CHAPTER 6 Animating Forces

Death(ish)

Presumably, every culture understands that there is a point beyond the liminal space between life and death at which inanimate bodies cannot be resuscitated, and that is usually what the word “dead” refers to. This distinction is not at all clear in the Ming and Qing usage of the word “dead” (si). Readers of every manner of text encounter people who were “returned to life” (su or huisheng) after being “dead.” Translators tend to be flummoxed by this. The presumption is that unlike, say, “tuberculosis,” “cholera,” or “euphoria,” for which there may not be a one-to-one equivalent in another language, there are certain immutable, universal, human experiences and concepts for which all languages have a simple term. Death (and life) are among them. Thus, many translators render “si,” as “dead” or “death” or “die.” But when the patient recovers from this state, translators render the same word as “unconscious,” “appearance of death,” “seemingly dead,” or “syncope.” Those may all be reasonable, but they point to an uneasiness with blurred boundaries between dead and permanently dead that was more comfortable in the early modern period.

One symptom of the liminal death space is termed in medical literature as buzhiren, “inability to recognize people,” or buzhirenshi, “inability to recognize people and things.” This state of being was a deviation from character, a change from what made the person who they were and an indication that they were in mortal danger. Herbert Giles, the early translator of Pu Songling’s Liaozhai stories, writing in 1880, felt the need to comment on the frequency of these trance-like or death-like states in those accounts: “Catalepsy, which is the explanation of many a story in this collection, would appear to be of very common occurrence among the Chinese. Such, however, is not the case.”⁸ Yet the perception that people can be revived from recent death is not only common in collections of anomalous accounts and other entertainments but pervades medical and historical literature as well.

Li Shizhen, for example, writes that when blood and qi move upward, they can cause “sudden death [baosi]. If the qi turns back again, [the patient] will live; if it does not turn back, [he] will die.”⁹ Elsewhere, he suggests a logical method to revive a patient who has died suddenly from being struck by malevolence (zhong’e si): “Use a bamboo tube to blow into his anus. When exhausted, change from one person [blowing] to another. Once the qi passes though again, he will come back to life [jihuo].”¹⁰ Li uses at least twenty-nine different terms to describe kinds of death from which one might recover. Sudden death without even first falling ill (cusi) is common in the Systematic Compendium, and prognosis of all these states includes the possibility of revitalization. Death from being horrified (jingbusi) or intimidated (xiasi) might be cured by the forced instilling of unmixed wine into the patient. Some of these states were inscrutable: “If someone has not been ill and yet suddenly dies, how can this be understood?” Others were mundane. Li repeatedly discusses death states resulting from different kinds of violence or accident: suicide by hanging, being crushed under a falling wall, drowning, freezing, death from fright or shock, death from nightmare demons, and death while giving birth. Potential healers needed to be ready to encounter the situation in which a patient had already died (yisizhe), a situation described again and again in the Systematic Compendium. That person can be revived by force-fed medicine, though sometimes only after breaking their teeth to force the medicine in.

Medical manuscripts contain many recipes to “bring people back to life” or to cure death (zhisi). Sometimes, this term simply means “effective” or “potent” but often it is literal.¹¹ In one of the medical manuscripts in the Berlin collection, for instance, even before the title page, table of contents, or preface, are seventeen emergency recipes, four of which are to revive the dead.¹² Because one must act quickly, recently dead and long dead were different things. A medical manuscript attributed to Pu Songling features many recipes to cure death.¹³ The first ten recipes are to treat different kinds of death, with others, presumably less urgent, featured in the body of the manuscript. A term found in these texts and many others is the modifier-modified compound “dead corpse” sishi, suggesting that there were other kinds of corpses.¹⁴ Both manuscripts, like many practical handbooks from the end of the nineteenth century, circulated practical knowledge about death that was at least three hundred years old.

