Hu Yanyun
Xue Fucheng was a famous diplomat and writer in China's modern history and one of the main leaders of the foreign affairs movement. He wrote a great deal of works throughout his life, and in addition to a large number of diaries and public accounts written during his mission, notes were also one of them, and the most famous was the "Notes on Mediocrity", which was often mentioned in the previous "Narrative Notes". In this film, although mixed with some absurd and unintended theories, but mainly collecting a large number of notes on the political and social reality of the late Qing Dynasty, Xue Fucheng mentioned that his mother's mother's mother's family had been entangled with "hanging ghosts" for hundreds of years.
Xue Fucheng
One or seven ghosts do evil, and Gu Zhao becomes a fierce house
"The Gu family of Yu Wai lives on the Xixi In Wuxi City, and the old clan has been hundreds of years old." According to historical records, Xue Fucheng's father, Xue Xiang, had been an official outside the country for many years, and the affairs and education of the family were mainly handled by his mother Gu Shi. According to legend, in the early years of Yongzheng, a Taoist monk passed by their house, suddenly stood at the door and stared at it for a long time, and then sighed and said, "Oops, this house is relied on by a ghost!" Then he asked someone to go in and tell the owner of the house, Gu Zhiguo, and said, "There are seven ghosts in this house, and from now on, seven people in the family will die of self-hanging, if I come to help you exorcise the ghosts, you can still avoid this fate, otherwise I am afraid it will be too late!" However, Gu Zhiguo was a well-known local Founder and Simple Man, "strict in nature, and dismissed from The Taoist priest as a demon." When the Daoist priest heard this, he smiled bitterly, "I have long known that this is the definite number of fate, and it is irreparable!" Say goodbye and sigh away.
After a few years, Gu Zhiguo was going to marry a daughter, who knew that the wedding date was approaching, and suddenly there was a dispute over the number of flowers to welcome relatives, and as a result, the two sides quarreled to the point of retiring from relatives, "the daughter suddenly hanged herself"; then, one of Gu Zhiguo's grandsons (the grandsons of his brothers), because of one thing, was reprimanded by his mother and "hanged himself with his wife"; soon after, Gu Zhiguo's own granddaughter-in-law had a disagreement with her husband, so she hanged herself, and her husband, that is, Gu Zhiguo's grandson, "swirled and hanged himself"; a few years later, Gu Zhiguo's great-grandson returned home from Shushu. I don't know why, "hanging myself under the mulberry"... In the seventy years, six people in the entire Gu family had been hanged.
The Gu family felt extremely sad about this, and they were also terrified of the prophecy of the Daoist monk at that time, and they were vigilant day and night not to have any new tragedies happen.
After Xue Fucheng's maternal grandmother Chen Shi married into the Gu family, she was "soft and silent, embroidering the curtain all day long", and the relationship with the concubines was also very good. Chen gets up every morning to make up, there is a osmanthus tree outside the window, and there are often birds chirping on it, which sounds like saying: "Wax plum blossoms go to the street, go to the phi, go to the phi." Chen Shi listened strangely and told the maid next to him, but the others said they did not hear it. Chen's nursing mother, Wu Mi, who has the talent of "seeing ghosts", said to Chen, "I always see a hanging ghost with a lock of hair and a short rope, lingering outside your window. Chen scolded her, "Don't talk nonsense! ”
After a few years, Wu Mi suddenly said to the Gu family: "Everyone should be careful, I saw the ghost yesterday rejoicing, it seems to have found a substitute for the dead, and the ghosts of the Gu family's ancestors are gathered together, their faces are worried, it seems that something bad is about to happen." The Gu family was always on guard, and this time they did not dare to relax at all.
Chen's "sex likes Peramei, with its high and distant rhymes". On December 17, 1988, Chen Shi got up early to rinse, and suddenly heard someone outside the door shouting for plum blossoms, so he asked Wu Mi to buy flowers, and when the flowers were bought, he found that Chen Shi had "hanged himself in the side room"! At this time, everyone woke up to what the little bird's cry meant - "Pi Li" is the meaning of the side room, "wax plum blossom on the street, Phi Li to go, Phi Li to go", that is to say, when the plum blossoms are sold on the street, someone will hang themselves in the side room.
Chen's death was a "collection" of the seven ghosts who had found a replacement, and from then on, the Gu family had nothing to hang themselves.
