The History of China - #258 - Strange Tales VIII: Beyond the Veil

Episode Date: October 8, 2023

A panoply of season spookiness for your yearly, ear-ly shocks and delights! 0:00:44 - "The Secrets of Hanlin Academy" - Old haunts have many mysteries contained within, some best left alone... 0:04:55 - "Meat Vegetables" - You are what you eat... 0:08:30 - "The Appearance of the Sha" - Sometimes they come back... 0:16:10 - "What Qi Becomes" - ... And sometimes they want more than what you're willing to give... 0:21:02 - "That Which Remains" - Justice is swiftly forgotten; injustice frequently lasts beyond the grave... 0:25:05 - "A Conversation With a Friend About the End of Things" - What do we leave behind? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast. The French Revolution set Europe ablaze. It was an age of enlightenment and progress, but also of tyranny and oppression. It was an age of glory and an age of tragedy. One man stood above it all. This was the Age of Napoleon. I'm Everett Rummage, host of the Age of Napoleon podcast. Join me as I examine the life and times of one of the most fascinating and enigmatic

characters in modern history. Look for the Age of Napoleon wherever you find your podcasts. Hello and welcome to the History of China. Episode 258, Strange Tales 8, Beyond the Veil. Of course, there are strange things in this world of ours, for which there is not yet a theory. As for those who insist all principles of existence have been discovered, and that all phenomena have been recorded? Come now. They are simply being ridiculous. Ji-yoon, Investigator of the Strange, 1724-1805 The Sec leading to Hanlin Academy's main hall has been closed for so long

that it's sealed shut with a crust of bird feces, rust, and autumnal debris. It will remain so in the future, no matter what, because if it is opened, it is said that tragedy will fall upon the school's senior scholar. Only once since I have been involved with Hanlin has this prohibition been tested. During a 1773 inspection, Prince Zijun refused to use a lesser door and demanded that the large center door be unsealed. Soon thereafter, both Director Liu Wenzheng and his assistant died. Then, there's the sandy embankment built in front of the academy to protect its scholars and manuscripts from floodwaters. Whoever built it planted strange, smooth balls of hardened earth into the dirt, as if they are occult artifacts of some kind.

Or maybe the balls formed themselves over time through a mysterious alchemical process, perhaps one related to thwarted floodwaters or drownings. Whatever the case, if the stone-like balls are broken, even by accident, harm too will befall the teachers in the academy. During the flood season that ran from the summer of 1763 into early 1764, the waters that hurled themselves against the embankment exposed a ball. A child then, perhaps innocently, perhaps not, flung the ball against the ground where it cracked open like an egg. As a result, my senior colleague Wu Yunyan abruptly died. Since then, we've all been careful to sh shoot interlopers away from the embankment.

Opening certain things, breaking certain things, these have both been proven to be great dangers at Hanlin, and the distinction between the teachers, the land, and the architecture to be far less than one might imagine. As well, where one sits at Hanlin can also be fraught with peril. For example, if a faculty member's parents are still living, he should avoid the southwest corner of the Yuanxin Pavilion. The scholar Lu Arshan laughed when he was warned of this, thinking it nonsense.

He sat in the pavilion without the least bit of concern. But when his father died not long afterwards, his cries were heartbreaking. These are just three examples of the many taboos associated with the academy. Sometimes, I think that perhaps the taboos are the main point of Hanlin. Or, to put it another way, I sometimes think that the connections between things that initially seemed to have no connection, and the generation of rules based on the perception of those connections, may be the deepest lesson taught. Indeed,

similar institutions also have their lists of unexpected relationships and consequent taboos. This is not to say, however, that I fully understand the principles involved, but it's not necessary that I do, to know the connections are there. When I was a boy, I went on a journey with our family servant, Shi Xiang. While we were passing a village outside of Jingcheng, Shi Xiang pointed at some mounds in a field to the west. Those are graves, he said. Zhou graves.

