CHAPTER 5 Unseen Practices
Ancient people, in their foolishness, created gu poison for wealth. They would take a hundred bugs and place them in a jar. After a year, they would open it. Inevitably, one insect would have devoured all the others. This was called “gu.” It could become invisible like ghosts and spirits, bringing misfortune to people, yet it was still merely an insect demon. When it bit people to death, it might emerge from various orifices of the body. The people would then catch it and dry it in the sun. Those suffering from gu would burn it to ashes and consume them, as it was a matter of like subduing like. It is also said that any gu insect can treat gu. Knowing the name of the gu suffices to cure it. For example, snake gu can be treated with centipede gu, centipede gu with frog gu, and frog gu with snake gu, as they subdue each other and can thus be treated.
—Systematic Compendium
Understanding why someone was ill was tantamount to trying to read the unseen—the proximal, distal, and ultimate forces of life—the immediate surroundings, the supernatural world, and the retributory debts from previous lives or ancestors. Elite medicine usually relied on the paradigm of systematic correspondence (of elements and organs, such as between fire and the liver) to understand bodily imbalance or dysfunction. Vernacular medicine, on the other hand, entertained broader views in its understanding of the relationship between the cosmos and the body. Vernacular knowledge sometimes coincided with or encompassed elite knowledge, but at times, the two remained distinct.
Two practices that were commonly discussed in popular entertainment and didactic texts—because they were fearsome, secret, and morally complex—were the use of gudu 蠱毒 (gu poison / demonological poison) and the practice of gegu 割股 (cutting the flesh [to make medicine]). While some versions of these may have been practiced, they were likely not as widespread as discussions about them made it seem. The nature of these practices relied on secrecy to achieve potency, and so there would have been few firsthand accounts of practitioners. Most accounts were anecdotes, case histories, and rumors. From a modern scientific perspective, it seems as if these practices, at least in their more extreme forms, must have been entirely imaginary. Yet to read accounts of how these practices were conceived, discussed, and reframed over hundreds of years is to glimpse how knowing itself evolved and who laid claim to the purview of that knowledge.
Gu Poisoning, or the Scholar and the Hedgehog
The belief that bugs and demons played a decisive role in the generation of disease was an accepted conceptual basis of elite health care prior to the second century BCE. After that period, the medicine of systematic correspondences rose to prominence, and bugs were largely neglected as pathological agents by the sorts of elite medical texts collected in the eighteenth-century Complete Library of the Four Treasuries (Siku Quanshu). When modern Western bacteriology entered China in the late nineteenth century, chong made a comeback as a key factor in disease.1 However, the belief that bugs and demons played an important role in the creation and transmission of disease persisted all along, as evidenced by their role in formularies, recipes, manuscripts, and practical medical texts of the Ming and Qing dynasties that were neither elite nor fringe.2 Gudu, a kind of demonological bug poison, appeared almost exclusively in particular kinds of medical literature—practical texts such as pharmacopeia and materia medica—while it disappeared almost entirely from theoretical discussions of medicine for a millennium and a half, since the establishment of an elite scholarly medical tradition beginning perhaps with Huang Di’s Inner Classic of the second century CE. Discussions of gu survived outside of elite discourse, in practical texts and how-to guides, in stories and cases.
How to create gu or gu poison and how to treat it was clear enough—the Systematic Compendium lists hundreds of medicines that purge, treat, cure, expel or kill gu. But its mechanisms, how the bug related to the demon, was more of a mystery. Gu could refer to a disease not necessarily produced by witchcraft, to witchcraft not necessarily resulting in disease, and to states of befuddlement associated with gu disease and witchcraft but not necessarily caused by either.3 Because it was so fearsome, complex, strange, exotic, and poorly defined, it begged for classification and delineation.
The basic concept is as follows. A person fills a container with various poisonous chong—insects, worms, centipedes, and snakes—and then buries the container (some accounts specify that one must bury the container on the fifth day of the fifth lunar month, and some specify that it must remain buried for one hundred days). The creatures in the container sting, bite, and devour one another during this period, eventually leaving only one, which has absorbed the combined poisonousness of all the others. This creature is a gu. The process to create a gu is conveyed in the word’s etymology—the Chinese character gu 蠱 has “insects” (chong 蟲) upon a “dish” (min 皿). The creator of gu then uses it (or its poisonous seed / excrement / venom) and must, within a given period (usually one day), administer it to their victim by secretly placing it in their food or drink. As soon as the victim has swallowed the gu poison, it develops into worms (or bugs) that resemble their parents and then gnaw on the viscera of the victim, producing pain, a swollen abdomen, bloody discharge from mouth or anus, emaciation, and ultimately death. The proof of gu poisoning is visible following the demise of the victim, when worms crawl out from the body. These worms, “similar to corpse worms,” were believed to live inside people and report their sins to heaven.4 The reason a villain would create gu and go to the trouble and legal peril of killing someone with it involves the demon/spirit that is attached to or attendant upon the worm/bug. The mystical properties of gu reward its creator with the property of the victim. This is why Li Shizhen refers to the “stupid, selfish” people who seek wealth by creating gu. Thus, gu was tied to envy and jealousy, greed and gold.
One of the most fundamental paradigms in early medicine, literature, and life is that of sympathetic action, the notion that “like cures like” (leizhiyi). In Chinese medicine, there is a strong trend of recording treatments that are meaningfully correlated to the illness, sharing certain linguistic properties (the teeth of the six domestic animals serve to cure the six kinds of epilepsy with animal names) or having literary or figurative significance (peach blossoms kill demons that have infected the body, because arrow shafts were made of peach wood and killed things outside of the body).5 This is true also for several suggested treatments for gu poison where the demonic bug that causes destruction, if captured, killed, burned, and imbibed, will cure that harm.
Gu poison was widely discussed in the medical literature of the first and second millennia as well as in legal codes. Why it was so commonly discussed is not clear, but it was believed to be extremely potent and apparently morally worse than other methods of killing, even with other kinds of poison or other kinds of witchcraft. Medical literature provided treatments and preventative strategies, but gu deserves some consideration because it held doctors and patients in thrall for centuries as one of the most nefarious forces in society. The idea of gu encapsulated several different fears about human behavior, about the unseen natural world, about death, sex, familial relations, envy, and tempting fate.
