At the end of the Qing Dynasty, Chinese society was in a long period of turmoil, and the Qing court's control over the local areas showed a significant decline, which led to an endless stream of vicious cases everywhere.
In the first year of Xuan reunification, an unclaimed male corpse appeared outside Suzhou, and this corpse almost killed five innocent people...
The bloody case under the nunnery
One day in September of the first year of Xuantong, Zhang Renshan, the local guard of Wu County, accidentally found a male corpse while patrolling the lake in the morning, and he was thrown at the lake, wearing only close-fitting clothes and a delicate robe abandoned by his side.
Zhang Renshan hurriedly ran to the county court to report the case.
Qing Dynasty County Ya
After the county commander Chen Qishou heard about this incident, he personally went to the scene, and after examining the body, he reported the cause of the man's death to the county grand master who was present.
The man had multiple knife wounds on his body, but not many fatal wounds, his eyes were ripped off, and he was clutching a lock of hair in his hand.
These clues did not help Chen Qishou to solve the case, and Chen Qishou had to look for clues from the environment of the crime scene.
He found no obvious stampede in the grass around the body, and that the body was by the lake again, so he concluded that the body must have been dumped here by the murderer.
Then he looked up and saw that there were no more buildings around the lake except for a small temple.
A lake in Suzhou
Seeing that Chen Qishou was interested in this temple, Zhang Renshan, the abbot, came forward and said that it was a nunnery called Fengchi, which was inhabited by three nuns, namely the abbot, the young nun Miaolian, and the eleven-year-old little nun Shibao.
After saying that, he pondered for a while, and whispered in his ear that he put his head close to the county order, adding that Miaolian's reputation was not good, and he seemed to have unclear relations with many men.
Chen Qishou did not respond after hearing this, so he took people back to the county court.
In the next few days, he sent a capable servant to the vicinity of the nunnery to inquire about Miaolian, and ten days later the servants claimed to have learned the truth of the case, and then they took the three nuns and two men of the nunnery to the county court.
When Chen Qishou interrogated these people, he first chose the youngest nun Shibao to interrogate him, because he felt that the little girl would not lie.
When Chen Qishou asked Bao Zhi about the murder that happened ten days ago, the little girl stuttered and said that the deceased was the sister-in-law of her sister Miaolian, and the murderer was the other four men who had an affair with her sister.
Nun of the Qing Dynasty
Hearing that everyone present here was shocked, Miaolian looked at her little sister with a frightened face, and Chen Qishou immediately began to interrogate Miaolian and ask her to tell the truth about the night.
Miao Lian was frightened at this time, she actually didn't have any trouble, and she didn't know who this dead person was, so she had no way to answer Chen Qishou's question.
However, Chen Qishou had already come to the conclusion in his mind at this time, and in his eyes Miaolian was the murderer, so he ordered someone to use a heavy sentence for Miaolian. MiaoLian could bear such a blow, and soon she began to beg Chen Qishou for forgiveness, saying that she had indeed united four men to kill a lover named Wang Agen.
Later, Chen Qishou asked her who the four murderers were, and Miaolian revealed four men who had been in contact with her on weekdays, two of whom had already been caught by the servants and taken to the lobby.
The two men naturally did not admit that they had committed the crime, but they gave in under the heavy punishment, and soon they confessed the "facts" of their crimes, including the details of Wang Agen's hair being plucked before his death, and the details of Wang Agen's eyes gouged out in order to vent his anger.
Qing Dynasty servant image
After that, Chen Qishou ordered the other two Miaolian's concubines to be arrested, and in front of The "ironclad evidence" of Rushan, they knew that the resistance had no meaning, so they had to sign and detain the charges, and then the five of them were put on death row together.
At the same time, Fengchi-an, as the scene of the crime, is also controlled by the prefectural government, and the abbots, Shōshu and Seho, can only take shelter in a small room.
The case is retried
After Chen Qishou finished the case, he thought that the file was perfect, so he sent someone to immediately send it to the prefect for inspection.
He Gangde, the governor of Suzhou at the time, quickly discovered the suspicious point after seeing this file.
First of all, Chen Qishou had obviously determined the identity of the deceased, but no family member came to identify the body, and no one knew the occupation and place of origin of this person, which was obviously unreasonable.
Image of a Qing Dynasty official
Second, the deceased suffered a lot of knife wounds on his body, although this is very similar to the crime of many people, but if it is a love killing, as stated in the file, then the four suspects will definitely be killed, and it is impossible to have only one or two fatal wounds.
Moreover, if Wang Agen had been killed by four people, he must have lost the strength to struggle before he died, and it was impossible for him to hold a lock of hair in his hand, and when he threw the body, the act of taking off the coat of the deceased was also very suspicious.
More crucially, after the four murderers were captured, none of them were able to take out the murder weapon, and the location of the murder was unknown.
In the whole trial process, the most important clue is undoubtedly the confession of the little nun Shibao, but the little nun is a child after all, is the confession really all true? This made He Gangde suspicious in his heart.