Long ago, one of their ancestors did a good deed that allowed their family line to persist three generations longer than it would have otherwise. I asked Zixiang what kind of deed. He said that the ancestor did not eat a certain piece of meat. He then told me this story, which I now tell you. Meat, vegetables. As the Ming dynasty limped toward its conclusion, and gave over to the Qing when the rule of the Manchus took effect, the Henan and Shandong provinces were decimated by drought. This drought withered everything to dust. As if the drought wasn't bad enough, a vast swarm of locusts next descended on the provinces.

Many villages died out due to starvation during this time, but a few cursed villages refused to accept extinction. They ate every animal or insect they could catch, and scoured every twig or stem of anything edible that the drought and the locusts had not killed off. They even ate the bark and roots off the trees and bushes. And when those things ran out, they moved on to each other. Officials who had previously spent hours debating the inherent goodness of human nature, as put forth by Mencius, or who had enthused about the elegance of Confucian insights into the cultivation of human emotion, did not try to stop this.

Instead, they joined in, unable to see the sense of rules of propriety that would see them dead. In this new social order, women and children from the poorest families were sold by relatives or taken by force. They were then bound and gagged and sold at street markets as zhaizhen, meat vegetables, an ancient term that occurred in the historical records every couple of centuries in times of extreme hardship. This was a state of affairs that met a traveling Zhou ancestor when he stopped to rest in the restaurant of a small Shandong village and ordered a pork dish.

At first, the Zhou did not understand what was going on. Then he gave his order to the cook, and the man told him that the kitchen was out of meat. Give me a minute, though, said the cook, and I'll cut you some fresh meat myself. He yelled to the kitchen, You're taking too long back there. We have hungry customers. Drag me some pigs out so I can chop off a hoof.

That was when the Joe's world turned upside down, because after the cook spoke, his assistant dragged out two young women from the back room, bound in ropes and gagged. Before the Joe knew what was happening, the cook grabbed one of the women, yanked her to the butchering area of the kitchen floor, and hacked off her arm with a cleaver. Gushing blood from the fresh stump, the woman flopped, writhed, and screamed against her gag. The other customers acted like nothing unusual was taking place, but the Joe rushed forward. Both women saw him.

The one with the severed arm cried for him to kill her. The other woman, trembling pitifully, with a face drained of all human color, screamed against her gag too, but her plea was to be saved. Waving money, the Joe yelled at the cook to stop cutting and sell him the women's freedom. After he saw how much money the Joe was offering, the cook agreed.

The first woman had lost too much blood to have a chance at any kind of freedom but the kind that she was begging for. So, the Joe plunged a knife into her heart. As for the second woman, she remained by his side as they traveled away from the village. Later, she became his concubine and bore a son. It was this son that allowed the Joe's line to continue three generations longer than it would have otherwise. When the midwife wiped the afterbirth from their son, the Joe and the woman saw that the boy was marked by a bright red line, a birthmark that looked like a cut.

It ran from the edge of the baby's armpit and around his shoulder blade, so that it looked exactly like the wound the other woman had sustained. This shows how deeply we are marked not only by the previous lives we've lived, but also by those we've encountered during those previous lives. The Appearance of the Shah Many Confucian scholars admit to believing that the soul survives the body's death. What's more, like the Buddhists, many also believe that it is rare for the soul to return to Earth once it ascends to the heavenly realms, outside of reincarnation. Nevertheless, accounts exist that testify the soul does sometimes return,

newly strange, in the early days after a person's demise. It does so to take one last lingering look at what it has left behind. This is called the return of the Shah. These final visits are rare. Still, they are reported with enough of the same details and with enough regularity that they seem the product of a natural law or process. For example, if a child dies too young for its teeth to have grown in, its shah never returns to visit.

