Because of scarcity, ignorance, and human weakness, we are anxious, panicked, and will face it for a long time in the face of unknowns and variables.
Looking back at the ridiculous scene that makes people laugh today, it is indeed the real experience at that time, and the absurd words ooze bitter tears. Maybe we're not so ignorant compared to the past, but after many years, looking back at the present, are all kinds of strange things just as funny? No matter how wonderful ** is, it can't match the absurdity of reality. The Qin people did not have time to mourn themselves and later generations mourned them, and later generations mourned them without learning from them, and also made future generations mourn for future generations.
In 1768, the 33rd year of Qianlong, under the prosperity of Kangqian and Qian, after the Great Voyage, the crops introduced in the Americas were widely planted, **inflow, although the price **, but the living was also improved, and the population also exceeded 100 million for the first time at this time. However, under the beautiful scenery, rumors spread quietly.
In the same year, the excessive population growth had made the limited land and Chinese society at that time unable to carry it, and more and more people were forced to abandon agriculture and become wandering beggars.
At this time, although the economic development of the Jiangnan area is rapid, and the economy and culture have ranked first in the country, the density of population and the gap between the rich and the poor have brought about a drawback, and the news spreads very quickly. For most of the people who could not survive at that time, they had to shave their hair and beg everywhere as monks, also known as beggars, and the number of monks and beggars along the road continued to increase, and the bureaucracy of the time failed to manage these floating populations, and they became natural message communicators.
At this time, the society, whether it is economic or cultural, is changing, impacted, people have never been afraid of stability, and the unknown changes make people anxious, the familiar society is no longer familiar, and the surrounding instability factors make urban and rural residents feel uneasy.
In the midst of this general unrest, in Deqing County, 60 kilometers north of Hangzhou, Zhejiang, a stonemason surnamed Wu was hired by the government to repair a collapsed water gate. A strange farmer handed him a rolled-up note with the names of the farmer's two nephews. Farmers were told that the stonemason would drive pieces of paper with the names of the living into wooden stakes and borrow the souls of the living to inject spiritual energy into the project, a spell known as "soul calling." The person who was called the soul died inexplicably because of the loss of spirit.
The stonemason reported the farmer, and the farmer was punished by the government. And this trivial matter, in the months that followed, became the source of this great national panic.
The false news spread from Deqing to Hangzhou, and then spread throughout the south of the Yangtze River to Shandong and Zhili. It is firmly believed that there is a group of demons who are cutting their hair and ...... the corners of their clothesStealing people's souls through their names.
People are panicking, looking for ways to fight witchcraft, and wary of every stranger around them. More and more strange beggars were suspected of witchcraft and were caught by local officials one after another. The officials demanded no benefits, they were tortured, and the beggars had to admit their crimes.
Subsequently, the incident continued to ferment, more and more monks and beggars were arrested, and more and more criminals confessed, confirming the existence of witchcraft.
As the supreme ruler, Qianlong reprimanded his ministers for their perfunctory rebuke and ordered them to purge demons and rebels. As a result, the magistrate had to step up the investigation and torture to extract confessions, and the situation became even worse. A passing monk was arrested, tortured, and forced to confess that he was a soul demon after only asking for the name of a child.
This is the government side, and when it comes to the people, they are making their own calculations. People who have always wanted to settle old grudges or seek personal gain seize this opportunity to impose the crime of "soul calling" on their opponents, fabricate evidence, and submit it to the government.
So far, many beggars, monks, and innocent people have been lynched to death or died tragically in prison. The chaos lasted until the end of the year, when the ministers of the Military Aircraft Department began to discover that most of the confessions in the chaotic cases of braiding were contradictory and suspicious, and the investigation continued, but the truth was that "the gangsters privately used their father's wealth and wife to spend nothing, so they cut their braids themselves, pretending that they had been cut and their money and belongings were also taken away by others." There were even naughty children who skipped school and cut their braids in an attempt not to go to the library.
They began to feel the absurdity of this chaos and eventually reported it to the emperor. At the end of the year, the purge-out decree was revoked, the monks detained in prison were quickly released, and the endless "soul-calling cases" in various places were closed like rolling soup and snow.
At this point, the farce of "calling souls" that had tormented the empire for more than half a year came to an end, and they dispersed.
In this case, the reaction of the rulers, the bureaucracy, and the reaction of the people are all worth playing, and such an event has actually happened more than once in history, and this year's event is clearly described in the book "Calling the Soul: The Great Witchcraft Panic in China in 1768" by the foreign sinologist Kong Feili.
The first sentence of the opening sentence of "Calling the Soul": "1768, the eve of China's tragic modern era", to the last word, does not say that this "tragedy" has ended.
And even now, the custom of "calling the soul" may still exist. Time is changing, history is changing, the vicissitudes of life, people are very stable.