Xue Fucheng's former residence in Wuxi
Second, Zhaowen County Bureau, Liu Ru is strong
In the ancient notes of our country, the "hanging ghost" is a very special existence, most of them are women, always carrying a "smelly smell" rope, looking for a replacement all over the world. In the "Spring In the Water Window", Ouyang Zhaoxiong of the Qing Dynasty wrote that chen Pengnian, the governor of the river and the governor of Caoyun during the Kangyong period, was young, and one summer he drank with friends, and halfway through the wine, the friend went to buy it, and he waited under the pergola. Suddenly, a young woman staggered forward, her expression flickering, and she entered the door of her friend's house and lost a rope in the doorway. Chen Pengnian knew that this was a hanging ghost, so he burned the rope. When the female ghost found out, she was furious and "threw out her tongue and hair, and the blowing was very cold, and the hair was sprinkled." Chen Pengnian was full of courage, not only was he not afraid, but he also encouraged it. The female ghost was first blown out of a hole in her chest, and then her entire body was "blown away with the blow." At this time, when his friend returned, Chen Pengnian asked him to hurry into the house and found that his wife "had suspended the head of the bed, relieved, and was not exhausted." It turned out that the two little ones had just quarreled, and thanks to Chen Pengnian burning the rope of the ghost, his wife did not commit suicide.
The most famous hanging ghost in Chinese history is Liu Ruyi, a strange woman in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties. Yuan Ming wrote in "Zi Bu Shu" that the Suzhou Zhaowen County Bureau was qian Qianyi's former residence, and the three rooms in the East Wing were the place where Liu Ru was hanged, "successively closed and closed". In the year of Qianlong Gengzi, the prince who was directly subordinate to him was appointed here, "there are many families and few inner houses, and this house is opened to live in a certain clan, and the second concubine is a companion; and a concubine is in the West Wing, and the old concubine is the companion." That night, when the old concubine of the West Wing was overheard shouting for help, the prince quickly ran over to see that the concubine was no longer in bed. When she reached the bed, she found her eye wounded and forehead broken, naked and bleeding, standing naked. The prince asked her what had happened, and the concubine said, "I never blow the lamp when I sleep, and just now I went to bed, and a gust of wind blew open the curtain and gagged all over my body." I opened my eyes and saw a ghost with a high bun and a big red coat open the tent, and kept reaching out to beckon me to go with her, I was scared where I was still moving, she immediately came up and grabbed me by the hair and pulled me up. I escaped to the back of the tent and saw a hanger in my eye. The old man heard my shouting, and then ran to me, and the ghost opened me and went out the window. "The prince was horrified, thinking that the other concubine who lived in the East Wing was timid, so he did not tell her." The next day, at noon, the East Wing did not open the door, and when it was opened, the two wives were hung with a long belt. ”
However, Yuan Ming was not convinced that this incident was really liu rushi's doing, "or that Liu Shi was martyred for Shangshu (that is, Qian Qianyi), and died in the right life, and should not be severe." In fact, Xue Fucheng also held the same view, and he said in another article in the "Notes on YongYi": "It is said that those who hang to death are often strong in their deaths, but there are also those who are not complete. This article is actually a bit of a "sequel" meaning of the article "Hanging on the Ghost": "Yu Wen's grandmother Mrs. Chen's first death, every morning in the twilight, the family trance to see its shadow in and out of the family, Feng Shen is not different from life, the person he hangs in the cloak, later changed to the kitchen." ”
And Chen's ghost often haunts the home: when there is a fire and the smoke is thick, "I see a beautiful person drinking water with a scoop, and the fire has gradually been extinguished." The family rushed forward to look, saw the wet water on the side of the salary, and the scoop was also thrown outside the cylinder, but they poured water together to extinguish the fire, and the firefighter Mrs. Shi Chen was also realized. "When relatives are sick and the abdomen is expanded, the soul of the Chen clan " rubs the abdomen with his hand, feels the cold air gushing out from between the navels, and the crux of the abdomen has disappeared." In particular, when Xue Fucheng was eight years old, he suffered from laryngeal sha, "all the doctors tied their hands and thought they were going to die." Yu suddenly fell ill, and saw a person who seemed to be like a portrait of Mrs. Chen, holding a cup of water sprinkled on it, the whole body was cool, and after a few days of scabs, the illness was relieved"... In this sense, after Chen's death, not only did he not do anything, but he had already become the guardian deity of the entire family.