Particularly if they have died from one of the “five interruptions” (hanging, drowning, being crushed, freezing, or fright), patients can be revived if quick action is taken.¹⁵ They can be awakened (su), or become aware (jue), or returned to life (huo), or resurrected (jisu). Li writes:

If someone has died from being crushed or falling from a height, quickly take them to a safe place. Then cover the victim’s mouth and nose with your sleeve for as long as it takes to eat a meal. When the eyes open, at once pour hot urine into their mouth. If someone has died from nightmare demons, be careful not to expose the victim to a shining light and do not touch him. Lead a buffalo to stand above him and he will immediately wake. If someone has attempted suicide by hanging themselves, if the region below the victim’s heart is still warm, they might be brought back to life.¹⁶

Li quotes the Zhou hou beijifang (Formulas to keep up one’s sleeve for emergencies), a recipe book from the Jin era: “For all attempts to rescue someone who has died from hanging, it is of utmost importance to stabilize the [victim’s] heart.… Then pierce a cock’s comb and drip the blood into the victim’s mouth to calm his heart and spirit.” Li explains that blood from the comb of a three-year-old rooster is the best, as yang qi prevails to its full extent, and moves upward since it is nourished by heaven. Being red, it is “the yang in the yang” and therefore good for treating death, a state of pure yin.¹⁷ Many recent deaths in the Systematic Compendium require swallowing blood of one kind or another to stabilize their heart and spirit, suggesting that bodily warmth, and perhaps life itself, was blood based and not just a function of qi. Or this warmth was generated by the shen (spirit), which according to the Huangdi neijing suwen (Basic questions from the Yellow Emperor’s inner canon) and as repeated by Li resided in the heart. The spirit could be stabilized, sympathetically, with blood. Though just as often, sudden death requires an infusion of other strongly yang substances such as dirt, cinnabar, the white parts in chicken droppings, or rhinoceros horn blown up the nose.

Calling Back the Soul

Peony Pavilion (Mudan ting) is the most famous example of romantic reanimation in the Chinese tradition. Tang Xianzu’s 1598 southern drama, subtitled The Soul’s Return (Huanhun ji), features the young woman Du Liniang, who has died of longing, being revived by Liu Mengmei. They have a ghostly romance, and she instructs him to disinter her body. He goes to do so with a gravedigger and nun playing the clowns. They find that her body has not decomposed, even though it has been three years since she died. Once returned to life, Du Liniang lacks strength after being dead for so long. She vomits a gobbet of mercury, which the gravedigger asks to keep as his payment, thinking it is a lump of silver. Mengmei puts him off saying that the “essence that she has vomited … must be treasured as a precious heirloom.”¹⁸ The comedic tendency of the play, and particularly this scene, combined with the sparseness of stage directions and explication, impede an understanding of how exactly Liniang can return to life. What brings Liniang back is not a heavenly or physiological phenomenon but qing, love itself. As sinologist Judith Zeitlin puts it, Peony Pavilion “was both the culmination of the late Ming glorification of qing (sentiment, love, passion, desire) and a primary vehicle for the promotion and dissemination of qing as a cardinal virtue for more than two hundred years.”¹⁹ Tang Xianzu defined qing in his manifesto-like preface to the play: “Qing is of origins unknown, yet it runs deep. The living can die for it, and through it the dead can come back to life. That which the living cannot die for or which cannot resurrect the dead is not love at its most supreme.”²⁰ Peony Pavilion makes it clear that qing calls the hun back to Liniang’s body, but despite the comedy of the scene, there is also a medical logic to it.

When Liniang revives, she is very weak, and the nun suggests that they make medicine for her by cutting the crotch out of Mengmei’s pants and mixing it with wine. The Systematic Compendium suggests this is a particularly good medicine to cure diseases of sexual exhaustion and depletion, and the strongly yang aspect of the mixture is consistent with medicines to revive the dead.

Although extreme emotions were serious causes of illness, Liniang’s death and resurrection were more a result of literariness and popular trends than of medical mechanisms. But literary figures can be lost on less sophisticated readers, as in Wu Bing’s Lady in the Painting (Huazhong ren). When the servant (played by a clown) prepares to dig up the heroine’s coffin as part of his master’s plan to resurrect her, he complains: “There’s never been such a thing in the world! Where did he come up with this notion? I expect it’s from having misread The Soul’s Return, so he thinks there really was a Du Liniang who came back to life. My master is truly an idiot!”²¹ Wu Bing may have been satirizing the popularity of Peony Pavilion and its many fans who fell in love with its characters. But many, including sophisticated readers, believed that resurrection was possible.

