Qin Hui, Nationalism, and the Endurance of Hate

Qin Hui (1091-1155) was a government minister and important political figure of the Southern Song Dynasty. The "Southern Song" is what we call the ongoing Song Dynasty after they had lost northern China to a tribe of steppes nomads called the Jurchen. The leaders of the Jurchen, called in China the Jin Dynasty, were bent on subjugating all of China to their rule, leading to a long conflict we call the Jin-Song Wars.

(Incidentally the need of the technologically more sophisticated Song to fight off the more martial Jin led to major advances in gunpowder weapons, especially rocketry.)

Anyway there was a long period in which China was divided between a Han-ruled half and a barbarian-ruled half. The leadership of the Han-led Song realm was divided between a faction that sought accommodation with the Jurchens, for example by paying tribute, and a faction that wanted to fight to the death.

Qin Hui

Enter Qin Hui. According to a long, nearly contemporary narrative of suspect neutrality, he was captured by the Jin but later returned to the Song court, claiming a miraculous escape. There he became a leader of the peace party, which led his enemies to insist that he was a traitor and that the Jin had allowed his escape.

Yue Fei, from a Song Dynasty Scroll

One of his opponents was a general named Yue Fei, who was, wikipedia informs us, a "national heroic person."  Qin Hui outmaneuvered Yue Fei and negotiated a peace treaty with the Jin that required the Song emperor to accept a subservient status toward the Jurchens.

Yue was imprisoned, but even there his recognized status as a heroic fighter made him dangerous to his enemies, so Qin Hui arranged for his trial and execution on charges of treason. Love this detail:

When asked by General Han Shizhong what crime Yue had committed, Qin Hui replied, "Though it isn't sure whether there is something that he did to betray the dynasty, maybe there is.” The phrase "maybe there is" (simplified Chinese: 莫须有; traditional Chinese: 莫須有; pinyin: mò xū yǒu) has entered the Chinese language as an expression to refer to fabricated charges.

Qin Hui died not long afterward, still in power.

When a new emperor came to the throne he pardoned his predeccssor's enemies, including Yue Fei, and the general was rapidly enshrined as a Chinese hero. A grand tomb was built for him, and iron statues of Yue Fei, his wife, and two of his subordinates were made to grovel before the tomb. It became traditional for people to spit on the statues and slap their faces.

And there they still are, more or less, since the statues have been stolen and replaced many times; most recently they disappeared during the Cultural Revolution, and new ones were installed in 1979. And to this day people still slap them and spit on them.

I find all of this fascinating because of the enduring patterns it represents. Nationalists always see those who compromise with outsiders as traitors and honor those who fought to the death; you see this, for example, in Poland, where noblemen who cooperated with the Russians are today villified, even if they were working effectively within the imperial system to make conditions better in Poland. Stalwart military men are usually the heroes, their enemies backstairs schemers who do them in via slanderous rumor, preferably in alliance with wicked women.

(And in another ancient trope, the emperor who lost northern China to the Jurchens is remembered as having "excessive interest in the arts.")

There is a strain within humanity that prefers brave defeat to effective compromise, that wants things to be clear and simple and hates those who work with subtlety and caution, that villifies softness and venerates bold killers. We deserve to be bold and free and strong and victorious, and we should fight to force others to honor us; those who accept subordination over destruction are traitors and deserve to be spit on for eternity.

Asian Art at Christie's

Large (15 inches) floral scroll dish, 1403-1425 AD

Dragon Moon flask, 1736-1795 (20 inches tall)

Bronze dragon head finial, Han Dynasty or Six Dynasties Period, 206 BC to 589 AD

Figurine of a noblewoman, Han Dynasty, 12 inches tall

Ming Dynasty Horsemen

Striding dragon, gilt bronze, Tang Dynasty

Silvered bronze  mirror with a rabbit doing – well, what?

Pounding something with a mortar and pestle, apparently. A toad watches.

So this lovely being must be Chang'e, the moon goddess, and that must be the rabbit who was the great friend of Chang'e and mixed the elixir of immortality for her when she ascended to the Moon Palace.

