Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768 by Philip A. Kuhn Read Free Book Online Page B

these conditions meant for his home county of Hsiao-shan
(adjacent to Hangchow, and a scene of soulstealing panic twenty years
later): "When the rice price was up to 16o copper cash for one peck,
all the grass roots and tree bark were eaten. In places where there
was powdery sand, people unearthed it to eat and called it `Buddha's
Sand,' though some died of it.""
    This was no short-term problem; rice prices continued to rise
during the second half of the eighteenth century. Yet their effect on
local society was apparently buffered by a rise in the money supply.
Beginning in the 176os, the opening of silver mines in Annam by
Chinese entrepreneurs, as well as a quickening influx of Mexican
silver coins in payment for Chinese goods, swelled the supply of
silver. One authority estimates that China's silver supply rose by some
274 million Mexican dollars in the period 1752-18oo.'9 But it was
after the 176os that the silver influx was most profuse, as can be seen
in the record of silver imports:LO

    The decreasing availability of silver in the early Ch'ien-lung period
may have made it harder to sustain living standards in the face of
population growth. The marked increase beginning in the 176os and
gathering force in the 1780s probably made it possible, for a time,
to realize prosperity despite intense crowding. Yet the benefits of
silver trickled only slowly into local society. For the lower Yangtze,
the turnabout seems to have occurred around 1780. For that crucial
region, at least, qualitative evidence suggests that the celebrated eighteenth-century "prosperity" cannot have begun much earlier than that
date. Our Hsiao-shan informant, Wang Hui-tsu, goes on to say, "For
more than a decade before 1792, rice prices stayed high. [Yet] when
one peck cost 200 copper cash, people thought it was cheap. In 1792,
when one peck cost 330-340 copper cash, people still enjoyed life."
How could this be explained? Wang believed that it was because the
inflation after about 1780 was not confined to population-sensitive
rice prices, but extended to all commodities: when rice prices had
been high in the past, other commodities were not affected, "while
today 117941, everything including fish, shrimp, and fruit, is expensive. Therefore, even small peddlers and rural laborers can make
ends meet."21 One explanation for this turnaround is an increase in
the supply of money in general. With more money in everyone's
hands, sellers could charge more for goods of all kinds.22 Though
the evidence is still sparse, Wang's account adds convincing local
substance to inferences from silver-supply data.
    More research will be needed before we can understand fully how men's awareness of their social surroundings was shaped by eighteenth-century economic change, particularly population growth and
the availability of money. We must get the periodization right: what
temporal shifts made people aware of changes in their life chances?
If Wang Hui-tsu's sense of the timing turns out to be right, then what
we are seeing after 178o is but a brief felicity. The real prosperity of
the Prosperous Age extended from the 178os until the mid-i8ios
(when a worldwide shortage of silver decreased foreign capacity to
buy Chinese goods-at about the same time that opium imports
created a catastrophic outflow of silver, causing the nationwide distress that we have always associated with the beginning of the modern
period).23 If so, then the soulstealing crisis occurred just before the
increased money supply had begun to relieve the burden of population pressure in the fourth quarter of the eighteenth century. Rice
prices in the lower Yangtze were still weighing heavily on commoners'
lives in an overcrowded society. In 1768, the outer world had only
just begun to pay the bill for China's population boom.

    Uneven Development
    If the highly developed Hangchow region saw some hard times
before the 178os, what of the outlying mountainous