Song-Chuan Chen. Past & Present. Volume 239, Issue 1. May 2018.
Shanghai was among the first five treaty ports to be opened to Europeans by the Treaty of Nanking, signed after the Qing Empire (1644-1911) was defeated by the British in the First Opium War (1839-42). A wall poster from the early 1850s, currently in the collection of the Cambridge University Library, gives a rare glimpse of how people in Shanghai reacted to the arrival of foreign powers:
To the households who have farmland or graves outside the North Gate of the City, on the Second and Third Land Registers: Our ancestors’ tombs and farmland are being confiscated by foreigners for road construction. The [area affected] is about ten square li, marked with concrete sticks … Households victimized by the destruction, like mine, should take up weapons to chase out the [foreigners] and should not just sit by idly. After the tombs are destroyed, it will be too late for regret. From the first day of the second month, listen for the sound of gongs and then take action. This is to be widely advertised. After this poster is hung, in the spirit of solidarity, regardless of whether you are of Ningbo origins, Guangdong origins, or local resident, whoever helps the foreigners dig up farmland and graveyards for road building will be killed when the gongs sound.
The protection of ancestral tombs, together with farmland, is the animating motivation of this poster. People were ready to kill to protect these ancestral legacies. Europeans in China acquired land in this period for a variety of reasons, including the setting up of concessions, mining, and the building of consulates, homes, warehouses, offices, roads and railways. When colonial authorities attempted to obtain land on which tombs were located, the possibility that these might be destroyed aroused anti-foreign feeling, because tombs were sites of ancestor worship. As a custom with a long and involved history, ancestor worship was vitally important to traditional Chinese society.
There is no recorded evidence that the violence threatened in the wall poster actually broke out, but the poster reveals how ancestral tombs became a rallying point for resisting attempts at land acquisition by the foreign community. Not all resistance involved calls to arms such as that in Shanghai. Yet whenever there was local unrest of this kind, the colonial authorities, the Qing central government and the local community were forced to the negotiating table. Concessions, more often than not, were offered by the Europeans to the Chinese.
This article recounts how tomb land and customs relating to death—in particular, the belief in feng shui (the alignment of the built environment with perceived natural forces) and the practice of keeping bodies for long periods in mortuaries, either for funeral ceremonies or to be returned to the ancestral home for burial—featured in the process of colonial land acquisition. It explores how belief systems played a role in late Qing China’s foreign relations—specifically how they empowered popular and governmental resistance to imperial expansion. At the grass-roots level, the possibility of the destruction of ancestral tombs tapped into powerful collective emotions that mobilized local populations. Officials offered vigorous support for local resistance efforts, since death-related religious practices were manifestations of the dynastic imperial ideology. In late Qing China’s interaction with the West, death practices became a significant political force.
This article views tombs and death practices as part of the religious-political fabric of Qing China. The protection of tombs and the performance of death rituals were the responsibility of the government as much as of descendants. The Great Qing Code (Daqing Lüli) specified how and when corpses were to be buried, and criminalized the ‘exposure, manipulation, alteration, and destruction of dead bodies’. Tomb protection could trump land ownership, as is evident from the case in 1880s Taiwan when a descendant’s right to maintain an ancestral grave was upheld even though he did not own the piece of land where it was located. In another example, the leader of the Li clan of Guangdong province’s Shunde District was plagued by guilt when selling a piece of land in 1753, the proceeds of which were designated for ancestor worship—not even selling the tomb land per se. With their privileged legal and sociocultural position, tombs were sites of conflict and sometimes became targets of destruction during clan feuds. Within a clan, they could become embroiled in family politics as members fought over the right to worship an ancestral tomb that was believed to have fortuitous feng shui. Funeral rites were equally sacred. Governor-general Duanfang (1861-1911), for example, lost his job in 1909 because, on his watch, photographs were taken during Empress Dowager Cixi’s imperial funeral procession.
These records indicate that death practices were central to the nexus of political power in Chinese society. When these practices were obstructed by uninitiated foreigners, the controversy burst into China’s foreign relations—just at the time when the late Qing state was seeking to counteract European imperial expansion. Death-related religious practices were thus transformed from domestic sociopolitical issues into a potent source of conflict in China’s foreign relations. This paper documents how culturally deep-rooted death practices empowered resistance to European colonial expansion. Conflicts over tomb land and death rites contributed directly and indirectly to the development of China’s anti-foreign movements, and to the national quest to reclaim sovereign rights. It is a history of how the living protected the dead and the dead empowered the living.
Protecting the Dead
The Qing government, the local elite and ordinary people all played a role in resisting the destruction of tombs and traditional death rites. The examples provided in this section show that because tombs were sites of ancestor worship—which gave them symbolic political meaning in the Qing imperial state ideology—resistance was likely to be stirred up if they were threatened. In protecting ancestral tombs, officials and the local elite were attempting to prevent the erosion of political power rooted in the Confucian-Daoist tradition of ancestor worship. When facing the possible destruction of ancestral tombs, a clan leader could win the support of officials by appealing to these shared religious emotions.
In 1887, the Hospital for Women and Children in Fuzhou, founded by the Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church of the United States, wanted to expand its premises after a decade of success in its medical mission. As the land contained tombs, however, opposition arose from local elders and the gentry—the elite of the local community—some of whom had been given nominal official titles or were waiting to be appointed as officials. Twenty-three of them signed a petition arguing that sale of the land to the church did not have the agreement of the whole community and was therefore invalid. What angered them most was seeing that the foreigners had already dug up seven graves and cut down pine trees planted around the tombs to attract auspicious feng shui. ‘The scene was truly saddening and everybody was upset’, wrote the petitioners from the village.
