Free Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768 by Philip A. Kuhn

satisfaction. Perhaps it is the bleak
smile of recognition: that great enterprises are laid low by the pettiness of the men who serve them, that the pettiness of many will
always overbalance the greatness of one, that to sow in joy is to reap
in tears.
    If any monarch was carefully groomed for rule, it was Hungli. As
a boy, his imperial grandfather adored him, as much for his coolness
and pluck as for his evident intelligence. His father, Injen (the Yungcheng emperor), secretly named him heir-apparent as soon as he
himself acceded to the throne in 1723, in order to spare the regime
a vicious succession struggle like the one he had recently fought and
won. Injen had confronted a grim scene when he took power: a
polity demoralized by factional fighting among the entourages of
rival imperial princes. His response had been to secure his personal
position by stripping the Manchu aristocracy of its military powers,
and to bring the fractious bureaucracy to heel through rigorous
discipline. To tighten security and centralize imperial control, he
introduced a confidential communication system that was managed
by a new high-level advisory committee, the Grand Council. To
rationalize the finance of local government. and thereby reduce corruption, he replaced informal tax-surcharges with a new system of
public levies. These accomplishments of Injen, stern rationalizer and
masterful institution-builder, were presented to the twenty-five-year old Hungli on his succession to the throne in October 1735. Compared with how his father had got it, Hungli was handed the empire
on a platter.'

    Hungli (1711-1799) in middle age.

    Upon his succession, Hungli named his reign-period "Ch'ien-lung."
Although this is not susceptible of literal translation, an imperial edict
explained that the new sovereign had received the "munificent (lung)
aid of Heaven (ch'ien)" and that he would labor with "solemn dedication (ch'ien-t'i)" to further the purposes of his imperial father's
"splendid legacy."`' In fact, Hungli's reign saw the gradual dissipation
of that legacy. This cannot fairly be laid to lack of solemn dedication,
but to problems peculiar to the age.3 Injen had faced direct challenges
to his personal security, but Hungli faced subtler ones. Although he
did not have to confront a contentious aristocracy, he had to wrestle
daily with an official establishment that had become expert in finding
quiet ways to protect and enrich itself. The age was one of surface
amity between conquerors and conquered, signified by the monarch's
own ostentatious sheen of Chinese culture and his patronage of arts
and letters. The Manchu elite had learned to cope with Chinese elite
culture, even as the Han elite had come to acquiesce in Manchu
overlordship. Yet this dulling of cultural distinctions had its price,
and Hungli suspected that his Manchu compatriots were now but
feeble support for his imperial supremacy. This slow, quiet dissipation
of Manchu hegemony was a threat impossible to ignore but hard to
grasp effectively. And beneath the surface of politics sounded those
great engines of historic change, commercial vitality and human
fertility.
    Material for Hungli's biography is so overwhelming that the job
may never be done." To penetrate his ghostwriters and reach the
man himself, there is no escape from reading the monarch's own
comments, instructions, and obiter dicta, jotted in vermilion ink upon
reports as he read them and now preserved in the imperial archives.5
This can of course be done only in the context of events. If the events
of the soulstealing crisis contribute to such a biography, it will be by
showing (wherever possible through documentation in his own hand)
how Hungli reacted to certain problems that he perceived to be particularly troublesome: chief among them, sedition and assimilation.
    Perceptions of Treason
    After the thirteenth century, all China's ruling dynasties originated
in conquest: no