Yuan Mei my homeboy strikes again...

...with a short story encapsulating so neatly the class- and language-barrier crossing legal culture of eighteenth-century China that I can barely move.

"The Real Longtu Turns Out To Be A False Longtu"*

A man of Jiaxing county [in modern Zhejiang province] named Song became county magistrate in Xuanyou [in modern Fujian province, which is frigging far away from Zhejiang**]. He was a stern, fastidious official, and thought of himself as a second Lord Bao. In one of the villages under his jurisdiction, there was a State Student named Wang. Wang started an affair with his tenant's wife, and the two got along well. It put Wang off that the husband was at home, so Wang bribed a fortune-teller to confide to the husband that it was not an auspicious year to remain at home, and that he should instead travel far away to avoid disaster. The husband believed all this and told Student Wang, who lent him capital and ordered him to go do trade in Sichuan. The man did not return for three years; all the villagers gossiped that this tenant had been done in by Wang.

Magistrate Song had also heard of this matter and wanted to right the injustice done to the tenant. One day, as he passed the village where Wang lived, a whirlwind began to blow in front of his sedan chair. He followed it and saw that the wind was coming from a well; he ordered his staff to dredge the well, and found a decayed male corpse inside. Believing it truly to be the disappeared tenant, he arrested Student Wang and the tenant's wife, interrogating them using harsh torture, under which both confessed to murdering the husband. They were sentenced according to the full extent of the law.*** Local people began to call the magistrate "Song Longtu," and there was even an opera scripted from the story that was sung in all the neighboring villages.

The next year, the husband returned from Sichuan. When he entered the city, he saw that onstage they were putting on a performance of Student Wang's story. As he watched, he realized that his wife had been executed unjustly and immediately began to wail in sorrow. He petitioned the provincial seat for redress. The judicial commissioner took the case for him, and Magistrate Song was sentenced according to "deliberately punishing an uninvolved person to death." The people of Xuanyou made a ditty about this:

Blindly sentencing the adulterers as murderers,
a real "Longtu" turned out to be a fake.
A warning to the people who rule us commoners,
even if not corrupt, you pay for a mistake.

***

This story wouldn't have much sting if legal cases didn't have a popular circulation, through venues ranging from the terse classical tales penned by literati authors to media much more accessible to the illiterate or semi-literate. The fact that Yuan Mei had served as a magistrate for several years in three different places himself only adds to the ironic impact of the "false Longtu": sure, it's a funny story of a snobby overreacher, but the pressures on local officials to solve cases, particularly those with a corpse involved, was pretty damn heavy. Even if Yuan could look back in his leisurely retired life to criticize Magistrate Song, he must have once faced much of those pressures himself.

In fact, we know Yuan Mei used supernatural associations with the law in resolving cases: he told one story about his days as a borough magistrate within the city of Nanjing in which a young wife had disappeared, only to show up in a village far outside the city. The father-in-law wanted a divorce, saying that she had obviously been going to meet a paramour, but the woman stubbornly said that she had been carried to the village involuntarily by a giant whirlwind. Yuan sided with her and used a story from the collected works of a thirteenth-century Confucian as proof. In that story, a girl was blown away by a giant whirlwind and ended up wedded to a Prime Minister; "I only wish I could promise you that your son will get as far as that," Yuan told the father-in-law, which was apparently effective in shutting the old man up.

Given his profound skepticism toward most religious practices around him, I doubt that Yuan Mei believed that the young woman had been blown by a wind to where she was found. It's possible that he even created this story because it, like the tale of the false Longtu, is funny. But from both the story he included in his collection of "weird tales" and the one he claimed to be autobiographically true, we can see that popular expectations about the magistrate's justice, which blurred the boundaries between what we'd call fiction and fact, could not be simply put aside by even the most cynical official.