The Qing officials in charge of treaty-port matters in Fuzhou sided with the local community and informed the missionaries that the land sale had not been properly registered and that building work would have to cease. Faced with this opposition, the US consul in Fujian, Joseph C. A. Wingate (in office 1880-90) asked the governor-general to intervene. He argued that the sale had already been agreed and that the landowners, who had subsequently been arrested for making the sale, should be released immediately. The case was finally settled after a year of negotiations. Given that the hospital was a charitable enterprise and the damage to the tombs had already been done, the local elites agreed that the hospital could continue to use the land that had already been developed. But the untouched tomb land would have to be returned to its original owner. The Qing authorities also reiterated prohibitions against building on tomb land in the area.
Compromises were offered by both sides in the dispute between the US missionaries and the people of Fuzhou, but that was not what happened in a case of Russian land acquisition in the port of Yantai. In 1902, when the Russians stationed in Yantai wanted to move their consulate into the area where Europeans had established themselves, they had their eye on a nearby cemetery belonging to the Liu clan. The owners refused to sell the land, however, saying that they could not bear to witness the desecration of ancestral tombs. The governor of the province reported that the clan head was weeping in his office, and he believed the sentiments voiced reflected genuine sentiment rather than a ploy to extract a higher price. Upon learning of this, the Russian officials agreed to respect the custom of venerating ancestors and pressed the matter no further. When they instead stated that they would buy the land in the future if the clan head changed his mind, to pre-empt possible future diplomatic rows, the Qing central government warned the governor never, under any circumstances, to sell the land to foreign nationals.
A tomb conflict in Anhui became even more complicated than the disputes in Yantai and Fuzhou. A three-hundred-year-old grave was at the centre of the province’s mining rights recovery movement between 1905 and 1908. The London and China Company had signed a deal in May 1904 that granted them the right to mine iron ore in exchange for a contribution of £50,000 (400,000 ban liang) to the local government, a sum which amounted to half of the province’s annual budget. In 1905, local elites—including the titled gentry, landowners and merchants of the province—petitioned the government to abandon the plan and raised 10,000 liang to set up a mining company of their own to replace the British venture. Their efforts failed, however, and the British project went ahead.
When the London and China Company began building roads towards the mine, however, they damaged the ancestral tomb of the Pan family, prompting the governor of Anhui to complain to the Qing foreign ministry, arguing that there was a great likelihood of social unrest, especially given the reputedly fearless character of the locals. The governor and the local elites together used the damage to the tomb to initiate a movement aimed at recovering mining rights, even though there was only a single tomb involved and the damage was limited. A local newspaper, set up specifically to whip up patriotic sentiment, reported on the incident and made the more general claim that ancestral tombs were under threat. The Anhui elite’s commercial interests and their patriotic movement for the recovery of mining rights merged into a form of economic nationalism. The local officials and elite stirred up public anger over tomb damage to raise the stakes in their bargaining with the Qing central government and successfully forced it to renegotiate with the foreigners.
Faced with the threat of public unrest, the company agreed to give up its mining rights, but asked for £400,000, later reduced to £275,000, as compensation for the investments already made in equipment and road construction. The British minister in Beijing intended to back down after learning that the company’s contracts with the Qing government were expired when the company damaged the tomb. The company, however, managed to raise the issue in the British parliament, where the foreign secretary, Edward Grey (1862-1933), was forced to take up the issue, though he did not commit himself to any specific course of action. After three years of wrangling, the two sides agreed that the Qing government would return the company’s £50,000 contribution and pay £2,000 compensation.
These examples testify to the complexities of tomb-land issues. When a tomb was destroyed, it could create a genuine, heartfelt grievance, as expressed by the local elites in Fuzhou and the Liu clan in Yantai. But it could also serve as the focus for other nationalist or economic purposes, as in the case in Anhui, where anger over the threat to ancestral tomb land was used by the local people and local government to advocate the return of mining rights. In the Fuzhou case, the locals and officials were not uncompromising; they could be conciliatory and pragmatic when charitable work was involved and tombs had already been dug up. Thus the government believed that it was in its interest to protect tomb land both because of prevailing ideology and out of deference to local sentiment. The government and the local community were not averse to compromise, however, when it served local interests and suited government policy towards foreign powers.
In general, the archival documents show that foreign land acquisition involving tombs had the potential to arouse collective emotions—anguish, sadness, hatred and shame—which would rally locals to protest and resist. Officials then often stepped in to express their concerns to foreign representatives and to negotiate.
Tomb Land and Feng Shui Diplomacy
The power of the ancestors lay dormant but became manifest when destruction threatened. This power was derived from widely shared religious practices that combined the popular customs of ancestor worship, Confucianism and Daoism. According to common beliefs, ancestors had access to deities who would decide a descendant’s fortune based on whether that person behaved morally and also provided necessary nourishment for their ancestors in the form of food, incense and joss paper (burnt as a form of currency for the afterlife), offered in front of the tomb or a memorial tablet at home. The feng shui of tombs was an integral part of ancestor worship. According to Daoist theory, the feng shui of the place where ancestors were buried had an auspicious or malign impact on the health, wealth, marriage prospects, fertility, fortune and other concerns of their descendants. Disasters could be brought upon a neighbourhood if an adjacent tomb’s feng shui was disrupted. When Europeans in China attempted to acquire land that contained tombs, they were treading on sensibilities arising from these beliefs. James L. Watson and Evelyn S. Rawski have argued that in nineteenth-century China ancestor worship was omnipresent in everyday life and ‘had achieved important commonalities in belief that cut across the boundaries of regions and social strata’, creating a standardized ‘Chinese way of death’. They have also argued that ancestor worship had strong links with political authority—a connection that can be traced back to the Late Shang state (c.1200-1045 bc). The relationship between religion and politics evolved into a key element of orthodox Confucianism. Ancestor worship was an important ritual of the Confucian state and was performed by rulers and people alike in everyday life.
