Deaths by poisoning: The dark side of food culture in Song China
A rare corpus of case histories of murder by poison (du 毒)Footnote 1 reveals the dark side of food culture in Song China, illuminating the conceptual connections amongst their authors’ legal approaches to criminality, medical understandings of toxicity, and socio-moral conceptions of justice. Outside of medical and pharmacological texts, detailed accounts of the poisoning of specific victims are rare in Song sources, and references to poisoning in official histories are too terse and scattered to be analyzed systematically. Fortunately, longform narratives of murder by poison were preserved in two twelfth-century collections with distinctive curatorial approaches, which will be read in parallel and in counterpoint: Zheng Ke’s 鄭克 (fl. 1124–1149) 1133 judicial compendium Tortoise and Mirror for Judging Cases (Zheyu guijian 折獄龜鑑) and Hong Mai’s 洪邁 (1123–1202) multi-volume anecdote collection Record of the Listener (Yijian zhi 夷堅志), published starting in 1160. This article analyzes six narratives that I have chosen—from a larger sample of similar casesFootnote 2—for their capacity to reveal their authors’ epistemic frameworks for assigning criminal responsibility in poisoning cases, and for conceptualizing the distinctions amongst food, medicine, and poison.
Zheng Ke and Hong Mai were armchair collectors of past-case narratives rather than direct observers or investigators of these violent events, and their compendia consist of retellings of accounts that had previously circulated either in official historical records, or through informants’ oral accounts. Yet, even from a curatorial remove, they closely identified with their protagonists’ epistemic standards for investigating guilt and validating truth. In the Mirror, Zheng celebrates local officials who exposed poisoning plots, distinguished truths from falsehoods, and restored the moral fabric of society. Hong’s Record overlays a supernatural valence upon criminal poisoning cases, where imperial justice and cosmic retribution collaborate in punishing poisoners and reasserting the established socio-political hierarchy. Thus, these poisoning cases provide essential clues to reconstructing their authors’ explicit moral frameworks and implicit epistemic standards across legal, medical, and socio-moral spheres: validating the certainty of a suspect’s conviction, proving the toxic etiology of a victim’s death, and affirming the inevitability of terrestrial and supernatural justice.
These poisoning narratives are neither transparent narratives of common occurrences in social practice, nor are they particularly representative of a fraction of Song-era homicide cases. In Song penal law, the manufacture of poison was punished as a capital crime; poisoning was treated as a premeditated homicide (mousha 謀殺), for which murderers received the most severe statutory punishment of beheading, and social inferiors received harsher punishments for murdering their superiors than vice versa.Footnote 3 Yet legal and administrative accounts of individual deaths by poisoning appear only sporadically in the primary sources for Song social and political history. Hence, this small sample of extant narratives from the Mirror and the Record is more notable for their collective survival and conceptual coherence than their representativeness. Here I interpret them anthropologically, as self-contained but overlapping narratives that reflect the fears, anxieties, and concerns of their individual compilers, the original authors of their source texts, and their intended audiences.
Further, these poisoning narratives present mirror images of the socially constitutive functions of food, as criminal toxic interventions destabilized not only the health of the body but also threatened elite-centered visions of sociability and authority. In this sample of homicide cases, the victims are almost exclusively male scholar-officials, and with two exceptions the suspects are members of low-status groups, women, or both. As a less confrontational method of murder requiring more cunning than strength, poisoning appears to have been preferred by those with limited social influence or physical power, such as women or underlings. For Zheng and Hong’s intended audiences of male literati, these narratives of violent subterfuge were initially unsettling but ultimately comforting, as female and low-status malefactors faced retributive justice from male-dominated terrestrial and celestial bureaucracies. The conceptual connection running throughout these lurid tales is the disruptive threat that poisoned food and drink posed to the preservation of familial, social, and political hierarchies, and to the perpetuation of the moral and legal orders that supported them. They demonstrate the permeability of the boundaries that separate the conceptual categories of food, medicine, and poison, which might be envisioned as a Venn diagram. In poisoning cases, investigators asserted their epistemic authority as agents of terrestrial and/or otherworldly justice, reconstructing the cause of victims’ deaths by validating the toxicity of food and medicine they had unknowingly consumed, confirming their poisoners’ guilt, and affirming the justness of their punishment.
A judicial compendium of true crimes: Tortoise and Mirror for Judging Cases
Zheng Ke’s Mirror is the second earliest printed collection of legal case studies in China, containing a total of 395 cases—murder, theft, and fraud—that had been solved by exemplary local judges in distant and recent history.Footnote 4 Prescribing methods of criminal detection and presenting a logical system for collecting evidence and interpreting testimony, Zheng drew upon his experiences as a local judge in the Yangzi Delta.Footnote 5 Zheng’s intended readership was local officials or sub-officials, responsible for law enforcement and criminal investigations. County magistrates possessed broad authority to collect evidence, torture suspects, extract confessions, decide verdicts, and sentence the guilty.Footnote 6 These skills were learned on the job because magistrates’ classical educations had not prepared them to judge cases, interpret evidence, or manage investigations. In the Mirror, Zheng was performing his own judicial experience and expertise, presenting himself as an epistemic authority on criminal investigations.Footnote 7
Zheng incorporated approximately one third of the Mirror’s cases from the earliest casebook in Chinese history, the Collection of Suspicious Cases (Yiyu ji 疑獄集), compiled by He Ning 和凝 (898–955) and his son He Meng 和㠓 (951–995), who collected an original tranche of 99 cases covering over a millennium from the Warring States into the Five Dynasties.Footnote 8 The remaining two-thirds of the Mirror’s cases comprise newer material from the Five Dynasties and the Northern Song, which Zheng mostly extracted from official sources such as State History (guoshi 國史) biographies (liezhuan 列傳) and “records of words and conduct” (yanxing lu 言行錄). But he also drew upon a broader range of source texts, including funeral epitaphs (muzhiming 墓誌銘), brush-notes (biji 筆記), and anecdotes (xiaoshuo 小說), as well as oral transmissions of recent cases.