Fin de siècle newspapers ran several articles about hun-souls returning by occupying the bodies of corpses not their own. One of them, published in 1888, “The False Soul’s Return” (Jia huanhun ji), explicitly challenges this kind of credence, pointing out that those who believe that Du Liniang actually returned to life are not only incorrect, but dangerously at risk of being duped by swindlers. It then recounts the story of a conman pretending to be a deceased husband who returned to life in another’s body to seduce widows. The argument here seems to hinge as much on Confucian morality—anyone seducing virtuous widows must be peddling lies—as it does on the enduring credulity of Peony Pavilion’s naive readers.

It was not uncommon to read stories about grave robbers who, upon discovering a beautiful corpse, sexually violate it, resulting in the deceased female victim returning to life.²² This notion hinges on two suppositions. The first is that death, a yin state, can be counteracted by yang, and more specifically jing, male essence or semen that is the embodiment of yang. The second is that the corpse must not have the key indicator of long-term death—rot. Liniang’s body, though it has been in the ground for three years, had not decomposed. This state, both in entertainment literature and elsewhere, was commonly believed to be the result of the unjust death of a virtuous person.²³ It was also commonly believed, as stated in the Systematic Compendium—and as evident in excavated early Chinese burial sites—that jade and gold, if buried with the deceased, prevented the corpse from decomposing. Ji Yun wrote in a letter to his older brother that a case of a missing corpse in his district sounded much like one he had heard about in Tianjin, where a concubine of a wealthy family who had been bullied and abused by her husband’s first wife hanged herself in a mulberry grove. County officials were unavailable to investigate immediately, so a guard was posted at the scene. When the officials finally arrived, there was no guard and no body. Years later, it was discovered that the guard, aroused by the concubine’s beauty, violated her corpse, and “the corpse revived after receiving the essence of a living person, and they agreed to become husband and wife and fled to Shenzhou together. This was a true story that happened at the end of Emperor Kangxi’s reign, and I saw the entire file with my own eyes.” Ji Yun then goes on to surmise that the case in his brother’s district is the same. The only reason someone would steal a corpse would be to prevent litigation of the bereaved family against those who drove her to suicide. In this case, the deceased was a maidservant in a eunuch’s household (Ji Yun writes that it was not yet known if she was beautiful), and therefore presumably there was no sexual abuse, so there would be no reason for a wrongful death lawsuit. It is more reasonable to believe that her corpse was violated, brought back to life, and then fled with whomever brought her back. Further, Ji Yun muses on the ethics of such a case: “Legally, raping a corpse and then fleeing with the corpse constitutes two types of crimes. But from a Buddhist perspective, the maidservant was abused and died with grievances, and the guard managed to bring her back to life, so it should not be a crime.”²⁴

A common trope in entertainment literature is that a soul returns to its recently deceased body because the original inhabitant has been given an extension of life after review of their worthiness by a judge in the underworld. Sun Wukong crosses his name off Yama’s list in Journey to the West, and Qin Zhong is allowed to return to his body for one last encounter with Jia Baoyu in Story of the Stone. These stories of a hun returning to its dead body abound in biji and in collections of anomalous accounts. But these are also attested to in accounts written and propagated by officials.²⁵

Medical manuscripts in the Unschuld Collection at the Berlin State Library have many methods to call back a wandering hun, seen as the ultimate cause of many illnesses, especially of children.²⁶ One manuscript tells of a female shaman called to a family to make the true hun return (shou zhenhun) to their son. She chants an incantation that calls on popular and local gods to return the hun. After this, the family offers gold and silver to the door god and puts a talisman under the pillow of the sick child, chanting, “Lost hun, lost hun, not knowing where it is, by the river or in the wild, in temples or mountain gates, general touring the mountains and the five paths, the local earth god, the ancestral stove lord, please find the lost hun, and urgently send it back to the door [god]. I hereby obey the command of the Supreme Elder Lord, quickly and urgently, as if it were a decree.”²⁷ Such a record is rare since shamans tended to transmit their knowledge orally, and in secret.