The government wrote the national belief system into the law. The key legal text of the Qing dynasty, The Great Qing Code, had a series of regulations about tomb and corpse protection. Any person who violated the law could be sentenced to corporal punishment, exile or, in the most serious cases, strangulation. Article 276.6, for instance, stipulates: ‘One who levels the gravemound of another person for a field or garden will receive 100 strokes of the heavy bamboo’.
Qing bureaucrats incorporated the concept of tomb protection into treaties, conventions, contracts and land regulations concerning foreigners. The Shanghai Land Regulations of 1845, for example, drawn up by Shanghai Governor Gong Mujiu (1788-1848), were the first to include protection of tomb land and death practices. The rules that came to define official tomb-land safeguarding were established in the 1854 version of the Shanghai Land Regulations. Article 3 of the regulations stipulated that: ‘If there are graves or coffins on the land rented, their removal must be a matter of separate agreement, it being contrary to the custom of the Chinese to include them in the agreement of deed of sale’. This effectively singled out land with tombs for special protection. And Article 11 states:
In no case shall the graves of Chinese on land rented by foreigners be removed without the express sanction of the families to whom they belong, who also, so long as they remain unmoved, must be allowed every facility to visit and sweep them at the established period, but no coffins of Chinese must hereafter be placed within the said limits, or be left above ground.
Compromises, as the articles show, were made on both the Chinese and European sides: the rights of existing tombs were respected but new ones were forbidden. These same clauses were written into the 1869 and 1898 land regulations governing foreign concessions in Shanghai. The well-known Chinese medical practitioner Zhang Xiangyun (1855-1925) resorted to these laws when he refused to move his ancestral tombs. Zhang’s family cemetery fell within the limits of the Shanghai International Settlement after its 1899 expansion. The land was then acquired by a successful Jewish businessman, Silas Aaron Hardoon (1851-1931), who incorporated it into his 171 mu (34 acre) home—the Aili Garden. When Zhang refused to give up his ancestral tombs in the middle of Hardoon’s private estate, Hardoon was forced by law to permit family visits to the tombs. Given that the Zhang family had been celebrated Chinese physicians for several generations, their refusal to renounce the land might be a reflection of the stock they placed in their family’s success, attributable to the auspicious feng shui of the land their ancestral tombs occupied.
Qing officials were attuned to feng shui issues more broadly than the narrow, but important, tomb-land issue. In negotiations with the French and British in Shanghai in 1856, for example, Chinese officials decided that foreign activities in the area should not disrupt the feng shui of a nearby neighbourhood. This idea was codified in a trade agreement with Japan in 1871 that states: ‘The local magistrates shall see that no harm accrues to dwellings, tombs, or geomancy [feng shui ]’. From then on the Chinese wording ‘buguan fangxiang‘ (literally: ‘not concerning alignments/directions’), meaning feng shui, was often quoted in official papers as justification for refusing requests from foreigners and in arguments in official documents.
The German minister Max von Brandt (1835-1920) was doubtful of the meaning of feng shui when he, along with other representatives in Beijing, was informed by Qing officials in 1880 that none of the land on Wushi Hill in Fuzhou could be leased under any circumstances because the locals regarded this hill as the seat of auspicious feng shui for the city. Foreigners who had wished to rent land on the hill had come into conflict with locals many times since 1851. Nearly a dozen letters exchanged between the two sides capture the debate over the concept. The Qing officials argued that the feng shui question could trigger public unrest, and if the feng shui was disturbed it would bring disaster upon the neighbourhood. Von Brandt objected, stating that feng shui was such a vague concept that it could be applied to any case of land acquisition. Von Brandt’s concerns were not unfounded, for a Qing negotiator in 1856 was instructed to use feng shui as an excuse to reject a British request for the lease of Kongtong Island, which would have sparked a diplomatic row because an earlier French bid had been rejected.
Foreigners did not need to dig up tombs to destroy the feng shui of an area—they could do that merely by their presence. A group of US missionaries led by Gilbert Reid (1857-1927) came to Ji’nan city in 1887. They rented a house and were beaten up on their first night there. The locals argued that the mere presence of the missionaries disrupted the feng shui of the neighbourhood. The anti-foreign sentiment in some areas—though not in the majority of counties—hardened into the belief that foreigners were devils. In other anti-missionary incidents, feng shui was often invoked in objections to the construction of churches and foreign cemeteries, as if the very sight of Christian symbols would upset the spirit of the land. The language of feng shui bespoke anti-foreign sentiment in these localities. Officials cited it as much as an excuse to reject lease agreements as a point of real concern.
In Tianjin—a port opened to European trade and foreign concessions in the wake of the Second Opium War (1856-60)—Qing officials took great care not to upset public sentiment. The British Concession, established in 1860 as the first of its kind in the city, chose relatively empty ground—probably a result of their experiences in Shanghai. The regulations for the French Concession, agreed in 1861, stipulated the same conditions as the 1854 Shanghai Land Regulation for the protection of tombs, but added that in the case of Chinese descendants willing to move, the French should pay compensation of one liang per tomb.