Each case record in the Mirror is a self-contained micro-history with common features: Zheng identifies the jurisdiction, judge, suspects, victims, and/or plaintiffs, and explains how suspects were interrogated and sentenced. Zheng presented these as historical narratives, using authenticating details to establish the Mirror’s veracity. After a large fraction of cases, Zheng appended his own commentaries (an 按), explaining how and why these particular judges had made the right decisions and how his readers could learn from them. My reading of the Mirror confirms Brian McKnight’s judgment that Zheng was suggesting “devices for gathering and assessing facts rather than in the making of legal decisions.”Footnote 9
As a smaller subset of the hundred-plus homicide cases collected in the Mirror, poisoning cases follow the same narrative pattern. For homicide cases, Zheng was advising his readers on the proper rules of evidence for interrogating suspects and for evaluating testimony, which would establish the validity of a criminal conviction. Thus, when poisoners attempted to subvert moments of elite sociability and family bonding centered around eating and drinking, exemplary judges healed the breach by restoring domestic stability and the social hierarchy. Zheng selected narratives of judges whose epistemic values coincided with his own, including examples of abductive reasoning, in which a detective seeks out the most probable conclusion out of a number of possibilities in order to explain a given set of observations.Footnote 10 This was more than deductive reasoning, where judges start with a general or universal premise and then draw inferences from a set of clues, or inductive reasoning, where a detective follows a chain of inferences from an initial observation of a case. Zheng’s exemplary judges justify their epistemic authority by following the proper investigative procedures that deliver the proper verdict from a given set of evidence and testimony.
The case of the poisoned wine: How to distinguish false accusations of attempted murder
The earliest of the Mirror’s poisoning cases is #51, “Du Ya Investigates the Goblet,” in which a stepson launches a slanderous accusation of attempted murder against his stepmother at a family New Year’s banquet. Here, we see an exemplary judge demonstrating his epistemic authority across the legal, medical, and moral realms by distinguishing true testimony from false, distinguishing genuine poison from a simulated toxic substance, and prescribing justice for the guilty parties. Zheng curated this narrative from a Tang-dynasty case in the Yiyu ji as a comforting example of how an official could exonerate the innocent from a miscarriage of justice.Footnote 11 Du Ya 杜亞 (725–798) was serving as Commander (zhen 鎮) of Weiyang 維揚 (modern Jiangsu), when he adjudicated dueling accusations from a rancorous family new year’s rite:
There was a wealthy commoner, who, soon after his father’s death, had not served his stepmother according to the Way. On New Year’s Day, he toasted his stepmother’s longevity, and she bestowed a goblet upon her son in return.
有富民, 父亡未幾, 奉繼母不以道。元日, 上壽於母, 因復賜觴於子。
When he received it, he was about to drink it, but suspecting that it was poisoned, he poured it out on the ground and the soil heaped up. He cursed his mother, saying: “If you would use poisoned wine to murder people, then how could high Heaven bless you!”
既受, 將飲, 乃疑有毒,覆於地而地墳, 乃詬其母曰:「以酖殺人, 上天何祐!」
The stepmother beat her chest [in anger], saying: “By Heaven above, how could you have falsely accused me so deeply!”Footnote 12
母拊膺曰:「天鑒在上, 何當厚誣!」
For the stepson, the wine’s effervescence provided visual evidence of toxicity, but his stepmother vehemently denied the charges. Both of them were interrogated at Du’s prefectural offices, where he employed abductive reasoning to arrive at the most probable verdict. Through relentless questioning, Du concluded that the stepson’s wife who poured the wine had doctored it with an unknown adulterant that only appeared to be toxic when spilled on the ground. In order to discern false testimony from true, Du isolated the witnesses in separate cells and cross-referenced their statements, concluding that the stepson and his wife had colluded to falsely accuse his stepmother of attempted murder.
Zheng’s commentary presented the case as an example of properly “discerning false accusations” (bianwu 辨誣) by “using facts to investigate treachery.” Under normal circumstances, this New Year’s rite would have been a performative acknowledgment of the generational hierarchy within the lineage. For Zheng, this case demonstrates how mendacity and lack of filiality could make a mockery of a man toasting his innocent stepmother’s longevity, when both of them would assume the safety of the wine they were about to drink. Oddly, all of the extant versions of the narrative entirely elide the question of the beverage’s actual toxicity, because intra-familial treachery and slander are at the center of this poisoning case. From Zheng’s perspective, Du distinguished himself through his epistemic standards for assessing legal, medical, and moral knowledge by affirming that the toxic wine had been a manipulative ruse and discerning the stepmother’s truthful representations of events from her accusers’ falsehoods.
The case of the poisoned turtle meat (or wine?): How to determine the time and cause of a homicide
Zheng curated the second poisoning case, #163, from a Northern Song biographical vignette set in the second half of the eleventh century, in which an exemplary official unites forensic knowledge, medical theories of toxicity, and socio-moral understandings of punishment. He likely derived this extended and convoluted narrative from an official “record of words and deeds” (yanxing lu) of the state councilor Fan Chunren 范純仁 (1027–1101).Footnote 13 This case is a model of abduction, in which Fan reveals a cunning plot to poison one of his prefectural colleagues:
When Grand Councilor Fan Chunren was Prefect of Hezhong fu (modern Yongji 永濟, Shanxi), [after] Administrative Supervisor Song Dannian had finished a banquet, it was announced that he had taken ill. That night he suddenly died. His concubine and clerk had been having an adulterous relationship. Chunren knew that this death was not in accordance with reason, and consequently sent the case to the authorities for adjudication.Footnote 14
范純仁丞相知河中府時, 錄事參軍宋儋年會客罷, 以疾告, 是夜暴卒。蓋其妾與小吏為姦也。純仁知其死不以理, 遂付有司案治。
This occasion of elite sociability concluded in Song’s grisly death in a stealthy and non-confrontational act of violence. As underlings with limited social power, the concubine and her clerk-lover were exerting agency by plotting to murder Song with the goal of removing themselves from service. Yet based on the Mirror’s case narrative, it is also unclear exactly how or why Fan surmised that there was something anomalous about the banquet that correlated with Song’s sudden death.Footnote 15 Spontaneous flashes of insight like these were common in the Mirror, where exemplary judges intuitively grasp that the fact pattern of a homicide case somehow conceals a sinister plot, even if they cannot articulate how they know what they know. In the Mirror version of this case, Fan concludes that Song’s concubine and clerk had committed murder before finding conclusive evidence of poisoning from an autopsy, while the yanxing lu version reverses the causality.