It was also a tool of the state to propagate the notion that good deeds could lead not only to a longer life but to a return from death. Illustrated Exhortations and Admonishments, published in 1594 by Anzheng Tang Bookstore in Jianyang, Fujian was an epistemic text written specifically in simple language and accompanied by a woodblock print illustrating the plot so that it could reach the widest possible readership. It contained two hundred very short stories, each labelled either “virtuous” or “wicked,” with each titled “The Retribution for [Certain Behavior].” Most frequently, the stories of goodness hinge on a filial act that is rewarded either by the protagonist or their sons passing the imperial examinations and attaining high office, though sometimes immortality. Predictably, the stories of evil deeds provoke much more imaginative responses from the cosmos. It is unknowable if Zou Diguang himself believed all that is contained in his book, much of which aligns with accounts in zhiguai and anomalies in entertainment literature, but he believed reifying this gossip—appealing to common knowledge—would help him govern.

The hun and po, according to medical texts, were unstable, barely tethered to their place in the body. Many medicines in the Systematic Compendium pacify (an) or stabilize (ding) the hun and po and sometimes the spirit (shen). Under the entry for cinnabar, Li Shizhen describes “lost hun, a strange disease: when a person believes his own physical appearance to be split into two persons that walk together and lie down to sleep together, and when [that person] is unable to distinguish between the real and the false, this is a disease of’ a hun-soul loss.”²⁸ It is unsurprising, given familiarity with this condition, that entertainment literatures were preoccupied with the dangers of being unable to distinguish between truth and fiction. The Story of the Stone, in particular, toys with the liminality or transmutation of real and false not only as a trope but also as a symptom of soul-loss.²⁹

In a cosmos that encompassed transformation, reincarnation, and soul-loss, it was not a stretch to imagine that souls could also transfer from one body to another. There were many accounts of the accidental possession of one dead body by the hun of another. Ji Yun writes to his wife, “In the letter you sent, you said that the mother of Lan Ji had died and come back to life, with a changed voice and unable to recognize her children. This is not some strange illness, but rather a case of borrowing a body to resurrect the hun. The original person has already perished, and the one living is someone else’s hunpo, hence she cannot recognize her own children.” He goes on to tell an account he heard from his student about his wet nurse dying and coming back to life the next day. She asked where she was, and everyone assumed she was babbling in her illness. Her voice and posture were both like a man’s, and she didn’t recognize her husband when he came to see her. Her family members knew something was wrong and asked her in detail. She finally admitted that she had originally been a man who had died a few days ago and been released by the king of the underworld to return to life, but because of a deficit in yin virtue was returned to the body of a woman. Ji Yun writes, “The resurrection of Lan Ji’s mother is like this woman’s case. This is also good material for biji.”³⁰ Similar accounts do abound in Ming and Qing biji—and all manner of entertainment literature.³¹ Does this suggest that Ji Yun considers biji to be fictionalized accounts of true stories or the best way to propagate investigations into the workings of nature? Either way, the workings of the hun transcended bodies, genres, and realms of knowledge.

The Living Dead

To investigate what animates bodies, we need to consider the movements of the dead. What is the difference between a person who is alive and a “stiff corpse” (jiangshi) that can move about and attack people? If a “stiff corpse” can move without a soul, what animates it? Yuan Mei discusses the walking dead at length. In one entry, he writes that a friend of his described Henan: “There were many coffins temporarily placed in fields, and consequently [locals] often suffered from stiff corpses grabbing people.” The problem, he said, was that you could break off their arms, but you still couldn’t really escape because their claws would dig into the flesh so far. The solution was to nail red date pits into spinal acupuncture points of the dead. Only then would their hands relax.³² This matter-of-fact account could just as well have come from materia medica. Yuan Mei uses the phrase “has worked repeatedly with immediate effect” (lüshi zhexiao), ubiquitous in medical literature, to proclaim the utility of the red dates in treating attacks by stiff corpses.

