In April 1768, when mason Wu Tungming refused farmer Shen Shiliang's request to paste a small paper with the names of his nephews on it on a wood pile during a small local project to rebuild a collapsed bridge in Deqing County, Zhejiang Province, he did not expect something so seemingly trivial would be the fuse of a massive witch-hunt and imperial investigation, which stirred the whole Qing Empire during the flourishing age of Emperor Qianlong who reigned from1736 to 1795.

The episode was explored at length by Harvard professor Philip A. Kuhn in his famous work "Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768."

At the time a superstitious belief prevailed in some quarters that if a person's name was inscribed on wood or stone, this would increase the strength of masons or carpenters and the material they worked with would be more durable. But the downside of the belief was that those whose names were pasted would lose their souls perhaps even their lives. This was called soul-stealing at that time.

Motivated by hatred towards his unfilial nephews Shen went to Wu and tried to persuade him to inscribe their names. He hoped that if they lost their souls their oppression of him would end.

But Wu refused and instead hauled Shen before the local magistrate, who ordered the farmer receive 25 lashes as a punishment for spreading sorcery. After the flogging Shen was released, but things were not over.

Talk of soulstealing spread outside De-qing County to nearby Xiaoshan County, where four vagrant monks two officially registered and two not were rounded up by an angry mob on suspicion of stealing the souls of local children.

Under torture, two admitted the charge and were handed over to the provincial governor. He, however, found inconsistencies in their confessions and ordered further investigations. These revealed a local official had falsely accused the pair after failing to extract bribes from them.

Part of the allegations concerning the monks were that they were found to have scissors on them. It was thought a person's soul could be stolen by cutting off the queue (hair plait) of those targeted.

The monks were released but the rumour of soulstealing began to spread far and wide. First to the nearby province Jiangsu, then to distant Hubei in Central China and Shandong, Jiangsu's northern neighbour. Shandong governor Funihan, a ruling Manchurian, reported the case directly to the Qing central court.

Four senior cabinet ministers who chaired regular issues pertaining to central government in Beijing when Emperor Qianlong moved his court from the capital to Chengde 400 kilometres north to escape the sweltering summer undertook an investigation into the case and found all charges of soul-stealing baseless.

They harshly condemned local officials for failing to properly carry out their duty to calm public unrest and quell rumours.

Then Emperor Qianlong happened to notice a reference to the case among piles of daily governmental reports.

Thereafter the matter took a new turn.

The emperor ordered his ministers to conduct a serious and in-depth investigation into the matter.

The ministers, all highly educated people, repeated their belief that soul-stealing was impossible, but their learning and assertions did nothing to dissuade Qianlong, considered one of the greatest of China's emperors.

He worried that soul-stealing through cutting of the then customary queue, was a sign of civil protest against the Manchurian rulers, who had insisted the majority Han people wore their hair in the Manchurian style, with forehead shaved and the long queue at the back, since coming to power in the mid-17th century.

Qianlong over-rode the central ministries order by issuing an imperial edict to provincial officials.

As a result of the repeated and stern demands of the emperor, a nationwide campaign to track down soulstealers was launched. Those previously charged and released were rounded up again and subjected to hideous tortures in an effort to force them to confess.

The nationwide investigation lasted four months and found no evidence of a soul-stealing conspiracy. Not surprising as there had never been such a plot. Likewise no principal behind a soul-stealing scheme was ever identified.

Officials at different levels were exhausted and the emperor embarrassed by the whole debacle. But he would not, or could not admit, he was wrong. In October, a royal decree was sent to ministries and local officials, urging the investigation into soul-stealing end. Several provincial officials were targeted as scapegoats and lightly punished.

"Although the principal criminal of the soul-stealing has not been caught, this case has upset my officials and subjects seriously. For the sake of their peaceful life, I order a stop to the investigation," the emperor said in his face-saving decree.

Interesting and absurd as the story is - as indeed are most witch-hunts the soul-stealing case was rooted in the then socio-economic conditions, says Kuhn, a disciple of William King Fairbank (1907-1991), the founder of US Sinology.

By 1768, the year of the soul-stealing debacle, China had enjoyed nearly a century of peace and the population had doubled from the beginning of the Qing Dynasty to more than 300 million.

More people and less arable land caused tensions within society. There was widespread discrimination against vagrant beggars, monks and land-less peasants.

This was the primary reason behind the antipathy towards the disparate and made them easy targets of discriminatory allegations.

Interestingly, in spite of the tensions, officialdom from the lowest level magistrates to ministers, throughout tried to ameliorate the tension. And if the emperor had not interfered, the soul-stealing case might have quickly disappeared among a sea of documents and files.

But Qianlong kept a keen eye on his ministers and magistrates to prevent them from routinely concealing matters of importance, which they did not want to be burdened dealing with.

Zheng Jiadong, a historian at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said the skill of Kuhn was the ability to narrate a truly macro picture through the description of some detailed and interesting events.

(China Daily 06/15/2005 page13)