Despite the many medicinal treatments to cure gu, the healing practice that made gu poison so fearful was to pass it along to someone else.6 This is similar to the notion of “selling the sickness”—placing gu in a basket of riches and leaving it by the roadside, believing that some innocent passerby will contract the gu and thereby cure the perpetrator.7 Writer Zhou Zuoren (1885–1967) discussed the prevalence of this belief even in 1937, saying that an ill person would write the name of his sickness on a piece of paper and leave it out for someone else to find. He who reads the name of the illness then falls ill with it, and the author is thereby cured. Often, the contagious words had to be left in a basket with food or money to entice passersby into reading them.8 Zhou blames this practice on the common knowledge circulated by entertainment literature: “As for anomalous accounts and short stories, although they may be the works of the ancients or be very interesting and cherished by the public, they do not accord with reality. In the interest of truth, they should be corrected.”9 Complaining that pharmacologists did not follow modern science but still relied on the “words of a novelist from over a hundred years ago,” Zhou writes, “despite the development of general education in the past twenty years, common knowledge, tastes, and interests [changshi yu quwei] seem not to have improved, as the stain of old habits runs deep.”10 Not all anomalous accounts were so alive in the public imagination, though. What was it about this mechanism that appealed to common sense? Was this a rudimentary understanding of the economy, in which one can only become wealthy by robbing his neighbor, applied to the body? Was fear of gu like a fear of the “evil eye,” according to which being too fortunate invited disaster?11 Perhaps it was an awareness that one has “overloaded their luck,” reflecting the notion that when something reaches the extreme, it becomes its opposite.
Fears of gu combined fears of witchcraft and bugs. Bugs suffused the world of humans, and medical and religious traditions made it clear that bugs were present in the human body from birth. “Corpse worms,” also known as the “three corpses,” were discussed at length in Daoist texts and were normalized by medical ones. They were a dark force born at the same time as the rest of the body: “Inside the human body there are from the beginning all the three corpses. They come to life together with man, but they are most malicious. They communicate with demons and the numinous, and they regularly invite evil [qi] from outside, thereby causing human suffering.”12 It was also believed that corpse worms were the root cause of desire for sex, delicious food, and luxury goods.13 Corpse worms had a mundane aspect, weakening the body so that malignant qi could enter, and a demonic aspect, leaving the body to report the host’s misdeeds to heaven, thereby inviting retribution. Corpse worms used both aspects to turn the living into a corpse.
The idea of gu is ancient, but it evolved and persisted.14 Healers’ manuscripts from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries collected treatments for gu poison and related gu illnesses. It is evident from them that gu was evolving in the minds of healers from the arch-legendary demon bug into a secular malady, such as “gu swelling,” and “gu distension.” In one manuscript, gu became mosquitos. Others contain treatments, though not descriptions, of “false gu poisoning.” Yet others include treatments for “water gu” or “qi gu,” suggesting that it had evolved into something waterborne or airborne, perhaps even contagion itself. One manuscript from the south includes tests to diagnose gu poisoning that are found in other medical texts, such as the Systematic Compendium: “Have the patient spit into clean water. If the saliva floats on the water, then it is not gu poisoning; if it sinks, then it is gu.”15 Another manuscript is more concerned with protecting travelers who enter a home that is either afflicted with gu or that raises gu.16 In this case, the entire house was believed to be infectious, but a simple medicine, pills made of dried water chestnuts, prevents contracting it.17
Materia medica often prescribe mundane treatments for gu poison. Many involve drugs that induce vomiting or diarrhea, presumably to evacuate the poison or worms. Other remedies for gudu rely on sympathetic correlation—dragon’s teeth, earthworms, centipedes, alligator meat, snakeskin, boa constrictor bile, pit viper meat, and so on all treat gu poison, because they share figurative or categorical properties with gu. Since gu is made up of worms, snakes, and bugs, other bugs or creatures that are normally thought to eat bugs will combat them. Centipedes, for instance, were thought to consume worms, so when ground and taken with wine, they could treat gu. These more material treatments are said to “disperse, “treat,” “cure,” or “expel” gu poison. Other treatments focus on the demonological ramifications of gu, and these prescriptions are said to “kill” it.
The gu demon rewarded the person who created it by giving him the possessions of the deceased victim whom he poisoned. If the person who created the gu is unable to find his intended victim that day, he must find someone else to poison, or he himself will be killed by the gu spirit/demon. Hence there are records of people poisoning their own relatives if no other victim could be found on the day the gu was produced. The only way to rid himself of his duty to the gu demon was to gather valuables such as gold and silver, place them and the gu worm in a basket, and leave the basket by the side of the road. The person who finds the treasure and brings it home inherits the burden of the gu, and the cycle continues. Related afflictions, such as “gold silkworm” (jincan), are treated in a similar manner. Li Shizhen writes of them that “according to recent research,” southerners raise golden silkworms and put their excrement into beverages and food to poison people. One suggestion was to stir food with bronze chopsticks before eating, and if the chopsticks turned black, it indicated the presence of poison.18 People poisoned by golden silkworm inevitably die, and the worms then give the victim’s wealth to their creators. Golden silkworms cannot be destroyed but only gotten rid of by taking twice the amount of ill-gotten wealth and placing it in a basket on the roadside along with the golden silkworm. If someone else happens to pick it up, the golden silkworm will follow him. This, Li says, is called “marrying the golden silkworm.” If one does not dispose of golden silkworms this way, they will enter their host’s abdomen and destroy their teeth, intestines, and stomach.19 Amassing wealth in a subsistence economy was dangerous since the only way to do so was to steal from your neighbors, but the circulation of wealth was also dangerous, since there were few ways to make easy money without strings, or golden silkworms, attached.