And just as seers use books of charts and records to predict eclipses and other celestial phenomena, some specialize in predicting the exact time and day when the shah will make its goodbye visit. use books of charts and records to predict eclipses and other celestial phenomena. Some specialize in predicting the exact time and day when the Shah will make its goodbye visit, the direction from which it will come, and in which it will depart. Does this sound ridiculous? When I was young, I thought so. But I have learned over the years that my prejudices do not determine what events are permitted to occur. Besides, I have had the opportunity to witness the appearance of the Shah myself. It happened like this.

A village seer told my neighbor that her father's Shah would return on such and such a date at such and such a time. A believer in such things, she performed the proper protective rituals, and then invited me over to wait with her family for the designated hour to arrive. I expected nothing. Nevertheless, something came. The Shah. Striking terror in us, the transformed soul that had been my neighbor's father drifted through the rooms of her house, a blur resembling white smoke or translucent fabric.

Round and round it swirled, as if committing people and curios to memory, or deciding how to dispose of each one, before it finally ducked into the chimney, swooped up its narrow throat, to then be glimpsed through the windows, disappearing in a southwestern direction. The evidence of this event could not be doubted. Trusting in the seer's forecast, the family had even covered the floor with ashes. The prints of bare feet and hands were visible in the ashes throughout the house. I even got on my knees to make sure the prints were what they looked like. They were.

Moreover, when questioned, the family members swore that they matched the size and shape of the deceased's extremities. So my choice was this. To believe what I saw, or to believe in my theory of what was possible for me to see. When souls leave the body in the days after death, they can resemble many things. Sometimes people see mists or blurs. Other times they see something black and quick. A few people say that the quick black things look like enormous blackbirds folding themselves out of the body before taking flight. In the collection of notes from the Hall of Records,

the Tang Dynasty writer Zhang Du writes about several cases of the shah appearing in this bird-like form. He records, During the Wei Dynasty, a man by the name of Zhang saw something that looked like a glossy black bird made of smoke, the size of a large child. He threw his hunting net on the creature. When he took the net away, there was nothing underneath. Afterwards, he went around his village telling everyone what happened. In this way, he discovered that about the time he'd tried to net the black thing The shawl of a recently deceased person had been forecast to return The thought that the spirit continues to exist after the body's death

Is not as comforting as one might first suppose Freed of the measurements of the human body And the affections and limitations of the human mind, the things that the soul transforms into after death are radically different from who it once was, in the same manner that an animal freed of domestication might return to its wild nature. Consequently, the Sha is dangerous. A story in Xu Xuan's classic collection, Historical Accounts of the Otherworldly, illustrates this threat. It concerns one Peng Hu, a towering young man with a reputation for being brash and skeptical.

When his mother died, Peng Hu grieved deeply, yet scoffed at those who warned him to take precautions in case her shah returned. A seer said to Peng Hu shrugged off the seer's advice, his family took the seer's words to heart and left to visit relatives. Thus, Peng Hu was home alone when his front door blasted open late one night. Peng Hu was shaken to his core by the abrupt violation, but his reflexes were quick. In one breath, he leapt across the room to a large earthen pot and jumped inside, pulling the cover after him. There he waited and hoped, even as he felt a shadow flicker across

the pot. He knew the shadow belonged to what his mother had become, in the same way children know that their parents are near. And there was something with her. He felt it in the room, moving around, a flood of darkness and impossible thought. This something said to the Shah of Penghu's mother, Is somebody hiding in that pot? Penghu experienced the longest pause that he'd ever known. It seemed to stretch on for weeks, for months, for years. Finally, the Shah, his mother, said, No, there is nothing in the pots.

Let us leave. I have seen enough. I have seen the Shah, yes, and I know many others who have as well. Just recently, the wife of our family servant, Song Yu, died. Shortly after, whisperings and shufflings came from her room, right before something that resembled her appeared to her children. However, I also know that there are false stories told about the Shah. Two of our family's other servants, for example, one Sun Wenju and one Song Wen, charge high fees to forecast the date of a Shah's return.

