It was the spring of 1807, and the Jiaqing emperor (r. 1796–1820) was displeased. It was bad enough that a shocking triple murder case in a gentry household had burst the bounds of a local county courtroom in Shouzhou 壽州 in Anhui Province and was presently roiling the ranks of local officialdom all the way up to the Governor-General of Liangjiang (Jiangsu, Anhui, and Jiangxi) with charges of government corruption and negligence. Now some of the investigating officials in the case stood accused of being suborned—perhaps even bribed—by the defendant’s family to rule the deaths accidental instead of getting to the bottom of the case. Adding further insult to this injury to the proper functioning of regional government, the emperor had just heard a rumor that one of those negligent officials had commissioned a play about the case and sent an opera troupe to perform it in the Jiangsu town where the Governor-General was re-examining the evidence and witnesses, intending thereby to manipulate the judgment of the Governor-General, other officials, and the public.Footnote 1
If true, the existence of this play would be a serious problem in its own right. The Jiaqing emperor and most Qing officials, like other elite men of their era (and indeed of the previous two millennia in the Chinese-speaking world), believed that the content and style of theater and other artistic performances had considerable power to influence public morality, and that this power could be all-too-easily bent to wicked ends as well as good ones.Footnote 2 Professional actors, a group with marginal social and legal status and questionable morality, could not be trusted to use this ideological leverage well. Educated and powerful officials and local gentry must therefore rein in the theater world and its denizens for the protection of the common populace—and those elites certainly should not be misusing the power of theater for their own corrupt ends. While an official circulating an essay or poem in defense of his administrative malfeasance would be bad enough, an apologia in the form of a play performed in public would be a great deal worse. The twists and turns of the Shouzhou murder case, topped with the rumor of the subversive play, all fed neatly into already-existing fears of corruption in government and disorder in the provinces.
It all came at a particularly delicate time, too. In the eyes of both important political actors in the moment and historians after the fact, the Jiaqing emperor’s reign was haunted by a sense of multifaceted crisis in governance. After the death of his father, the powerful Emperor Emeritus Qianlong (r. 1735–1796), in 1799, the Jiaqing emperor began his independent reign with the purge of his father’s powerful favorite Heshen (1750–1799) on dramatic charges of corruption. This was followed by tricky efforts to clean up central and provincial bureaucracies woven through by Heshen’s influence and a pervasive culture of graft and influence-peddling, all without too seriously disrupting the operation of the machineries of state. The Heshen affair sowed distrust between and among the emperor and his officials, and the hit-or-miss attempts at cleaning house after Heshen’s removal seem not to have fully restored that trust. Troubles on the frontiers, notably the Miao uprising in the southwest and piracy on the southeastern coast, and unrest in the heart of the empire in the form of the White Lotus Rebellion, also threw the weaknesses of the state into relief in the 1790s and early 1800s. Wensheng Wang characterizes this era as one of “political debt,” during which the Jiaqing emperor and his high officials had to grapple with a state overextended by both the empire’s growing population and a lifetime of the Qianlong emperor’s aggressive governing style. Jiaqing chose to respond with partial retreat, relaxing many of Qianlong’s interventionist pressures on officials and society.Footnote 3
Seeking a sustainable balance between central “inner court” institutions like the Grand Council, officials in the provinces, and local elites, the Jiaqing emperor was willing, relative to his father, to relinquish some control over local society and affairs to lower-level officials and the native educated elite in communities around the empire.Footnote 4 But there were limits to such flexibility, and the Shouzhou case presented both the problem of corrupt officialdom and the harsh reality that leading local elites, with their knowledge of conditions on the ground combined with fluency in the languages of bureaucracy and conventional morality, were not necessarily any more trustworthy or virtuous than those corruptible government officials. Moreover, although the murders themselves took place in the middle of Anhui, somewhat outside the prosperous, densely populated cultural centers of the Jiangnan region, the most alarming incidents in the subsequent investigation played out right in the region’s heart. This was a place long regarded by Manchu emperors and officials as a trouble spot for decadence and moral malaise, where even formerly upright Han Chinese bureaucrats and Manchu bannermen might be poisoned by proximity to wealth and ease.Footnote 5 Pushed to the edge of tolerance by a convoluted investigation that eventually led him to pen the aggrieved vermilion rescript “This case is hateful in the extreme!”Footnote 6 the Jiaqing emperor was willing and able, under the right conditions, to mobilize diverse tools of state power and information-gathering in ways quite reminiscent of his interventionist father.
Thus, as the murder case appeals and counter-appeals wound their tortured way through the provincial bureaucracies of Anhui and Jiangsu, watched intently by the emperor and the rest of his court in distant Beijing, the emperor also marshaled a parallel state structure to get to the bottom of the opera allegation. For this purpose, the emperor did not work through the tiered apparatus of county, prefectural, and provincial civil officials. Instead, he called on parts of the Imperial Household Department (Neiwufu 內務府), a sprawling organization whose nominal role was to take care of the mundane daily needs of the royal household, from the staff who worked in the imperial palaces in Beijing and elsewhere, to the goods that filled those compounds and dressed and fed their inhabitants. Staffed largely by free members of the Manchu Eight Banner system, banner bondservants, and palace eunuchs, the Imperial Household Department was a creation of the early Manchu Qing rulers, though previous royal dynasties had other structures for managing palace life.Footnote 7 Dorothy Ko has written, with accuracy, that “the modest name of the Imperial Household Department belies the fact that it was a tariff authority, manufactory, trading house, real estate developer, commercial bank, and investment fund rolled into one.”Footnote 8 While the purpose of all these functions was supposedly domestic (if on a grand scale of domesticity), generations of Qing emperors had also used the Imperial Household’s connections to the world of merchants, handicrafts manufacturers, and other suppliers as a channel for information-gathering and even social control and ideological coercion, especially in the economically and culturally important lower Yangtze region.Footnote 9 The curious case of the subversive play is a vivid example of one such moment when the Imperial Household reached down to the lowest tiers of local society to collect information and exert its will with impressive precision: in this instance, through the hybrid official and unofficial structures created to keep the imperial court in Beijing staffed with theater performers. At the same time, like the unruly murder case from which it sprang, the theater investigation also shows us the Jiaqing emperor and his officials confronting the limits of their grasp on ordinary people’s lives, both conceptually (many of their assumptions about the theater side of the case were simply wrong) and practically, in that there was still much in the ebb and flow of the world of itinerant entertainers which the Imperial Household, despite its specific investment in understanding and making use of performers, could not measure or control.
This article outlines the events of the murders and the sprawling subsequent investigation of the crime, then examines the Imperial Household Department’s investigation of the related theater allegation and the surprising connections this reveals between the world of legally and socially marginalized theater performers and the ponderous mechanisms of the Qing state. Both sides of the case reflect, in microcosm, the Jiaqing emperor and his high-ranking subordinates’ worries at a moment when they were re-evaluating the question of how and how much the state could, should, or must intervene in local society.
A drama-worthy crime
The Shouzhou triple murder of late 1803 is not a new archival discovery. Historians of law and crime have been interested in the Shouzhou “sensational case” (ju an 巨案), “case of murders by poison” (du sha an 毒殺案) or “case that took three lives” (san ming an 三命案), since the opening of the Qing archives in the 1980s.Footnote 10 Such is its dramatic nature that it has also been the subject of at least one novel,Footnote 11 several popular-history articles on mass audience portals like Sohu, Pengpai, and NetEase,Footnote 12 and even a racy video collage on Bilibili.com.Footnote 13 Thus far, however, neither the murders nor the administrative and theatrical scandals they ignited seem to have drawn much attention in English-language scholarship.Footnote 14 Before exploring how its effects rippled outward, therefore, it will be helpful to sketch the facts of the case itself. In doing so, I am indebted to more recent Chinese-language studies, particularly two articles by Lin Qian 林乾 and Peng Qiuxi 彭秋溪. My interests and conclusions diverge from theirs; Lin’s study focuses on the Liu family of legal experts involved in the case, approaching it as as a study in the role such advocates played in the Qing legal system, while Peng’s interest is primarily in what the case reveals about commercially oriented opera scriptwriting in Suzhou. Both Lin and Peng also see potential (though not certain) cover-up and conspiracy in the denoument of the opera investigation, whereas this article, viewing the puzzle through the lenses of officials’ moral anxieties and the Imperial Household’s distinctive approach to personnel management, reads the motives and results of the investigation differently.Footnote 15 Nevertheless, the path mapped by these and earlier studies published in Chinese made the prospect of sorting out dozens of palace memorials on the criminal happenings much less daunting and pushed me to clarify my own thoughts on the case’s significance.