The same official apprehension about social unrest over land acquisitions by foreigners was manifested in the granting of mining and railway rights to foreign companies. As early as 1867, officials expressed concern that the building of railways would destroy tombs and damage feng shui; this, in turn, could provoke the locals to take up arms and rebel. That concern was reflected in the drafting of the Contract for the Construction and Operation of the Chinese Eastern Railway, negotiated in 1896 with Russia. Article 2 states: ‘In laying out this line, cemeteries and tombs, as also towns and villages, should so far as possible be avoided and passed by’. When, in 1898, mining rights in Hunan province were granted to the Peking Syndicate (a British corporation), the same protection was sought. As mentioned above in the Anhui case, tomb-land issues mixed the patriotic aspirations of local elites with their commercial interest in recovering mining rights. A similar dynamic could be seen in the grass-roots reaction to the building of foreign-owned railways.
Between the 1840s and 1880s, as far as treaty negotiations were concerned, Qing officials were capable of protecting the visible symbols of its ruling ideology. In the 1890s, however, as foreign interests scrambled for expanded concessions, Qing diplomats retained control but cracks in the system of protection began to appear. In Tianjin, where the British and French were earlier persuaded to accept Qing terms, the diminished Qing government began to give in on tomb-land protections. When the regulations for Tianjin’s German Concession were negotiated in 1895, the Germans at first asked for all tombs to be removed, but compromises were solicited by the Qing. The resulting compromise included four (of nineteen) clauses that related to regulating tomb land. The first three favoured the Qing position and reiterated the same conditions for tombs as in the French Concession. The agreement also added protections specifically for tombs of Chinese officials to be ‘left unmolested’ and included protections for charitable cemeteries belonging to native associations in Tianjin. The fourth clause, however, reflected more favourable terms for foreign interests, by agreeing that tombs could be subject to negotiation for removal to facilitate road construction—with the exception of tombs belonging to ‘notable families’. This left ordinary people’s tombs unprotected. The same rules were written into the land regulations of the Japanese Concession in Tianjin, settled in 1898. It was no longer the case, as in 1854, that the Qing could simply demand: ‘In no case shall the graves of Chinese on land rented by foreigners be removed’.
After the Boxer War (1900-1), the Qing retained little of their negotiating power. During the war, eight imperial powers joined forces to quash the Boxers—Chinese peasants who claimed to possess magical protection against bullets and had killed European diplomats, missionaries and others. Four further concessions—belonging to Russia, Belgium, Italy and Austria-Hungary—were set up in Tianjin after the war. The Qing officials in charge of the negotiations were repeatedly urged by their superior, Li Hongzhang (1823-1901), to persuade the four nations to abandon the land that they had chosen because there were too many tombs involved, especially in the Italian concession, which had nearly ten thousand. This time, however, the site of ancestor veneration could not be protected, because the Boxer War had emboldened the foreigners. Not only was the government weak, but the war had also devastated local communities, leaving them too debilitated to organize any meaningful resistance to foreign claims. The Qing China of 1901 was both militarily and morally weak. Under these circumstances, the most the Qing officials were able to achieve was an increase in the compensation for moving the tombs, from one to four liang.
A display of Qing powerlessness also met a 1902 Italian demand to use a cemetery in the village of Huangcun in Zhili province as a military camp for troops victorious in the Boxer conflict. Under heavy pressure from the Italians, Qing officials decided to buy the land using official powers and then to rent it to the Italians, instead of the usual practice of letting the two sides reach a price themselves. The handling of the purchase was intended to deflect the anger directed at foreigners and avoid further unrest. In its final decade, the Qing central government was too worn down by external and domestic forces to tend to this key symbol of its ruling ideology.
While the strength of the Qing imperial state was the paramount force in tomb protection, negotiations over tomb land also depended on the particular Qing officials in charge and the local circumstances. Qing bureaucrats were a variegated collection of individuals. Although they received a similar education, the diversity of their experience resulted in a variety of judgements, especially when it came to the new challenge of dealing with Westerners. Li Hongzhang, in charge of foreign affairs in the northern ports, ordered his subordinates time and again to make tombs a priority in Tianjin’s negotiations, and this was the driving force behind tomb protection there. Li’s extensive experience in overseeing treaty ports had attuned him to the danger of public unrest resulting from the tomb issue. While Li was able, to some extent, to push for tomb-land protections during negotiations with the Germans in Tianjin in 1895, tombs did not feature in land regulations negotiated in the same year with the Germans in Hankou, where Zhang Zhidong (1837-1909) was in charge. The same was true of the land regulations negotiated by Zhang with Japan, Britain and France in Hankou around this time. Tombs in Hankou deemed to ‘offend the eye’ by the Japanese were to be removed. The same went for concessions in Shashi and Suzhou. In comparison with Li, Zhang seemed to be less attuned to tomb-land issues. It appears, however, that few tombs were involved and there was no concerted opposition from the people of Hankou, Suzhou and Shashi. In such cases, Zhang was neither driven by local demands for preservation nor assisted by local interests.
The Qing officials who stood between public anger and foreign demands were not only mediating peaceful solutions, they were also negotiating the legitimacy of their own government. As death-related religious beliefs were tied inextricably to state ideology, it was the duty of officials to afford protection. Inaction could endanger their legitimacy. Officials, moreover, were believers themselves, and therefore attuned to the mood of their own society. After the First Opium War, Qing officials were forced to attend to the needs of foreign powers and were pragmatic in their dealings. Before the late 1890s, their priority was mainly the protection of traditional beliefs and the ritual system to reassure the public. In subsequent years, as Qing state power waned, foreign demands started to override more traditional concerns.