Certainly there are those who have such skills, but these two scoundrels are not among them, for I have looked at their grimoires and found them to contain nothing other than generic charts of the seasons. Likewise, the protective talismans and incantations sold to calm a shah or render it powerless are largely hokum. Their power only lies in depriving one of coin. This includes the currently popular ghost-killing rites sold to those too poor to move away from a haunted room. So, as with everything, from the practice of medicine and scholarship to political service, the genuine and the fraudulent coexist and blur into each other. What should one do then?

Simply this. Be skeptical of what you hear. Yet also have enough humility to accept the world contains more than what you can see or imagine. Hi everyone, this is Scott. If you want to learn about the world's oldest civilizations, find out how they were rediscovered, follow the story of Mark Antony and Cleopatra's descendants over ten generations, or take a deep dive into the Iron Age or the Hellenistic era,

then check out the Ancient World Podcast. Available on all podcasting platforms, or go to ancientworldpodcast.com. That's the Ancient World Podcast. Everything that exists is formed from chi, that sacred ether that does not matter itself, yet condenses into the things of the material world, just as vapor in the air condenses into water on the ground before again melting into the sky. In this way, the form of the animals that we see originate in the heaven realm. As the spiritual seeds of those animals grow and unfold in our realm, they take in chi through their breath. As they become old, they give chi back the same way. Plants are similar. The seeds of their being come from the shadows of the earth, not the sky. Yet just like the animals,

their growth depends on taking in qi. They do this through leaf and root, inhaling and exhaling in rhythm with the seasons and the infinite transformations of yin into yang into one another. Thus, they bloom. Upon its birth, a living thing takes in qi day after day, through skin, through eyes, through mouth and ear, until one day it reaches its full maturity. After that, qi seeps from it, quicker than it can take it in, so that eventually it becomes dry and not wet, shriveled and not plump. When qi is inside a thing and accumulating, it is of the category spirit. When qi is leaving a thing to return to its origin and decreasing, it is of the category ghost. Zhang Zai, 1020-1077 What Qi Becomes Although rare, it's not unknown for ghosts to kill people. In keeping with the mysteriousness of the realms beyond the material world,

many times their reasons aren't evident. But sometimes, they clearly murder to feed off the spirits of the living. Ni Yujang told me that he once heard Shi Liangsheng offer an explanation for this. A ghost is made from the vital qi that's left behind after a body dies. With time, such qi will naturally disperse. However, by feeding on the vital qi of the living, ghosts can delay their disappearance from our world. Female ghosts generally seduce human beings to draw out their qi. Male ghosts generally kill people to draw out their qi. This is the difference between

draining blood from an animal over time or hacking it into meat straight away. Two. One day, Liu Tingsheng told me and my teacher, Bao Jing Ting, a story about five traveling students who were studying for their official exams. The students got caught in a vicious summer thunderstorm and sheltered for the night in an abandoned temple. Exhausted from traveling, they quickly fell asleep on the floor of one of the rooms, all except for one student, who stayed awake to serve a rotation as a guard in case bandits were about. Suddenly, gusts of cold wind shot inside the room, and the temperature plummeted. Before the bulging eyes of the guard, mists in the vague shapes of people

drifted inside, settled over one of his sleeping companions, and began to suck out gossamer threads of chi from his pores. The guards shouted at his companions to wake them, but his cry was cut short. Almost as soon as his mouth opened, one of the sentient mists broke against him, and he felt too weak to use his voice or move his tongue. Thus paralyzed, the guards watched as the ghost finished draining the first sleeping student, leaving him a husk, dry and dead, and then moving on to the second and the third. The ghosts were just about to start feeding on the fourth student when an unfamiliar old man ran into the room shouting,

Stop! he said to the ghosts. These gentlemen are fitted to pass their exams and become officials one day. Therefore, the divinities of heaven forbid their coming to harm. The old man's cry powerfully affected the ghosts. Not only did they stop, but they fled the room, too. The stranger disappeared right after the ghosts, causing the two survivors to wonder who he was, a former temple monk or a ghost of some kind himself. As for the students, the one who acted a guard went on to become the principal of a local Confucian school, while the other student became a teacher at the same school. When Liu Tingsheng finished his story, Bao Jingting burst out laughing.