In addition to an abbreviated summary of the case, the following section suggests some reasons why the drip-by-drip revelation of these murky events would have been so disconcerting for the Jiaqing emperor and his officials. True-crime tales that provoke strong emotions usually do so because they tap into deeper cultural and political anxieties of their time, and the Shouzhou triple murder case certainly fits this pattern.
The story began in the house of Zhang Tiwen 張體文, in Shouzhou, a county-level department in Fengyang Prefecture, Anhui Province (now a district of the city of Huainan). In the early spring of 1803, Zhang Tiwen must have appeared to his neighbors to be a picture of patriarchal good fortune. His family was wealthy and influential in their locality, and he had three living adult sons, at least two with sons of their own. The Zhangs had lived under a single roof until 1800, an ideal of family harmony that few real families actually attained. Even after dividing the family property in 1800, father and sons continued to live close together. Zhang Tiwen’s second son Zhang Dayou 張大有 and his third son Zhang Daxun 張大勛 both held the rank of Martial Provincial Graduate (wu juren 武舉人), either by virtue of success in a provincial-level military examination or because the family could afford to purchase honorary titles. (Whether the eldest son, Zhang Xiulun 張秀倫, was also a degree-holder is less clear.) Youngest brother Zhang Daxun and his wife, Hu shi 胡氏,Footnote 16 had two sons, one just turned twenty and one only five years old. Middle brother Zhang Dayou’s wife had died fourteen years earlier in 1789, leaving him with a motherless one-year-old boy. Luckily for the family, though, Hu shi was already raising her own older son at the time, and she stepped in to care for her widowed brother-in-law’s little one too—now, by 1803, no longer so little. The family also kept poorer relatives housed and employed and had numerous hired laborers from outside the Zhang clan who boarded within the household—further indicators of their prosperity and gentry lifestyle.Footnote 17
In short, the Zhangs must have looked like a storybook mid-Qing gentry family. But storybook families rarely appear in either crime dramas or legal archives, and the Zhangs did indeed hide dark secrets behind their ideal public image. In early April of 1803, tragedy struck the household when two corpses and one dying man were discovered in a side bedroom of the family home. The two dead bodies belonged to live-in laborers for the family, a father and young son named Li Gengtang 李賡堂 and Li Xiaobazi 李小八孜. Still clinging to life was Zhang Lun 張倫, a distant cousin of the Zhangs who did odd jobs for his wealthy relatives; he was barely breathing and died that afternoon without regaining consciousness. All had been healthy the day before and had obviously died of unnatural causes.Footnote 18 The deaths of these three rather humble persons set off four years of convoluted legal wrangling, an extraordinary duration for a criminal case by Qing standards. Qing government regulations required regional officials to investigate crimes under strict time limits, with extensions usually available only for unavoidable circumstances like travel delays or the illness of a critical witness. When a case took four years to resolve, something had gone very wrong—something else beyond the original inciting incident, that is. This was certainly true of the Shouzhou triple murder case, which would prove to be an autocratic ruler’s nightmare of miscommunication, missed clues, bribery, and cover-ups.
It is tempting to narrate the procedural history of the case in its entirety, as it unfolded across a series of jail cells and courtrooms in the southeastern provinces of Anhui and Jiangsu and in the emperor’s capital far to the north. In order of discovery, with its twists and turns intact, it makes for a serial-drama-worthy tangle of red herrings, alternative forensic theories, turnabouts, and new accusations, in the course of which the cast of investigating officials and hired legal advocates eventually grew to outnumber the original victims, suspects, and witnesses all added together. For the sake of brevity, the account given here spoils many of those plot twists and skips to the last chapter of the mystery. Still, even a shortened summary conveys some sense of why this case was and is so compelling as raw material for popular storytelling.
Here, then, is the end of the murder mystery: four years after the strange deaths, in early 1807, new provincial Governor of Anhui Chu Pengling 初彭齡 (1749–1825) and Manchu Vice-Minister of the Board of Personnel Yulin 玉麟 (1766–1833) rendered a final verdict. The second Zhang son, Zhang Dayou, had killed Zhang Lun and the two Lis. It was a premeditated act: Dayou ordered several Zhang family dependents to give his victims wheat cakes with arsenic mixed into the sugar filling. His minions listened at the bedroom door while the three victims died (or close enough) in obvious agony, then cleaned and arranged their bodies so that in the morning they would appear to have expired peacefully in their sleep. Further, the triple murder was a cover-up for another serious crime, that of incestuous adultery. Widower Dayou confessed that when his son was a toddler under the care of his sister-in-law Hu shi, he and Hu shi began a sexual relationship which continued for more than ten years. Hu shi’s husband, Dayou’s younger brother Daxun, worked in the government grain transport system and was often away for long periods of time, so the brother- and sister-in-law had ample opportunities for their adultery. Later, Hu shi also had sex with her husband’s distant cousin Zhang Lun and with another Zhang cousin employed by her husband. The oldest brother, Zhang Xiulun, knew about the first illicit relationship and had tried to persuade Zhang Dayou to break it off; other family employees and hangers-on also found out over the years but were afraid to confront the powerful Zhang family on whom their livelihood depended. At last, when young Li Xiaobazi accidentally discovered Hu shi’s affair with Zhang Lun in the winter of 1802–1803, the two Lis began to talk about the scandal outside the household. This motivated Dayou to kill both the witnesses and his cousin-rival.Footnote 19
Adultery with a married woman was a crime under the Qing legal code, but the sexual crime in this case was much worse than a simple violation of married chastity, because Qing law held that sex between a woman and any of her husband’s relatives with the same patrilineal surname was not just ordinary “illicit sex,” but incest. Since Zhang Dayou and Hu shi were brother- and sister-in-law, considered close relatives, they could both be sentenced to death by strangulation if their sexual relationship was exposed.Footnote 20 Janet Theiss has written eloquently about the challenge incest posed to Qing officials’ conceptions of both female marital fidelity and the hierarchical family order in the late eighteenth century. A sexual relationship between an elder brother and his younger brother’s wife—like Zhang Dayou and Hu shi—was exactly the sort of incest case that Theiss found most troubled magistrates, one in which the patriarchal prerogatives of a male relative higher in the generational order clashed with every husband’s entitlement to wifely chastity and fidelity. In such cases, “judicial officials’ confusion and reticence in the face of the incest conundrum reflected an intensification of the tension between generational and marital patriarchy in both statecraft discourse and social life.”Footnote 21 The facts of the Shouzhou case could almost have been engineered to make investigating officials uneasy, stirring up uncertainties that had been lingering since the reign of the Jiaqing emperor’s father Qianlong, whose activist approach to domestic policy had pushed his officials to intervene in the moral lives of local families (sometimes in internally conflicted ways). Thus it is perhaps not surprising that the parade of officials who handled the case before Governor Chu Pengling and Vice-Minister Yulin took over seem to have been eager to look anywhere but at Zhang Dayou—though, of course, the Zhangs’ wealth and social connections didn’t hurt either.
Between the spring of 1803, when victim Li Gengtang’s brother first insisted the deaths be reported to government authorities a few days after they occurred, and the spring of 1807, when Governor Chu sentenced Zhang Dayou to beheading, the case followed an unconventional path. The Shouzhou county magistrate at the time of the murders, Zheng Tai 鄭泰, was persuaded by the Zhang family’s insistence that the deaths were due to some kind of accidental poisoning, either from ingesting toxic mushrooms or from gases produced by burning coal for heat. If these inconsistent explanations were not entirely convincing on their own, it helped that Li Gengtang’s relatives dropped their complaint and could no longer be found to testify after the Zhangs paid them off with 2,400 taels of silver. Ruling the deaths an accident rather than a crime meant there was no need to report the case upward beyond the county level, and it lay cold for more than a year.