Fighting to the Death for Death Practices
Aside from tomb land and the concept of feng shui, another foreign-relations flashpoint arose from mortuary practices that involved weeks-long rituals before burial or the keeping of corpses for years while they awaited return to ancestral lands for burial. The common idiom ‘falling leaves return to their roots [luoye guigen]’ gave expression to the belief in the necessity of burial in one’s home town. In major cities such as Shanghai and Tianjin, native-place associations customarily bought land in nearby suburbs for charitable mortuaries as temporary resting places for deceased sojourners before their eventual burial back home. The remains could stay in coffins above ground for years. Land acquisition once again came into conflict with these mortuary practices when they took place in areas either newly acquired by, or adjacent to, Europeans. Ruth Rogaski argues that colonial authorities were fearful of such mortuaries, because in their eyes Chinese practices ‘might hide a host of hygienic sins that could threaten the health of the white population’. The Europeans wanted, therefore, to curb the use of mortuaries, setting the colonial powers once again on a collision course with local beliefs. A number of cases show that local communities were even more likely to insist on their right to uphold mortuary practices than to defend tombs; these were more intimate and immediate than ancestral tombs or the concept of feng shui.
As with other clashes, different conflicts resulted in different outcomes. In Ningbo a dispute resulted in a degree of compromise from the Chinese, while attempts by the Belgian Concession in Tianjin to regulate mortuary practices met with stiff resistance. In 1882, the people of Ningbo set out to build a charitable mortuary for the victims of drowning or death on board ships. The original plan called for the construction of a mortuary and three pavilions beside the river. Construction of the mortuary was nearly complete when the foreign community got wind of the project. The British and US consuls then registered objections to the Qing authorities, arguing that the buildings, although not within their concessions, were only 987 feet away from the British Consulate and 637 feet from the British police bureau. They feared that the proximity might allow for the spread of disease to the concessions. Because the mortuary was intended as a charitable institution, the Chinese side effectively maintained the moral high ground. The local gentry went so far as to argue that the foreigners opposed the plan because they had bought up the land surrounding the area as an investment and land prices might fall because of the mortuary. They further argued that the charitable mortuary and pavilions were set up precisely for the purpose of preventing the spread of disease from dead bodies lying on river banks, where they might otherwise be placed. In the end, the two sides compromised. The three pavilions were not built, but the mortuary remained, though it was agreed that corpses would be kept there for no more than a month.
The Belgian Concession in Tianjin, set up in 1901, included a populous Chinese village along a riverbank, since better locations were already occupied by the eight other foreign concessions. To curb weeks-long storage of the dead during a time when plague was spreading in northern China, the Belgian consul Albert Disière (in office 1906-14) devised a set of regulations to govern the funeral rites of the villagers in the concession. The regulations required burial within three days and levied a fine of one yuan for keeping bodies in a mortuary between one and three weeks, ten yuan for up to eight weeks, and two additional yuan for each week after that. Deaths were to be reported within twenty-four hours; failure to do so would entail a fine of one yuan. The Municipal Council would also monitor the quality of coffins. In the case of an epidemic, further regulations would be introduced. These regulations caused an outcry among the villagers, who labelled the fines a ‘death tax’ (siren jun) and believed the foreigners were seeking the most offensive way to tax them. The villagers successfully petitioned the Chinese authorities to intervene and, in the face of public pressure and the refusal to comply, the new regulations were quietly abandoned. In the end, Disière’s fear of Chinese death practices had not the least impact on local rituals.
Peaceful resolution of any kind, however, eluded the authorities in Shanghai’s French Concession, where violent protests flared up after the French attempted to disrupt local burial rites. Once again conflict arose over charitable mortuaries. Around the 1870s, the French Municipal Council—the self-governing body of the Shanghai French Concession—began paying compensation for the removal of tombs and mortuaries from the concession. The largest mortuary alone housed six to seven thousand dead. It belonged to Ningbo natives living in Shanghai and was called Siming Gongsuo (Siming Hall). In response to the offer of compensation, the community was at first divided over whether to sell the land to the French and move the mortuary out, but in the end they refused the deal. In a seemingly provocative action, in 1874 the French Municipal Council announced plans to construct two roads that would cut through the north side of the mortuary and cemetery compound. On 3 May that year, clashes between the municipal police and Ningbo natives broke out for the first time, and one Chinese was killed. The death sparked a riot the following day, which led to the burning of French houses and further Chinese deaths. In the face of this violence, French and Chinese officials stepped in. Ernest Godeaux (1833-1906), who was in charge of the French Consulate in Shanghai, made the Municipal Council abandon the road construction proposal, while the Qing government agreed to compensate the Council for the damage caused by the riot.
The story, however, had not yet reached an end. Twenty-four years later, another clash broke out over the Siming Hall. Responding to signs of plague in the city, in 1898 the anxious Municipal Council attempted to tear down the wall of the Siming compound and remove the remains by force. Violence broke out, and seventeen Chinese were killed, including women and children. Hundreds of thousands of people then joined a strike organized by the native-place associations of Ningbo. The ranks of the protesters were swelled by Guangdong natives and other sojourners in the city as well as Shanghai locals. The case inflamed general anti-foreign sentiment, which threatened to spread nationwide after the other communities of the treaty port joined in. The French soon abandoned their demands. The Ningbo migrants were uncompromising in their efforts to protect their right to maintain their religious practices. As an organization for sojourners, both living and dead, the Ningbo native-place association in Shanghai summoned resistance as potent as that of communities in Tianjin and Ningbo.