The rather late story that Chang'e (an old goddess) ascended from earth to the Moon Palace, there to live forever but with only a rabbit and a toad for company, inspired many poets of the Tang and later periods. Here, via wikipedia, is an example:

Now that a candle-shadow stands on the screen of carven marble
And the River of Heaven slants and the morning stars are low,
Are you sorry for having stolen the potion that has set you
Over purple seas and blue skies, to brood through the long nights?

Chinese Art in the Cleveland Museum, 200 BC to 600 AD

Lots of wonders in the online collection of the Cleveland Museum, not so many big or spectular objects but just the kind of weirdness I enjoy. Above, an earthenware model watchtower from an Eastern Han tomb. c. 100 AD.

Statuette of a kneeling woman, Han Dynasty.

Funerary Urn, c. 300AD, and detail.

Detail of a similar urn.

The museum has a lot of these objects; this one is glossed like this:

Han dynasty tombs were often furnished with grave goods to provide the deceased with items for the afterlife. This panel with a dragon was part of a miniature pottery stove to be placed in a burial chamber. This scene of a dragon being fed Lingzhi fungus by a winged fairy is molded on the panel. The dragon is an auspicious creature and an animal of the cardinal directions that protects the east.

This "fairy" would presumably one of the Yuren, the "winged furry beings" who flitted about on the border between life and death. Lingzhi is the hallucinogetic "mushroom of immortality" revered across Asia. Is feeding hallucinogens to dragons really a good idea? I guess the immortal can afford such experiments, but I would caution mortals against trying this.

More cookstove panels. And to think that until today I knew nothing about the amazing world of carved panels from toy Han dynasty cookstoves.

Bronze dragon tripod, c. 50 AD.

Chimeric tomb guardian of the type sometimes called "Bixie," 300s AD.

Jars in the shape of owls, Han dynasty.

The museum has many of these bronze mirrors, an important item in Chinese noble society for 3,000 years. Mirrors were believed to retain something of the essence of those who gazed into them, so if you had an ancient family mirror it became part of the cult of your ancestors. This one has Daoist themes, and this delightful chariot.

The Tomb of Fu Hao

Fu Hao was a queen of the Shang Dynasty who lived around 1200 BC; her tomb was excavated in 1976. Her tomb was in the middle of a large royal cemetery but seems to have been covered over by the excavation of larger tombs nearby and thus never looted. The similarity to Tutankhamun's tomb, which was also hidden by the excavation of a grander tomb just above it, besides their having lived in the same era, has led to her sometimes being called the Chinese Tutankhamun. The tomb was identified as hers because several objects have her name on them.

Oracle bone from the reign of Wu Ding

Fu Hao is not mentioned in Chinese chronicles but she appears on several surviving oracle bones. Texts on these bones record that she was one of the three chief wives of King Wu Ding. (He had 64 in all.) The king's wives mainly came from other kingdoms, and there is a theory that Fu Hao was born on the steppes among warrior nomads. Oracle bone inscriptions are obscure, gnomic records, and this is early in the history of Chinese script, so their interpretation is very much disputed. According to the usual online sources, these oracle bones record that Fu Hao was ordered by the king to perform the oracle bone rite herself, and to sacrifice to his ancestors. Both of these tasks were usually undertaken by male priests. 

Weirder still, inscriptions describe her as commanding armies and winning a major battle over an enemy called the Tufang with whom the Shang had fought for generations. You may be thinking that this has to be some kind of misunderstanding, but Fu Hao's tomb contained 130 weapons, including the ax above. These were 1) extremely rare in the tombs of women, and 2) the same kind and quantity as found in the tombs of other generals. 

Bronze ax and jade dagger from the tomb

So, Fu Hao was quite an unusual character.

Excavating the tomb

She was buried with sixteen slaves and six dogs, which seems to be about normal for a senior queen of that era.

Love this jade phoenix.

Wikipedia lists the contents of her tomb as follows:

• 755 jade objects
• 564 bone objects (including 500 hairpins and 20 arrowheads)
• 468 bronze objects, including over 200 ritual bronze vessels, 130 weapons, 23 bells, 27 knives, 4 mirrors, and 4 tiger statues
• 63 stone objects
• 11 pottery objects
• 5 ivory objects
• 6,900 cowry shells

Quite a pile of loot. Several of the jade objects were centuries old before they went into this tomb, which nobody really understands. Were they novelty items, or were they considered the relics of a lost age of heroes? More goodies below.

