25 A CON MAN POSING AS AN OFFICIAL Legal Confession of Luo Fenpeng 羅奮鵬 (b. 1726)
A man making a living as an itinerant scribe began impersonating an official and calling on people from his hometown to ask for loans. After being caught, he made a full confession.
The eighteenth century, perhaps especially the Qianlong reign period (1736–1796), is remembered as an age of peace and prosperity, when the population was increasing and taxes were kept low. Yet one does not need to dig too far below the surface to find evidence of political conflict and social tension. The Qianlong emperor orchestrated a massive censoring of books, wanting anything that referred to northern non-Han in insulting ways either rewritten or destroyed. Banditry, rebellion, and ethnic conflict disrupted the peace from time to time. Nonviolent crimes like fraud and theft, which rarely appear in the historical records of earlier periods, are well documented because of the survival of the Qing archives, full of reports of even routine legal cases. Such records provide glimpses of the lives of people close to the margins.
Below is the legal confession of a swindler named Luo Fenpeng. He must have been a man of talent, since successful deception requires astute understanding of other people: Who can be most easily tricked? How might one gain their trust? What are they willing to spend money on? What would make them suspicious? If impersonation is involved, one must also have acting skills to play the part convincingly. Thus, it is likely that Luo Fenpeng, who managed to trick a long series of people out of money, was in fact a person of considerable ability. In the end, however, he was caught. Impersonating an official was considered a political crime by the Qing government (and by the Ming before it), a threat to the government, punishable by death even when the guilty person had no political motives and committed the offenses primarily as an easy way to get money, not that different from theft.
In his confession, Luo describes leaving his home in Jiangxi and traveling rather long distances, west into Hunan and Hubei, then east into Jiangsu, at first supporting himself by the legal if not very well-paid job of scribe. Not surprisingly, he does not tell us anything about his inner feelings. We do not learn why, unlike so many other men with enough education to serve as teachers, he did not stay in his home region and accept his modest circumstances. Perhaps he had a bad case of wanderlust. Nor do we learn what went through his mind when he decided to turn to swindling people by impersonating an official. Perhaps he got a thrill from discovering that he was good at tricking people. He remained wary, however, and more than once moved on.
Confessions secured in legal cases must of course be read with the occasion in mind. The accused person has to admit facts known from other evidence but doesn’t want to come across as a truly evil person. Even though Luo was literate and could have written out a confession himself, this was probably put together by a legal clerk from his oral responses to questions.
Confession
I am from Luling County in Ji’an Prefecture [Jiangxi]. I was originally surnamed Luo, and my name is Fenpeng; Li Rongzong is an assumed name. This year, I am thirty-eight. My father is Luo Junzheng, and my younger brother is Luo Yunpeng. I have taken a wife surnamed Li, who gave birth to a son, Xunguan, only eight years old. In the twenty-fourth year of Qianlong [1759], I left home and went from Hunan to Hubei, working as a scribe along the way to get by. I did not falsely pretend to have official rank. In the twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth year of Qianlong [1760 and 1761], I went to various places in Henan, selling calligraphy, and committed no acts of banditry or swindling.
In the eleventh month of the twenty-sixth year of Qianlong, I heard that the emperor was touring the south, and I wanted to go and see. After the twentieth, I arrived at Yangzhou and first stayed at the Jiangxi native Shan Zixian’s needle shop on Coppersmith Street. As I saw that Yangzhou was bustling, I conceived the idea of pretending to be an official in order to swindle. So I invented the name Ouyang Zhang and said I was a vice prefect by purchase. Then, I met Li Huancai, who had a tailor shop on Peppertree Alley and was also from Jiangxi. I told him that I was Ouyang Zhang of Anfu [also in Jiangxi, and close to Luo’s home] and that because of a boating accident when crossing the Yellow River, my baggage had been swept away and lost. He believed it and borrowed sixteen taels on my behalf. I also borrowed a total of eighty taels from Shu Wen and Zeng Er, who were on a Ji’an tribute boat. I had clothing made, hired servants, and, wearing a crystal-buttoned official’s hat, used the name Ouyang Zhang and went to visit the Nanchang government student Lu Xuan. I met him several times and also went to visit the Yangzhou subprefectural magistrate Xie Tao. He, too, is from Ji’an, and I thought he would give me some traveling money, but he had gone off on business, and I never got to see him. There was also the Zhenjiang Transport Command company commander Ouyang Weiguo, escorting [grain boats] to Yangzhou, and his brother Ouyang Zhiping and the fellow provincial lumber merchant Xiong Wenjin. I went to see all of them. Ouyang Weiguo had already departed, and I did not swindle any money from him.