Notes on Mediocrity
The third and fifth daughters hanged themselves, and the cause of death eventually became a mystery
In his lifetime, Xue Fucheng not only actively participated in the foreign affairs movement, but also sent envoys to Britain, France, Italy, belgium and four countries, was well-informed, and was one of the very few people in the late Qing Dynasty with scientific minds and global thinking. Such a person, of course, will not easily believe in any ghost, he described the ghost in his notes, because the notebook is not a correct history, occasionally wearing chisels, strange forces and chaos, the reader will not be more calculated, but let us see the real picture of the late Qing suicide phenomenon from one side.
In less than eighty years (Yongzheng was located in 1723, until the eight years of Jiaqing's suicide, that is, in 1803, exactly eighty years), there were seven self-hangings, which cannot but be said to be shocking. On the whole, the seven people who committed suicide, three men and four women, did not have a clear gender increase; from the perspective of today's people, most of them did not have any "fatal" reasons, just some family conflicts and trivia. It is particularly noteworthy that the economic status and family conditions of the entire Gu family were absolutely in the upper middle class in China at that time, and such a family member who gave up his life so lightly may show more of the distortion of values and the huge pressure of ethics and morality in the era of feudal autocracy.
Objectively speaking, the phenomenon of collective self-hanging is far more in the notes of the late Qing Dynasty than in any previous era, and the reasons for such tragedies are also incredible. For example, Wu Chichang wrote about a strange case in Laoting County, Hebei Province, in "Guest Window Gossip": "There is a people's wife Zhao Yangshi, Chinese New Year's Eve, and her husband trades outside the mouth, and his family is called Xiaokang." "The Yang family is childless, and the daughter of the sister, the thirteen-year-old Yingu, is the stepdaughter." Zhao Shi suffered from chancre and could not afford to lie down, so he called his mother Yang Wangshi to be his companion, and he was more than sixty years old. "There is also Zhao's aunt and niece Zhang Wangshi, who is twenty-two years old, who came to see his aunt's illness and also lives together.
One day, a water carrier brought water, and the door should not be called, and at night, when the water carrier came again, the door was still not opened. He felt that something was wrong, so he gathered his neighbors and relatives to break through the door, "then three women and one woman hanged themselves in the room." Zhao Yangshi tied a rope to the window ledge and sat on the kang; the Yang Wang clan erected several kangs and hung them on several feet; Zhang Wangshi and Yingu moved the willow chair in the middle of the house, "with a belt of two people clasped around the neck, tied back to the chair stall, like the sky is flat, sitting on the ground and dying." "What is particularly strange and frightening is that all four people are wearing new clothes, their eyebrows are painted with powder, and the hairpins are easy to walk, as if they have personally sorted out their remains.
"If an official examines four corpses and is not injured, he is not killed; if there is no trace of a man in the room, he is not adulterous; if he does not lose anything, he is not a thief; if he is calm in makeup, he is not angry." Why did the four of them die together, and why did they see no one, and why did they find out? "The case was so big that Zhao's husband and Yang's son kept the lawsuit in Beijing. The official final speculation is that Zhao Yangshi was in pain due to illness and hanged himself, his mother Yang Wangshi lost his daughter, Yingu lost his mother, and Zhang Wangshi also hurt his aunt. This speculation was also finally agreed by the Ministry of Punishment. People at the time talked a lot about this, thinking that there must be a powerful ghost doing something about it. But excluding ignorance and superstition, the suicides of Zhao Yang and Yang Wang are understandable, while the suicides of Yingu and Zhang Wangshi are contrary to human morality, or it may be pointed out more directly: if the two of them do not die, they are likely to be subjected to more unbearable social pressure than hanging themselves.
There is also a case written in the "Detailed Meaning of Washing Injustices" in Daoguang in Pingdu, Shandong Province, five of them hanged themselves at the same time, and they were neatly dressed, and they also wore sachets and purses, and the investigation found that these five beards usually had very good feelings, and two of them were recently "sent to marry" by their masters, and since they could not bear to be separated, it was better to go to Huangquan together, so they hanged themselves together - and people at that time also thought that it was caused by "hanging ghosts".
"The Detailed Meaning of the Wash of Injustices"
Writing this, I feel more and more that the "ghost" is not credible, not that the author has to deny the existence or absence of ghosts, but must resolutely deny the practice of explaining all social tragedies with "ghosts". This kind of approach is indeed simple and straightforward, replacing a lot of reflection and vigilance in the ancient years, so that the dead are quickly buried, and the living are forgetful of their worries and happiness... But a muddy nightmare is a muddy nightmare: in the age of ghosts, the living are also ghosts, and in the age of no ghosts, the dead are also human.
Editor-in-Charge: Gu Ming
Proofreader: Ding Xiao