It seemed to be a given that jiangshi were bodies that lacked a hun, but some people speculated that jiangshi had a kind of evil qi animating them and poisoning the living who breathed it. Yuan Mei and Ji Yun both contemplated reanimation without re-ensoulment. Yuan Mei tells the story of a man who dies of illness far from home, but he returns as a ghost and asks his friend to take care of his wife and mother, to publish his manuscripts, and to pay off his debts. His friend agrees. He (at this point, the story refers to him as “the dead one”) then makes to leave but is detained by his (living) friend. They reminisce, and after a while, the dead friend’s face “grew ugly and slowly began to decay.”³³ Frightened, the living friend goes to leave, and the dead friend (now referred to as “the corpse”) gives pursuit. The corpse chases his former friend for miles, and the friend eventually jumps over a wall, after which he faints. The friend is revived with ginger broth the next day, and the family of the deceased, who had been out looking for the missing corpse (now inanimate), carries it back home.³⁴

Having discharged his posthumous duties, the corporeal ghost’s hun departs, leaving the po behind. The po, alone, animated the body with either resentment (for the living) or a bestial need to kill without regard to former ties. Yuan Mei, or some other “knowledgeable person” (shizhe) as he claims, commented on this story:

The hun is benevolent and the po malevolent, the hun is sentient [ling] and the po is witless [yu]. When [the dead] first came to visit, his sentience had not yet dispersed. The po followed the hun’s lead. They moved together, but once his unfinished business was resolved, his hun scattered and his po was left behind. When hun is in [the body], the person still is, and when hun departs, the person is no longer. The moving corpses [yishi] and running shadows [zouying] of the world are all the doings of po. Only a man of the Dao can subdue the po.³⁵

Ji Yun summarizes this account from Yuan Mei, and at the end of the document, he quotes verbatim Yuan Mei’s “knowledgeable person’s” comment. His account claims:

1.  There are two souls, the hun-soul and po-soul, and they are the same as ling, the same term used to describe “numinous” and sentient things.

2.  The attachment of po to hun enables life.

3.  The hun-soul disperses once one’s worldly concerns are attended to, which then leaves just the po-soul behind. This animates the corpse.

4.  The hun is the seat of personality, but not of agency.

5.  Moving corpses and walking shadows are all transformations of the po.

Ji Yun says that all these claims “are indisputably reasonable and make good sense”; however, “from my narrow perspective, in the end I suspect there are also other causes.”³⁶ Twenty-first-century readers might presume, given Ji Yun’s status as one of the empire’s most well-read scholars, that he is skeptical of Yuan Mei’s claims, but he puts forward a theory that builds on Yuan Mei’s. He suggests that the root cause of these jiangshi moving while dead, having enough life to attack people but not enough sense to spare friends and relatives, was that there was some soul-stealing sorcerer, malefic thing, wandering spirit, or perverse qi controlling the body, something unseen attached to the corpse.

Malevolent Qi and Corpse Attachment Illness

There were many kinds of qi. In the Systematic Compendium, there are as many kinds of qi inside the body as there are organs, as well as blood qi, hot and cold qi, and hun qi. Pain could be attributed to leg qi. Outside of the body, different kinds of qi were emitted by all things and categorized according to their origins—trees, forests, rocks, fire, water, silver, and gold, as well as seasonal qi, moist qi, medication qi, varieties of wind qi, and on and on. Each species of animal and bug had its own kind of qi. Some illnesses are discussed as having or being a kind of qi such as “occlusion qi,” or retching qi. Yin and yang qi pervaded bodies and environments in differing proportions. There were even ways of marking time with qi—the hours from zi (23:00– 01:00) to si (09:00–11:00) were those of living qi (shengqi zhi shi); the hours from wu (11:00–13:00) to hai (21:00–23:00) were those of dead qi.³⁷ Important for understanding Ji Yun’s theory of corpse animation—the “other causes”—is the notion that there are also kinds of malefic (xieqi), malign (e’qi), ghostly, or demonic qi (guiqi). One or another kind of qi could “attach” itself to things and people and exert control over them.