In early 1805, the investigation sputtered to life again when a former yamen runner from the Shouzhou magistrate’s office with a grudge against his sometime employer Zheng Tai submitted a complaint directly to the office of the Governor-General of Liangjiang, skipping multiple levels of intermediate offices. This complaint accused youngest brother Zhang Daxun of committing the triple murder after the Lis discovered his wife Hu shi’s affair with Zhang Lun, making no mention of the actual killer Zhang Dayou and his incestuous relationship with Hu shi. (Zhang Lun’s familial relationship to Hu shi was distant enough that their affair, though still destructive to the family’s reputation, would have merited milder punishment than sex between a brother- and sister-in-law.) The yamen runner’s complaint also accused Zheng Tai, by now moved to another post, of participating in covering up the murders to hide his negligence in the original investigation. Governor-General Chen Dawen 陳大文 (1738–1815) was only a month away from being transferred to another posting when he received the runner’s complaint; Chen assigned the case to the Anhui provincial Surveillance Commissioner, Eyunbu 鄂雲布 (1748–1811), whose first priority was not the actual murder accusation but the allegation of corruption against Zheng Tai.Footnote 22 Murders, regrettably, happened all the time in the vast Qing Empire, but most of those were not an existential threat to the functioning of the state. Officials paying off witnesses to cover their mistakes, though, that was deadly serious indeed—perhaps particularly so in the near wake of the Heshen scandal. Magistrate Zheng Tai lost his new post and his official status long before his now-former colleagues worked out who had really killed Zhang Lun and the two Lis.
By the spring of 1805, Eyunbu (now Surveillance Commissioner of neighboring Jiangsu Province, but still on the Shouzhou case) had reached a tentative conclusion that the victims were indeed poisoned to cover up Hu shi’s adultery with Zhang Lun. Eyunbu believed the killer was not Hu shi’s husband, the youngest brother Zhang Daxun, who had been away from Shouzhou at the time of the triple murder, but rather the family’s patriarch Zhang Tiwen. This version of the story resolved several tensions in the case to the probable satisfaction of busy, stressed officials. A patriarch killing a distant younger relative and two hirelings was still murder, but it was a murder less disruptive to family hierarchy than the same crime committed by a younger son. Moreover, Zhang Tiwen had already died of natural causes in the summer of 1803, a few months after the murders. With no living criminal to sentence and punish, the case could wrap up without further investigations or loss of life. Hu shi and the Zhang family would suffer some reputational damage, but from the perspective of provincial officials in Jiangsu and Anhui in 1805, arriving at this resolution must have been something of a relief.Footnote 23
For the Zhangs, however, this verdict was far from satisfactory, and they continued to appeal their case, hoping to exonerate the family completely. They met with luck in the new Liangjiang Governor-General, Tiebao 鐵保 (1752–1824), who arrived at his post before the case was formally closed and immediately ordered a complete re-investigation.Footnote 24 Tiebao seems to have felt that the Zhang family’s good reputation on the one hand, and the role of the disgruntled former yamen runner and his hired legal advocate in reviving the investigation on the other hand, made the whole case questionable. If Qing monarchs were perennially uneasy about their limited ability to monitor what was going on at the lower levels of their own official bureaucracy, those bureaucrats themselves had a similarly conflicted attitude toward the local government employees and freelance experts on whom the smooth functioning of their courts depended. Yamen runners were of lowly status and officials generally expected them to unscrupulously seek their own financial advantage at every opportunity.Footnote 25 Songshi 訟師, “litigation masters” like the man hired by the yamen runner to write his complaint, were even more unsettling figures. These were men who often shared with government officials at least the basics of the same elite education, but who used that education for ends counter to the officials’ own purposes: writing legal filings that might well defend the guilty and accuse the innocent, and in general inciting ordinary subjects of the empire to get involved in lawsuits instead of resolving conflicts through orderly local mediation. Officials reviled these legal experts as ruffians and pettifoggers (songgun 訟棍) and often punished them for interfering in court cases, but at the same time the Qing legal system could not have functioned without them. They appeared as both villains and underdog heroes in popular culture, including opera.Footnote 26
If one believed, as Tiebao came to do, that the three poisoning deaths really could have been accidental, then the Shouzhou case looked like a situation in which a “verminous [yamen] runner”Footnote 27 and a greedy pettifogger had teamed up to fabricate scurrilous accusations in order to blackmail a county magistrate and a respectable local gentry family. The Zhangs, of course, also employed generously compensated litigation experts to advocate for their own interests with every official who investigated the case (and, it would later be proven, to falsify facts and distribute bribes as well). But at this stage Tiebao and his subordinates dealt most sternly with the songshi on the opposite side, Liu Ruheng 劉儒恆, whom the aggrieved yamen runner had hired to compose the complaint that revived the investigation. Liu Ruheng now became a criminal suspect in his own right, and at the final close of the case was exiled to military service in distant Fujian Province as punishment for “instigating lawsuits” and for exaggerations of fact in that original 1804 complaint. Liu and his family’s efforts to mount their own legal defense throughout 1805 and 1806 repeatedly brought contradictions in the murder case back under the eye of the central bureaucracy in Beijing and may deserve some credit for the case’s eventual resolution, but that contribution would not earn the gratitude of the state for the unfortunate pettifogger.Footnote 28
During 1805 and 1806 Governor-General Tiebao had the case re-examined by lower-level officials at length, first back in Anhui and then, moving the investigation across provincial lines within his jurisdiction again in early 1806, in the Jiangsu trade hub of Suzhou Prefecture. There, he assigned it to Suzhou prefectural magistrate Zhou E 周鍔, assisted by Zhao Tang 趙堂, magistrate of Suzhou’s constituent Changzhou County. It is not clear why Tiebao chose these particular officials to re-try the case. Were they his trusted proteges, or did he perhaps believe that as administrators in the complicated Suzhou jurisdiction they would be better qualified for the task than officials appointed to more remote Anhui? Whatever Tiebao’s reasons, Zhou E and Zhao Tang repaid his trust with questionable results. Throughout the investigation, murderer Zhang Dayou laid low while his younger brother Zhang Daxun and other witnesses repeatedly changed their testimony and filed new appeals, muddling the case. In Suzhou the Zhang family’s allies successfully used their wealth and influential connections to suborn these new investigating officials, plying Zhou E and Zhao Tang with friendly attention, gifts, and money.Footnote 29
The two magistrates eventually reported to Tiebao that the deaths of Zhang Lun, Li Gengtang, and Li Xiaobazi had been accidents after all. To align their finding of accidental death with forensic evidence from the Shouzhou coroner showing (according to the best evidentiary standard of the time) that the three victims had died from poison, Tiebao and his subordinates arrived at a convoluted theory: the victims had accidentally killed themselves with their own heating fire, burning a combination of coal and discarded wood chips. The coal had produced vapors of “coal poison” (mei du 煤毒), while the wood chips, in a gigantic stroke of unluck for Zhang Lun and the Lis, happened to come from an old tree that had been a nesting place for venomous snakes. Snake venom had gone into the air with the smoke when the wood burned, sealing the victims’ fates.Footnote 30 Although Tiebao and his subordinates were driving toward a theory that would allow them to exonerate the Zhang family, the process dragged out, the delays frustrating officials in the central government. In the fall of 1806, Tiebao’s memorial delivering his conclusions in the Shouzhou case finally arrived in Beijing, but before the verdict could be finalized by the central bureaucracy, litigation master Liu Ruheng’s family made yet another direct appeal to the capital, pointing out problems with Tiebao’s account of the facts.Footnote 31
By now the Jiaqing emperor had had enough. He appointed Chu Pengling, an official he personally trusted, to take over as governor of Anhui Province and close the case. Chu arrived in Anhui from Beijing at the end of November 1806. By mid-January of 1807, he had already disproven the smoke poisoning theory: hardly anyone burned coal in Shouzhou, and the Zhang family had bribed a woodworker to lie about the snake-infested tree. Eventually the investigators tracked down not only the Zhang family employee who purchased the deadly arsenic for Zhang Dayou four years earlier, but even an assistant of the pharmacist who had sold it to him. Chu Pengling recommended that Zhou E and Zhao Tang, the Suzhou officials who ruled the poisoning accidental, should be dismissed from their posts.Footnote 32
That same month, as accomplices turned cooperating witnesses and the walls closed in, Hu shi was taken into custody and confessed everything, including her adultery with her brother-in-law Zhang Dayou. From his own jail cell, her husband Zhang Daxun hatched a plan with one of the Zhangs’ hired litigation masters, concluding that Hu shi’s last chance to preserve her chaste reputation (and reduce her husband and older son’s penalties for participating in the cover-up) lay in suicide. The family bribed the female jail wardens watching Hu shi to relax their guard so that Hu shi could hang herself just two days before the Lunar New Year, sending a final posthumous appeal recanting her confession to the capital in care of her brother. Dealing with this appeal, though it was ultimately dismissed, would add extra weeks to Governor Chu’s investigation.Footnote 33 It was at this point that the Jiaqing emperor assigned Yulin, the Board of Personnel vice-minister, along with several subordinates, to collaborate with Chu on the case. Yulin, like Chu, was an experienced civil official with a jinshi degree and the emperor’s personal trust; it may also be no coincidence that Chu was Han and Yulin Manchu, given that by now both Manchu and Han officials were potentially implicated in mishandling the investigation. Meanwhile, the real murderer Zhang Dayou panicked, fled town, and confessed his crimes after being apprehended on the far side of Anhui province. The layers of cover-up fell apart more or less all at once, and in March of 1807 Chu Pengling and Yulin were able to lay out the facts of the murders to the central government’s satisfaction.Footnote 34 Untangling the degrees and kinds of culpability proper to the crowd of officials and local literati who had been involved in dragging the case out for four years, though, would take some weeks longer.