Regardless of the proper sequence of events, Fan’s suspicions were sufficiently well-founded for him to order Song’s family to delay the funeral until an autopsy could be undertaken, furnishing indisputable physical evidence of death by poisoning: “blood was flowing from the nine orifices, the eyeballs had dried up, the tongue was rotten, and the whole body was pitch-black.” While Song Ci’s 宋慈 (1186–1249) Collected Record of Injustices Rectified (Xiyuan jilu 洗寃集錄, c. 1247), the first extant manual in legal forensics in China, was not composed until over a century after Zheng completed the Mirror, Song collected knowledge from earlier cases observed by Northern Song judges and coroners. His vivid description of the telltale signs of poisoning confirms Song Dannian’s autopsy results:
The mouth, eyes, ears, and nose will all have a discharge of blood. In severe cases, the entire body will be black and swollen, the face blue-black in color, the lips curled and blistered, the tongue shrunken, cracked, rotten, swollen, or slightly protruding.
口、眼、耳、鼻間有血出。甚者遍身黑腫, 面作青黑色, 唇卷發皰, 舌縮或裂拆、爛腫、微出。Footnote 16
Hence, Zheng was depicting Fan as an exemplary judge employing state-of-the-art forensic and medical knowledge to provide indisputable evidence of premeditated homicide. Fan’s interrogation of the suspects centers around the secondary questions of precisely when Song’s concubine and clerk had poisoned him during a multi-course banquet, and which toxic substance he had ingested:
The officials interrogated the prisoners, who said they had slipped poison into the minced turtle meat. Chunren asked: “During which course was the minced turtle meat served?Footnote 17 How could someone who had been poisoned [earlier on] be able to make it [all the way] to the end of the banquet? These are not the true facts.”
有司訊囚,言置毒
胾中。純仁問:「胾在第幾巡? 豈有中毒而能終席耶? 必非實情。」
Here, Fan used abduction to arrive at the conclusion that Song Dannian certainly would have died much earlier in the banquet if he had indeed eaten poisoned turtle meat, so he ordered another interrogation, which extracted the true version of events from the accused: “when the guests had scattered and had gone home drunk, they had slipped poison into his wine cup and murdered him.” This dispositively confirmed why Song fell ill and died directly after, and not during, the banquet. This recurring element of poisoned wine might indicate that this might have been a common trope in Song narratives, as this toxic delivery device reappears in Hong Mai’s Record in a similar official setting, with another official concubine as the perpetrator.
Why did the suspects falsely confess to poisoning this particular course in the middle of the banquet, and not Song’s wine goblet afterwards? Their initial explanation seems bewildering:
Perhaps the criminals considered that the other guests all knew that Dannian was not fond of turtle meat, and after that course there were still many more courses left. They plotted that the case would be overturned on an irregularityFootnote 18 at a later date and they would escape the death penalty.
此蓋罪人以儋年不嗜而為坐客所共知, 且其後巡數尚多, 欲為他日翻異逃死之計爾。
One possibility is that Song’s concubine and clerk assumed that if the banquet guests had corroborated the fact that Song hadn’t consumed the turtle meat that they had falsely confessed to poisoning, then the case would have been overturned on a technicality, perhaps on appeal.Footnote 19 A second possibility is that the accused were desperately obfuscating the facts of the case to avoid execution.Footnote 20 Rather than resolving this ambiguity, Zheng’s commentary focuses on the broader principles of investigative work, praising Fan’s punctiliousness in pursuing these poisoners:
Everyone who is good at thoroughly examining treachery certainly must be good at interrogating the facts. If the true facts had not been gathered, then the case would have been certainly overturned later, and the treacherous people’s plot would have succeeded.
凡善覈姦者, 必善鞫情也。若不得實情, 則後必翻異, 而姦人得計矣。
Zheng admonishes judges to relentlessly pursue the truth, by collecting evidence and scrutinizing testimony, and paying attention to the plausibility and sequencing of fact patterns. As we will see below, Hong Mai’s epistemic standards for investigators to reveal truth and dispel falsehood are congruent with Zheng Ke’s conceptual model. As with other poisoning cases in the Mirror, the perpetrators’ motives in the turtle-meat case are never explained beyond general accusations of malice, and officials’ investigations are starting from the a priori assumption that the underlings were homicidal.
Whether derived from a Tang-dynasty anecdote or a Northern Song official biography, these two poisoning cases from the Mirror fit a common pattern of judicial reasoning and epistemic rigor. Zheng urged judges to sift through visual evidence and oral testimony in order to confirm their initial intuitive judgment of a suspect’s guilt or innocence, forming an internally consistent explanatory framework through abduction. While poisonings comprise less than one percent of the Mirror’s cases, these common narrative elements recur throughout the larger corpus of murder cases, and Zheng consistently reinforces a comforting vision of capital crimes being investigated and punished. In selecting these particular cases, Zheng was celebrating exemplary local and regional officials who were called upon to restore a household’s harmony or to stabilize socio-political hierarchies, siding with familial elders against their offspring and an official against his concubines and clerk. The conceptual category of food is undermined by the irruptive element of poison, creating lethal menace out of contexts of eating as solemn as a family’s new-year rites, and as festive as an official banquet. Zheng depicts these exemplary judges as demonstrating their command over three distinct epistemic realms: forensic knowledge of investigative methods, medical knowledge of toxic substances, and legal systems for punishing capital crimes. The case narratives in Zheng Ke’s Mirror purport to contain a level of truth content equal to historical texts produced by the imperial court, as judges investigate the facts and testimony that would produce a just conviction for poisoners. But we will see that Hong Mai’s Record of the Listener presented readers with analogous tales of poisoning with similar epistemic values, where authorities reveal the underlying truths and reassert the validity of facts as they solve baffling crimes and assign proper punishments through terrestrial justice, with an additional overlay of otherworldly retribution.