China Cracks Down on Online Negativity

Lily Kuo in the NY Times:

China’s censors are moving to stamp out more than just political dissent online. Now, they are targeting the public mood itself — punishing bloggers and influencers whose weary posts are resonating widely in a country where optimism is fraying.

The authorities have punished two bloggers who advocated for a life of less work and less pressure; an influencer who said that it made financial sense not to marry and have children; and a commentator known for bluntly observing that China still lags behind Western countries in terms of quality of life.

These supposed cynics and skeptics, two of whom had tens of millions of followers, have had their accounts suspended or banned in recent weeks as China’s internet regulator conducts a new cleanup of Chinese social media. The two-month campaign, launched by the Cyberspace Administration of China in late September, is aimed at purging content that incites “excessively pessimistic sentiment” and panic or promotes defeatist ideas such as “hard work is useless,” according to a notice from the agency.

“In reality, we all experience fatigue and anxiety as a result of work and life, but these real emotions deserve respect and should not be deliberately amplified for traffic. The internet is not a dumping ground for negativity,” China’s state broadcaster CCTV said in an editorial about the campaign.

I am very curious as to whether something like this might work. Certainly it did not work in communist Eastern Europe, where relentless government positivity only made the people more cynical.

But if a tweak of social media algorithms to feed people good news and positive takes made people happier and less angry, would it be worth it?

Probably not.

The Four Pests

Beginning in 1955, the Chinese government began calling for the extermination of the "four pests": rats, flies, mosquitoes, and sparrows. People have long claimed that the "smash sparrows campaign" in particular was a disaster, because sparrows controlled insect pests. Wikipedia: 

The eliminate sparrows campaign resulted in severe ecological imbalance, and was one of the causes of the Great Chinese Famine.

According to the government, 2 billion sparrows were killed in 1958, and 1 billion in 1959. 

First hand account: 

It was fun to 'Wipe out the Four Pests'. The whole school went to kill sparrows. We made ladders to knock down their nests, and beat gongs in the evenings, when they were coming home to roost.

It seems to have worked, with very few sparrows reported in China by 1961. On the other hand, sparrows didn't just eat grain, and by 1960 ornithologists began sounding the alarm about multiplying insect pests.

But as I said, that is old news, and most of the articles I have found about it don't radiate objectivity. Lots of "look what happens when people mess with nature" sort of stuff. But now a new paper from Chinese researchers supports this claim and offers some serious estimates of the harm:

How do large disruptions to ecosystems affect human well-being? This paper tests the long-standing hypothesis that China's 1958 Four Pests Campaign, which exterminated sparrows despite scientists’ warnings about their pest-control role, exacerbated the Great Famine—the largest in human history. Combining newly digitized data on historical agricultural productivity in China with habitat suitability modeling methods in ecology, we find that, after sparrow eradication, a one-standard-deviation increase in sparrow suitability led to 5.3% larger rice and 8.7% larger wheat declines. State food procurement exacerbated these losses, resulting in a 9.6% higher mortality in high-suitability counties—implying nearly two million excess deaths. 

I suggest a new list of the four pests: tyrants, the lackeys of tyrants, ignorant ideologues, and people who venerate "action" over understanding. 

A Korean Hostage Prince in Tang Dynasty China

Figurines from the Tomb

Under the Tang Empire, China helped the Silla state become rulers of the whole Korean peninsula (c. 668 AD). In return, the Chinese emperors expected the Silla kings to act as Chinese vassals. The politics of this were complex and contentious. One piece of the relationship was that some members of elite Korean families were taken to the Chinese capital of Chang'an and lived there as high-class hostages.

In 2022, Chinese archaeologists excavated a Tang dynasty tomb near Chang'an. The tomb had been looted, but besides a large number of clay figurines, one very important artifact remained: a lengthy inscription describing the life of the deceased (above):

The epitaph, made of bluestone, consists of a square cover and base. The domed cover is adorned with incised cloud and floral motifs, with peonies carved on all four corners. At the center, an inscription in seal script reads: "Epitaph of the Late Lord Kim of the Great Tang." The main epitaph block features an incised grid containing 557 Chinese characters written in regular script.

