The Qing Dynasty had ushered in a Kangqian dynasty comparable to the rule of Han Wenjing and the rule of Tang Zhenguan, especially during the reign of Qianlong, which reached the top of power and prestige in the rule of the Qing Empire. However, the political and social life of the entire Qing Dynasty was swept up in darkness by a folk magic called "calling the soul".
The foreigner who knows China best - Kong Feili
Kong Feili is an internationally renowned sinologist, and the official information on The Chinese Baidu platform introduces Kong Feili
Philip Alden Kuhn (9 September 1933 – 11 February 2016) was born in London, England. In 1950, he graduated from Wilson Senior High School in Washington, D.C., and was admitted to Harvard University in the same year. The famous American sinologist, Professor of History at Harvard University and head of the Department of East Asian Civilization and Language, is famous for his research on Chinese social and political history since the late Qing Dynasty. Beginning in the mid-1970s, Kong Feili turned to the study of overseas Chinese immigration history. He was director of the Fairbank Research Center at Harvard University and chair of the Department of Far Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of Chicago. ”
A considerable part of Kong Feili's academic life has been used to study Chinese history, and his representative work is this "Calling the Soul: The Great Panic of Witchcraft in 1768", which is widely,—— praised in Chinese historians and sociological circles. What book is this, superstition? cult?
In fact, Kong Feili chose a more novel perspective to look at the fate of the Qing Empire, we all know that after kangxi fifty-one years, the Kangxi Emperor issued the order of "prosperous ziding, never add endowment", the Qing Empire from population, to agriculture to the state finance, have achieved a very stable state, followed by three generations of prosperity, historians called it "Kangqian shengshi", but it seems that the era of the prosperous era, the genes of the Qing Empire have already mutated, Kong Feili took advantage of the historical data under this peaceful and prosperous era, a folk panic about "magic", resulting in a situation from the court to the people, to reflect the fate of the inevitable decline of the Qing Empire.
The horror of witchcraft
In 1768, thirty-three years after the Qianlong Dynasty, a kind of magic fear called "Calling the Soul" suddenly broke out in China.
This demonic fear began in Jiangnan, the richest province of the Qing Empire, and traveled north and west along the canal and yangtze river, quickly sweeping through most of China. The fools and fools are dominated by this sorcerer's fear of believing that the sorcerer can steal a person's soul to serve himself by braiding his hair, clothing, and even his name, and that the soul stolen will die immediately. For most of the year from spring to autumn, the entire empire was mobilized by this demonic fear.
The small people were busy looking for ways to resist witchcraft and protect themselves, and officials at all levels were desperately pursuing the "demon people" who frequently committed crimes in various places, while the Qianlong Emperor, who was living in a temple, was restless, trying to find out the sinister conspiracy behind the fear of the soul, and constantly issued edicts to direct the nationwide search.
In fact, the situation of "calling the soul" is not so serious.
Spring is the germination period of things, and only a few people are involved in it; In the summer, things were a little complicated, and in the autumn, the Qianlong Emperor discovered the expansion of the situation, and after Liu Tongxun, the father of the military minister Liu Luoguo, went to Chengde to make a routine work report, the matter was all over.
Magic is easy to understand, but mental skills are difficult to correct
The so-called "soul-calling" sorcery in history did not actually exist, and it hid a deep political struggle, mainly including the following: the game of bureaucracy and imperial power and the game of low-level laborers and the top managers of the empire (feudal rulers).
The first is caused by the legend of the braided braid.
In the spring of 1768, several cases of accusations against stonemasons, beggars, and wandering monks for cutting braids and calling souls in Jiangnan (Zhejiang, Jiangsu, Jiangxi) caused headaches to local officials, and several unlucky eggs were "framed" by the sensitive masses, and they enjoyed the disaster of imprisonment fiercely, and finally repeatedly tossed until the case was closed, only to find that it was something out of nothing, so they hastily put it away. However, the people's panic about "calling the soul" has become uncontrollable.
Under the background of that time, Sheng Shi was already just a strong foreign cadre, and since "calling the soul" originally occurred in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River, it was helpful to explore its social and economic situation to understand how all this affected people's social attitudes.
China's most prosperous regional economy has been around here for seven or eight hundred years. Characteristics of the late Chinese imperial economy, such as commercialized crop production and specialized markets, are most clearly expressed here.