Collected anecdotes of poisoned meals: Record of the Listener
Hong Mai’s Record of the Listener is one of the most familiar sources for Song social, cultural, and religious history.Footnote 21 By collecting over two thousand tales of the supernatural in multiple installments, Hong was positioning the Record in the tradition of medieval zhiguai 志怪 (“anomaly accounts”).Footnote 22 Comprised of casual anecdotes arranged in seemingly random order, the text is simultaneously classifiable as a biji collection,Footnote 23 but these two bibliographic categories were not mutually exclusive, and the Record would later be classified as both.Footnote 24 Manling Luo has observed that in late Tang tales of the strange, “stories about literati experiences of the supernatural delineate the places and mobility of scholar-officials in an immense but bureaucratized cosmos.”Footnote 25 My reading of the Record confirms that Hong assumed that concentric and mutually-reinforcing structures of retributive justice were simultaneously operating within the empire and cosmos, as exemplary officials employed similar epistemic standards that we have already witnessed in Zheng Ke’s Mirror.
Of course, the modern Western categories of “fiction” and “fictionality” that were conflated into the modern Chinese term xiaoshuo 小說Footnote 26 are anachronistic and foreign to Hong’s epistemic framework, which was grounded in a foundational value of historical reliability.Footnote 27 The oral anecdotes of poisoning collected in the Record might not have been produced within the same official regime of factuality as the court archives that were processed into case histories in the Mirror. Yet given Hong’s practical experience in the court’s Historiography Bureau during Emperor Xiaozong’s 孝宗 reign (1127–1162),Footnote 28 I would venture that Hong is also making truth claims that are more verifiable than provisional. Confirming his epistemic values, his anecdotes bear similar authenticating features as Zheng’s case histories: date stamps, place names, and identified informants.Footnote 29 I would lend further credence to Ronald Egan’s conclusion that “Hong Mai is not making stories up … The events they describe may be strange or extraordinary, but in Hong Mai’s mind they narrate events that had happened.”Footnote 30 Furthermore, Robert Hymes has assembled an evidence-based argument that affirms this interpretation of Hong’s epistemic stance towards the verifiability of his source material and the importance of authentication within his narratives.Footnote 31
While the Record contains many more anecdotes about poisoning in medical or pharmacological contexts, I have selected a smaller sample of four narratives in which the circles of food, medicine, and poison also overlap, with both unsettling and comforting valences for Hong’s readers. These are tales of premeditated murder using poisoned food that culminated in criminal cases that to some extent involved investigation and prosecution, and parallel the case studies in the Mirror, but also overlay supernatural forms of punishment where the judicial process has been corrupted or fails entirely. These four cases are more verbose than Zheng’s cases, and were written in a style that was less telegraphic and more reminiscent of practices of oral storytelling. Their thick descriptiveness makes them more amenable to an indirect approach to reconstructing the social practices and ethical ideals of food culture by exploring how criminal perpetrators collapsed the conceptual boundaries separating food, medicine, and poison, and how exemplary officials combined legal, medical, and socio-moral forms of knowledge in punishing them.
The case of the poisoned porridge and another case of poisoned wine: How to catch homicidal concubines
Two murder cases in the Record also feature concubines as prime suspects, again exerting their limited social agency by weaponizing poison to murder the officials they served. These narratives dovetail with the Mirror cases discussed above in terms of their blocking of narrative elements, and their protagonists’ epistemic standards for combining forensic knowledge of criminal investigation, medical knowledge of toxic substances, and determinations of retributive justice. “The Assistant Magistrate of Nanfeng” (“Nanfeng zhubu” 南豐主簿) and “Jia Chengzhi” (賈成之) feature similar victims and parallel criminal motives as the Song Dannian murder case from the Mirror. Concubines resort to poisoning as the least confrontational means for escaping servility by murdering their masters, using wine as a weapon, along with a new one: porridge. First, there is a county-level official who forsakes his wife and family for his official concubine,Footnote 32 a figure of sexual temptation who leads him astray:
When the Fujian native Wang Somebody (personal name undisclosed) was serving as Assistant Magistrate of Nanfeng county (modern Jiangxi), he was obsessed with his official concubine Long Ying. Dispatching his wife and children to return to his native place, he was left alone with Ying at his post. Sun Que, the county magistrate, admonished him to stop this [affair], but he was unwilling to heed him. Finally, Wang stealthily took [her] and they absconded.Footnote 33
閩人王某(不欲名)為南豐主簿, 惑官奴龍瑩, 遣妻子還鄉, 獨與瑩處。知縣孫愨諫止之, 不肯聽, 終竊負以逃。
Ying was physically bound to service at the county compound, so Wang was violating bureaucratic procedure and forsaking his family obligations by trafficking her to his next official posting. Perhaps Hong is gesturing at her domestic failings by indicating that the couple was now entirely living on takeout—available at urban markets as early as the early twelfth centuryFootnote 34—rather than home-cooked meals: “all of their food, drink, and vegetables were provided by an outside cook.”
Hong Mai describes the ensuing poisoning incident in forensic detail, revealing the concubine’s homicidal shamelessness and the official’s escalating suspicions through dialogue:
One day, Ying was carrying porridge and was being unusually attentive. Wang hadn’t even had time to eat it when sooty dust suddenly fell into the bowl, and he ordered that it be taken away. Ying said: “But isn’t it enough that I just get rid of the dirty part? Why must we throw [it all] away?”