These attachment illnesses were common in medical texts, suggesting not just that outside forces had entered the body but that death itself had a qi that was contagious. Chao Yuanfang (early seventh century) explained that zhu 注, “influx,” also connotes zhu 住, “to be attached to.” This means that the illness is chronic. After an attack by a demon is cured, there may be lingering qi that resides in the patient, causing outbreaks of pain until death. After the patient dies, this qi flows over into a bystander. Hence one speaks of “demon influx” guizhu 鬼 注.³⁸ At some point, attachment / influx zhu 注 became pathologized as attachment-illness zhu 疰, which obfuscated its demonological origins. It was used to form compounds such as “overexertion attachment-illness” (laozhu), “bug attachment-illness” (chongzhu), “poison attachment -illness” (duzhu), “heat attachment-illness” (rezhu), “food attachment-illness” (shizhu), and “corpse attachment illness” (shizhu). Distinguishing between these kinds of illnesses caused by malefic external factors (e.g., demon influx, corpse influx, etc.) and their vectors (e.g., corpse transmission, corpse influx, corpse qi) was both difficult and, it seems, unnecessary.

The influx of noxious or malign qi into the body was a major source of illness, and many of these were associated with corpses.³⁹ It was not just that corpses produced an awful smell and that corpse qi was believed to affect organs negatively. It was that such qi implicated demons. The qi invaded or poured into a body (zhu 注), caused illness (zhu 疰), but also lingered after it was cured (zhu 住), and would be passed on to subsequent generations or passers-by. The passing on of the lingering illness to those proximally or relationally close to the deceased is reminiscent of “marrying the golden silkworm” and is likely why medicines that treated corpse- attachment often also treat gu poisoning.

The corpse and corpse qi illnesses (shibing and shiqi) listed in Systematic Compendium are coequal with or interchangeable with “demon-attachment-illness,” “demon influx,” and the “five corpses” (presumably different kinds of corpse qi): flying corpse, fleeing corpse, wind corpse, sunken corpse, and corpse-attachment.⁴⁰ These illnesses were marked by a piercing roving pain, often accompanied by absent-mindedness, “jumbled essence spirit,” mental derangement, an inability to recognize people, and illusory visions. These are also symptoms of hun soul-loss, suggesting that the syndromes are related, as we will see below.

Family and members of the community often worried that the qi or other forces tied to the physical corpse could contaminate objects, which in turn could contaminate those who encountered them. People could be infected by a residence, by clothes or bedding, or by food or medicine belonging to the deceased. If a patient died of “corpse pouring” or depletion- consumption, his clothes, utensils, and residence were all likely to retain harmful qi, which could then infect his relatives and neighbors if they could not afford to dispose of them.⁴¹ This kind of transmission or infection, this pollution or stain, shows that death was not inert, not final. It transformed inert things into virulent ones.⁴²

The debate about what came out of corpses, and when, was not always gruesome. Souls were thought by some to have a luminescence. The notion that souls glow, and that they transform into fireflies, may draw on the earliest meanings of po or its variant ba, describing the growing light of the new moon.⁴³ Glowing souls might refer to the kind of moral luminosity humans can achieve through ritual practice or other methods of cultivation, akin to the inner glow thought to reside in jade and to be revealed when polished.⁴⁴ Glowing souls might also draw on the warmth of the body and the inner fire thought to keep it that way. That souls glow is a notion that may have drawn on all these beliefs, bolstered by empirical evidence of the bioluminescence of bacteria that grew in the wounds of corpses that had not yet begun to decay.⁴⁵

The location and mechanisms of the hun were still ambiguous. Personality seemed to reside in the hun but still interacted with other organs. There are stories in which exchanging one heart for another makes the transplant recipient smarter but does not alter his personality at all.⁴⁶ Li Shizhen describes symptoms of hun-soul loss as “feeling that there is another self wandering about. The figure is identical to the patient but does not speak.”⁴⁷ Some tales describe the physical shape of the soul as a bird, firefly, dragon, or a tiny person.⁴⁸ Wandering souls, from the earliest such stories through the imperial period, often take the size and shape of their owners.⁴⁹ Yet as much as hun were tied to life and personhood, there were many stories of things coming to life without them.

