooden vice" consisting of three upright beams, of which the
outer two functioned as levers:
    The chief torturer gradually introduces a wedge into the intervals,
alternately changing sides. This mode of forming an expansion at the
upper part, causes the lower ends to draw toward the central upright,
which is fixed into the plank, by which the ankles of the victim are
painfully compressed, or completely crushed. Should the unhappy sufferer be resolute from innocence, or obstinate from guilt, and submit
to the consummation of the horrid procedure, his bones are ultimately
reduced to a jelly.'

    Overwhelmed by the pain, Chu-ch'eng eventually declared that all
charges against him were the truth. Still the magistrate was not satisfied, because the agonized monk's story was not sufficiently
coherent. Twice more the chia-kun was tightened, but with no better
result. Ching-hsin now underwent the same torments. After three
days, the magistrate had something resembling admissions of guilt
from all four monks. The maimed prisoners were sent, probably in
the regulation wheeled boxes used for transporting prisoners, some
twenty miles eastward to the Shao-hsing prefectural yamen, the next
rung in the official ladder, and again interrogated. This time, since
Chu-ch'eng's bones were already broken, the presses were not used.
Instead, his lips were slapped ten times with a wooden switch. Cheng-i
was again subjected to the chia-kun. Ching-hsin and Ch'ao-fan were
by this time seen as less promising culprits and were spared further
torture.
    By now the testimony was more confused than ever, and the pris oners were sent on up the ladder: this time to their final