Illicit sex and premeditated murder in a supposedly respectable family of degree-holding gentry, foot-dragging and incompetence in government investigations, pettifoggery on all sides, multiple cover-ups, outright bribery and official corruption—in all, it is no wonder if absolutely anything with a connection to the Shouzhou case had the Jiaqing emperor’s nerves on edge by early 1807. Thus, when Governor Chu Pengling added subversive opera to the mix of worries, the royal flush of mid-Qing royal nightmares was very nearly complete.
To uncover the facts of the criminal case itself, the emperor counted first on ground-level officials in the regular bureaucracy, like Shouzhou magistrate Zheng Tai. When that channel failed, he relied on trusted high officials like Tiebao, Chu Pengling, and Yulin, men with “outer court” positions in the capital or provincial bureaucracy who had personal relationships with the emperor and held sufficient rank to communicate with him through the inner palace memorial system developed under the Yongzheng and Qianlong emperors in the eighteenth century. Though by this time much more routinized than during the system’s early years as the Kangxi and Yongzheng emperors’ personal information channel, palace memorials passed to the emperor through the Grand Council were still a quicker and more direct communication route than routine memorials transmitted through the layers of regular bureaucracy. Officials of sufficient rank still retained the option of sending secret, sealed palace memorials bypassing even the eunuch staff of the Office for Provincial Memorials (Zou shi chu 奏事處) who normally sorted such documents.Footnote 35 The Jiaqing emperor made frequent use of the palace memorial system, including sealed memorials, to keep abreast of the Shouzhou murder investigation, especially as he began to lose both patience and confidence in its progress in 1806. To get to the bottom of the theater problem that now reared its head, he also had recourse to yet another set of administrative mechanisms and expertise, these ones built up within the Imperial Household during his father’s long reign. The Imperial Household’s links to the world of lowly entertainers had grown at least as much from the late Qianlong emperor’s taste for spectacle and grandeur as from his interventionist tendencies as a monarch, but both Qianlong and, eventually, Jiaqing found uses for those connections in the work of information-gathering and governing as well.
How to investigate a drama
We know almost to the day when Anhui governor Chu Pengling’s palace memorial mentioning rumors of a suspicious play must have reached Beijing, because on the March 27, 1807, the Jiaqing emperor issued three incensed edicts about it: one to Chu Pengling, one to Dai Junyuan 戴均元 (1746–1840), Director-General of the southern stretch of the Grand Canal, and one to Shuming’a 舒明阿, the Imperial Household’s Textile Commissioner for the city of Suzhou (Suzhou zhizao 蘇州織造). To Dai and Shuming’a, the Emperor passed along the news from Governor Chu:
I hear that after Zhou E concluded this case, he commanded a theater troupe from Suzhou to compose a play called The Cedar Garden of Longevity [Shou chun yuan, a pun on an old name for Shouzhou] in twenty-four scenes, representing Zhou E as Kuang Zhong and Tiebao as the Bodhisattva Maitreya. He ordered the theater troupe to go to Qingjiangpu and perform there, in order to confound investigation by the Governor-General.
聞周鍔於審辦此案後, 即令蘇州戲班編造《壽椿園》傳奇二十四齣, 以周鍔為況鐘, 以鐵保為彌勒佛, 令戲班至清江浦演唱, 藉以搖惑督臣耳目。Footnote 36
By this point, Chu had already submitted memorials impeaching Prefect Zhou E of Suzhou (along with County Magistrate Zhao Tang of Changzhou) for mismanagement and probable corruption in the handling of the Shouzhou case. Now, it appeared, Zhou E might also have compounded his crimes by recruiting a theater troupe and sending them to propagandize in Qingjiangpu where Governor-General Tiebao was conducting his final hearings in the case, hoping thus to manipulate fellow officials and the public into accepting Zhou’s judgement of accidental poisoning and prevent them from suspecting his venal motives.
Since the early years of the dynasty, Qing rulers had forbidden staging plays about current events, for a value of “current” which included anything after the establishment of Qing rule in the mid-seventeenth century. Plays set in earlier periods were also barred from using past events or eras of non-Han rule, like the Jin and Yuan dynasties, as a thinly veiled vehicle for commentary on the present Manchu dynasty. In his study of stage costuming and identity in the early Qing period, Guojun Wang has observed that by the second half of the Qianlong reign, prohibitions on Manchu-styled stage costuming appeared to be relaxing as the ethnic categories of the Qing ceased to be quite so “unstageable.”Footnote 37 Nevertheless, as an imperial campaign in 1780–1781 to find and censor suspected seditious dramas about “the current dynasty” and the Southern Song-Jin conflict demonstrated, some lines in both costume and actual content still could not be crossed.Footnote 38 The rumored Cedar Garden of Longevity, if Chu Pengling’s description proved true, would be an especially egregious violation of the norms. While an emperor could commission palace operas representing himself in relation or by analogy to various supernatural beings and legendary heroes,Footnote 39 this kind of theatrical self-aggrandizement was absolutely not a privilege available to government officials, let alone government officials seeking to cover up active malfeasance. Of the rumored characters in the play, Kuang Zhong was a legendarily incorruptible Ming dynasty official who featured in vernacular stories about solving crimes and restoring justice, and who had once been a magistrate in Suzhou just like Zhou E.Footnote 40 Maitreya, the Buddha of the future, was a favorite bodhisattva in the Chinese Buddhist tradition whom many popular sects, including some of the White Lotus rebels who plagued the Jiaqing emperor’s early years in power, believed would arrive at the end of an age of social decline and injustice to bring about paradise on Earth. The grandiose message the Jiaqing emperor must have imagined when he read those names could hardly have been less subtle, and it did not please him one bit.
The emperor likely knew that officials within his regular bureaucracy, however trusted, would be of limited use to him in getting to the bottom of this problem. In secret edicts, he tasked Chu Pengling with questioning Zhou E about the opera rumor and asked Dai Junyuan (whose office was based in Qingjiangpu, rumored site of the suspicious performance) to search his own memories of the previous year and investigate quietly. Zhou E, of course, protested his innocence; from Qingjiangpu, Dai Junyuan could report only that he had never seen such a play performed during festival days at the official residence, but that he had heard a play by that name might have circulated in Suzhou.Footnote 41 If Chu and Dai wanted more answers from Suzhou, where the play was rumored to have originated, they would have to use the channels of local government in that area, which ran right through Zhou E’s own former subordinates. Moreover, as officials who had moved from post to post within the formal bureaucracy throughout their careers, neither Chu nor Dai had any particular local knowledge about the ecosystem of theater performers in the Jiangnan region.
No, if the emperor was to have any hope of getting real answers to his questions about the suspicious play, those answers would probably have to come from Shuming’a, whose role as Suzhou Textile Commissioner put him at the center of mechanisms evolved during the reigns of the Jiaqing emperor’s father and grandfather to exercise state surveillance and control over Suzhou’s theater world. Through the Textile Commission, the Imperial Household had built up an unusual, targeted fusion of state and social institutions in the Suzhou region as an effect of the court’s demand for theater performance. To understand what happened next in the Shouzhou investigation, we thus need to examine an institution that, at first blush, could hardly seem more distant from the halls of imperial power and the grisly technicalities of a murder investigation. This was the guild of opera actors in Suzhou, where lowly performers throughout the Jiangnan region organized amongst themselves to regulate their profession and support one another in times of difficulty.
The Suzhou Theater Guild, the Textile Commission, and the Imperial Household
In his biji compilation on local customs in the Qianlong and Jiaqing reign periods, Suzhou native Gu Lu 顧祿 included a description of the relationship between the Suzhou theater guild and the Imperial Household in Beijing:
Laolang Temple is the headquarters of the Pear Garden [i.e. the theater profession]. Anyone belonging to the ranks of entertainers must first register his name at Laolang Temple. The temple falls under the administration of the Textile Commission; this is because when the Nanfu [the palace theater office] needs to be supplied with personnel, they must be selected via the Textile Commission.