As I had stayed at Yangzhou for a long time and feared discovery, on the nineteenth of the second month, I threw the hat button away and, taking the remaining two or three taels, fled across the [Yangzi] River. On the twenty-third, I reached Suzhou and, on the second of the third month, reached Hangzhou, where I amused myself for a few days on West Lake. As my traveling money was exhausted, I again thought of swindling, whereupon I bought a dark blue rank button at a stall. Fearing that someone from Yangzhou would come searching, I dared not keep using the name Ouyang Zhang and changed my name to Li Chunguan. Saying I was a Ji’an native and a prefect by purchase, I went to visit the Hangzhou prefect Zeng Yueli, who was also from Jiangxi, but was not received. There was also the Chuzhou brigade commander Zeng Jieji, at Hangzhou on a horse-buying mission. He was a Jiangxi native, and I went to visit him, hoping he would give me some traveling expenses, but I did not meet him either. I had no money to spend, so I worked as a scribe to make a living.
Later, I traveled on foot to Jiangning. Seeing that there were many Jiangxi lumber merchants there, I again wore the blue-buttoned hat and, using the name Li Chunguan, went to visit them. I wrote some calligraphy samples and gave them to the lumber merchants Chen Lüxiang and Huang Canxian, earning more than thirty taels.
In the fifth month, I set out from Jiangning, going north of the [Yangzi] River to the Shouzhou area [Anhui] and, as before, getting through the days by working as a scribe. On the twentieth of the first month of this year, I arrived at Nine Temple Mountain in Tongshan County, Hubei, and stayed at Jiuyi Temple. The Daoist priest, Liu Jingting, was also a Jiangxi native, and he invited me to eat. But I had no money to donate. Recalling that there was a fellow provincial, Li Xuan, [who] had served as county magistrate of Yuanrang [Hunan], I wrongfully used his name to write the calligraphy for two door tablets. Moreover, I wrote the words, “Rewarding the regular metropolitan graduate, Board of Revenue office director, and grand master for governance of Shaowu Prefecture, Fujian, who accompanied the imperial carriage on a southern tour, imperially favored with conferral of a court necklace, satchel, and advancement by one class.” I meant only to show off to him. Unexpectedly, when I went to stay at an inn outside the Tongshan County walls on the twenty-third, someone surnamed Yu was gambling for high stakes there with some others; they were arrested by constables, and I was taken with them for questioning. In the heat of the moment, I put on my official’s cap and said I was Li Xuan and was awaiting an appointment as prefect. The Tongshan magistrate questioned me for a while and handed me over to underlings to keep in custody for further investigation. I seized an opportunity to escape. On the sixth of the second month, I reached the Shankou area in Wuning County and spent the night at the home of one Hong Nanyang. On the seventh, the dismissed stipend student Ye Guangjia, seeing that I wore a rank button, took me to his home. I lied that I had served as prefect of Zhangzhou, Fujian. Because his relative Nie Xianmo was in the midst of a lawsuit over the compilation of a clan genealogy, Ye Guangjia promised me eighty taels if I would intercede with the district magistrate on his behalf. We went to the district seat together. Considering my own false position, I dared not go to meet the district magistrate and seized an opportunity to flee. I reached the Shatian area but on the fourteenth was caught by magistrate’s runners from the two counties of Wuning and Tongshan and brought to this court. I did not receive money from either Ye Guangjia or Nie Xianmo and except for [what I have related in this confession] have not done anything illegal. Even in my home of Luling, I merely made a living by instructing the young.
Translated by Mark McNicholas, in True Crimes in Eighteenth-Century China: Twenty Case Histories, ed. Robert E. Hegel (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009), 219–21, modified.
SOURCE: Guoli Gugong Bowuyuan 國立故宮博物館 (National Palace Museum), ed., Gongzhongdang Qianlongchao zouzhe 宮中檔乾隆朝奏折 (Secret palace memorials of the Qianlong reign) (Taipei: Guoli Gugong Bowuyuan, 1982–89), 17:243–46.
Further Reading
- Bodde, Derk, and Clarence Morris. Law in Imperial China: Exemplified by 190 Ch’ing Dynasty Cases. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967.
- Hegel, Robert E., ed. True Crimes in Eighteenth-Century China: Twenty Case Histories. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009.
- McKnight, Brian E., and James T. C. Liu, trans. The Enlightened Judgments Ch’ing-ming Chi: The Sung Dynasty Collection. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999.
- McNicholas, Mark. “Poverty Tales and Statutory Politics in Mid-Qing Fraud Cases.” In Robert E. Hegel and Catherine N. Carlitz, eds. Writing and Law in Late Imperial China: Crime, Conflict, and Judgment. Seattle: University of Washington Press.