Another vision of creating wealth using these demonic worms involves enslaving victims. Some sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts claim that the hun-soul of the victim killed by gu becomes subjugated to the villain and must serve him, even in death: “The soul is sent to [the perpetrator’s] household to serve as a laborer.… The more people it kills, the more spiritually potent the gu becomes, making the household increasingly wealthy.”20 Other accounts explain this villainous subjugation by gu as a kind of soul-stealing while the victim is alive: “In my native Fujian, there is gu poison. If someone is affected by it, they are made to work at night, with their souls being summoned in dreams. When they wake, they find themselves exhausted and drenched in sweat. Within a few months, they die from fatigue and disease.”21 Whether it steals the victim’s wealth after he dies from subjugation or the gu master profits from his victim’s labor, this conception of gu is closer to witchcraft than poison, and closer to fears of soul-stealing in the eighteenth century and the literal witch hunt for gu practitioners in the Han dynasty, almost two millennia before.22
Li Shizhen investigates an account of an official in Fuqing who was accused of possessing golden silkworm poison. The suggestion was made to send two hedgehogs into his house, where they indeed found and killed “it” in a crevice in the wall behind his bed. Given that golden silkworms are very poisonous, “as if they were demon spirits,” Li asks rhetorically, “How can it be that hedgehogs are able to check them?”23 By way of answer, he makes a logical analogue: “Centipedes can control dragons, and slugs can control centipedes. Why should this be related to size and intelligence? Whether creatures fear each other is determined by heaven.”24 At ease with cataloguing the kind of mechanism, Li cites another story about a poor scholar from Chizhou named Zou Lang. Venturing outside one day, Zou found a small basket filled with silver utensils. Bringing it inside, he suddenly felt a silkworm wriggling on his thigh. It was golden and looked rotten. He brushed it off, but it returned to the same spot. He stepped on it. He hacked at it with a knife. He threw it into the fire and tried to drown it in water. But every time, it returned exactly as before. A friend explained to him that this was a golden silkworm and told him what it meant. Zou said that he could not bear to pass it on to another family, and thereupon he swallowed it. His family thought that he would certainly die. However, he felt no pai, and unexpectedly lived a long life. Li asks, “Could it be that in view of such extraordinary honesty, even demons are unable to overcome righteousness? … The destruction caused by golden silkworm gu is extreme. Hence, I have recorded these two cases. In the first it is obvious that gu fear hedgehogs. In the other, utmost honesty overcomes evil.”25 Li cites this latter story from Records Taken during Leisure Time at the Prefect’s Office (Mufu yanxian lu), a Northern Song collection of brush notes, although he abridges it, cutting out much of the suspense and characterization of the original account. In his hands the story illustrates a simple moral: virtue cures treachery.26
Gu was many fears rolled into one thing; it was a bug, a poison, and a way to steal one’s wealth or soul. The meaning of gu poison seems to have been its relationship to ill-gotten wealth or to envy more generally. To guard against being poisoned generally, one had to be wary of eating outside of the home and be suspicious of strangers. But one also had to be upright, wary of lavish gifts and windfalls.
Suspicion of innkeepers seems to have been particularly intense, since they had regular contact with strangers, especially those from border regions or the miasmatic south.27 Inn keepers “were continually suspected of being in league with a gu specter,” and one way of verifying this nefarious alliance had to do with dirt. Paradoxically, it was thought that a house with gu would be suspiciously clean, so visitors to an inn or similar establishment should clean their shoes on an inner wall or spit on the floor. If the dirt produced in this manner disappeared immediately, it would be wise to lodge elsewhere.28 These notions were still circulating as late as 1923:
Families that raise gu, regardless of dwelling size, keep their rooms meticulously clean. All chores are done by the gu as their servants. Inns with gu often make guests disappear. Those who lodge overnight vanish without a trace, their belongings and money taken as the gu master’s. Not even a corpse or trace of remains can be found, as the gu have completely devoured them. Travelers who wish to test if an inn has gu can enter a room and deliberately scatter their belongings about before locking the door and waiting outside. If the room is tidy again without any staff entering, that inn raises gu. One can then leave openly without paying, and that inn will not further harm you.29
The premodern world was a dusty, muddy, buggy place, and any home or inn that was spotless must have naturally seemed odd. Suspicion of overly clean places must have been tantamount to suspicion of wealthy establishments or families. But travel and travelers were cause for concern too. Many of the illnesses encountered in texts, be they literary, medical, or miscellaneous, are associated with travel, or with travelers, reflecting historical conflicts between the expanding empire and the non-Han people who suffered because of it. The cultural divide between people of conquered territories and their conquerors and the consequent suspicion of retaliation were real in the minds of authors. Chinese children were the preferred victims of gu poisoning by members of non-Chinese tribes, according to European accounts: “The Miao women carry pears in cloth bags, selling them to children. Many children are poisoned by gu in this way.”30 Reports about gu poisoning of Chinese administrative officials also reflect the suspicion of reprisal by those living under minority rule.31 Gu and golden silkworms were associated with amassing wealth, travelling merchants, and the uncivilized practices of border regions—some of the primary fears of poor Confucian scholars, like Zou Lang, the protagonist of the story mentioned above.
Some argue that gu played a foundational part in establishing fervent belief in Confucian values at court, and not merely state ideology.32 The famous phrase “the witchcraft scandal” (wugu zhi huo) refers to an attempted coup d’état against Emperor Wu of the Han dynasty in 91 BCE and subsequent persecutions of suspected perpetrators. Wugu, the art of directing malevolent spirits to harm people, is mentioned in the dynastic histories alongside shamanic curses (zhuzu) and burying dolls representing the intended victims (maiouren).33 The histories are not clear about the specifics of wugu practice and exactly what happened in the wugu witchcraft scandal.34 They record that Emperor Wu closed the gates of Chang’an for days to search for evil people. A prisoner then accused Gongsun Jingsheng, son of Chancellor Gongsun He, of having illicit sexual relations with Princess Yangshi, a daughter of the emperor. Jingsheng was also accused of wugu, offering sacrifices to evil spirits, placing curses on the emperor, and burying human images along the road the emperor traveled. Thereupon, the emperor ordered a sweeping investigation, which culminated in the deaths of the Gongsun father and son, princesses, the empress, and the heir apparent.35
Close to death and paranoid of betrayal by his most trusted advisers, Emperor Wu ordered the execution of hundreds of the hereditary elite, many of whom were members of his own extended royal family.36 Rumors of wugu and treason thus disrupted the imperial succession and wiped out established families who had dominated court since the beginning of the Western Han dynasty. The resulting power vacuum was filled by men from obscure backgrounds, including a group of officials identified with a commitment to the Confucian classics.37 While History of the Former Han does not specify what, exactly, it means by gu, it is clearly something tied up with demons or black magic, an effigy buried along the road, a weapon of the envious or vengeful, something feared by a suspicious emperor, something that can result in the death of your own family members, and something punished with great severity.
While historians may debate the degree to which the “calamity of wugu” actually altered the course of Han dynasty politics and even of Confucian values in China, the dramatic story, with which wugu is virtually synonymous, and its outcome, rely on essentially the same logic as the story of Zou Lang eating the golden silkworm: the treachery, malevolence, and sedition encapsulated by wugu is counteracted with Confucian virtue.