老郎廟, 梨園總局也。凡隸樂籍者, 必先署名於老郎廟。廟屬織造府所轄, 以南府供奉需人, 必由織造府選取故也。Footnote 42
This small temple located on Zhenfu si qian Street 鎮撫司前街 in Suzhou was dedicated to the god of opera actors and functioned as the religious and secular center of the theater world in the region.Footnote 43 The “Nanfu” mentioned here was the court theater office, a division of the Imperial Household headquartered just outside the palace in Beijing. Its mandate was theatrical and musical entertainment for the palace and its denizens, from grand spectacles on ceremonial occasions to private recitals at the emperor’s pleasure. Most of these performances were based on Suzhou-style kunqu 崑曲 opera, a gentle and melodious performance form with roots in Kunshan, not far from Suzhou city. Kunqu was favored by members of the literate elite classes from the late Ming period through the early nineteenth century, and eighteenth-century Qing rulers adopted this taste as well: nothing less prestigious would do for the royal stages.Footnote 44
This meant that the Nanfu needed a large number of kunqu experts to fulfill its mandate. At its height in the late Qianlong and early Jiaqing periods, the Nanfu and its sister compound at Jingshan Hill employed around five hundred men as professional opera performers, in addition to several troupes of palace eunuchs also trained in opera. More than half of the Nanfu’s non-eunuch performers came from the Suzhou area; the rest were largely members of the upper three banners of the banner system, a group from which many other Imperial Household staff were also drawn. The Suzhou contingent were clearly the Nanfu’s most prestigious employees, since this group had better salaries on average than the bannermen and included all of the highest-paid actors.Footnote 45 Despite the Jiaqing emperor’s professions of frugality, his Nanfu was barely smaller than his father’s; only under the Daoguang Emperor would the court theater office be reduced in scale and its Suzhou actors laid off.Footnote 46 Until then, these men had to be recruited and relocated all the way from Suzhou to the imperial compound in Beijing, at considerable effort and expense.
As Gu Lu explained, though, the Nanfu itself had no direct presence in Suzhou. The Imperial Household was represented there by the Suzhou Textile Commission, usually headed by a high-ranking bondservant or other trusted subordinate of the emperor, always a member of the Manchu banner system. The post of Textile Commissioner was an Imperial Household position, outside of the regular provincial bureaucracy. While the ostensible purpose of the three Textile Commissions in Suzhou, Hangzhou, and Jiangning (modern Nanjing) was to supply the Imperial Household with fabric from the region’s silk industry and other Jiangnan goods, in practice their portfolio had grown much broader by the mid-Qing. Among other duties, the Textile Commissioners served as the emperors’ private eyes and ears in the Jiangnan area. Indeed, secret reports on local conditions from Imperial Household officers managing the textile and salt offices in this prosperous region had been an important part of the early genesis of the palace memorial system and the Grand Council in the long eighteenth century.Footnote 47 By the Jiaqing period, there were longstanding precedents for using the Textile Commissions as a channel to gather information and intervene in local society in Jiangnan.
In Suzhou, just as the Textile Commission furnished the court with fine silk textiles and other locally produced necessities and luxuries to support the emperors’ collecting and connoisseurship activities, it was also tasked with keeping the court theater office supplied with the human flowers of Suzhou’s “Pear Garden” (li yuan 梨園, a longstanding poetic term for the world of theater performance and performers). Unlike a collection of inkstones, porcelains, or other inanimate objects, though, a collection of performing artists could never be set aside in a storehouse as “complete.” Actors learned, aged, went through changes of life circumstances, and, of course, had minds of their own. The performing staff of the Nanfu thus needed constant replenishment, requiring an active connection between the offices of the Imperial Household, local theater communities, and the palace. While the Imperial Household could and did train some performers internally (notably the bannermen and eunuch members of the court troupes), the human and embodied nature of theater meant that the cream of the craft could not be fully regularized and confined to production within an imperial “workshop.”
Over time, the Imperial Household’s representatives in Suzhou thus forged a relationship with the Laolang Temple opera guild, making the guild into a force-multiplier for the Textile Commission’s efforts to gather information and mobilize labor within the social world of Jiangnan opera performers. This relationship strengthened the guild throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, helping to build it into a regional institution quite different in scale and effectiveness from smaller theater guilds in other cities. When the Suzhou guild asked its members to provide information about their activities, donate to guild upkeep, and conduct their professional dealings according to guild norms, it did so with the power of the Textile Commission standing behind it, increasing the incentive for actors and troupes to cooperate.
It is not clear when this relationship began, but the earliest surviving documentation dates to 1735, the last year of the Yongzheng reign, when stone tablets were erected in the Laolang Temple to thank the then-Textile Commissioner, Haibao 海保, and the Suzhou performers working in the Nanfu in Beijing for helping the Suzhou theater community secure protection from local bullying. Of course, the tablets also reminded the temple’s visitors and the residents of Suzhou that the temple and guild enjoyed the patronage of this powerful royal institution.Footnote 48 During the reign of Yongzheng’s successor, Qianlong, the connection between the Imperial Household and the Suzhou guild strengthened further as the emperor’s southern tours brought him to Suzhou and other major Jiangnan cities. The Textile Commission hosted the emperor and his entourage in Suzhou, and providing theatrical entertainment was part of that task.Footnote 49
The Laolang Temple guild became the mechanism through which the Suzhou Textile Commission recruited the hundreds of expert theater performers its imperial masters demanded. A stone tablet commemorating a Daoguang-era renovation describes the temple as not only a place where actors gathered for religious purposes, but also the physical site of labor mobilization for the Imperial Household: “whenever it was time to undertake the obligation of selecting [actors] for the Palace and similar matters, [we members of the guild] would all gather at the temple to discuss together and fulfill the command.”Footnote 50 In other words, the guild decided which actors would be sent to Beijing to serve in the Nanfu, a lifetime (sometimes even multi-generational) sinecure which also included housing and other basic provisions for any close relatives who followed the chosen ones to Beijing. Palace service did not pay especially well, quitting the job at will was difficult if not impossible, and it came with a certain amount of hardship; but it was also a very stable kind of employment, quite unlike the feast-or-famine lifestyle more common to theater performers in this period. Whether an actor wanted this fate for himself or a young relative, or wished to avoid it and stay in Suzhou where more profitable opportunities might be available to the talented, either way his destiny was in the hands of the guild and its leaders.
We do not know exactly how actors were selected for the palace troupes or how much choice candidates had, but we do know the Textile Commission’s relationship with the guild and theater workers of Jiangnan could be quite coercive. Yangzhou literatus Li Dou 李斗 records an anecdote about an official opera company the Textile Commission maintained in Suzhou: sometime around the 1760s, a troupe sponsored by one of the fabulously wealthy salt monopoly merchants of Yangzhou broke up and those actors returned to their native Suzhou, “where it happened that a certain powerful official constrained [ju 拘] them to enter the Textile Commission troupe.” Though this was surely Suzhou’s top official troupe, its pay rate did not come near the income such skilled actors could earn in private employment. When another salt merchant started a new troupe in Yangzhou, the trapped actors could not opt to leave for this better opportunity at once, but rather had to scheme to be relieved of duty (de mian 得免) a few at a time. The most prominent actors, tasked with managing the Textile Commission troupe, were unluckiest; unable to get away, they sank into poverty.Footnote 51 Although they were at the top of their profession, these actors had little flexibility in the face of the Textile Commission’s power to make demands on members of the Jiangnan opera community.