Well, he said, for most of my life, I've personally looked down on scholarly sorts, as well as government officials, so I'm slightly surprised that such positions would carry significance for a ghost. That is Bao Jingting's opinion, and there is merit to it. But who knows? One could also read the situation not as a fabrication invented by vain scholars,

but as an actual case that illustrates Shiliangsheng's theories. Since ancient times, writers of conventional histories have testified to the existence of those who history would otherwise forget. While Zhiguai explore the strange, there's no reason that they can't also preserve records of individuals who deserve to be remembered. Zhiyun, in The Locust Tree Notes That Which Remains During my uncle Zhong Han's tenure as an official in the Anhui province, a local farmer was planting crops one day when his digging implement uncovered a coffin with a corpse inside. Time had reduced

it to gummy soil and splinters, with one notable exception. Amidst this decay sat a fresh-looking human heart, gleaming, fat, and red. Frightened by the heart's preternatural state, the farmer dashed to the river and hurled it far out into the water. He then returned to the digging site. Minutes later, he found a long, flat gravestone near the decayed coffin that was inscribed with writing. He brushed away the dirt to render the characters legible. What was written there was so disturbing that he put the stone back and fled the area,

vowing never to return. Eventually, my uncle Zhang Han heard about the incident and let it be known that he wanted to see the stone. The farmer and his neighbors panicked when they heard this. It was bad luck to mess with old graves. This was why the farmer had gotten rid of the heart. So, to avoid any more involvement with the burial site, they shattered the gravestone into pieces and tossed them into the river too.

As an added precaution, the farmer then went around telling everyone that he had invented the whole story. A busy man, my uncle soon forgot about the case. But as he retired, he came across a rubbing someone had made of the gravestone. He learned that not only

was the farmer's original account true, but also the story behind the heart. The rubbing reads thus. Daughter, your pale jade is blemished. Not by you, but by others. By wrongs done. Near water, you died. Afterwards, I put your body at the bottom of this mountain.

In this life, I failed you. I could not even clear your name. But I swear you this. I cover your tomb now, not just with dirt. I cover your tomb with a promise. The centuries will not forget the injustice done to you. I pray this to the spirits. If you were at fault,

let your heart rot. If the only wrong was that done by others, let your heart never die. Let it testify to the truth that they did not. My nephew Zhao Xian, who told me about this incident, and I agreed that the father's message indicated his daughter was unjustly accused of some crime and died as a result, whether through suicide or murder.

The grief-stricken father, unable to accept this, used her grave tablet to protest and accuse. Subsequently, sympathetic spiritual forces abetted his cause and allowed the daughter's heart to remain fresh, to vouch for her good character. While the father's efforts are praiseworthy, unfortunately, the note on the tablet was undated and signed with his writing pseudonym, a miner of stones and gems, rather than his real name. And no relatives could be traced through inquiries or historical records. Consequently, the girl's identity has been lost to time. The architects of the wrongs done to her shall never be named.

Her name will never be cleared. And sadly, the full circumstances behind her tragedy can therefore never be fully comprehended. All we can do is try to imagine. A conversation with a friend about the end of things. A patch of sunlit field at mountain's bottom. I bow to this brightness. I see an old man enjoying the beauty too. Do you own this field? I ask. Every day, he says, I watch the rustle of the pines. Every day, he says, I find the bamboo shifting in the wind a marvel.