The fear of gu—a combination of premeditated murder, heterodox practice, treason, and bugs—endured for centuries. Legal codes and cases punished those who practiced gu through the nineteenth century.38 The Ming and Qing dynasty legal codes list particularly harsh punishments for those who “make or keep” gu poison.39 Both codes list the Ten Great Wrongs (Shi E) before going on to discuss the hundreds of other articles on transgressions and punishments. Most of the great wrongs relate to crimes against the crown or one’s own family. The fifth of the Ten Great Wrongs is called “depravity” or “acts not in accordance with the Way” (bu Dao) and refers to killing three people of the same family, dismembering or mutilating someone (see the next chapter), making or keeping gu poison, or practicing sorcery. Criminals convicted of these crimes were sentenced to the most severe punishments—beheading or slow slicing.40 The codes date back as far as Han dynasty law, which itself was based on earlier codes that said, “Those who dare to poison people with gu, or teach others to do it, will be publicly executed.”41 Ming and Qing laws may or may not have reflected contemporary concerns, but they did suggest the magnitude of historical fears intermixed with the direst threats to Confucian harmony and stability.
The “calamity of wugu” is not the first account of gu, nor was it, despite its renown, the only frame through which gu was viewed. Earlier accounts occur in Records of the Grand Historian (Shiji) by Sima Qian (145–86? BCE), Zuo Tradition (or Zuo Commentary, Zuozhuan) and The Book of Changes (Yijing), which respectively cast gu in terms of other ancient fears besides treachery—demons, women, and wind. Zuo Tradition tells a brief story of the Prince of Jin (Jin Hou) calling a physician from Qin to diagnose him. The physician says that he has an incurable illness:
This is what is known as proximity to the female,
A sexual exhaustion that is like gu.
It is not from ghosts, not from diet,
But is a bewilderment that destroys the will.
A good subject will die,
And Heaven’s command does not protect him.42
Here, gu seems to mean “a spell” or “bewitchment.” The physician clarifies his rhymed diagnosis/divination, saying that “too extended a contact with females brings illnesses of internal heat, bewilderment and gu.”43 The good minister, Zhao Wu, probed further, asking what exactly is meant by gu, to which the physician replied, “It is what arises from excess, indulgence, bewilderment, and disorderly living. In writing, a jar with vermin is gu [minchong wei gu]. The flying insects in grain are also gu. In the Book of Changes, when the female bewitches the male, and when the wind falls upon the mountain, that is called gu. All these things are of the same kind.”44 Illnesses brought on by excess, known as depletion disorders, are discussed well into the modern period, and are associated with demons, death pollution, and corpse worms.45
The physician above refers to the hexagram Gu (one of the sixty-four) in the Book of Changes. The character gu, with multiple bugs/worms in a container, might here be rendered “ills to be cured,” “blight,” “spell” or perhaps “decay” (Yijing 3.57–58). The hexagram consists of the Sun trigram ☴ below and the Gen trigram ☶ above. The Sun trigram is linked to images of a grown woman and the wind, while the Gen trigram is linked to images of a young man and mountains. Thus, the hexagram is comprised of woman bewitching man and wind blowing on the mountain, as the physician in Zuo Tradition explains. Its sexually oriented quality, combined with wind, which was widely understood as the primary external cause of most illnesses, may contribute to the deep fear and horror of gu throughout Chinese history.46 The second-century dictionary Explaining Single Graphs and Analyzing Compound Characters (Shuowen jiezi) describes gu as “generated by nocturnal licentiousness,” “demons who have suffered execution with public exposure,” and simply as “worms in the stomach.” It may have been long after the Han dynasty that gu came to be seen primarily as poisonous bugs created by patient, deliberate villains, but none of the ancient fears—licentiousness, wind, demons, and bugs—completely vanished from gu in the early modern period.
In modern newspapers, fears of vengeful lovers, poison, and people who live in the distant south attend on fears of witchcraft and bugs. A recurring theme in these accounts is that merchants or other travelers who have affairs with women in Guangdong, Yunnan, and Guizhou will be poisoned by them, often with delayed effects. If they do not keep their promises or do not return south at the appointed time, their paramours will activate the poison and kill them. In one case, such a man was detained by his wife, who refused to let him return to visit his mistress. His belly swelled up like a drum, giving him a twisting pain that grew worse daily. Just as he was resigned to death, a traveling doctor happened to pass by, diagnosed the man with gu poisoning, and charged twenty ounces of gold as payment. He then burned charms and chanted spells, causing the patient to evacuate “countless tiny snakes” still squirming about. And just like, that his illness disappeared.47
FIG. 15. Hexagram 18 Gu from the Book of Changes
FIG 16. The Chinese character for gu, comprises three bugs (chong 蟲) above a container.
Fin-de-siecle newspaper articles link gu to licentiousness, returning to one of the oldest associations of gu. In one report, a man’s son fell ill and became emaciated over the course of a year. One day, his father called at his door to no response. Breaking into his son’s room, he found his son on the bed, naked and lifeless, with a book clutched in his hand and the bed wet with semen: “Only now did Mr. Su realize the cause of his son’s illness and death. Opening the pillowcase, he saw the pornographic books he had purchased in his own youth but stored away after reading. They had now become murder weapons killing his son! The ancients said good family governance means not keeping gu poisons. Is this not their very meaning? Indeed, pornographic books’ capacity to harm surpasses even that of gu poisons.”48 Apologists for Ming and Qing xiaoshuo had for centuries been arguing against similar fears that readers would fall ill of depletion maladies after encountering excess, debauchery, and licentiousness in their pages. A famous apocryphal origin story about the novel Plum in the Golden Vase tells that its author soaked its pages in poison to exact revenge on a licentious enemy, who, licking his fingers as he feverishly turned its pages, imbibed the poison and died. Novels, like gu, were a complicated threat involving poison and witchcraft, with the potential to cast spells, seduce readers, and subvert social order.49
It is not clear when popular consensus decided that gu poisons were no longer a real threat. Common knowledge can be slow to evolve. A piece in Shenbao from 1924 describes historical features of gu and concludes, “Are these not absurd stories and fictions?,” implying that many whose minds still needed changing.50 Shenbao was a famously moralizing publication, railing against gu and all its associated practices and implications. It told stories warning of all sorts of bad behavior, for which gu poisoning was the repercussion. In a report from 1891, a doctor was called in to examine a young man of twenty with a painfully distended belly, his navel protruding an inch. He told the doctor that the illness had started just twenty days prior, which surprised the doctor, since such extreme cases usually took much longer to develop. The doctor presumed that it was caused by sexual indulgence and that it was incurable. The young man died just five days later. As the grieving father wept by the corpse with his wife, he saw a foot-long worm wriggle out of his son’s nose. Enraged, he cut open the worm and found many smaller worms inside. Hearing this, the doctor was surprised, saying that there are countless worms (chong) that can harm the body, but he had never heard of one so large and full of smaller worms as this one. Reflecting on the abrupt onset of symptoms after lewd indulgence, the doctor felt that this had to be a case of lust disease. Considering that the son’s partners were mostly undesirable types—“brothel prostitutes, wild chickens, and saltwater girls”—he must have contracted the disease from them. The doctor then realized that this was not a disease after all but a case of gu poisoning. One of his partners must have intentionally poisoned him with gu, which was the only explanation for the speed of the illness. The doctor opines, “The Book of Changes says that gu is like a woman of ill repute [fengnü] seducing a man under a mountain—such sorcery is often found in places filled with miasma and is especially practiced by those in the sex trade. They use this to manipulate customers into returning.”51
The doctor refers to the belief, described in Shenbao, that gu, once administered, does not take effect until the poisoner activates it. Some referred to this as “reanimating life gu” (tiaosheng gu). Because of these practices, clients often refrain from eating anything when visiting a brothel. In response, prostitutes fawn and flirt and insist that the client write promises for future visits. When he moistens the brush in his mouth, he unwittingly ingests the gu. These practices were especially prevalent in the southern border regions and had not been reported in Shanghai, according to the doctor:
Today the grand brothels stand lofty as before, but many are now cold and deserted. There are no wide-roaming guests as in former times, and regulars are scarce. Top-class prostitutes can still scrimp by, but the lower-class ones can’t even survive. Consequently, they employ all kinds of strategies, including gu, to bind the clients. Once the gu takes hold of a client, he has no choice but to indulge her until his money and health are spent. If such trends spread in Shanghai, it will chill any moral person’s heart!52
Fears of licentiousness and of border or minority practices spreading to the major cities we part of gu’s terror. The fear is that licentious women can kill young men not only with gu but also with over indulgence in sex, all the while transferring their clients’ wealth to their own coffers, just as gu demons were thought to do.