According to the inscription, Kim Young was a Silla prince who served as a political hostage, or zhizi, in Tang China. He was born in the sixth year of the Tianbao reign (747) and died in 794 at the age of 48 in the Taipingli guest residence in Chang'an.

According to historical records, three generations of his family served as hostages in the Tang Dynasty and were granted official posts. Kim Young himself twice accompanied Tang envoys on diplomatic missions to Silla and participated in ceremonial duties, including mourning and investiture missions. His funeral was organized by Tang officials, with the magistrate of Chang'an county overseeing the arrangements. Both his burial site and coffin were bestowed by imperial decree, demonstrating the Tang court's favor and respect for him.

The inscription also mentions Kim's wife, which is important because otherwise we know next to nothing about that part of the hostage-host arrangement. Kim married into one of the top noble clans of Tang Dynasty China:

His wife was from the influential Wang clan of Taiyuan and the daughter of Wang Qianling, magistrate of Yanshi county. This suggests that hostage Silla princes stationed at the Tang court often married into elite Chinese families.

The ever-growing corpus of tomb inscriptions is probably the main way contemporary scholarship is adding to the history of Han and Tang dynasty China. Tomb inscriptions, some of which are even longer than this one, can add to, and serve as a check on, the royal chronicles that our almost our only textual source for political events.

And how fascinating that in 668 AD a Korean could have the name "Kim Young."

Sima Qian, "Records of the Grand Historian"

Sima Qian

The biggest difference between professional historians and regular history lovers is that history lovers want to know what happened, but professionals want to know how we know what happened. I listen to a lot of lectures on YouTube, mainly philosophy and linguistics but sometimes other topics. But never history, because YouTube historians hardly ever get around to telling you about the sources of what we know, and for me history without that discussion is empty.

It occured to me recently that while I had taken a whole course on Chinese history before 1600 AD, and read a fair amount about the era of the Chin (221-206 BC) and Han (202 BC to 220 AD) dynasties, I had no idea where our knowledge of those periods comes from. So I decided to find out.

As it turns out, this was a ridiculously easy thing to learn, because most of what we know comes from a very small group of chronicles written in the imperial court. The most important is the Shiji, usually rendered in English as The Records of the Grand Historian, written by Sima Qian. Qian died around 86 BC. He was for a time the chief historian of the Han emperors, a job that mainly involved him in producing a calendar for each year that correctly noted the various festivals, lucky stellar conjunctions, and unlucky days. He effectively inherited this position from his father. But his father had a more exalted view of  the job, and he had embarked on an ambitious project to chronicle Chinese history from its origins to his own time. On his deathbed he charged his son with finishing this project.

Sima Qian was a diligent and thoroughly Confucian sort, and he dutifully set about writing this chronicle. He turned out to be, however, far from traditional in his approach. It is hard to gage how original he was, because only snippets of earlier Chinese histories survive. But none of those fragments reveal a history anything like Sima Qian's. His chronicle contains three kinds of chapters: narratives, biographies of famous people, and treatises on particular subjects such as currency and the evolution of ritual. This is a massive work, four times as long as Thucydides' History of the Peloppenisian War. It begins in China's legendary past and covers a period of about 2,500 years. Most of it, therefore, relies on other sources that are now lost. But we know that Sima Qian did not uncritically follow older accounts, since he tells us that he removed stories about magic and "other impossible things." He also tells us when he has multiple sources to rely on and when he is reduced to only one. As a result, Sima Qian has a very high reputation to this day.

Interestingly, the part of the work that has come in for the most criticism and doubt was the chapters about his own lifetime. You might think that since Sima Qian worked in the imperial court, knew many of the key political figures, and traveled across the realm on government business, this would be the most reliable part of the text. But there are certain issues. Wikipedia:

In 99 BC, Sima became embroiled in the Li Ling affair, where Li Ling and Li Guangli, two military officers who led a campaign against the Xiongnu in the north, were defeated and taken captive. Emperor Wu attributed the defeat to Li Ling, with all government officials subsequently condemning him for it. Sima was the only person to defend Li Ling, who had never been his friend but whom he respected. Emperor Wu interpreted Sima's defence of Li as an attack on his brother-in-law, Li Guangli, who had also fought against the Xiongnu without much success, and sentenced Sima to death.