Selling the Ancestors
While some were fighting to the death to protect their death practices, others were ready to sell tomb land. Despite the general consensus on protecting ancestral tombs among the elite, officials and local populations, some owners and fraudulent dealers continued to sell tomb land to foreigners. A property market had existed in China since at least the Song dynasty (960-1279), long before the first treaty port was established in 1842. Market forces complicated the issue of land acquisition and added new difficulties to already troubled interactions. The examples below demonstrate that individual tomb land was readily sold to foreigners from the moment they arrived in China and that communities, especially impoverished ones lured by the prospect of compensation, collectively sold cemetery land. Charitable cemeteries set up by social organizations or by local governments were especially vulnerable.
Of particular interest to unscrupulous land dealers was the five mu (one acre) of charitable cemetery land in the middle of the foreign quarters in Yantai. Sietas, Plambeck and Co. applied unsuccessfully in 1869 to the Qing authorities to buy the cemetery land, which was next to their offices. The following year one Song Jingxing, under the pseudonym Song Zhitian, forged title deeds and sold the land to the company. When the case was exposed, Song was stripped of his academic degree, and a stone tablet was erected in the cemetery forbidding future sale. Seven years later, in 1877, the company again apparently fell victim to a fraudster, Liu Xianzhou, who forged deeds and sold the land for 200 yuan. This time the local magistrate even put his seal on the deeds, possibly because he was in on the fraud. The case then came to the attention of Li Hongzhang, who was at the time serving as the Superintendent of Northern Trade. Li forbade the sale, saying that only by preventing their desecration would he avoid being plagued by a guilty conscience over the dry bones that lay in more than a hundred tombs in the cemetery. This time the company was not going to back down as easily. They appealed for help to the city’s Danish consul and to a Russian minister in Beijing. They also sold half the land to a British company so that the British minister would be involved. Li, representing officialdom’s staunch tomb protectors, refused to budge. He placed the safekeeping of the cemetery in the hands of a charitable association known as the Benevolent Hall (Guangren tang). A wall was built to protect the tombs, paid for by the various native-place merchants’ associations in the port.
A quarter-century later, in 1902, another fraudster, Li Xiyuan, together with a Chinese member of the company’s staff, Xu Deming, attempted to sell the land to the company for the third time, and again the deeds were stamped by the magistrate. The governor, Li Xijie, recommended to the Qing imperial court that it approve the land sale to the company as a way of solving the recurring problem. In this way, he argued, the Benevolent Hall would profit and the foreigners would have the land they wanted. The company was rumoured to have spent over 5,000 yuan in its attempts to acquire the land during the preceding decades, and Li argued that it would not rest until it succeeded. After thirty years of wrangling and disproportionate cumulative expenses, Sietas, Plambeck and Co. took ownership of the land with official consent. By this point, official corruption may have involved even the governor himself.
Perhaps the most persistent of all the tomb-land sellers was Tang Caiting of Wuhu, a city located in Anhui province. Tang, together with his sons and associates, attempted five times in the early twentieth century to sell a piece of tomb land in a cemetery containing more than a thousand graves to different buyers: twice to missionaries, twice to Chinese businessmen and, finally, in 1914 to the Chinese Maritime Customs Service. The locals even established a ‘Tomb Protection Society’ (Bao ying hui) to co-ordinate their efforts to stop Tang’s attempted sales. The known facts of this case are patchy, but it was most likely that Tang was the legal owner of the tomb land, but the locals worried that the sale would endanger other tombs and the area’s feng shui. Opposition to Tang’s tomb-land sale demonstrates that even in cases of clear ownership, the community could step in and block the sale of the owner’s ancestral tombs.
A case in Fuzhou further exemplifies the oppositional role of the local community. In 1878, one Zhu Lianshen was punished by the local community for selling tomb land. Zhu bought a piece of land, originally to bury his recently deceased mother, but abandoned the plan when he became convinced that the feng shui was not auspicious. Three months later, upon learning that an American wished to buy land for residential building, Zhu snatched up another three plots of adjacent tomb land and sold the plots to the American for five hundred yuan. Zhu even paid the original owners to remove ancestral tombs and clear the land. When the locals got wind of the sale, they blocked the American’s construction plans. The US consul in Fuzhou then asked the governor of Fujian to intervene. The official dispatched to investigate reported that he was greeted by thousands of people who had come to express their anger. He discovered that the land contained ‘ancient tombs’ more than a century old, and the cemetery was marked with a stone tablet forbidding sale of the land that dated to the Qianlong era (1735-95). This meant that the land was designated as a public cemetery that could be used free of charge. Judging from the documents, it is possible that the local community worked together with an official to fabricate the ‘public cemetery’ and ‘ancient tomb’ status in order to strengthen their position in blocking a tomb-land sale. At any rate, Zhu was ordered to return the money to the American and was punished by the public humiliation of having to wear a cangue.
These cases make clear that local communities played a key role in foiling owners and fraudsters who want to sell tomb land. The community—in the form of a village and a circle of the provincial elite that often included local officials—could block a deal on the principle of tomb-land protection or for the perceivedly practical reason of preserving the area’s feng shui. On the other hand, a local community could also come together to agree on selling cemetery land. There were at least two such cases. Because this kind of sale was regarded as a sacrifice, the community expected the land to fetch a high price.