With so many properties and associations ascribed to gu, it is understandable that people curious to discuss it fixed on certain aspects. Yuan Mei seemed to understand gu as a secular creature, a flying insect that brought wealth by excreting precious metals and had to be tended by women:
In Yunnan [far southwestern province], every household raises gu. Gu can excrete gold and silver, providing profit.… Families hide their young children, fearing they may be consumed by the gu. Those who raise gu keep them in a secret room and order women to feed them. If the gu see a man, they will be ruined, as they are masses of pure yin. Those that consume men excrete gold, while those that consume women excrete silver. This was told to me by Hua Feng, the regional commander of Yunnan.53
Everyone knew what gu was, and yet everyone understood it differently. Yuan Mei’s gu does not attach itself to a demon or subjugate a hun-soul to obtain the victim’s wealth. Rather, it turns the victim into wealth through a dark but natural process. Much of what gu represents and the fears it provoked implicated women—fears of what women know and what they can do. Since the Song dynasty, “reanimating life” (tiaosheng) practices gradually became associated with gu poisoning.54 A sorcerer would cast a spell on a fish or piece of meat or perhaps poison it with gu and then once the victim ate the meat, the sorcerer could bring it back to life inside the victim, and it would devour them from the inside. Tiaosheng, like gudu, was believed to be practiced primarily in the southern border regions. Numerous biji and travelogs explain it in similar language.55 Like gudu, the “reanimating of life” was attended by a tiaosheng demon that somehow transferred the victim’s possessions to the sorcerer who began the process. Some accounts claim that after death, the victim’s soul would be under the secret control of the sorcerer.56 Li Shizhen writes, “In Lingnan they have a destructive practice of ‘reanimating life’ in that they mix poison into a guest’s beverages and food in a most detestable way.”57 Xie Zhaozhe explains, “Some variants of gu include reanimating life gu that can change chicken and fish into live forms after they have been eaten.”58 Fears of reanimating life have a natural association with gu, since both mechanisms feature a living being inside a person, a parasite that devours them from within. Xie distinguishes between the different methods for raising and using “gu insects” (guchong) among people in southwestern regions, naming golden silkworm gu and reanimating life gu alongside the “critters in a jar” definition. A key feature of these practices was, after all, not just taking life but creating it. Whether it brought dead animals back to life inside of the body or created a super venomous, demonic being, “reanimating life” and gu poison recalled the power of women to create life.
Yet gu was inextricably linked to death and the dead. In the Systematic Compendium, gu poisoning shares treatments with “corpse attachment-illness” (shizhu) and “bug attachment- illness” (chongzhu), which fall under the rubric of “corpse transmission” (chuanshi) illnesses. These illnesses were seen to have exogenous origins, with wind, depletion, bugs, or corpse qi pouring into the body from the outside. Elsewhere, gu poison is tied to diseases of sexual excess, since numerous drugs treat it along with “consumptive [i.e., depletion] demons” (guizhu) and “demonic seduction-specters” (guimei).59 The Systematic Compendium also retains the ancient association of gu with wind, since certain drugs are able to “control ‘wind-head,’ eliminate gu poison,’” or treat “gu-poison and ‘wind evil’ (fengxie), illnesses causing dizziness or delirium.”60 As an illness that results from and is related to others caused by a malicious thing entering, pouring into, or attaching to the body, it makes sense that many of the drugs prescribed to treat it are purgatives to literally expel the poison, parasite, or bug, and to also exorcize the attendant malevolence. The gu poison of the early modern period is even treated with drugs that “kill all types of ancient spirit beings, calamitous demons … and evil qi.”61 The fearsomeness of gu lay in its embodiment of so many fears—of foreign places and people, bugs and demons, wind and bad qi, envy and wealth, licentiousness and excess.
Treating the malevolence of gu with the goodness of Confucian virtues only partially tempered its menace. Enter the hedgehog. Record of the Grand Historian, composed around 104–91 BCE, reports that six centuries previously, “Duke De of Qin instituted the dog-day sacrifice, tearing the limbs off of dogs at the four gates of the city, to defend against the calamity of gu.”62 Li Shizhen explains that “remedy masters think dogs can suppress all the evils and devils of the Earth, so [this sacrifice] is good for preventing attacks of demons and witchcraft.”63 The word for hedgehog in Chinese is wei 蝟, frequently written with the chong radical 虫 on the left side. But it can also be written with a “dog” radical 犬 on that side (wei 猬). This linguistic and classificatory liminality enables hedgehogs to be both bug-like, sympathetically curing the bug- poison of gu, and dog-like, apotropaically treating its demonological aspects.