*Longtu is the courtesy name of the famous Song judge, Lord Bao, who was basically a medieval Chinese supernaturally assisted version of Sherlock Holmes.
**Not unusual, since by the "rule of avoidance" magistrates weren't supposed to serve in their home districts.
***Both would have been up for death penalties--the adulterer by beheading after the assizes, and his partner in crime by the harshest sentence on the books, lingchi, a.k.a. "death by slow slicing." [Won't go into gory details here.]

Some more pictures

By all rights I have no excuse whatsoever to not post something more substantial, but... well, these images kind of speak for themselves. I'm scanning a batch for a More Serious Project, and though these don't apply to that, I figure no one could possibly think

SNAKE DEMON ATTACKS (oh shi--!)

or

EPIC BATTLES BETWEEN DAOISTS AND DEMONS (calling it for the Daoists.)

unawesome. Both are from Jingshi Tongyan, a 1624 collection of tales edited by Feng Menglong. The first is an illustration of the famous Miss White Snake, who marries a mortal man for TWOO WUV but is forced apart from him at the end of the tale and imprisoned under a pagoda.* The second picture depicts a Daoist master named Xu and his students fighting the armies of an evil dragon (dragons in Chinese lore are associated with water). It's a bit hard to tell, but they consist of turtles, crabs, and a shrimp or two, all armed with swords and spears.

*Intense folks who want to read the original from 1624 in Chinese, see here. Those who rather prefer Wikipedia, sidle on over here.

** Original here. It's pretty rousing stuff.

Lazy Post

Hell of busy-ness this month, but I'd feel sad leaving my oh-so-devoted readers with nothing for so long. No Bear Wives--that may have to wait until after end of term, at least--but have some pictures from Athanasius Kircher's truly epic China Monumentatis from 1667.*

Fig. 1: The Kangxi Emperor-Monarchæ Sinico-Tartarici

One word: PIMP. Note the weird little dog (not sure if he was a doggy type in life). The really cool thing about this picture (and the others in the book) is that we can "read" them to be depictions of China in the 17th century, but they actually have a lot of improbable distortions based on how European observers saw, for instance, Kangxi's throne troom as a copy of the French king's. We can't make judgment calls about European travelers simply being unable to see the "real" things around them--only that they saw, but what they saw was processed between observation and representation. Here's a contemporary photo of the Taihedian throne room for comparison.**


Fig. 2: Father Adam Schall-P. Adami Schall Germanus I. Ordinis Mandarinus

I will pwn you with geometry. (Kangxi was actually quite into geometry. Unfortunately, the mass conversion Schall was supposed to be working toward didn't exactly occur by dint of his success in sharing the delights of triangles with the Emperor. Instead, they studied math, which is probably the opposite of mass conversion.)

Fig. 3: Green-haired turtles-No Latin caption. [Let them speak for themselves.]

Included because they can fly. [Hums "Flight of the Valkyries," followed by the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles theme song.]
Oh yeah, I know. I haven't ever seen them because they're from the palm-tree areas of South China. Gosh, they have some strange shit down there.***

Fig. 4: Mandarin with sidekick-Modus scribendi
This reminds me so strongly of Carl Pyrdum's medieval marginalia monkeys. Indeed, I wonder if it isn't from the same visual tradition? (Especially as this is the modus scribendi?)

I could post a lot more, but these are probably my top 4 . Maybe later I'll try to find the page of "regional costumes" from various Chinese cities, or the pictures of Chinese beauties posed in "native" styles and costumes.


*Randomly: judging from how dark these images are, I'd guess it's the English edition we're looking at. Oh well, the Latin captions are still sweet.
**NB, the Taihedian, or "Hall of Great Harmony," was the pimpest of the throne halls, and was reserved for fairly special occasions--celebrating the New Year, for instance, or the accession of a new ruler.
***Other strange shit those Southerners have: people who use tree bark to make fake injuries so to better accuse others of assault or even murder; sodomites (often rendered "rabbits" in slang); pirates; weird islands where people have holes in the middle of their chests; informal wars between gangs hired by different powerful lineages.