Yet the Laolang Temple guild and its members also benefited from their relationship with the Textile Commission. In using this civilian organization as a channel for palace labor mobilization, the Textile Commissioners empowered the guild, recognizing and sanctioning its authority to create order, resolve disputes, and organize mutual support for the theater profession in the Jiangnan region. The perquisites from Imperial patronage of Suzhou opera flowed outward from the Textile Commission via the guild. Beyond employment opportunities, this meant Imperial Household support for the physical improvement of the Laolang Temple, which was renovated in 1783, refurbished in 1791, and renovated again in 1848–49.Footnote 52 It also meant royal support for the guild’s leadership and their actions. Sometimes this support was tacit; for example, in 1798 the guild invoked precedent from the earlier era of Haibao’s patronage as Textile Commissioner to launch a revival of its mutual-aid dues system, which collected funds from working actors to give charitable support to destitute members of the profession.Footnote 53 At other times, Imperial Household intervention in guild activities was quite direct: the Textile Commissioner at least once removed the head of the guild (after being petitioned by members who had discovered the head embezzling Laolang Temple funds), and appointed someone else to replace him. This suggests that the guild had surrendered some of its internal self-governance to the Textile Commissioner, but also that guild leaders held their posts with the backing of this powerful Imperial Household officer.Footnote 54 Because actors, even skilled ones, were a group on the margins of society, barred from holding degrees or civil service offices and considered adjacent to (when not actually identical with) courtesans and other sex workers, the guild’s client relationship with the Imperial Household not only strengthened guild leaders’ authority in relation to its members, it also gave those members some promise of protection within a society that looked down on them, as when Textile Commissioner Haibao helped the actors escape abuse in 1735.Footnote 55
Diarist Gu Lu’s description raises another aspect of the relationship between the guild, Textile Commissioner, and theater community: “anyone belonging to the ranks of entertainers must first register his name at Laolang Temple.” Opera performers in a prosperous, thickly populated and theatrically inclined region like Jiangnan were enmeshed in a dense network of professional and familial connections. Teacher–student relationships, current and former troupe memberships, marriage and blood ties, and patronage relationships all wove together the sampling of Suzhou-native actors whose biographies Li Dou sketched in a collection of theater anecdotes in his late eighteenth century biji, Yangzhou huafang lu. Footnote 56 The Suzhou guild was a central anchor point for this region-wide network: the place where newly formed troupes were recognized, and where opera performers gathered to register their membership in the trade, venerate their founder deity, seek support in times of hardship, and discuss issues that affected the profession.
Between the centrality of Suzhou to the world of kunqu-style opera and the Suzhou theater guild’s unique client relationship with its imperial patron, the guild’s influence was not confined to the boundaries of the city and prefecture of Suzhou: by the mid-Qianlong period, and until well into the first half of the early nineteenth century, it was truly a regional organization in a way that no other theater guild of the time seems to have been. The wealthy nearby city of Yangzhou, for example, had a thriving theater scene with a Laolang Temple of its own, but that temple’s scope appears to have been strictly local, dealing with troupes who performed in Yangzhou city proper.Footnote 57 By contrast, donation records from the Suzhou guild’s 1783 renovations show contributions from actors and theater troupes not just in Suzhou, but across and beyond the Jiangnan region: in Yangzhou, Nanjing, Wuxi, Qingjiangpu, and Pizhou in northern Jiangsu; Anqing and Jiangzhen in Anhui; several sites in Zhejiang Province (including Hangzhou, Jiaxing, and Huzhou); and as far away as the northern end of the Grand Canal system in Tianjin.
Maintaining a good relationship with the guild in kunqu opera’s home city was important to these actors even as they lived and worked far away from that center. Many guild members living elsewhere were Suzhou natives, but there was more at work than just native-place affinity; social sanction and reward amongst one’s peers would have been quite powerful in a profession whose work was, by definition, collective. A single actor could hardly ply his trade without a troupe; troupes, meanwhile, needed to maintain cordial relations among themselves since actors moved between them, they often worked with the same playwrights, and they might refer other troupes for bookings they were too busy to take. This, too, helps explain why the actors who tried to leave the Textile Commission’s official troupe in the 1760s were in such difficulty: they not only needed to escape, they needed to do so on friendly terms, because irritating the Textile Commissioner might also cause trouble with the guild, and a bad relationship with the guild would affect their careers even if they left Suzhou to work elsewhere.
The Suzhou guild kept track of its members’ troupe affiliations, movements, and career activities even as they ranged within Suzhou city, around Suzhou’s hinterlands, and out to other cities like Nanjing, Yangzhou, and Qingjiangpu. All this information, gathered by the guild for its own purposes, was available to the Textile Commissioner as needed. Suzhou’s theater guild used its imperial backing to extend its influence throughout the Jiangnan region, and in return for that backing, the Imperial Household gained access to the expanded knowledge base and professional connections of the guild and its leadership.
By the time the Jiaqing emperor asked Shuming’a to look into rumors about the suspicious play The Cedar Garden of Longevity in 1807, the Suzhou Textile Commission already had ample experience putting its ties to the theater guild in service to the state’s desire to regulate both the contents of cultural production and the people who produced it. Two examples from within the Jiaqing emperor’s adult lifetime illustrate this well. In the early 1780s, at the midpoint of the Qianlong emperor’s literary inquisition, the emperor attempted to expand his surveillance and censorship of highbrow literary works to the humbler scripts of plays performed by working theater troupes. Of the many regional officials across the empire who received this order, only the Imperial Household officers in the Suzhou Textile Commission and the Yangzhou-based Lianghuai Salt Commission actually carried it out to a reasonable degree of success, by using the Textile Commission’s existing access to local networks and expertise to curate a trove of drama scripts from Suzhou shops, drama troupes, and opera teachers. Meanwhile, officials elsewhere, lacking the resources of well-organized and compliant local theater institutions like Suzhou’s guild, largely threw up their hands. They wrote to the emperor in desultory responses that entertainers in their jurisdictions moved around too much, did not use written script books, and in general were too hard to keep track of. They issued proclamations banning seditious theater, but most collected no more than a handful of tattered scripts.Footnote 58
Later, in the early Jiaqing reign, the court became freshly concerned about the spread and popularity of luantan 亂彈 operas. These were plays in styles other than kunqu and its close cousin yiqiang 弋腔—particularly clapper operas (bangzi qiang 梆子腔), like qinqiang 秦腔 opera from the empire’s northwest. Clapper operas were often raunchy in style and content, and they were difficult to regulate because their play repertoire was ever-changing and frequently orally transmitted, rather than recorded in written scripts officials could collect and censor.Footnote 59 Tasked with promulgating a 1798 edict banning performers in Suzhou City and its surrounding area from practicing luantan opera, the Textile Commission made the Laolang Temple guild its direct mouthpiece. Sixty-nine guild leaders and other influential members of the opera profession affixed their names to a stone inscription of this edict placed in the temple, committing themselves to the responsibility of carrying out the luantan prohibition.Footnote 60 While top–down attempts to eradicate luantan across the empire were, to put it mildly, unsuccessful in the longer term, in Suzhou the Textile Commission could make the assumption that the guild’s professional and social leverage would do at least some of the work to drive these unwanted opera styles out of sight and retrain or exclude the offending performers, without state authorities having to intervene directly.
The Textile Commission’s connection with the Laolang Temple guild is, in some respects, reminiscent of the relationship mid-Qing rulers wishfully envisioned between county-level magistrates and ordinary local communities, organized and channeled through respected community elders and the state-mandated baojia 保甲 mutual responsibility system and through patriarchal authority figures within each family. In both cases, community institutions functioned (or were supposed to function) as force-multipliers for the state, allowing it to tap into local information networks and harness the community’s power to enforce the state’s preferred behavioral norms. The theater guild’s history also echoes the state’s deputization of local gentry organizations to deal with public problems like management of local knowledge, water conservancy, and famine relief (and, eventually, even military defense), symbiotic relationships which became more prominent during the dynasty’s last century.Footnote 61
Yet there are critical differences as well. Unlike members of gentry groups, the Laolang Temple guild’s membership were of lowly social status and, despite exceptional cases of theater performers who amassed great personal wealth, were much more marginal economically than local elites who organized to compile gazetteers or mobilize labor for hydraulic management. The benefits of collaboration between the guild and the Textile Commission did flow both ways, but the relationship was nevertheless an extremely hierarchical one. Barred by their profession from ever holding examination degrees, guild leaders could not act as social peers of the officials with whom they collaborated, let alone hope to leverage their service into an official post or build a power base that could challenge the state’s authority. The guild could be a client to the Imperial Household, but never a potential rival or a strong center of local power, and this may help account for the willingness of officials even during the most autocratic years of the Qianlong reign to work through the guild while letting it retain much autonomy.