In 1867 a group of Shanghai farmers sold farmland that included tombs to British merchants who intended to build a racecourse. They anticipated an imminent rise in land prices due to the development, and they wanted a share of the profits. At first they asked for 60 yuan per mu, but the company were only willing to pay 35 yuan. The negotiations ended with an ‘open contract’ (huoqi) according to which the farmers accepted 25 yuan. But the contract also contained a clause stipulating that once the land was ‘used’ (deyong) the company would pay an extra 125 yuan per mu. When the racecourse was built, the farmers asked for the money, but the company refused to pay on the grounds that the conditions for the further payments were only fulfilled when the land was used for residential building or resold, as the English-language contract stipulated. The land’s value did not appreciate because the land remained in the company’s hands as a racecourse. The company further argued that the prevailing land price in the area was 20 yuan per mu and 25 yuan was a better deal than the farmers could get elsewhere. In the end, the farmers did not even collect the 35 yuan originally proposed. Because the contract and negotiations concentrated on the price rise, the question of moving the tombs located on the land was never clearly settled and no payment for it was ever made. Motivated by economic gain, the farmers sacrificed their beliefs for a price, but that price fell woefully short of their expectations.
In 1878 the Chinese Maritime Customs Service negotiated a deal with a local community in Wuhu to purchase a cemetery housing six hundred tombs. Although the Maritime Customs Service was managed by foreigners, these managers had the status of Chinese officials, so the inspector-general, Robert Hart (1835-1911), was able to strike a favourable deal. Originally, the locals asked for 50 yuan per piece of tomb land (width one zhang, length ten zhang) and an additional 7.5 yuan for moving each tomb. These prices were significantly higher than recorded sales of cemetery land in other places. The locals argued that this was because the land was in an area of auspicious feng shui and on high ground, which was scarce in low-lying Wuhu. Hart asked local authorities to buy the land for the customs service instead. After protracted negotiations the customs service finally agreed to pay a lump sum of 8,000 yuan for the whole cemetery, which was higher than the estimated market price of 6,000, but far less than the 33,000 for which the locals had hoped. Although the price fell short of the community’s expectations, they sold the tomb land anyway. Economic motives trumped ancestor worship.
The selling of tomb land demonstrates that beliefs about tombs and a community’s emotional attachment to them were by no means the only forces governing tomb-land issues. Economic considerations and the desire for monetary reward played a complicating role. While officials strongly backed local opposition in the Fuzhou and Yantai cases, and were able to block the deals, in Wuhu, local officials acted as go-betweens, helping the community to negotiate the sale. The Wuhu case demonstrates that officials and the community could work together in the sale of tomb land. Because the Chinese Maritime Customs Service was part of the Qing government, it was likely that the people of Wuhu felt their land sale was officially sanctioned. The local officials in turn believed they were merely assisting the ‘Chinese officials’ from Maritime Customs. Nobody involved would feel particularly responsible and thus would avoid the guilt that often arose from selling tomb land. As an unorthodox institution of the Qing government structure, the Maritime Customs had a unique capability to upend norms from within the government. But the consensus among the population and the officials of Wuhu was exceptional and rarely replicated elsewhere. Customary beliefs, nonetheless, were on display in all the cases, either as a reason for outright rejection of a sale or as a pretext for demanding higher prices. On balance, the belief system was powerful and widespread enough either to bar or to complicate tomb land deals.
Conclusions: The Power of the Ancestors
The omnipresence of a death-related religious consciousness that combined both Confucianism and Daoism, with local variations in practice, explains why most elites and ordinary people across China participated in the protection of tombs and death rites. Geography exercised little influence on the issue. Cases occurred in coastal treaty ports such as Fuzhou and Ningbo in the south, Shanghai in the Yangzi delta, and Yantai and Tianjin in the north. Incidents were also recorded in the inland river areas of Wuhu, Anhui and the nearby countryside where foreigners for various reasons attempted to acquire land. In the Chinese world of life and death, foreigners encountered no more trouble in tomb-land acquisition than a Chinese would have. The difference was that newly arrived foreigners often hungered for choice land in generally populated localities. The only ‘available’ land was often the cemetery. While foreigners did not mind using burial land for development, the Chinese frequently avoided it. The desecration of tombs along with the disruption of death rites could quickly turn from a local issue into a diplomatic row, in which Qing officials either took the initiative on their own or were urged by locals to bring the issue to negotiation. At first foreigners could not fully comprehend that the use of tomb land for other purposes or requests to change customary funerary rites were problematic. Made to see how their views affronted Chinese sensibilities, the foreign community more often than not reached conciliatory arrangements. This power of the ancestors in protecting against foreign incursion, however, was limited to particular localities. While a few incidents flared up and threatened to spread, none sparked a nationwide anti-foreign movement. On the whole, the power of the ancestors did not by itself jeopardize colonial power or cause a lasting impediment to the expansion of European imperialism.
The power of ancestors in Qing China resonates with resistance to colonial authority in Tunisia, where death rites were also deeply politicized. During the 1930s, the French colonists faced serious challenges resulting from their mismanagement of the burial rites of Muslims who had under the colonial regime become French citizens. The local community denied these Muslims the right of burial in the Islamic cemeteries because they believed that accepting French citizenship was an act of apostasy. Mary Dewhurst Lewis argues that this was a key event in the development of Tunisian nationalism and in the founding of the modern nation. By comparison, in Qing China, the disruption of death practices by colonial powers did not erupt into a nationwide movement. The difference is revealing. The Qing bureaucrats who sat at the centre of the power nexus created by traditional beliefs and the colonial desire for land acquisition, and who acted as protectors of traditional burial rites, were the primary reason for the divergence between the two societies in responding to colonial encroachment.
