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frontier was
secured in 1683 when Ch'ing forces conquered Taiwan. Peace nourished China's greatest period of demographic and commercial expansion, but the roots of this expansion dated from before the Manchu
conquest. By the seventeenth century, new crops from the Americas
(maize, sweet potatoes, peanuts, and tobacco, crops that could be
grown on dry uplands) were already sown on the nonirrigable hillsides by settlers flocking to China's internal frontiers. By the late
seventeenth century, the aggregate depopulation of the conquest
years was already made good, and the stage was set for the population
explosion of modern times. In the course of the eighteenth century,
the population is thought to have doubled. To serve these growing
masses, there emerged a dense network of rural markets. Not urbanization, but a proliferation of dusty (or muddy) local market towns
put virtually every Chinese peasant in touch with regional systems of
trade. Money was everywhere: silver from Spanish America promoted the free sale of land and labor. Commercial energy and population growth were creating a society that contemporary Westerners
(whose industrial revolution was still in its cradle) considered vigorous
and stable.' This is the society over which spread, in the early spring
of 1768, the shadow of sorcery.

    An Encouraging Story
    Writing about eighteenth-century society has been a buoyant experience for Chinese historians, more inspiring than relating the decline
and disruption, futility and weakness, of the period after 18oo.2
Eighteenth-century Chinese, whose genius for commerce and enterprise was sustained by firm and effective government, were admired
by the world. The tone of social historical writing has been bright,
even celebratory. Western historians too have caught the enthusiasm
as they have explored this "new and higher form of economic
activity."'
    Researchers have indeed painted a flourishing economic landscape.
The bustling eighteenth-century commerce had roots before the
Ch'ing conquest: an expanded money supply, in both the silver and
copper components of China's bimetallic currency, nourished an
expanding domestic trade that overflowed the boundaries of China's
major economic regions. Monetary expansion benefited from imports of precious metals and from their increased domestic production.
Silver and copper streamed into China in exchange for her silk, tea,
porcelains, and other products desired by the outer world. Exchange
grew more efficient, farmers could specialize in cash crops, and handicraft industries grew rapidly. The government took advantage of all
this liquidity to carry out major tax reforms.4 This expansive scene,
already visible in the late sixteenth century, was redrawn on an even
grander scale as the nation recovered from the turmoil of the Ming
collapse and Manchu conquest. The mild but persistent rise in prices
that accompanied the influx of silver was generally good for economic
growth: farmers could sell their grain more profitably and could pay
their taxes more easily. Investors flourished in the long period of
eighteenth-century inflation.5 Such is our picture of a vigorous, bustling age. To understand the background of the i 768 crisis, however,
it will be important to explore its effects on social attitudes, a subject
we still know very little about. The place to begin is the region of the
lower Yangtze, where the soulstealing crisis began.

    The Society of the Lower Yangtze
    The area known as Kiangnan ("south of the river") in east-central
China formed the prosperous core of what we now call the lower
Yangtze macroregion. On the provincial map, this core included
southern Kiangsu, a corner of eastern Anhwei, and northern Che-
kiang.6 It is in this setting, the most highly developed of China's
economic regions, that the eighteenth-century commercial expansion
is most often described. For three-quarters of a millennium it had
been China's most