Ji Yun recounts a story of a broom coming to life. It was unremarkable that such an object could cultivate its spiritual energy (lingqi) and develop the ability to transform, but this instance was unusual because the broom had adorned itself with stolen flowers, tantamount to bragging about its spiritual attainment, which tipped the family off that it was a demon. They threw it into the fire where it bled, moaned, and died. Another account tells of a large tree that had never been there, blocking Ji Yun’s servant’s path on his way home one night. As he tried to go around it, the tree seemed to move and rotate, blocking him at every turn. Suddenly, two woodcutters appeared on the scene and rushed toward the tree with their saws and axes, after which the tree transformed into a whirlwind and disappeared. Ji Yun argues that it was the qi of the woodcutters, rather than their strength, that the tree feared.⁵⁰ Ji Yun seems to accept Xunzi’s definition of human life. Xunzi had said, “Water and fire have qi but no life [sheng], plants have life but no awareness [zhi], animals have awareness but no morality, while humans have qi, life, knowledge, and a sense of what is right.”⁵¹ The broom and tree both have qi, life, and they both achieve awareness, but lack the ultimate component of humanity, which is why the woodcutters’ qi is stronger. Ji’s presumption that these things are demonic hinges on his belief that although the forces of the cosmos can be harnessed by anything to attain higher states of being, they should only be accessed by humans.

Paper Men, Voodoo Dolls, and Inanimate Objects

Things that looked like people were the most likely to come alive or most susceptible to becoming animated. Plum in the Golden Vase records a sort of contest of black magic between two women vying for one man’s affection and sexual and material attention. One, a singsong girl who won Ximen Qing’s affections, secures a lock of Pan Jinlian’s hair to place in her shoe and tread on it, with the intent, presumably, of causing her pain, illness, or simply estrangement from Ximen. Thereupon, Jinlian becomes dispirited, loses her appetite, and has headaches and heart pains to such a degree that her “sister” wives call Madame Liu to attend on her. Jinlian employs Madame Liu’s husband because he can affect a “turnabout” (huibei) in Ximen’s affections. He makes a paper talisman using the eight numbers of Jinlian’s birth and doing some unspecified divinatory calculations. Jinlian then burns the talisman (shenzhi) and drinks its ashes with water.

Following this, Liu creates a pair of male and female effigies out of willow wood. He inscribes them, again, with Jinlian’s “eight characters,” binds them together with red thread, fastens a strip of red gauze over the eyes of the male effigy, stuffs artemisia (ai) into its heart cavity, secures its hands with needles, and sticks its feet together with glue. The turnabout produced the desired effect.⁵² The efficacy hinges on metaphor with the binding together of lovers and the staying of feet and hands. But there is also a medicinal aspect to the magic—artemisia was believed to avert poisonous qi if shaped into the form of a man and hung above the door.⁵³ Willow and camphor wood were required to make these simulacra along with paper figures, as we will see.⁵⁴

But there is another system at work here—the stealing or use of something imbued with a kind of life force that could exist independently from the body. This life force was believed to be concentrated in fetuses, inner organs, and hair, rather than in flesh. It could be obtained through various means, such as directly removing these parts of the body and transforming them into medicine (usually in the form of a pill) or indirectly by uncovering an individual’s precise date and time of birth, known as the eight characters (bazi), which were often kept secret for this very reason.

The reader of Plum has already been advised by the narrator to suspect the likes of the Liu spouses in its many “gentle reader” (kanguan) passages. Modern readers may be inclined to view the Lius as harmless charlatans, rogues whom the reader is warned to avoid, but silly enough to dismiss as peripheral to the story. But the great variety of readers in the late Ming may have viewed this scene as one of uncanny realism, more ominous than comical—and a sign that Jinlian and her competitors will truly go to any length to achieve their aims. The creation of paper or willow dolls (zhiren or liushen) and the misuse of the “eight characters” would have been serious business even to savvy readers of Plum if they were of a certain age, because of a widespread panic over paper figures that had happened within living memory.

The first extant reference to Plum indicates that a manuscript of the first part was already in circulation among a small coterie of intellectuals as early as 1596.⁵⁵ These men may have been born too late to have experienced the collective fear of 1557, but it is possible that the author of Plum did. The novel’s early readers would likely have heard about outbursts of fear of sorcerers and accounts of their imbuing paper objects with life.⁵⁶ These accounts were rampant from 1555 to 1558 in the entire coastal region from the Yangzi River down to Guangdong, and in the inland area of Hengzhou in Guangxi. At the same time several religiously tinted incidents took place in and around Huzhou, Jiaxing, and Hangzhou, which in the historical accounts authored by the literati merged with the fear of paper figures.⁵⁷

