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c h a p t e r 4 The Murders Continue: 1626 . I T I S A L M O S T beyond belief that the shocking arrests, doubtful charges, tortures, and secret murders of six leading Donglin figures in 1625 failed to satisfy the Beijing authorities’ desire for retribution. Obviously, however, the authorities felt that they had not yet done enough. The year 1626, therefore, saw a second and equally grim round of arrests and murders, this time targeting seven of the most renowned and articulate scholar-officials of south China. Again, contemporaries recorded for posterity the harrowing stories of this new wave of martyrs, with undiminished relish for intense, day-by-day detail. By 1625–1626 an elaborate machinery of political repression had developed . There were two principal organs. One was the so-called Eastern Depot, of which palace eunuch Wei Zhongxian was director. It consisted of some one thousand uniformed police and two headquarters complexes , one inside the Forbidden City, and the other outside, at the Forbidden City’s eastern wall. The Eastern Depot could not directly arrest or interrogate officials, or anyone who enjoyed official status (jinshen); its jurisdiction was confined to commoners.1 The available records show that, indeed, Wei Zhongxian was regularly rewarded for his work in prosecuting thieves, counterfeiters, Manchu spies, and other small-time suspects who were not of the official class. The prosecution of officials (such as the Donglin) was the responsibility of the Embroidered-uniform Guard, whose offices and infamous “Decree Prison” were located south of the Imperial City, in the same government quarter that housed all the other military offices of the outer court. The Guard’s Northern Prison Office (Bei zhenfusi), of which Xu Xianchun was director, conducted the interrogations and tortures of officials . The Embroidered-uniform Guard grew in size from 17,760 in 1620 to 36,360 in 1627.2 Thus Wei Zhongxian’s hand in the arrest and torture of the Donglin and other officials was indirect and came by way of his informal control of Tianqi’s powers of edict and rescript rather than by his direct management of the Eastern Depot. With the cooperation of the Palace, anti-Donglin officials proceeded during 1625–1626 with the piecemeal removals of hundreds of perceived 1 0 1 1 0 2 T H E M U R D E R S C O N T I N U E enemies from bureaucratic life. Most were reduced from official to commoner status and were ordered to hand back the patents of official rank that had been awarded to their parents. However, for a select few of those purged, much worse was in store. In the spring of 1626, there was engineered a second round of arrests of seven more leading lights in the Donglin faction. They were made because the Tianqi court was still struggling to recover China’s moral high ground, and the seven men, although they had been removed from office , were still seen as threatening the country’s moral credentials. These arrests struck at the cultural heart of late Ming China, the wealthy region of Jiangnan, including especially the city of Suzhou. . Censor Zhou Zongjian (who in 1623, in a failed bid for Donglin leadership , had scathingly assaulted Wei Zhongxian and his then collaborator Guo Gong) was home on mourning leave in Wujiang county, not far south of Suzhou, when in April 1625 he was placed second in a list of four Donglin officials accused of partisan activity and removed from civil service . Zhou was also accused of taking bribes. The governors (fuan) of Nanzhili province were ordered to determine and recover the full amounts of the alleged bribes.3 After nearly a year had elapsed, the Palace had received no report from the Nanzhili governors about their investigation of Zhou Zongjian. It therefore ordered a detachment of the Embroidered-uniform Guard to go to Wujiang, arrest Zhou, and bring him to the Decree Prison for interrogation .4 Upon receiving this directive, Governor (xunfu) Mao Yilu belatedly reported having collected 1,000 taels from Zhou. The Palace was dissatisfied with Mao’s report; it said there was much more silver than that to be accounted for, and it directed Mao to “severely press” Zhou Zongjian’s family for more.5 Also placed under arrest by the same Palace rescript was Miao Changqi of Jiangyin county, about twenty-five miles northwest of Suzhou. In February 1625, Miao had received permission to leave Beijing and go...

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