Li Shizhen was inclusive of strange and marvelous information, even repeatedly remarking, “This medicine is strange, [so I] include it here,” while excoriating claims that taxed his own credulity.64 He valorized Confucian ethics throughout his work though, as we will see below (“human flesh is not medicine”) and tells stories that affirm that stance. Yet the matrix of relationships between illnesses and drugs in his vast work is too complex to be explained by one underlying world system. In the case of gu, its bug aspect required mundane and sympathetic medicine, its demonological aspects required apotropaic approaches like dog sacrifice, and the licentiousness and greed that was ultimately the cause of gu poisoning could be treated by the virtue of earnest Confucian scholars. The root cause of gu in its ancient and more modern iterations was, ultimately, selfish others. Many medicines in the Systematic Compendium treat gu, but those that offer proof of effectiveness are the ones that cause the sufferer to “call out the name of the gu master,” after which that wicked person is summoned and made to remove the gu and thereby effect a cure.65
Cutting One’s Flesh to Make Medicine
If gu poisoning was a symbol of envy, jealousy, and selfishness, another unseen medical practice, gegu, epitomized selfless devotion. Yet gegu was also problematic. Still, doctors seized on this complicated perception to defend their own problematic Confucian virtue. The phrase “doctors have the spirit [of those who] cut their thighs [in desperation to make medicinal soup with their own flesh to cure a parent]” recurs again and again in entertainment literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.66 The practice of gegu (lit., “cut the thigh”) referred to making medicinal soup out of one’s own flesh as a final, extreme effort to cure a patient, usually one’s parent or parent-in-law.67 Li Shizhen traces records of this practice back to the Corrected Materia Medica (Bencao shiyi), published in 739, which claimed that human flesh could cure diseases. The New History of the Tang (Xin Tangshu) of 1060 records early historical accounts of gegu, and it was followed by more cases in the Song and Yuan dynastic histories.68
By the Ming dynasty, such acts were reported frequently in historical sources and in vernacular entertainments.69 The widespread circulation of the ideal of gegu in popular literature and local histories likely contributed to social pressures on children to perform the act.70 Both men and women displayed, or were said to display, extreme filial piety to their parents through this dire practice. Many accounts of gegu record filial commoners from obscure backgrounds attracting the attention of local officials and literati, who wrote commemorative essays and poems to glorify these deeds and request commendation for their practitioners from the government. Han Yu (768–824) was one of the first to condemn gegu, arguing that filial action consisted of securing medicine for the sick parents but should not involve any harm to one’s own body. If self-mutilation were permissible, he asked, why then did the former sages and worthies not do it? Moreover, if such acts resulted in death, it could lead to the extinction of the family line, an unforgivable sin.71 Many others, such as Pi Rixiu (ca. 834–83) echoed this sentiment, going so far as to say, “Cutting off your flesh is like slicing off your parents’ flesh.”72 Zhu Xi was more equivocal, endorsing gegu with some reserve if practiced in secrecy. Allowing others to know only proved that one was going to extreme measures not for their parents, but for themselves.73 One should not proclaim their own acts of flesh cutting, but many literati recorded adulatory stories of others who performed gegu. The educational commissioner of Huguang (modern day Hubei and Hunan), Zou Diguang, celebrated the practice in his epistemic text aimed at the middlebrow reader, Illustrated Exhortations and Admonishments (Quan jie tushuo). He tells the story of Zhen, who came from a family of Confucian doctors (ruyi) and was extremely filial to his ill father. Zhen would weep day and night, believing that medicine could not cure him. He burned incense and prayed to heaven, cutting flesh from his thigh to make soup for his father. His father had not eaten for a long time but was enticed by the aroma of the soup and ate it. His illness was immediately cured. That night, in Zhen’s dream, heaven granted him “Shun’s filiality herb” to apply on the wound. Upon awaking, he found that the bleeding had stopped and the pain had vanished, as if he had never been cut.74
Cutting the flesh to make medicinal soup was often discussed as the practice of young women serving their parents-in-law, or in the case of another story from Illustrated Exhortations and Admonishments, a young woman serving her adoptive mother. The practice recurs in MingQing entertainment literature where it is invariably represented as a noble act.75 Some, such as the poet Wu Jiaji (1618–84), celebrated it, when his niece secretly cut the flesh from her thigh to make medicine for her father.76 These celebrations may have contributed to increasingly drastic cutting, presumably because the greater the sacrifice, the more potent the medicine. The Ming play Record of Filial Devotion and Loyalty: The Five Human Relationships Completely Presented (Wulun quanbei zhongxiao ji), written by the scholar Qiu Jun (1421–95), features Shi Shuqing, a young woman and model wife who plans to slice off a piece of her own liver when her mother-in-law falls ill. On the same night, her sister-in-law plans to cut her own flesh for the same purpose, both without knowledge of what the other is doing. They secretly feed their soups to their mother-in-law, and she is healed almost instantly.77
Accounts of those who practiced slicing the liver (gegan) rarely, if ever, express disbelief at the physiological possibility of the act. Within the criticisms of slicing the thigh is implicit the possibility of death and thereby terminating the family line to save a dying member of it. Yet slicing the liver, an even more extreme version of filial cutting, rather than highlighting its own fictionality, establishes within the discourse of living sacrifice a hierarchy of courage and devotion. Women, as well as men, were depicted as brave enough to slice their livers, as in the story “Slicing a Liver to Save Mother-in-Law” (Pougan jiu gu) from the popular Ming handbook Illustrated Twenty-Four Paragons of Filial Piety for Women (Nü ershisi xiao tushuo).78
Li Shizhen mentions that human flesh has been used to treat “exhaustion consumption” (zhaiji) and then accuses previous physicians of doing harm by recording that human flesh is effective medicine rather than trying to put a stop to the practice of slicing. He writes, “We receive our hair, skin and body from our parents and do not dare to harm or damage them. Even when the parent is seriously ill, how could they allow their children to injure their bodies, let alone dare to eat their bones and flesh? This is just a perspective held by the ignorant.”79 But Li seems somewhat disingenuous about discouraging the use of human flesh as medicine, since he goes on to record the medicinal properties of human hair, teeth, urine, bile. Li argues only against the practice, not against the efficacy, of using flesh for treating consumption. It may have been the metaphorical notion that “doctors have the heart to slice their thighs,” that is, doctors should be as devoted to their patients as filial children are to their parents, that drove Li Shizhen to disavow the actual practice of cutting the flesh.80
FIG. 17. A woodblock-printed image depicting a filial daughter-in-law slicing her liver to make medicinal soup for a sick parent-in-law. From Illustrated Twenty-Four Paragons of Filial Piety for Women (Nü ershisi xiao tushuo). 15b. Harvard University Libraries.