一日, 瑩攜粥來, 勤渠異常時。王未暇食, 忽有煤塵落碗內, 命撤之。瑩曰:「但去其污處足矣, 何必棄?」
Simple disgust seems to have motivated Wang’s refusal to eat the sooty porridge, but the bizarre incongruousness of these circumstances gradually leads him to realize that his concubine is homicidal. A convenient plot development positively confirms the meal’s toxicity:
Just then, a dog passed in front of them, and then knocked the congee over onto the floor and ate it up with abandon. In a brief moment, the dog vomited up black blood, twisted and turned over, and then died. When Wang asked about this incident, Ying said: “The porridge arrived from outside, and I don’t know why this must have been so.”
適一犬自前過, 乃翻粥地上, 縱使食, 須臾間, 犬吐黑血, 宛轉而死。王詰其事, 瑩曰:「粥自外入, 非知其然也。」
When summoned for interrogation by an incredulous Wang, the takeout cook reports that Long Ying prepared that day’s porridge herself, and it is only when incontrovertible proof of attempted murder arrives that her “complexion started to change color.” Arrested and remanded to the custody of the prefectural compound, she confessed that she was having an affair with a soldier and plotting to seize Wang’s money as a dowry before absconding. Since this was only a case of attempted murder, she was only sentenced to flogging rather than beheading. Hong concludes with a counterfactual, seeing the soot as either an improbable coincidence or a cosmic intervention: “without the protection bestowed by falling dust, Wang would not have avoided [death].” Beyond trusting his concubine with his life, Wang was misguided in trusting the exclusivity of her affections, which a man of lower status had claimed. As with the porridge case from the Mirror, the judicial authorities punish Long Ying for attempted murder, thereby restoring the proper domestic and social hierarchy that she had ruptured by liberating herself from sexual servility. Within the intimacy of a domestic setting, a food as calming and bland as porridge could cross the line from food into poison, when an elite male victim complacently regarded his homicidal concubine as harmless. Here, Wang and his fellow officials combine their forensic knowledge of investigative procedure, their medical knowledge of toxic compounds, and their understanding of terrestrial and otherworldly retribution.
“Jia Chengzhi” depicts another government concubine who was the designated poisoner in an elaborate homicidal conspiracy against an official. Here the Venn diagram circles of poison, medicine, and food all converge, but this case is resolved through supernatural retribution rather than bureaucratic justice. The eponymous protagonist is serving as a Controller-General (tongpan 通判) in Hengzhou 橫州 (modern Guizhou), and his arrogance and insubordination enrage his superior officer, Prefect Zhao Chi 趙持 (n.d.), who plots his murder with a cabal of subordinates.Footnote 35 At an official banquet, the government courtesan Ruan Yu 阮玉 slips poison derived from toxic herbs into Jia’s wine, toasting his longevity (a trope we have seen above in Zheng’s Mirror) while Zhao is conveniently indisposed. This courtesan is aware of the homicidal qualities of the unnamed medicine she is delivering to her master, even if Hong leaves her presumed motives undescribed. Embodying the telltale signs that were incidentally described in Song Ci’s coroner’s manual, Jia immediately knows enough to confirm the poison’s toxic effects but is powerless to reverse them:
When the wine entered Jia’s mouth, he soon felt his stomach and intestines withdrawing in pain, and blood flowed from his eyes and nose. He immediately ordered that he be rushed home, and when he reached it, he was already unconscious.
酒入賈口, 便覺腸胃掣痛, 眼鼻血流, 急命駕歸, 及家, 已冥冥。
Before dying at home, he urges his family not to pursue this murder case through official channels, which were likely to be corrupt and ineffectual, as he vows to “lodge a suit with the underworld.” Through a series of increasingly uncanny plot contrivances arranged by Jia’s vengeful ghost, who has intuitively solved his own murder through unexplained means, Prefect Zhao and every single one of his co-conspirators die a horrific and unnatural death, thereby delivering retributive justice.
To authenticate this narrative’s veracity, Hong Mai surrounds it with a scaffolding of details: the name of his informant, the month and year of Zhao’s death, and the names and official titles of every individual involved in the plot. As opposed to Long Ying and Song Dannian’s killers, who were murdering their master to pursue a relationship with lower-status men, Ruan Yu was not plotting to escape her government servitude; she was a patsy who was abetting a malicious official. Rather than threatening to overturn the familial, social, and gender hierarchy, Zhao Chi’s conspiracy against Jia Chengzhi is an act of premeditated murder orchestrated by a high official against his second-in-command and would leave local bureaucratic structures intact. Zhao assumes that as a high-status official he will walk away scot-free, but Jia works from the supernatural realm to avenge his own murder and punish the conspirators. In both of these tales of poisoning, Hong Mai foregrounds the officials who possess both criminal and medical knowledge of their own toxic demise, as they seek to apprehend the conspirators and concubines who murdered them, relying on retributive justice to redress the intimate acts of violence to which they had unwittingly succumbed.
The case of the poisoned steamed cake: How to posthumously solve one’s own murder
Demonstrating Hong Mai’s conception of the convergence of imperial and supernatural punishment and his epistemic values for seeking evidence and establishing guilt, in “Court Gentleman Wang’s Shrine” (“Wang Tongzhi ci” 王通直祠) another deceased official seeks posthumous vengeance against his poisoners. The narrative begins with a set of authenticating details, followed by the protagonist Wang Chun’s 王純 (n.d.) premeditated murder during a simple office snack, the last day of his service as magistrate of Chong’an 崇安 county (modern Fujian): “While he was managing his duties, even before he had finished eating a steamed cake, he returned home in a rush, and then fell to the ground and died.”Footnote 36 As bland and innocuous as porridge, steamed cakes were an ideal poison delivery device, soaking up an unidentified toxic agent. Wang’s slow-walking subordinates were unmotivated to investigate his untimely death, until his avenging spirit possessed the body of his family’s maidservant during his funeral rites:
A young maidservant of the Wang family suddenly opened her eyes wide and shouted at the monks: “Everyone get out of here, there’s something I want to say!” Her bearing and voice were no different from Lianggong’s [Wang’s style name].