Burton Watson:

No one raised a hand to help him. According to Han custom, a gentleman was expected to commit suicide before allowing himself to be dragged off to prison, where he would be subject to "investigation," which meant torture until the victim confessed. But Sima Qian declined to take this drastic step because, as he himself states, he hoped at all costs to finish writing his history. In the end he was sentenced to undergo castration, the most severe punishment next to death, and one which carried with it an aura of shame.

Qian later wrote, "When you see the jailer you abjectly touch the ground with your forehead. At the mere sight of his underlings you are seized with terror ... Such ignominy can never be wiped away."

Watson: 

After his punishment the emperor made him a palace secretary, a position of great honor and trust that could be filled only by a eunuch, since it involved waiting upon the emperor when he was at leisure in the women's quarters. At this time Sima Qian seems to have finished his history. . . .

Obviously a man who had suffered such a punishment would have every reason to hate the ruler who inflicted it and to despise his fellow courtiers who had been too timid or callous to come to his aid. For this reason many critics have viewed the sections of the Shiji relating to Emperor Wu and his court with suspicion.

Emperor Ming (AD 58-75) disliked Sima Qian's account of his great ancestor and accused him of "using veiled words to criticize and slander, attacking his own times." But we don't know if Sima Qian was fair or not, because his is the only account that survives. Beyond the basic facts that can be gleaned from seals and inscriptions, everything we know about Emperor Wu comes from Sima Qian. Watson again:

Posterity must forever view Emperor Wu and his age solely through the eyes of a man whom the emperor, in a fit of petty rage, condemned to the most humiliating punishment conceivable. It is difficult to imagine a more striking and ironical example of the power wielded by historians.

Jonathan Spence, "God's Chinese Son"

Map of Ching China showing the areas
ruled at one time or another by the Taiping.

Jonathan Spence (1936-1921) was my teacher for modern Chinese history at Yale, one of the many fabulous gifts I received from my alma mater. If you want an introduction to Chinese history from 1600 to 1989, his The Search for Modern China (1990) is the best thing I know; and if you want a short introduction to how traditional Chinese governance worked in practice, The Death of Woman Wang (1978) is terrific.

God's Chinese Son (1996) is partly a narrative of the event we call the Taiping Rebellion and partly a biography of Taiping leader Hong Xiuquan. But like all of Spence's books it really part of his grappling with China, his lifelong attempt to understand its history, culture, and likely future fate. I thought it was great.

Hong Xiuquan was from a class of people one meets over and over in Chinese history, a failed candidate in the imperial civil service exams. As with many others, his aspiring family had made a huge investment in his preparation, so his failure was a major blow to them and thus a double burden on Hong.

While traveling to Canton for his repeated exam failures, at a time when his mental state may not have been very good, Hong met Christian missionaries and became interested in their teachings. In 1837 he had a vision in which he ascended to heaven, where God, dressed in a dragon robe and seated on an imperial throne, called Hong his son and introduced him to his elder brother, Jesus. Hong began to tell his close friends and relations about his vision, and some immediately became his followers. He embarked on years of wandering southern China in which he sought to learn more about Christianity and to draw more followers to his cult of the "God Believers."

In the 1840s the Ching imperial state began the decline that ended with its overthrow in 1911. Defeat by foreigners in the First Opium War (1839-1842) had damaged the prestige of the state and its ruling Manchu dynasty, and revolts broke out in many regions against Manchu rule. Secret societies called the Triads spread, mixing banditry with ethno-nationalist rebellion, using the slogan "Destroy the Ching, Restore the Ming." Banditry was a particular problem in the region of southern China where Hong and his followers lived. For his part, Hong hated the Manchus as much as anyone, and he preached that the Manchu emperors were demons who needed to be destroyed. It was against this background of spreading chaos and anti-Manchu anger that the Imperial authorities decided, in 1851, that Hong and his roughly 30,000 followers needed to be suppressed.