Li cites an admonitory story that was also recorded in the Dynastic History of the Ming.81 Jiang Bo’er sliced flesh from his ribs and offered it his sick mother. When this did not cure her, he prayed to the spirits saying that if his mother recovered, he would sacrifice his son to them. Both events came to pass. When word of this came to the ears of Emperor Taizu, he was enraged by this breach of morality and neglect of reason. Jiang was caned and banished. The ministry of ritual was ordered to examine the case, and Li quotes from its report:
When sons’ relatives fall ill, they should send for good doctors. When they call on heaven and pray to spirits, they should do so with utmost sincerity and intense emotion.… When it comes to cutting one’s thigh, this is something introduced only in later times. The ignorant have gained wide recognition with such weird practices. By perpetrating such shocking offenses, they may have hoped to win public recognition or to evade corvee. They did not stop at cutting thighs—they went on to cut livers. They did not stop at cutting livers—they went so far as to kill sons. This neglect of the Way and harming of life is worse than anything else.82
The curative power of flesh inherent in the concept of gegu lay in its metaphorical significance as the embodiment of life. But it was the lineal bond that made flesh medicine—it was the child or child-in-law caring for the parent, retributively nourishing flesh and blood with flesh and blood that affected the cure. Presumably, a stranger’s flesh could not be employed in this manner. Gegu was an act of living sacrifice, in which both the recipient and the sacrifice survive.83 These mechanisms were lost on some practitioners, though. In the above case, sacrificing a child threatens the family lineage and results in death.
Gegu was widely known and oft discussed. What made the practice supposedly effective, aside from its sympathetic action and filial devotion, was its secrecy. Like gu poison, the potency of cutting the thigh or liver derived from the requirement that it must be performed in secret.
These were unseen practices. Stories of cutting flesh from the thigh gave way to stories of cutting flesh from the side, to cutting a hole in the side, pulling out the liver or other entrails and cutting pieces off them. The practice had to be kept secret from the family and the government, but for it to effect a cure, it must also be kept secret from the patient. The patient could not know what kind of medical soup they were consuming, or they would surely not take it, and if they did, it would not be efficacious.84 The combination of extreme devotion and supposed secrecy led to gossip and anecdote which then received government attention aimed at discouraging it. Yuan, Ming, and Qing courts issued prohibitions against gegu, and perhaps it was, as Li claims, a modern practice of the common people, not recorded in the classics, as were the practice of gu poison and witchcraft.85 The edict of 1652 forbade state honors for those who killed themselves with extreme acts of filiality like gegu or gegan. The Board of Rites refused a memorialist’s request for canonization of a woman who committed gegu, calling this behavior “the ignorant filiality of common people who take life lightly.”86 Judging from the increasing number of cases mentioned in local gazetteers, popular literature, and collections of miracle tales compiled in the Ming and Qing, to say nothing of the repeated bans on the practice, attempts to discourage gegu were apparently not effective. They certainly were not effective in quelling the imagination of those captivated by the idea of cutting the flesh. Emperor Yongzheng’s (r. 1722–35) edict of 1728, responding to a memorial requesting honors for a filial son who died after cutting out a piece of his liver to feed his dying mother, is telling in its ambivalence: “We think that although the practice of cutting the liver to cure a parent is uncanonical, it was done out of the urgent desire to save his mother. Truly this is rare behavior and deeply deserving of sympathy.” He granted honors in this one case as an exception, demonstrating his great benevolence.87 Yongzheng reviewed the uncanonical status of gegu, quoting criticisms of the practice, while noting the still significant numbers of “foolish men and women” who “sacrifice their lives to save their parents” because they do not have a proper understanding of virtue and the dynasty’s laws.88 Although he criticized the ignorance of such suicides and the failure of local officials to educate people in these matters, Yongzheng was moved by the tragedy and sincerity of such acts. More importantly, his comments and edicts reified these stories into historical cases.
But gegu has another history. In the Song dynasty, the Buddhist legend of Miaoshan elevated gegu as the act of a bodhisattva, and in the Ming and Qing gegu was often associated with Guanyin, the bodhisattva of compassion. The legend goes that Princess Miaoshan, who was born under numerous auspicious signs, grew up to be a very kind, gentle woman who wore simple clothes and ate only once a day. Despite being persecuted and banished by her parents for her devotion to Buddhism, when the king fell ill, she cut out her eyes and cut off her arms and had them made into medicinal soup, which she sent secretly to the king, who, after recovering, discovered that it was his own daughter who had made this sacrifice. Miaoshan was revealed to have been Guanyin in human form and disappeared amid divine music, a shower of flower petals, and auspicious clouds.89 Hence, characters in entertainment literature, particularly female characters, often pray to Guanyin before they perform gegu.90 The bodhisattva of compassion, Guanyin, was generally represented as handsome and princely young man in Southeast Asia, China, and Tibet until the Tang dynasty. By the Ming dynasty, Guanyin had become completely sinicized.91 That he was transformed into a woman in later Chinese iterations may have had something to do with the compassion demonstrated by the cutting of flesh to save others. Despite the fact that men engaged in gegu, it was often associated with filial female suicide and with beautiful widows who cut off their noses or ears, disfiguring their bodies so that they would be unwanted by suitors.92 The sacrifice of slicing the flesh was, in the eyes of some, tantamount to suicide, not only because it could end in death but because the disfigurement made these women unable to perform ritual sacrifices due to their “unwhole” bodies.93 The story of Miaoshan illustrates two points: how gegu came to be a site of contestation between the sexes and how the “Confucianization of Buddhism” took place in Ming and Qing China.94
If gegu was imagined as partially the purview of women when it was first discussed in the Tang dynasty, men and male healers tried to appropriate that practice in later periods. As for “doctors [who] have the heart to perform gegu,” there is little or no evidence that doctors practiced gegu, but they claimed that their efforts to heal others were akin to gegu in humaneness and self- sacrifice.95 That phrase expresses a trope popularly associated with female sacrifice and reconfigures it as a symbol of masculine virtue.96 There was a long tradition of marginal literati being fond of identifying with women, who were also marginal figures, but rather than using female figures to project male literati anxieties (a minister who loses favor with the emperor compares himself to a wife losing favor with her husband), male doctors who were decidedly marginal literati figures appropriated gegu, originally an act of Buddhist women and devoted daughters-in-law.