A poem by Fa Yan, an 11th century Chan Buddhist monk. In a passage to A Guide to Rare Books, Qian Zheng discusses the special fondness that the spirit world has for literature, since it is likewise full of lives untethered to bodies. As an example, he relates the story of how the spirits of Wukong Mountain became so attached to the books of the scholar Zhao Qingchang that they howled in broad daylight and shook the trees when his descendants sold off his collection after his death. Since losing something to which one is attached is always painful, one feels sympathetic to the spirit's distress. On the other hand,

their unwillingness to let go of the world is exactly why they remain stranded in the realm of the living. Change is the nature of all things. What gathers, scatters. What scatters, gathers. Thoughts become flesh. Flesh become thoughts. Keeping this larger view in mind allows one to maintain composure. Spirits sometimes become attached to things other than books, too, such as the idea of home. For instance, the old residence of Zhang Luan, the Ming Dynasty Emperor's father-in-law, was abandoned and the main hall was sold to my late grandfather.

Shortly thereafter, my grandfather brought in a crew to dismantle the building so that he could sell off the stones and wood. As soon as the work began, the air filled with weeping and whisperings. The frightened workmen said the sounds came from the thick pillars in the corners of the room, as if they were buried deep inside the wood like insects in amber. One day, while having a larger conversation about the dangers of attachment, I and my former classmate and friend, Dong Chu Jiang, discussed these two accounts. I said to him, According to the Buddhists, the physical world is an illusion created by the waking mind,

similar in kind to the illusions created by the dreaming mind. While one daily encounters mountains, rivers, forests, and lovers, they're unreal in an ultimate sense. Because we too are unreal in an ultimate sense, except for that part of us that is beyond the power of our mind to fully comprehend. At death, we dissolve, back into our original nature, like a wave smoothing back into the ocean. This is sure to be some kind of annihilation, even if something eternal remains. So the thought of it disturbs many people.

Like the ghosts we've discussed, they don't want to let go. I'm fine with such dissolution, though. Even if the I that presently says I vanishes, I find consolation in imagining others acquiring my possessions. I find solace in the thought of someone holding one of my books or pieces of art with affection, and upon seeing my personal seal declaring, this was once owned by Ji Yun, who had a little something to say. That is more than enough for me.

Dong Chu Jiang laughed. Well, my friend, he said, what you're saying sounds brave, but it nevertheless reveals that you can't let go of the desire to persist, even if it's in name only. Don't mistake me. I'm not saying that gathering antiques and art, or the reading and writing of poems,

or the touching of beautiful things, has no place while we're alive. But once we're done with it, let us be done. Let what we've gathered, including our names, fill the bellies of worms and rats. Let it become one with soil and sea. Because this philosophy guides my life, I don't sign my books with my seal, nor anything else in my house. Nevertheless, I own much. When I walk up a meadow, my eyes own all that I see, every color of every flower that flares. And in the night's darkness, the bright moon functions as my personal lamp. If I hike a mountain, that's mine too, and also the river currents in which I bathe. There is no rent paid in those moments.

And when I look elsewhere or move on, there is nothing lost. In Dong Chu Jiang's view, there is more wisdom than in my own. I am grateful to have such friends. While these materials have been collected in pursuit of truth, I cannot guarantee they are all free of fabrication or distortion, since they come from eyes not my own.

But this is not a problem unique to strange tales. Even in the case of orthodox histories, we are given different versions of the same event by credible historians. As for my own work, I have recorded faithfully those materials that have come into my purview, historical record, and eyewitness account alike. I have no doubt that some exaggerate or misremember. Nevertheless, I am confident my work contains ample truth to shine light on the way of spirits. Certainly, there is enough to guide those who would follow me.

That alone makes me satisfied. Gan Biao, Historian of the Strange, in the Shoshanji, circa 315 CE. Thanks for listening. The Civil War and Reconstruction was a pivotal era in American history. When a war was fought to save the Union and to free the slaves. And when the work to rebuild the nation after that war was over turned into a struggle to guarantee liberty and justice for all Americans. I'm Tracy. And I'm Rich. And we want to invite you to join us as we take an in-depth look at this pivotal era in American history. Look for The Civil War and Reconstruction wherever you find your podcasts.