This did not go according to plan.

Instead of the police action the authorities expected, they got a 14-year war in which at least 10 million people died, some say 30 million. Hong and his followers marched more than a thousand miles across southern China, driven from one place after another by imperial forces, but always regrouping and gaining more followers from among China's millions of disaffected people. Eventually the God Believers conquered the great city of Nanjing and established it as the capital of their kingdom of Perfect Peace (Taiping).

Here is a poem of Hong's, written in 1937, that may give a hint at his mental state when he launched his rebellion:

Poem on Executing the Evil and Preserving the Righteous

In my hand I wield the Universe and the power to attack and kill,
I slay the evil, preserve the righteous, and relieve the people's suffering.
My eyes see through beyond the west, the north, the rivers, and the mountains,
My voice shakes the east, the south, the Sun, and the Moon.
The glorious sword of authority was given by the Lord,
Poems and books are evidences that praise Yahweh in front of Him.
Taiping [Perfect Peace] unifies the World of Light,
The domineering air will be joyous for myriads of millennia.

I don't personally see Hong's theology as especially important to his movement. In times of uncertainty and rapid change many people are drawn to cults, and it sometimes seems to me that the content of the teachings matters little compared to just offering an alternative to the status quo, especially if it is mixed with a bit of apocalypticism. But if you are interested, Spence has a detailed account, much of it drawn from the writings of westerners who were curious about this native Chinese version of their faith.

What really struck me about the story of the Taiping is the shear scale of events in China. In nineteenth-century China, a bandit chief could command 100,000 men, a rebel cult leader like Hong 250,000. These huge armies were raised, fed, equipped, and transported thanks to the astonishing productivity of southern China's wet rice agriculture and the bustling commercial society is supported. It astonished me that both sides were able to lose whole armies in campaigns and then just raise more men to replace them, along with fleets of boats, arsenals of weapons, and so on.

Another interesting insight concerns the conspicuous competence of China's civil servants. Their education consisted entirely of reading Chinese classics and learning to write something called an "eight-legged essay" that was never used for anything except answering questions on the exam. Yet once in office they did things like manage irrigations systems, build roads, negotiate with foreigners, and battle bandits. They were not perfect, of course, but they kept the empire together through nearly a century of strife. They eventually put down the Taipings, who at their peak led a state with 30 million inhabitants. One incident that lodged in my brain concerns a local official who was particularly successful at putting down banditry in his district. His superiors asked for a report on his methods. He explained that it was too crude to divide villagers into those who were "for" or "against" the bandits; instead, one had to divide people into "those who know," "those who are afraid," and "those who want things to happen."

One of the Taiping's problems was that early on they accepted a couple of people as legitimate mouthpieces for God and Jesus, in addition to Hong. The difficulties created by the sometimes conflicting pronouncements of these men were smoothed over by Hong until after they took Nanjing. In their new capital one of these prophets began to proclaim himself the equal of Hong, indeed to be another younger brother of Jesus. Hong eventually had him assassinated, and 6,000 of his followered massacred.

Tricky business, prophecy.

Some accounts of the final days of Taiping have a sort of Jonestown feel, but Spence does not see it that way. In his telling the Taiping were basically ok socially and religiously, they just lost the war against the forces of the Ching state. There was some meddling by western powers, at first in favor of the Taiping (who seemed to be a sort of Christians, however weird), and then in favor of the empire, but this was essentially a Chinese civil conflict. I think this is an important point. While some left-wing westerners have lately been blaming all of China's problems in this era as on western imperialism, most Chinese do not see it that way. They have a 2,000-year tradition of regarding meddling by foreigners as something that happens when the Chinese state is weak, along with civil wars, banditry, and revolts. In the Chinese version of Chinese history, it is always the Chinese who are the main actors, and whether things go well or ill is up to the Chinese themselves. While westerners often argue that adapting to western technology and influence is a major theme of nineteenth-century Chinese history, Chinese historians generally see it as a side issue compared to their usually problems with the decay of an old imperial dynasty. Today there is a monument to Hong Xiuquan in Nanjing with text that makes no mention of his interest in Christianity or anything else about foreigners; he is simply a man who rose up against a corrupt Chinese regime on behalf of the suffering common people.

