Volume 38, Number 9 · May 16, 1991
That Old Chinese Black Magic
By Frederic Wakeman
Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768
by Philip A. Kuhn
Harvard University Press, 299 pp., $29.95
China, destined perhaps to be the world's last Leninist state, was awash with rumors after the Tiananmen killings of June 4, 1989, that the aged leader Deng Xiaoping was about to die. In Beijing sullen survivors of the massacre symbolically broke small bottles (xiaoping) homonymic with the dictator, and residents of the capital spoke ominously of sorcerers' creating tiny effigies of 'old Deng' to be hexed and otherwise incised. Such death wishes made manifest in voodoo-like dolls (tishen, or 'substitute bodies') had ancient origins in China. The history of the Han dynasty (206 BC–AD 220) was punctuated with palace purges conducted by emperors who had discovered manikins designed to bring sickness and death.[1] In later reigns Daoist magicians sometimes exerted a dark influence over monarchs who believed in the casting of spells. And the emperors of the last dynasty of all, the Ch'ing (1644–1911),[2] while publicly espousing enlightened Confucian virtues of sagehood, practiced a particularly death-obsessed form of Tibetan Buddhism within the privacy of the imperial household.[3]
Review, 3826 words
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