On the other hand, compared to the baojia and other local structures of mutual responsibility among humbler subjects of the state, the Suzhou theater guild stands out precisely because of its wealth of resources and its powerful backing. Any reader of Qing legal history—and, indeed, of the case files in the Shouzhou triple murder investigation—quickly notices how often baojia and family and community elders did not really have the access to (or inclination to report) local intelligence, or the capacity to enforce norms, that the state idealistically expected of them. For the most part, theirs was an un- or barely funded mandate, meant to expand the state’s capacity without increasing the size or cost of its bureaucratic corps; as the empire’s population grew, that capacity had become ever more thinly spread. By contrast, the Imperial Household invested in the Laolang Temple guild, cultivating the relationship with each donation to the temple, each performance it sponsored locally, and each new cohort of actors and families sent to Beijing. These were investments in wealth and authority, but also in expertise: the Textile Commission’s staff needed to understand the particular conditions of the guild in order to work with it. Moreover, the Textile Commission did not try to dictate the guild’s structure from the top down, as the state did with the baojia system, but rather invested in an existing organization which grew in influence as a result of that investment. The development of this unusual arrangement may have been more accidental and contingent than deliberate, but by 1807 the Textile Commission office knew how to draw on the guild’s surveillance and management capacity and what sort of results it could expect from doing so.
Return to the Cedar Garden of Longevity
To resolve the theater question in the Shouzhou case, the Textile Commission would have to flex this ability to gather information and intervene at ground level within the Jiangnan opera community. The Jiaqing emperor seems to have been confident it could indeed do so. His immediate response, on learning about the rumored seditious play in the spring of 1807, was to order Textile Commissioner Shuming’a to investigate the news, directing him to report back with copies of the script and a detailed account of its composition. Just five days after receiving that edict from Beijing, Shuming’a did indeed dispatch a lengthy memorial with testimony from the leaders of the opera troupe in question and from one of the original playwrights, followed in the next few weeks by the full sixteen-act script of The Cedar Garden of Longevity. Footnote 62
This feat of imperial micromanagement was made possible by the longstanding, tight relationship between the Textile Commission and the theater guild. Because of its jurisdiction over the guild, Shuming’a’s office had already heard of Cedar Garden of Longevity half a year earlier, within a month of its stage debut at the start of the summer theater season in 1806. This was indeed right around the time Governor-General Tiebao was wrapping up the Shouzhou investigation and writing his final report to send up to the capital. Even without suspecting deliberate political manipulation, Shuming’a ordered the play banned immediately, since it clearly contained references to the Shouzhou scandal (a poisoning, a lawsuit, the unsubtle title) and he knew well that current affairs were a forbidden subject matter for theater. The ban was effective; in all, Cedar Garden of Longevity had less than twenty performances before Shuming’a shut it down.
As a result, when Shuming’a received the new edict demanding an investigation in the spring of 1807, the Textile Commission already knew that a theater company called the Entwined Fragrances Troupe (Jie fang ban 結芳班) was responsible for the play, and even knew the names of the troupe’s leaders, Zhou Tingyu 周廷玉 and Qian Baiyuan 錢百元.Footnote 63 In fact, this opera troupe seems to have been a well-established one; a group with the same name had donated to the 1783 Laolang Temple renovations nearly twenty-five years earlier. Zhou Tingyu also appears on that same inscription as an individual donor, so by 1807 he must himself have been a well-known face in the guild, an old hand with much experience at co-existing with both the guild and its Imperial Household backers.Footnote 64 Once Shuming’a had identified this troupe as the one referenced in the emperor’s edict, he was also quickly able to ascertain that they were outside of Suzhou City at the moment, performing around nearby Wujiang County—the sort of information the theater guild would have tracked as a matter of routine. Just two days after Shuming’a received the emperor’s edict, Textile Commission subordinates delivered the Entwined Fragrances Troupe’s two leaders, Zhou Tingyu and Qian Baiyuan, to Shuming’a’s yamen back in town. The frightened actors named the playwrights responsible for composing Cedar Garden of Longevity. One of the two writers was away in Hangzhou at the moment, but the other, sixty-five-year-old Mao Wenlong 毛文隆, was found and brought in for questioning that very same day.Footnote 65
Mao Wenlong explained that playwriting was a side hustle; his primary occupation was teaching basic literary skills to schoolboys in Suzhou. Both jobs made use of the classical education he had received as a young man, though neither was particularly lucrative: for each performance of one of his plays, he received six qian of silver.Footnote 66 In another life, someone with Mao’s background, somewhat educated but neither wealthy nor a serious candidate for the state examinations, might as easily have become a “litigation master” like the ones embroiled in the other side of the Shouzhou investigation. In this life, like many other paid playwrights producing “new” plays for the notoriously novelty-hungry audiences of the Suzhou region, Mao Wenlong patch-wrote his works by combining bits and pieces from existing plays and stitching them together with a few new compositions. For actors as well as for writers, a lightly rewritten old play would be much quicker and easier to prepare in comparison to an all-new composition, since not all actors were literate and most worked from memory. According to playwright Mao, far from being the fruit of subterfuge among government officials, the ripped-from-the-headlines elements of Cedar Garden of Longevity were entirely his own idea, a marketing ploy which the leaders of the Entwined Fragrances Troupe enthusiastically embraced as well. Most of the play, Mao told the Textile Commission interrogators, was simply a thinly veiled reworking of the old standard Leifeng Pagoda 雷峰塔, with its mythical characters like the God of Longevity, White Crane Immortal, and snake spirits in human form. Mao and his co-author had wedged Kuang Zhong into the story and salted two or three scenes in the script with just enough topical references to the Shouzhou case to lure audiences. Mao’s testimony does not suggest which position, if any, Cedar Garden of Longevity took on the Zhang family’s guilt or innocence, nor Zhou E’s virtues as a magistrate.Footnote 67
To round out Mao’s confession, Shuming’a was also able to pull together a full script from the actors’ working playbooks, even compelling them to reconstruct from memory some of the scenes that had been lost after the play’s abrupt cancellation. Moreover, the Textile Commission’s standing requirement that theater troupes formally request leave from the Laolang Temple guild any time they left Suzhou to perform elsewhere meant that Shuming’a could confirm the Entwined Fragrances Troupe had not, in fact, been anywhere near Qingjiangpu during the period Governor General Tiebao was re-examining the triple murder case there.Footnote 68 Mao Wenlong’s testimony and the script of The Cedar Garden of Longevity (now lost) seem to have allayed the Jiaqing emperor’s anxiety about the play. He did ask, in a grumbling vermilion rescript, why Shuming’a had not reported about the play when he first discovered it half a year ago, but Shuming’a’s formulaic apology for this “muddled and overcautious” oversight was sufficient to close the matter.
Could there still have been chicanery at play here? Many other modern accounts of the Shouzhou case find this anticlimactic resolution of the theater subplot unsatisfying. Popular articles and fiction unsurprisingly emphasize the conspiracy angle and de-emphasize the eventual conclusion that there really was not much of a conspiracy. Even theater scholar Peng Qiuxi, who does not see connivance by Zhou E or other officials in the play’s composition, still suspects that Shuming’a initially avoided reporting The Cedar Garden of Longevity to the emperor in the summer of 1806 because he feared the consequences of stepping into the sensitive Shouzhou investigation. Yet it seems at least equally likely the play just did not appear very remarkable to Shuming’a at the time; at that point the official corruption element of the Shouzhou case had not yet become news, and plays with novel, newsy additions were apparently quite common fare in Suzhou. Because only a partial script of the play was recovered in 1807, Peng also guesses that the Entwined Fragrances Troupe destroyed the most incriminating scenes before the Textile Commission got to them, then substituted more innocuous material when they were asked to recreate the lost scenes from memory, but there is no particular evidence for this theory. On the contrary, fragmentary playbooks were a common problem for officials trying to monitor the content of drama, as the Qianlong emperor had discovered in the 1780s. Most working scripts were hand-copied, and even literate members of theater companies would typically have worked from partial copies that included only their own scenes and lines, plus a few necessary cues. Troupes like Entwined Fragrances were itinerant; life on the road would not have been conducive to preserving scripts for a play that could not be performed again in any case. Any serious attempt to cover up incriminating details of the play’s contents would have a doubtful prospect of success, given that traveling opera troupes in this prosperous region generally employed a sizeable number of actors and crew, and that before its cancellation The Cedar Garden of Longevity had over a dozen public performances with plenty of witnesses present.
One suspects this anticlimactic resolution was probably also unsatisfying to the Jiaqing emperor, who was prepared to find in The Cedar Garden of Longevity “smoking gun” proof of Suzhou prefect Zhou E’s malfeasance. Instead, the emperor and his trusted investigators, Anhui governor Chu Pengling and Vice-Minister Yulin, had to be content with more circumstantial evidence of Zhou E’s incompetence, partiality, and susceptibility to manipulation. Zhou E and Changzhou county magistrate Zhao Tang were still punished; both were relieved of office and sentenced to hard labor in Ili. But despite the emperor’s ire at these incompetent local magistrates, when Yulin reported that Zhou E indeed denied being responsible for the suspicious play, he and the emperor both accepted that denial.Footnote 69 The Jiaqing emperor seemingly chose to trust information uncovered by his subject specialists in the Imperial Household, even when it conflicted with his gut reaction and with the Qing legal system’s preference for tying off loose ends.