The Qing bureaucrats mediating between local communities and foreign powers were driven as much by their concern for the future of China and its foreign relations as by the need to assert the legitimacy of their rule. Concentrating their efforts on facilitating peaceful interactions between Qing subjects and foreign powers, they sought to reduce conflict, protect the Qing empire and maintain their legitimacy. Death practices effectively empowered them in their negotiations with Europeans. To write into treaties the protection of tombs, mortuaries and traditional death rites was a way of bringing local beliefs and public sentiment to bear on foreigners—above all, they had been trained all their lives to use the pen (or brush) as a weapon. Public sentiment and the threat of unrest were ammunition for officials conducting China’s foreign relations. They employed religious practices as a power source to further negotiations, but they did not use sentiment in ways that would rally the people to drive out foreigners as the Tunisians did. Through the Qing bureaucrats’ intervention, concessions were made at times by the Chinese—as in the cases of the Hospital for Women and Children in Fuzhou and Ningbo’s charitable mortuary—although generally colonial authorities relented in the face of public protests and potentially explosive communal anger. The Qing bureaucrats negotiated their way out of crises by dissipating the explosive force generated from the community. After all, their primary sociopolitical imperative was to protect dynastic rule by finding acceptable solutions for the particular problems of various localities. Modern Chinese nationalism, which was at a formational stage during the last two decades of the Qing, was not yet the guiding principle that it would be for subsequent governments. But the Qing’s imperial universalist pretensions enabled them to view foreigners not merely as aliens but as another community to be pacified and governed by the Chinese bureaucracy. Foreign interests were thus realigned with the interests of the state by making the foreign community aware of the raw emotions surrounding burial rites and the depth of their importance to Chinese society and the maintenance of public order. It was largely thanks to the bureaucrats’ mediation that disputes over death practices did not lead to nationwide anti-foreign movements or rebellion against the Qing government.
The broader picture shows that because death practices were a fundamental part of the national psyche, the Qing, as a religious-political state, had a stake in protecting tomb land and death rites. In exercising this power of the ancestors, the Qing bureaucrats up to the late 1890s were still capable of finding middle ground between the demands of the foreign community and those of its own subjects. The approach of Qing officials reflected a core social value and was thus incorporated into negotiations and treaties with foreigners. This finding bolsters John King Fairbank’s argument that Qing bureaucrats were working together with, instead of simply being coerced by, foreigners on treaty port issues. The cases investigated here show that, in fact, Qing officials performed that complicated role with a great degree of resistance up until the last decade of the dynasty. By the late 1890s, however, the Qing central government’s ability to protect death practices had weakened, and after the Boxer War they were largely losing the power to manage the issue. While the central government was weakening, as shown in the treaty negotiations after 1895, the local communities led by elites could still make use of the power of the ancestors in dealings with foreigners or to nudge officials to resist foreign encroachment. The 1902 Yantai case pitting Russia against the Liu clan, the 1901 case of the Belgian consul versus villagers in Tianjin and the 1905-8 Anhui case displaying economic nationalism all demonstrate the undiminished strength of the local belief system even in the absence of central government support from the fading Qing state. The central government’s inability to assist was due, however, to the extremity of the crises that sprang up nationwide as an imperial scramble to carve up China overwhelmed the system, rather than to the weakening grip of ancestral power on the state per se. Soon thereafter, the Qing, China’s last dynasty, would perish in the 1911 Revolution.
Not every Chinese person, however, exhibited unease about the destruction of ancestral tombs. Those who were indifferent to social norms and unaffected by anti-foreign sentiment sometimes sold tomb land to Europeans. Monetary gain was generally the motive. Death practices, although a potent political weapon, provided incomplete protection for such land in the face of economic incentives. As soon as China’s treaty ports were opened, tomb land was sold to foreigners, either by legitimate owners or by fraudulent brokers. Poverty prompted communities such as Wuhu to give up cemetery land for monetary gain. The sale of tomb land showed the power of market forces and foreshadowed China’s rapid development and urbanization in the second half of the twentieth century, a time when economic gain outweighed the cultural significance of tomb land and death rites.
The coming of Westerners introduced a new economic dynamic into China. What cultural practices the colonial powers could not touch were very soon to be swept away by modernizations led by the Chinese themselves after the departure of the Westerners—a topic rich with potential for further investigation. Let it suffice to note that in the Aili Garden case, the Zhang family tombs were finally removed in 1954 to make way for the construction of the Shanghai Exhibition Centre. The charitable cemeteries and mortuaries in the former German Concession in Tianjin, carefully preserved by Li Hongzhang, have now disappeared under the city’s skyscrapers. In the case of Siming Hall, twice a rallying point for Shanghai’s anti-foreign demonstrations, only a wall and a gate still stand, having been designated a ‘Shanghai site of memory’. This memory belongs to a new nation—the People’s Republic of China founded in 1949—not to the dead of Ningbo, who had rested there while waiting to be carried back to their hometowns for burial. China’s own modernization, including an anti-superstition campaign initiated in 1898, seems to have significantly weakened the power of the ancestors. The destruction of tombs has occurred on a much greater scale during the twenty-first century. In Henan province alone, two million tombs were destroyed in 2012, as the Communist government implemented a ‘tomb-flattening’ (ping fen) policy to free land for agriculture and mechanized farming. There were protests and petitions, but their impact was limited as the government was bent on development.
During the century and a half since the earliest recorded demand for the protection of tomb land was articulated in Shanghai, China as a country has come a long way, but how far will it go in destroying this key element of its traditional religious-political practices? Today, the destruction continues. In the second half of the nineteenth century, during the last few decades of the Qing, the dead were able to stand their ground against European colonial expansion and showed that they could empower the living. The power of ancestors lay not in supernatural intervention but in the ardent desire of the living to act as their protectors.