Because the economies everywhere have reached a high degree of specialization, food production is too low to meet the needs of the local population. As a result, many towns in Jiangnan became distribution centers for large-scale inter-regional grain trade; in terms of manufacturing, jiangnan's wealth was based on the textile industry, with a national market, and silk as the leading export product. This large-scale industry was based on the manual labor of millions of peasant families; the development of commerce since the 16th century was accompanied by the emergence of a freer labor market, namely the disintegration of labor.
Population expansion, the disintegration of the labour force and price fluctuations have led to increasing population mobility, and it is precisely at a time when discrimination and persecution of monks and vagrants by the gentry and gentry are fierce, so it is normal for people to be so susceptible to the religious incitement of the nihilistic "soul calling".
As mentioned earlier, "calling the soul" was originally something that was created out of nothing, but it caused the Qianlong Emperor to have trouble sleeping and eating, and even used unusually arbitrary means, which actually had his considerations. There are visible and invisible threats in it -- looking back at the promulgation and forced execution of shaving, changing clothes, and surrendering orders in the early years of the Qing Dynasty, as well as the strong resistance of the broad masses of the Han people, it cannot but arouse the sensitivity of the Manchu conquerors to this, emphasizing that incitement and assimilation and assimilation in the minds of the Qianlong Emperor are two sides of the same invisible threat that can be seen and seen for the Manchu ruling nation.
In addition, the Qianlong Emperor's own insecurity was a shadow he imagined, and the other fifty percent was a result of actual life: witchcraft was a provocative product of confusing the masses and winning the trust of the people, making the rebellious masses particularly destructive and destructive; The Qianlong Emperor was both envious of Han culture, especially in the Suzhou and Hangzhou areas of Jiangnan (zeng six times in Jiangnan), and was also wary of bones (as evidenced by his strong advocacy of Chinese riding and shooting).
In order to deal with the "great crisis" caused by this "soul calling", the Qianlong Emperor can be described as painstaking
First of all, in light of the Qing Dynasty decrees pointed out in the "Laws and Regulations of the Great Qing Dynasty" and the "Collection of Criminal Cases", the Qing Dynasty decrees were particularly vigilant and severely guarded against such acts as "witches, evil arts, fibers, evil charms, and demon words to confuse the public". Then, there was a shout and a crusade throughout the provinces. At that time, due to the intervention of the Qianlong Emperor himself, the publicity and vigorous denunciation of the "demon monks" had a great impact on Henan, Zhili (present-day Hebei Province) and other provinces, as well as a large area of inner and outer Mongolia. The subsequent pursuit of the witches, the horror of soul witchcraft, extended to shaanxi, Hubei, and Hunan provinces. The final outcome of the tracking, the original commission of the trial of the soul caller, should be said that the Qianlong Emperor himself was actually the most important plaintiff, but the ending could not be resolved.
The Qianlong Emperor used both conventional administrative means and arbitrarily and arbitrarily, exercising the personal supreme power of the supreme ruler to deal with this matter. The feudal emperor of the Qing Dynasty controlled the bureaucracy, on the one hand, using the "Jingcha" (central) and "grand plan" (local) assessment system, and on the other hand, relying on the emperor's personal personal cronies to secretly report; There are both grace rewards and shelter, and various legal sanctions that are fully guarded against. After this handling of the horrific case of soul witchcraft called braid cutting, the imperial power of the Qing Dynasty was further consolidated and strengthened.
After several games between official power and imperial power, paying the lives of several innocent grass people and losing a few black hats, the suspects and witnesses of the soul-calling case who were escorted from various places to Beijing & Chengde were repeatedly tossed by the military aircraft of the Military Aircraft Department, and finally protected the majesty of the imperial power, and successfully concealed the anxiety about the authority represented by the foreign rule of the Qing Dynasty government on the braids and the people's anxiety about whether obedience was reliable, and the original unwarranted case was finally lifted up by the Qianlong Emperor and gently put down. His instructions also acknowledged that the contradictory requirement of a strict search and a desire to avoid harming the innocent was simply not operational.
The fear of the soul is only a game between the panic of the working people at the bottom and the high-level managers of the empire under the so-called prosperous world, from the appearance of self-disturbance, rumor-mongering, and subjugation, seeing the checks and balances of the old bureaucracy on the imperial power, as well as the solidification of social classes, and even the great increase in the poor class under the rapid population increase in the middle of the Qing Dynasty, and the prospect of the imminent crisis of the nomads... It reflects the tragic path that the old empire is about to embark on.