The Cedar Garden of Longevity may have been a dead end in the Shouzhou corruption investigation, but the affair of the play illustrates many features of the state’s unique relationship to the theater marketplace and community of the Jiangnan region: the yearly cycle of local itinerant theater troupes, the commercial demand for new and appealing (albeit derivative) entertainments, and, most importantly for the present purpose, the occasionally pointed, always-present possibility of surveillance exercised over all of it by the Imperial Household, through the appendages of the Textile Commissioner’s office and the theater guild. In investigating the rumor of the suspicious play, Shuming’a made use of his office’s influence over the guild in many ways: the routine awareness of which new plays were circulating; the capacity to effectively enforce controls over what plays were performed, at least within the city and its immediate surroundings (a power that often eluded regular county and prefectural officials in other parts of the empire); the ability to identify and track down specific troupes and performers as they moved through space, even on very short notice; and enough technical understanding of the opera world to recognize the plausibility of playwright Mao Wenlong’s testimony and communicate it back to Beijing in a way the Emperor and the officials of the Grand Council could easily understand. In contrast to the convoluted four-year unwinding of the original triple murder case, the Textile Commission’s investigation of the suspicious play appears downright breezy, but the apparent ease of the task is belied by the well-developed organizational machinery behind it.
Conclusions
The comic play-within-a-play that is the Cedar Garden of Longevity incident strikes an incongruously light note against the deadly serious drama of the larger triple murder investigation. Unlike the main case (in which sentencing recommendations ran to nearly two thousand characters in one of Chu Pengling’s memorials), no one involved in the opera kerfuffle seems to have been executed, exiled, or even seriously punished; the Textile Commission detained the principals while it waited to hear back from Beijing whether anything further was to be done with them, and then, having given them a good scare, presumably released them to go back to their lives on and off the theater stages of the Jiangnan region. Yet things could very easily have ended otherwise for these denizens of the theater world who had unwarily stepped into the middle of a snakes’ nest of official anxieties and paranoias. The Jiaqing emperor and his officials were so preoccupied with their worries about official malfeasance and the constant potential for critical, but demonstrably fragile, structures of government fact-finding and communication to break down or become corrupted that they were prepared to see monsters in every shadow. Meanwhile, Zhou Tingyu, Qian Baiyuan, Mao Wenlong, and the other members of the Entwined Fragrances opera troupe who inadvertently cast this shadow did not even realize they might be putting themselves in danger of being mistaken for monsters—or at least, not for monsters any more frightening than the minor goblins that elite notions of morality always made performing artists out to be. The interlocking mechanisms of the theater guild and the Textile Commission arguably placed these men in danger by bringing them within such easy reach of the state. But those mechanisms also protected the artists by quickly producing evidence of their (relative) innocence, evidence that Shuming’a and the emperor felt they could trust because they understood and were in control of its source.
In effect, then, the Textile Commission managed to realize, on a very small scale, a symbiosis of state and social institutions which ambitious late imperial rulers like the Qianlong emperor could otherwise only dream about. In the theater world of Jiangnan, an organ of imperial rule operated comfortably hand-in-glove with a grassroots organization created and largely managed by and for the community in question. This organization, the theater guild, was headed by respected senior members of that community who could interpret insider knowledge of their world for the state’s baffled agents and vice versa, and it was apparently quite effective at keeping track of members of the community and holding them answerable when necessary, either internally or in cooperation with the state. These were all functions that emperors and officials also sought—often with much less success—in systems like the baojia and the structures of the patriarchal family.
All this is not to suggest that the Imperial Household was by any means cleaner-handed or less prone to corruption than the regular bureaucracy; if anything, its upper ranks of bannermen and imperial bondservants were even more subject to the personalist, patronage-based politics that Philip Kuhn identified as a major source of emperors’ problems holding provincial bureaucrats accountable.Footnote 70 Its entanglements with the empire’s economy meant that temptations to graft were endemic, from the highest ranks of officers all the way down to the lowliest gardeners. But this case adds to the body of evidence that it did command information and organize people in a distinctive way. To say that the Imperial Household’s officers were concerned with expertise and technical knowledge is not an argument that they were exactly “technocrats” in the modern sense. Dorothy Ko draws a productive distinction between the technocratic “rule of ‘science’ and experts in modern society” and the “materialist” ruling style of Qing emperors and their subordinates, epitomized by the managerial staff of the Imperial Household. These Qing “materialists” were deeply concerned with the skills and knowledge of craft (practical subjects outside the conventional Confucian curriculum) because they promised control over material processes that supplied the royal household and kept the empire’s resources properly managed.Footnote 71 The present study suggests that “material” processes and technical knowledge also implicated some fields of practical expertise, like theater performance, that straddled the line between the material and the transient. Ko, Martina Siebert, and Kai Jun Chen, in another essay which hints that despite its distinctly early-modern motives the Imperial Household could in some ways have been the most managerially “modern” part of the Qing state, also suggest that in the workings of the palace machine “such mundane attributes as technical expertise and managerial skills became coextensive with political power.”Footnote 72 In this case from the Suzhou theater, that relationship between knowledge-making and power is unusually clear, with craft-centric knowledge of the theater realm put to direct use in the realm of law enforcement.
By contrast, we might consider the potential sources of social enforcement and surveillance in the Shouzhou Zhang family’s orbit, including their local baojia organization, father Zhang Tiwen and eldest brother Zhang Xiulun as patriarchs of the family, their fellow gentry in Shouzhou and their many educated friends and peers throughout the Jiangnan region. The tides of statecraft thought in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries cast up varying conclusions about which of these social authorities was, or should be, most trusted for which purposes, but at least in theory all were supposed to transmit moral instruction and provide accountability. In the real world, though, baojia, patriarchs, and gentry peers tried but failed to restrain Zhang Dayou’s sexual transgressions, turned a blind eye to incest and murder, and in some cases actively helped family and friends cover up these crimes. If the state in 1803–1807 had been able to access and trust any institution or group as a reliable source of insider knowledge about the Zhang family’s circles to the degree it trusted the Suzhou theater guild, the Shouzhou murder investigation would surely have unfolded very differently. The theater world of Jiangnan was hardly a utopia for its denizens, but from the perspective of the state it was surprisingly more transparent, accessible, and manageable than the world of respectable people like the Zhangs.
Setting incest and arsenic to one side, the ideal local personage whom a Qing magistrate would want to trust and rely upon surely looked a lot more like the martial degree-holder and wealthy gentry scion Zhang Dayou than like the kunqu troupe leader Zhou Tingyu, or even the playwright and petty scholar Mao Wenlong. Yet, together with their networks of professional learning and practice (a trait they shared with many other skilled trades learned by apprenticeship), it was precisely the theater workers’ lowly social status and circumscribed professional world that likely made their guild such an effective asset for the Textile Commission. Compared to these entertainers, the social groups with whom the Jiaqing emperor, his nineteenth-century successors, and their government officials most wanted and needed to interface—the educated, those who held degrees and spoke the language of government, the wealthy and landed—were better respected, better connected, and less vulnerable to social and economic pressure. Meanwhile, even the common subjects the state sought to manage through moral suasion and collective responsibility systems like the baojia still outranked these entertainers in the social hierarchy, and vastly outnumbered them to boot. The investment of resources and expertise that the Imperial Household sank into cultivating the Laolang Temple guild was practicable (for a time) because this relatively small, lowly community also supplied a specific service the palace needed; though effective, it could not have been scaled up to meet the huge and growing mass of the empire’s population.
The success of the Textile Commission in penetrating one particular corner of the Jiangnan cultural labor marketplace, set against the four tangled years of the Shouzhou murder investigation, throws into paradoxical relief the challenges the Jiaqing emperor and his bureaucracy faced in trying to keep the state running in a period of increasing stresses. Parts of the Qing state were indeed capable of extraordinary feats of information-gathering, from tracking the fleeing Zhang Dayou across the breadth of Anhui to peering into the pockets of humble sorts like Mao Wenlong and Zhou Tingyu. But these startlingly precise surveillance successes also remind us, as they reminded the Jiaqing emperor, how much more information lay beyond the state’s grasp—a problem that would only become clearer as the nineteenth century wore onward.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
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