Hell in Nineteenth-Century China

Life is Short, a demon

In his amazing history of what we usually call the Taiping Rebellion, God's Chinese Son: the Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan, (1996) Jonathan Spence takes a long look at the ritual calendar of southern China in the early 1800s. It was astonishingly dense. Essentially every day was sacred to some being or another, from Bodhisattvas to the spirits of local springs, so a superstitious person of the era must have been very busy propitiating all those powers. For example, the first day of the first lunar month belongs to the Maitreya Buddha, who rules the future, usually depicted as a fat and smiling man; he should be propiated with prayer and by vows to respect the will of heaven. 

The eighth day, in contrast, belongs to Yan Luo, known to all as the king of hell. Strangely, though, the Jade Record notes that Yan Luo has lost his former proud position as lord of the first of the hellish palaces. In that role, long ago, he proved too compassionate to those who had been unjustly killed, and allowed them simply to return to earth again to lead new lives.

This Jade Record was one of the most widely circulated religious Chinese tracts in the 1820s and 1830s. Because its folk Buddhist theology seemed to Spence to be important background to the rise of Hong Xiquan and his loosely Christian "Heavenly Kingdom," he devoted several pages to its horrifically detailed description of what happened to souls in the afterlife. This disgression within a digression is my favorite part of God's Chinese Son, which may say something interesting about my own taste in history.

According to the text, those who spread copies of the Jade Record and encourage others to read it

not only escape the worst torments of hell, and bring prosperity to their families and descendants, but in the transmigration of their souls may be reborn as human beings, or even move to higher stages of life – men to the happy lands, and women to the lives of men.

but

those who ignore, deface, or mock the tracts will find no such mercy, but be condemned at death to descend to the lower layers hell and, according to their crimes on earth, move through each of the ten hellish places in turn.

Pictures in the Jade Record show, for those who cannot read, how the judged souls are transformed. Only a few return as happy, healthy humans. Of the others, some are allowed to stay human, yes, but condemned to be ugly, misshapen, poor, and ill; while many, according to their sins, return as horses, dogs, birds, fish, or creeping things.

Near the palace of the first hell is a tower 63 measures tall (= 9x7, so the product of two magical numbers; among their other accomplishments the Chinese created the world's most extenisve numerology). Devils take the unfortunate souls to the top of the tower, from where they can view the families they left behind and see that rather than mourning their loss they are 

cursing the dead one's memory, defying his instructions, selling off the goods and property he so painfully acquired, and battling through lawsuits for what is left.

After this discouragement they are assigned to one of sixteen dungeons.

Under the Highest God's general supervision, each of the other nine gods of hell has his holy day, and an invocation that, if correctly and respectfully uttered, may war off his rage. Cumulatively, among themselves, they judge every foible of which humans are capable, and few will escape bing punished by them. The role of the god who rules the first hell is a prelimninary scrutiny of the newly dead, prior to passing them on to others. In his palace hangs a mirror, called the Mirror of Reflection, where all must see their own sins through their own eyes. 

The catalog of sins and sinners in the Jade Record is very extensive:

Thither go the quack doctors, the priests who deceive children of either sex to be their acolytes, people who sequester other's scrolls or pictures, marriage go-betweens who lie about their clients charms. Hither come shop clerks who deceive their customers, prisoners rightfully condemned who escape from jail and avoid punishment, grave robbers, tax evaders, posters of abusive bills, and negotiators of divorce. . . .

Death Has Gradations, another demon

Souls are guided through this process by two demons known as Life is Short (that's him at the top of the post) and Death Has Gradations, above. 

It is always hard to know what to make of such notions. On the one hand, there was no shortage in China of all the things the lords of hell were supposed to punish, so the warnings may not have been very effective. On the other, people have devoted a remakable amount of effort to propitiating unseen powers: building temples, performing pilgrimages, carrying out rites of a thousand kinds. Belief, as I have said many times, is a hard thing to quantify, but there are certainly senses in which it matters a great deal.