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the accuser, free the defendants, and thus
warn the public against irresponsible talk and lawless violence.
    The costs of hindering the public's effort to protect itself against
sorcery, however, might be considerable. Examples from other cultures show how deeply compromised are agnostic or unbelieving
governments that prohibit antisorcery violence among their subjects.
Navahos complain that not only do the white authorities forbid them
to kill witches; they even "fail to punish people for the worst crime
we know."28 Modern governments in East Africa have suppressed
popular antisorcery measures (such as the poison ordeal) at the cost
of accusations that they "have aligned themselves on the side of
evil."2'' From the standpoint of the state's public image, perhaps the
cleverest solution is one reported from Uganda. Under the British
protectorate, a law existed to punish those who "pretend" to be
sorcerers (in order to threaten rivals or project a fearsome reputation). Here the state does not admit to believing in the substance of
sorcery and maintains it is contending only with the pretense of it.
Yet ordinary Ugandans fail to distinguish between pretending to be
a sorcerer and actually being one; consequently, suspected sorcerers
can be haled before civil authorities and jailed.25 As we shall see, such
agnosticism has some parallels in the antisorcery provisions of the
Ch'ing Code.
    Be that as it may, provincial bureaucrats must have considered that
their courtrooms had worked quite smoothly in the cases of early 1768. The false charges against mason Wu and the machinations of
the corrupt constable Ts'ai had been exposed. In the Hsu-k'ou-chen
and Soochow incidents, those falsely accused had been released, and
the public had been duly warned against rash accusations. Though
lynchings of vagrant suspects would eventually come to Peking's
notice when the homicide convictions were automatically reviewed
by the Throne, there had as yet been no case of' actual sorcery that
was worth troubling His Majesty about.

    Yet fear of sorcery remained deeply embedded in the public mind.
Was there no protection against this scourge? How little the public
had been reassured! By June 21 the panic had broken out of the
lower Yangtze provinces and had spread five hundred miles upriver
to the prefectural city of Hanyang: there a large crowd at a street
opera seized a suspected soulstealer, beat him to death, and burned
his corpse.26

     

CHAPTER 2
The Prosperous Age
    Sorcery panic struck China's last imperial dynasty, not during its
waning days, but at the height of its celebrated "Prosperous Age"
(sheng-shih, a conventional slogan that often adorned official documents as a talisman of benign rule). Sorcery's dread image was
refracted through every social stratum. It overspread provinces with
a total population much larger than the entire population of Europe
at the time, and cost many lives and careers. Altogether, though, the
damage to human life was slight compared to the great witch scares
of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. Why the damage was
so limited is as curious a question as why the scare arose in the first
place.
    That a whole society could envisage the threat, that lowly and lofty
could sense the same emergency, suggests a cultural network densely
twined. But the vision struck peasant, bureaucrat, and emperor in
different ways, according to the preoccupations that ruled their several ways of life. The case suggests both unity and diversity: a nation
in which events at the highest and lowest levels affected each other
intimately, but in which society's prism refracted the soulstealing idea
in various hues.
    The Gilded Age of Hungli
    The economic triumphs of the eighteenth century were founded on
domestic peace. The last major fighting within China proper had ended in 1681 when emperor Hungli's imperial grandfather crushed
the Rebellion of the Three Feudatories. The coastal