Despite imperial ambivalence, gegu often found support from local officials, who prized it as a way of showing their own humanity.97 Gegu became increasingly common in the Qing, as evident in the growing number of cases mentioned in local gazetteers, popular literature, and collections of miracle tales complied in that period.98 According to many written sources like those quoted by Li Shizhen, gegu was a practice of the uneducated masses, of commoners, but accounts of scholars practicing gegu also increased throughout the Qing. In one county alone, there were 534 recorded cases of gegu during the Qing (up from 86 recorded in the Ming for the same county). Two hundred twenty-nine of these devotees were males, and thirty of those were scholars holding the first degree.99 Support of gegu by local authorities coincided with increased interest in and justification of the practice by the educated class.100
By the Qing, gegu usually referred to cutting the flesh of the arm rather than the thigh.101 This shift must have helped men think of this practice as something they could own, recalling as it does the famous scene from the Ming classic novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms, in which the physician Hua Tuo operates (hundreds of years before surgery became commonplace in China) on General Guan Yu’s arm after he is hit with a poison arrow.102 Guan Yu’s bravery in bearing the surgery, combined with Hua Tuo’s valor in performing it, became the sublime vision of a filial son acting as a doctor cutting his own arm.
FIG 18. Katsushika Oi (Japanese, ca. 1800–after 1857), Operating on Guan Yu’s Arm. Guan Yu plays Go while receiving surgery on his arm. Cleveland Museum.
Shenbao, the Dianshizhai Pictorial, and the Jingbao (Peking Gazette) carried many adulatory news stories of filial slicing, but also of misguided sacrifices and foolish undertakings. In one report, a filial Japanese man wanted to take out his own lungs to feed his mother who was on the verge of going blind from an illness. He worried that once he died, there would be no one left to make the soup and offer it, so he decided to kill his daughter for her lungs. When he told his wife of his plan, she offered herself up in her daughter’s place. The husband went through with the act, removing his wife’s lungs. As he looked around for a pot to make soup, a suspicious maid reported him, leading to his arrest. The article concludes, “In this world, there are filial sons who foolishly cut their arms or legs to treat their parents’ illnesses. But to go so far as to kill one’s wife to cure one’s mother, this is not just foolishness, but cruelty! Can this still be called filial?”103 In another account of misguided filiality, a farmer, a devout Buddhist from Hubei surnamed Gan, was desperate for rain, his region having long been plagued by a drought demon (hanba). He set up an altar to pray for rain and kneeled under the scorching sun for three days, but the rain did not come. So he cut a piece of flesh from his thigh, placed it in a dish, and offered it up. The next day at noon, thunder roared, and wind blew, followed by a heavy downpour. In an instant, the fields were soaked, and the ditches were full. Despite Gan’s success, the author of the piece is dismissive: “There are many ways to pray for rain, but never have I heard of someone slicing their thigh as an offering to heaven.… Can this be called ‘killing oneself to achieve benevolence’? It is both laughable and pitiable.”104 The author, alluding to the Analects (Lunyu) and its misapplication, dismisses this act as one of misreading by the uneducated. Both accounts lampoon the extreme devotion of misguided commoners who do not understand the mechanisms of gegu. It is not a traditional sacrifice, should not end in death, is not meant to bring rain, and should not be practiced by the masses.
Among the many Jingbao and Shenbao accounts of liver slicing from the last two decades of the nineteenth century, about half of the practitioners are reported to have survived. This group often sacrifices with little or no pain and recovers quickly.105 Some of these pray to Guanyin beforehand, suggesting unseen forces that underlie their healing regime: “As if protected by the gods, Hu Wenyun seemed unaware of any pain as the wound was treated and naturally healed safely, observed by clan elders and neighbors including Hu Bingzhuan. Former county magistrate Lu Fa personally investigated and verified the facts.”106 Those who die do so gruesomely and painfully, for which they are celebrated with money from the local officials and memorial arches from the court. A typical report starts with a man surnamed Ye from Ningguo County in southern Anhui, whose father had died, leaving them poor. His mother falls ill, and Ye, after hiring a series of unsuccessful healers, engages in “cutting the liver.” After cutting open his chest, taking out his liver, and slicing off a piece, his wife makes soup of the flesh, feeds it to Ye’s mother, and cures her. Ye dies of his wounds. The local governor donates three hundred foreign dollars to provide for coffin and burial and to support the widow and mother. The matter is reported to higher authorities, ultimately resulting in an imperial edict and the erection of a memorial archway honoring Ye and his act of filial piety.107 Other reports are more complex and mundane—filial children pray, cut into their chests, pull out their livers, slice off a piece of their livers, cook for their sick parent. The child sometimes faints but then recovers. Sometimes their scars are discovered and admired. In one case, “the bowel protruded from the incision in the son’s stomach, but the wound has now healed, leaving a scar to testify to his devotion which calls forth the admiration of all who see it.”108 Although the practice required secrecy both to avoid controversy and achieve potency, it was widely celebrated in print, illustration, and memorials.
Why the liver, specifically? Often, it is the heart that is identified as the source of warmth and life in the early modern period, though there are only scant references to “slicing the heart” (gexin).109 Chapter 1 of the Systematic Compendium states that “the liver stores the blood” and also “the liver stores the hun-soul, and it goes through changes and transformations. Hence, when the hun-soul roams and is not fixed, and when this is cured with dragon teeth, then this is based on this idea.”110 Perhaps it was not an attempt to bolster the patient’s life, exactly, but to bolster their hun.111
The “liver” in these texts may not correlate directly to the organ of modern biomedicine, which is highly vascular and indeed might seem to store the blood. Cutting into it would result in massive bleeding, likely followed by fainting and death. Furthermore, the modern liver is protected by the ribcage, and accessing it from below those bones would require cutting through considerable quantities of skin, muscle, and other tissue. In a world predating modern antiseptics, avoiding infection would be difficult. Attempting to remove a part of one’s own liver would almost certainly be fatal, assuming one could even find it through all the pain and blood.112
The practices of gu poisoning and cutting the flesh to make medicine secretive, and especially in their extreme versions, must have been imaginary. But creating greedy demons and super poisonous creatures or surviving self-inflicted surgery were perhaps because they were performed in secret, widely held and long-lived practices believed to really happen. They were not only believable but a threat to public morality and imperial stability.
Both practices were secret, and so knowledge of them was transmitted secondhand through narrative—stories, cases, anecdotes, reports, and rumors. These stories encapsulated some of the most trenchant fears—wind, worms, lust, and envy—and some of the diverse threats to male Confucian order—Buddhism, women, professionals, and the marginally literate. They elicited the highest of high-brow responses in the form of codified laws and imperial proclamations.
Although they were concerns of the court and a matter of public record, both were neglected by elite medicine for hundreds of years. Yet they lived on in histories, cases, practical texts, and the public imaginary. Gu poison and cutting the flesh resurfaced in every register of discourse in the early modern period as battleground territory for the curious, the devout, and those who wished to reestablish the usefulness of Confucian virtues in the modern world. These secret practices were widely known. The fact of their existence was real to those who discussed them, as were their meanings and implications. They persisted as common knowledge for centuries, without much empirical evidence.