王家小婢忽張目叱僧曰:「皆出去, 吾欲有所言。」舉止語音與良肱無異。
Hong sympathetically portrays the lengths to which Wang was seeking retribution from beyond the grave—much as Jia Chengzhi had—by summoning his subordinates from the county yamen to his home to listen to his channeled complaint, knowing that at least one of them is his poisoner, and possessing sufficient forensic and medical knowledge to build a postmortem case for their prosecution.
A lowly recording clerk becomes the object of Wang’s righteous anger, as he apprehended his homicidal motivations even before the crime had occurred:
The maidservant’s appearance was furious, and she ordered the attendants to seize the clerk and flog him a hundred times. The voice told the county magistrate: “This person is the one who murdered me. I have the strength to kill him myself, but to do so would be nearly as uncanny [as my own death], so I want to entrust that to all of you. Several days before I died, I apprehended that he had committed one crime that was extremely glaring, and I repeatedly scolded him face-to-face: ‘It’s certain that I will exhaustively investigate you!’ This person was indignant and also terrified, so he subsequently bribed the cook to put poison [into my food].”
婢色震怒, 命左右擒吏下, 杖之百。語邑官曰:「殺我者此人也。吾力可殺之, 為其近怪, 故以屬公等。吾未死前數日, 得其一罪甚著, 吾面數之曰:『必窮治汝!』 其人忿且懼, 遂賂庖人置毒。
“The day before yesterday, I ate half of a [steamed] cake, and immediately became aware of it, so I excused myself, wanting to speak to my wife and children, but I didn’t have time before I died. It would be fortunate if you opened my coffin to observe it, so this may be known.”
前日食餅半即覺之, 蒼黃歸告, 欲與妻子語, 未及而絕。幸啟棺視之, 可知也。」
This echoes two common tropes in Hong Mai’s poisoning narratives: a corrupt clerk turns to murder and a dying official attempts to get home in time to bid a proper farewell to his family. A third trope is the autopsy, where the evidence of poisoning is graphically inescapable as it had been in Zheng Ke’s case of Song Dannian or Hong’s case of Jia Chengzhi, confirming the oral testimony of Wang’s dead spirit: when the coffin is opened, “his whole body was entirely rotten and oozing black juices.” Memorializing the efficacy of Wang’s vengeful spirit and detective skills, an official shrine is established to commemorate him in the county seat. As with the case of Jia Chengzhi, the county yamen is a shark tank of vicious infighting and entrenched corruption, where malevolent actors resort to poisoning an exemplary official. Hong’s deceased detectives already intuitively know the identities of their murderers and the weapons they have used, and since the bureaucratic process of criminal investigation has been corrupted, only otherworldly retribution can avenge their deaths and ensure lasting justice.
The case of the reanimated meats: How to lift a frontier sorcerer’s curse
Hong’s “Treating the Method of Reanimating Life” (“Zhi tiaosheng fa” 治挑生法) reveals an entirely different form of food-based toxicity, produced by cultural anxieties about indigenous practices of sorcery along the southern imperial frontier.Footnote 37 A graphic story of otherness, it demonstrates the unstable boundary between the categories of poison, medicine, and food, as well as the epistemic frameworks of black magic, medical knowledge, and criminal procedure. Here, a sorcerer’s curse induces a deadly toxin—still described as du despite the lack of an ingested pharmacological agent—into victims’ bodies, transforming digested food into lethal parasites. The anecdote fuses two anomalous case studies of indigenous medical knowledge, both from the far southern Lingnan 嶺南 region, where a magical incantation induces the contents of the patient’s stomach, usually animal but sometimes vegetable, to “reanimate life” (tiaosheng 挑生) and revert to its pre-ingested, living form.Footnote 38 The first mention of this sorcery-induced syndrome, endemic to Lingnan, appears in the polymath Shen Gua’s 沈括 (1030–1095) biji collection Mengxi bitan 夢溪筆談 (Brush talks from dream brook). Shen summarizes the contents of an official memorial he read from Leizhou 雷州 (modern Guangdong), which described how a local commoner was “cursed to death” (zusi 詛死) by an indigenous sorcerer:
When the suit was investigated, the villager was able to take cooked food and cast an incantation upon it, so that in just a moment, small pieces of chopped meat or fish that had been roasted (or something similar) would entirely revert back into whole pieces of meat. One more incantation made cooked meat revert back into raw meat. With yet another, the raw meat would be able to move, and could be made to reanimate, so that beef would turn back into a cow, mutton back into a sheep, but much smaller.Footnote 39
問其狀, 鄉民能以熟食咒之, 俄頃膾炙之類悉復為完肉; 又咒之, 則熟肉復為生肉; 又咒之, 則生肉能動, 復使之能活, 牛者復為牛, 羊者復為羊, 但小耳。
If left to develop without medical treatment or magical intervention, this spell would be invariably fatal; if victims or their families didn’t make a hefty blackmail payment, “then their stomachs would crack open and they died; the cows and sheep they had eaten would emerge through the crack all by themselves.” In a bizarre, anxiety-inducing inversion of the birthing process, human hosts die in the process of hatching smaller versions of the animals they recently ate. Another parallel account of this black magic is roughly contemporaneous with the Dingzhi 丁志 installment of the Record (published in 1180),Footnote 40 and might have cross-pollinated with it. In Lingwai daida 嶺外代答 (Representative answers from beyond the mountain range, preface 1178),Footnote 41 a collection of ethnographic and geographical knowledge about Lingnan and Southeast Asia, Zhou Qufei 周去非 (1135–1189) provides a case narrative of murder through “reanimating life” (tiaosheng):
Fish or meat is given to guests, and against them the method is enacted of prevailing through compulsion, where the fish or meat is able to return to life inside the person’s stomach, and the person dies from it.Footnote 42
以魚肉延客, 對之行厭勝法, 魚肉能反生于人腹中而人以死。
This exotic spell, Zhou insisted, was easily curable and reversable with a prescription of unspecified herbal pharmaceuticals, whose prescription was known to local medical experts.