From the 1557 outburst onward, these events were described most often as the result of magicians creating and controlling paper objects. This form of magic seems contingent on the belief that inanimate objects could change into living things either naturally, in the course of time, or because of human magic.⁵⁸ Ji Yun records many such accounts.⁵⁹ In one letter to his wife, Ji Yun urges her to burn all the lifelike human figurines the grandchildren play with, because one day they might come to life: “Toys that resemble humans can often transform after a long time.… You must check if there are any toys among the grandchildren’s belongings that resemble humans and throw them all into the fire. Doing this is much more effective [for exorcising evil spirits] than setting up an altar and chanting sutras.”⁶⁰ Before she had any sons, Ji Yun’s mother played with and cared for clay figures she got from a local temple. When she died, her father had the figures buried in the backyard because he was afraid they would turn into monsters.⁶¹ Ji Yun takes up his grandfather’s stance here, showing one way in which common knowledge circulates and stays alive—patriarchal wisdom.

The fear of human figures and those who controlled them would likely also have been the lived experience for readers of early Chinese newspapers in the last decades of the nineteenth century. The “collective fear” or “soul stealing” epidemic of 1768 may have influenced the author of Story of the Stone, who writes about a jealous mother employing a woman to bewitch, stupefy, and sicken, with paper dolls, the two people keeping her son Jia Huan from thriving, Jia Baoyu and Wang Xifeng. This practice was certainly known to Ji Yun and Yuan Mei, who lived through the collective fear of paper men.⁶²

The technique of bringing alive dolls to do one’s bidding consisted of creating a doll out of wood, straw, or (from the Song onward) paper, and imbibing it with the life force of a victim or occasionally a demon. Although the method could also be used for good—for example, in the cases of exorcising disease demons, in which case the demon was made to descend into the image, which could then be burned—but most often, they were used to harm people both by stealing life force and then using a subsequently animated figure to steal from, harm, or menace others. The sorcerers perpetrating these crimes were thought to be Daoist priests, puppeteers, shamans, fortune tellers, and carpenters.⁶³

A large 1917 anthology of historiographical essays, unofficial historical sources, stories, and reports from early Chinese newspapers has an entire category of accounts listed under “paper men become evil spirits.”⁶⁴ In it, a three-inch paper man is found in a chicken coop with maimed chickens. There are rumors in Wuzhong about sorcerers cutting braids to enliven paper men.

Paper men press down on the chests of sleepers, causing nightmares, illness, and then death. Sorcerers read aloud incantations and write talismans, causing the true spirit to fly off and animate a paper man. Xu Ke records that

during the Dingyou and Wuxu years [1897–98], in the region south of the Yangtze River, it was widely rumored that men’s braids, women’s hair buns, children’s genitals, and chicken wings were being cut off. At midnight when the roosters crowed, people would dump out dirty water [around their homes] revealing small paper figures holding knives, about an inch long. Some believed these acts to be the doings of the White Lotus Sect.⁶⁵

One family, investigating urgent knocking at their door, found a small paper figure wriggling in the gap of the door, which they grabbed and doused in urine, whereupon it stopped moving. Upon inspection, they found the figure to be about five inches tall, holding a pair of paper scissors. Fearing that it would cause harm again, the family burned the paper figure and threw it into the toilet.⁶⁶ These fears were predicated on the notion that life was fungible, transmutable, contagious.

All manner of texts in premodern China discussed and debated what animates bodies and what it takes for a body to be permanently still and to decompose, but they expressed little consensus on distinctions and definitions. Even among medical doctors, anecdotes showed profound comfort with ambiguity about delimiting the space between life and death, to an extent that moderns (perhaps especially those raised in the milieu of Abrahamic traditions) cannot abide. Although qi, essence, and blood are often discussed as the foundations of life and health in the Chinese tradition, we see a lot of curiosity about the other things that animate bodies, hun and po, fire, spirit, and a variously named life force that was concentrated in parts of the body such as the heart and hair, and which could be transferred from body to inanimate thing to body. The extensive fear of these practices and the ubiquity of these beliefs, as discussed or implied in practical and entertainment literature, reveal common knowledge about life that was simultaneously widespread and contested.