Before that, he knew that this Chen Qishou was a nerd, who had no practical ability except reading, and this time it was not very normal for him to crack such an unnamed corpse case in only ten days.
Therefore, he asked Chen Qishou to answer several questions he had raised about the case, but Chen Qishou could not answer the question of the prefect, which forced He Gangde to personally come to the county court to retry the case.
Qing Dynasty case files
He felt that there was something wrong with Shi Bao's confession, so he took it to the church first.
He patiently asked Shi Bao if she had seen the scene of the crime on the day of the incident, and reassured her not to worry about other things, just tell the truth.
After pondering for a moment, Sebao said that his previous confession was false, and that he and his master had been upstairs in the nunnery building that day, and did not know what was happening downstairs.
He Gangde knew that there was no enmity between Shi Bao and Miao Lian, so he hurriedly asked her why she had made a false confession before to plant her own sister.
Sebo said that she was threatened by a county servant, and he said that if he did not say what he said at the time, he would kill himself, and in desperation, she had to compromise and say what she had said before.
Prisoners who are being sentenced
Hearing this, He Gangde couldn't help but be angry, and he reprimanded Chen Qishou and his servants for acting hastily and almost killing people, and then sent someone to arrest the ya servants who had threatened Shi Bao before and put them in prison.
However, due to the limitations of his authority, he could not continue to hear the case, and could only let the county order Chen Qishou retry it.
In order to help Chen Qishou solve the case, he also patiently helped him sort out the doubts and some clues he found, hoping that he could reform himself and try the case well.
But before Chen Qishou could resume his work, he lost the power to try the case in an official change, which made the pending case shelved again.
Outstanding cases
This official change was actually a "foreign affairs" innovation of the Qing Dynasty, and Jiangsu Province formally established a modern court system in the second year of Xuanun, and all cases had to be handled by the local courtrooms.
Due to the previous rumors of the murder of the lover by nuns in Suzhou, coupled with the storm of He Gangde's retrial, the case was finally handed over to the Jiangsu Provincial High Court for trial.
According to the file, the "judge" first interrogated Miao Lian, who confessed that she had never acted excessively with a man in the nunnery, and he had no idea of the identity of the deceased, and the so-called Wang Agen only said it after using the nickname "Agen" of Dibao Zhang Renshan in a hurry, and the so-called four concubines were just some tenants who lived in the temple.
The courtroom of the late Qing Dynasty and the beginning of the People's Republic
The trial team then interrogated the suspects, some of whom rented a room in a nunnery to set up a loom, some of whom were villagers who temporarily deposited the coffins of their loved ones there, and some of whom were arrested by the servants for their nephews watching the hilarity and causing trouble.
This shocked the members of the trial team, and after re-establishing The Seibo's confession, they decided to release them all.
At this point in the case, there is a big mystery, that is, who is going to plant them?
They then asked the previous "suspects" if something strange had happened to them after the crime. They said that Zhang Renshan had come to them and asked them to take out forty-eight silver dollars, otherwise they would face disaster, and they did not know what Zhang Renshan was referring to, and it was only later that they realized that this was actually the scourge of killing.
Silver dollars at the end of the Qing Dynasty
One of the suspects also said that there was another man living in the temple at that time, but he was not on the list of suspects, which made him very curious.
After hearing about this incident, the court sent someone to find this person, he said that he was also blackmailed by Zhang Renshan, and then his mother helped him pay forty-eight silver dollars, so he was not arrested, and he also received a receipt from Zhang Renshan.
With the receipt, Zhang Renshan's extortion charge had been convicted, and the servant who threatened Shi Bao was obviously with him.
With the deepening of the investigation, they found that Fengchi'an had a lot of income every year by renting a house, but after this case, all the assets in the nunnery had been looted by the county court, which was also an important reason why Chen Qishou insisted that Fengchi'an have anything to do with this case.
But the trial team obviously did not want to investigate the matter deeply, after all, the last thing was to lose the face of the Qing officials.
Therefore, after they convicted the servant and Zhang Renshan and the other two county staff, they made a hasty matter, and the county commander Chen Qishou was not held accountable at all.
Qing Dynasty land protection
As for the true identity and cause of death of the deceased, no one mentioned it at all, after all, the task of the courtroom was only to help Miaolian and others "settle their grievances", and they did not want to bother with other matters, which was a true portrayal of the newly established judicial system at the end of the Qing Dynasty.
This kind of atmosphere of protecting officials and officials and ignoring the truth of the facts is obviously impossible to protect the rights and interests of the people.
This also shows that the western reforms at the end of the Qing Dynasty were just useless flower racks, and the Qing Dynasty really failed to gain new vitality from these reforms, and was quickly overthrown by the wave of the Xinhai Revolution.
concentrate:
This article about the Suzhou nun murder case, with reference to the "Research on Women's Crime in the Late Qing Dynasty and the Early Ming Dynasty", published by Ai Jing in 2007