Hong Mai’s anecdote juxtaposes two anomalous tales of this cursed disease and its cure, which share the same conceptual repertoire as Shen and Zhou’s accounts, but it’s likely that Hong was recirculating oral accounts that were spreading into the Southern Song’s metropolitan core. Chen Keda 陳可大 was serving as Prefect of Zhaoqing fu 肇慶府 when
a swelling suddenly emerged on his lower ribs, and its appearance was like a malignant sore, and it was as large as a bowl in no time. A knowledgeable person said: “This [is a case of] being poisoned by ‘reanimating life.’ Wait until the fifth watch [3–5 a.m.], and try chewing a mung bean: if it tastes sweet and fragrant, then that’s what this is.”
肋下忽瘇起, 如生癕癤狀, 頃刻間大如碗。識者云:「此中挑生毒也, 俟五更以菉豆嚼試, 若香甘則是已。」
[The diagnosis] was as expected. He was instructed to pound Sichuanese cimicfugae rhizomeFootnote 43 into a fine powder, and took two qian of it mixed in cold boiled water in order to repeatedly dose it. Subsequently, he had diarrhea, and what came out were many stems of scallions, whose fibrous roots were all intact. The swelling subsided at once.Footnote 44
果然。使搗川升麻為細末, 取冷熟水調二大錢連服之, 遂洞下, 瀉出生蔥數莖, 根鬚皆具, 瘇即消。
Thus, rather than using magical or exorcistic methods to reverse the sorcerer’s curse, a knowledgeable medical expert prescribed a plant-based medicine that could dissolve toxified food. Exactly how the victim had been infected with this poison is left unstated. Tacitly assuming the Lingnan-witchcraft association, Hong devotes much greater explanatory detail to the expert’s diagnosis and prescription, which combines indigenous and mainstream medical knowledge.
Hong proceeds with a second criminal case narrative of “reanimating life,” which provides more medical detail and ethnographic knowledge:
The wife of the Leizhou commoner Kang Cai was treated by the Man sorcerer Lin Gongrong, who used chicken meat to reanimate life. The merchant Yang Yi happened to be good at medical treatment and dosed [Kang’s wife] with medicine. In the time it took to eat a meal, she vomited up a pile of meat in one piece. When it was cut open, raw meat remained within the tendons and membranes, which had already been formed into the shape of a chicken. From head to tail, beak to wing, all of it resembled one.
雷州民康財妻, 為蠻巫林公榮用雞肉挑生, 值商人楊一者善醫療, 與藥服之, 食頃, 吐積肉一塊, 剖開, 筋膜中有生肉存, 已成雞形, 頭尾觜翅悉肖似。
If Hong Mai’s conception of this syndrome’s etiology aligned with Zhou Qufei’s, the chicken would have eventually pecked its way out of the deceased woman’s split abdomen if an emetic medicine had not purged the toxin.
The judicial authorities in Leizhou finally get involved, escalating this incident into a criminal case against the indigenous sorcerer, whom they arrest and imprison. Prompted by the authorities, the medical expert Yang Yi explains the illness’s etiology and how the spell-induced toxicity activates inside the victim:
Initially, when the poison enters the body, it feels like the chest and stomach are somewhat painful, and then the next day it gradually grows into a disturbing jabbing pain. After ten days, the thing is alive and is capable of moving. When it rises upwards, the chest is painful; when it sinks downwards, the stomach is painful. As it accumulates, [the patient] becomes thin and emaciated. These are its symptoms.
初中毒, 覺胸腹稍痛, 明日漸加攪剌, 滿十日則物生能動, 騰上則胸痛, 沉下則腹痛, 積以瘦悴, 此其候也。
Concurring with Zhou Qufei’s diagnostic criteria, Yang’s prescriptions force the toxins to be either vomited out or expelled as diarrhea. This uncanny vision of witchcraft describes a toxic spell that inverts the life-giving function of eating the flesh of a slaughtered and butchered animal, which reconstitutes itself within the patient’s womblike stomach, sucking the life out of its eater, threatening to hatch and kill the human host. Chen Hsiu-fen has demonstrated that these Song source texts were the origin of a long-running trope in Yuan-Ming literature, where Lingnan indigenes practiced a form of black magic known as “gu poisoning” (gu du 蠱毒).Footnote 45 Ruth Yun-ru Chen notes that this polysemic term “signifies either witchcraft or a range of disorders that were often ascribed to venom, insect bites, or the practice of using magic to harm others,” and was “associated with non-Han minority groups … in Lingnan and the southwest frontier.”Footnote 46 In these three intersecting narratives from Shen Gua, Zhou Qufei, and Hong Mai, the spells of “reanimating life” represented Han Chinese fear of the ethnic Other in an unfamiliar natural and cultural environment where the most innocuous acts of eating could be rendered poisonous. This narrative from Hong Mai’s Record interpreted these black-magical anomalies as verifiable events, and the authorities combined their criminal expertise, medical knowledge, and ethnographic experiences in order to validate the facts of the case, thereby prescribing an efficacious cure for the victim and delivering a just verdict against the sorcerer.
Conclusions and departures
While Zheng Ke’s Mirror and Hong Mai’s Record were retroactively classified into distinct bibliographic genres of narrative prose compendia—model judicial casebooks and a biji/zhiguai fusion—we can trace common thematic patterns, epistemic frameworks, and socio-moral belief systems across these collected poisoning cases. These exemplary investigators demonstrate their epistemic values by mastering three bodies of knowledge: legal procedure in determining a poisoner’s guilt, medical expertise in identifying a toxic agent, and socio-moral understandings of bureaucratic and otherworldly justice. Zheng’s judicial reports and Hong’s anomalous narratives largely overlap in terms of content and form: they feature a recurring cast of stock characters, a small set of toxic murder weapons, and congruent plot shapes of crime and punishment. Across four of these six cases, especially evident are elite males’ social anxieties about murderous official concubines and bureaucratic subordinates. Whether these formulaic narratives document the mechanisms of local judicial procedure or supernatural retribution or some combination of both, each of them is gesturing at implicit conceptual frameworks and extradiegetic authority structures.
First, Zheng Ke and Hong Mai’s normative visions of moral and socio-political order can be discerned from moments when a poisoning has violently ruptured structures of authority and communities of sociability. We see common stereotypes in their characterization of virtue and vice: when poison plotters subvert the moral order of the lineage, the household, or the office, judicial authorities must restore the breached familial, domestic, social, or political fabric by bringing them to justice. Scholar-official curators of narratives like Zheng and Hong would of course valorize the lives and sensibilities of high-status males, so it is not surprising that the majority of poisoning victims are regional-level officials and the majority of poisoners are bureaucratic subordinates or official concubines. Punishing the murder of an official restores the mechanisms of bureaucratic justice, which in the cases of Jia Chengzhi and Wang Chun synchronize with the larger cycles of cosmic retribution when they posthumously punish their own poisoners. Only one victim in this selection of cases is a woman with higher status and seniority within the familial hierarchy than her poisoners: a stepmother in the Mirror whose unfilial stepson tries and fails to frame her for poisoning him. In only one example are the victims commoners: Lingnan locals bewitched by indigenous sorcerers who used black magic to reanimate ingested food, a sinister practice that proper medical intervention can cure. In these six narratives from the Mirror and Record, the poisoners themselves represent a broader cross-section of society, since sinister officials appear almost as frequently as the usual suspects of subordinates—like clerks, concubines, and servants—amongst the dramatis personae of stock villains. The only discernable difference between Zheng and Hong’s portrayals of elite and non-elite poisoners appears to be their levels of intellectual ability and agency, so that officials are capable of hatching elaborate conspiracies to poison their rivals, while their subordinates of both genders lack the capacity to think a single step beyond the act of murdering their patron. In three cases, Zheng and Hong portray concubines as depraved femmes fatales bereft of moral and intellectual agency, resorting to poisoning as a nonconfrontational murder method that might permit their liberation from servitude.
Second, the specific circumstances of these poisoned meals indirectly reveal the normative values of sociability that Zheng and Hong imagined food culture to sustain. A very small set of murder weapons can be classified within the same set of overlapping Venn-diagram circles of food, medicine, and poison, where the toxic delivery devices are fairly quotidian and innocuous: wine, porridge, steamed cakes. Notably, instead of targeting the delicacy of roasted turtle meat, Song Dannian’s murderers just slip poison into his wine at banquet’s end, and Wang Chun dies while eating a steamed cake in the office. The ubiquity of these vehicles for poisoning is exactly the point, as homicidal plots are successful exactly because they depend upon their victims’ credulity about the safety of their domestic and work environments. When poisoning occurs in situations with witnesses, it threatens to destabilize familial or lineage structures, like the new year’s toast gone wrong, or undermines occasions of elite sociability, like official banquets that became murder scenes. But when poisoning is an isolated act of violence in a domestic or office setting, the poisoner and poisoned are sharing moments of intimacy, eating innocuous and quotidian fare that concubines or underlings are deviously exploiting as toxic vehicles.
Finally, I would argue that in terms of their authors’ assumptions about truth content and historicity, along the continuum running from provisionality to verifiability, both collections are much closer to the latter than the former. In fact, we can conceptualize the Mirror’s judicial case histories as anecdotal narratives curated from historical texts to document exemplars of bureaucratic legal processes that rectified crimes of poisoning, and the Record’s anecdotal narratives as judicial case histories circulated by oral informants that described officials who employed both bureaucratic procedures and otherworldly retribution to punish poisoners. Yet not every anecdote in each collection is as verifiable as every other, and some appear to be presenting events with greater truth content than others. Zheng’s poisoned chalice anecdote was a Tang court case selected from a Five Dynasties judicial compendium, and the case of the ostensibly poisoned turtle meat was reprinted from Fan Chunren’s yanxing lu, a court-derived provenance that vouchsafes its historicity. In curating anecdotes and hearsay about anomalous events, Hong Mai is punctilious about providing authenticating details and trusted witnesses that vouchsafe their reliability. My readings of these four poisoning narratives in the Record of the Listener confirm Robert Hymes’ conclusions about Hong’s practice of authenticating the truth value of fantastic accounts “signifies great scholarly care … and an attempt to make a kind of knowledge”; and further, “within the larger frame of the Record of the Listener, the individual anecdotes again and again treat truth, falsity, and problems of belief and deception as central issues.”Footnote 47
As collectors of homicide narratives, both Zheng Ke and Hong Mai were depicting their protagonists as engaged in a truth-seeking judicial process of discerning the underlying fact patterns from evidence and testimony, and demonstrating their mastery of legal, medical, and socio-moral knowledge. Even when some of Hong’s model officials were posthumously solving their own murders by poison, these supernatural elements are consistent with his belief in their verifiability. Across each of the poisoning narratives examined here, an exemplary investigator serves as a mouthpiece for methods of reconstructing a truthful narrative of a crime using techniques that Zheng and Hong signal as praiseworthy: by ascertaining the epistemic validity of suspects’ claims, counter-claims, and alibis, and by employing abductive reasoning as a means of distinguishing a true conviction from a false frame-up. On both a textual and a metatextual level, truth matters for judges and detectives as much as it does for literary storytellers of crime and anomalies, and Zheng and Hong depict exemplary officials who are weighing the evidence and testimony in order to discern facts and dissolve falsehoods. Imagining a world where premeditated homicides are retributively punished by terrestrial and cosmic mechanisms of authority demands nothing less than belief in a regime of truth production, in which narratives are assumed to be factually verifiable by both authors and readers, and they depict protagonists who are actively engaged in processes of validating what they know about law, medicine, and justice.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
宋君因㑹客罷, 是夜門下人遽以疾告). See “Chengxiang Fan Zhongxuan gong,” 11.9b.
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