Chapter 59: The Execution

"In recent days customs have greatly decayed, and heresies have sprung up in swarms.

There are the White Lotus, Dacheng, Hunyuan, Wuwei, and Luo sects, among many names and varieties. By burning incense and performing rites of repentance, they stir and delude the people's hearts, and thereby some hatch seditious plots, and some join bandits and thieves.

These are truly the worst of wicked subjects...

Should any sect of whatever name be encountered, arrest them at once and punish them with heavy penalties, as a measure to nip trouble in the bud." — In the third year of the false Qing Shunzhi reign, Lin Qilong, a supervising secretary of the Ministry of Personnel, submitted this memorial.

In a dim cell of the Deqing prison, a young man covered in blood and grime struggled to sit up from the pile of weeds on the floor, slowly shifted himself to the base of the wall, and then leaned against it without moving.

There were three other prisoners in the cell: a white-haired old man past sixty, a burly man of about forty, and a dark-skinned youth who, by his looks, could not have been more than fifteen or sixteen.

The three paid no attention to the young man's movements. No one went over to help him, and no one said a word to him. They simply lay on the ground like corpses, every face without exception bearing the look of the dead, as though there were no one else in the cell besides themselves.

The cell was so quiet it was suffocating. Now and then a cough or two sounded from far away, and beyond that, not a sound. The air was full of mildew, and now and then one could catch a whiff of rot — though no one knew which prisoner's wound had festered again.

After leaning against the wall for half an incense stick's time, the young man finally let out a long breath. Watching the jailers pass by outside the bars from time to time, his eyes held an unspeakable venom.

The young man was called Tie Yi, a miner at the Old Phoenix Village copper mine in Deqing. A month earlier, unable to bear the overseer beating his master to death, he had killed the man in a rage and been arrested and thrown into prison.

The county yamen had already reported the case to the Ministry of Justice in Beijing, and he was only awaiting the ministry's approval to be executed after autumn.

What the county yamen did not know was that besides being a miner, Tie Yi had another identity: he was a follower of the Luo sect.

The so-called Luo sect, also called the Incense sect, and also called the Demon sect — its followers "abstain from meat and serve the demon," gather in crowds to burn incense, and repeatedly resist the authorities, rising in rebellion at the slightest provocation.

For this reason they have been deeply feared by successive governments, which suppressed them with great severity. Whenever local officials discovered Incense sect followers, they arrested and executed them without asking the circumstances.

Yet under this heavy oppression, the Incense sect remained active among the people. At the end of the Yuan dynasty, a peasant uprising with Incense sect followers at its core erupted and thereby buried Mongol rule in one stroke.

After Zhu Yuanzhang established the Ming dynasty, he pursued a policy of suppression against the Incense sect, and the once-flourishing sect went underground among the people again.

Its sect names also evolved from the Ming sect and White Lotus into the Luo sect, Hunyuan, Dacheng, and other appellations.

Throughout the entire Ming dynasty, apart from the Tang Sai'er uprising in the Yongle period and the Liu Liu and Liu Qi uprisings in the Zhengde period, the Incense sect made no major moves against the authorities, and its influence among the people gradually waned, until it did almost nothing beyond secretly burning incense.

The Manchu Qing invasion and its policies of racial discrimination and massacre against the Han, however, made the Incense sect active among the people once more.

Incense sect followers in various places, unwilling to endure Qing persecution, organized many righteous armies to resist the Qing. When Li Dingguo attacked Guangdong twice before, several Incense sect righteous divisions had risen in response.

Tie Yi lost his father in childhood, and his mother, unwilling to endure poverty, remarried far away. As a small boy he grew up eating the food of a hundred households.

At fifteen he became the disciple of Zheng Laoquan, the Deqing Luo sect incense master and blasting master at the Old Phoenix Mine. He not only learned the skill of blasting out mine shafts, but was also a man of great loyalty and chivalrous heart.

For this reason he enjoyed high prestige among the Luo sect followers of Zhaoqing, and together with his master Zheng Laoquan he was deeply trusted by the miners of the Old Phoenix Village copper mine.

Two months earlier, the Governor-General's yamen of Guangdong had sent a directive to Zhaoqing Prefecture, ordering the copper output of the Old Phoenix Village mine under its jurisdiction to be doubled, in preparation for the two princes of Jingnan and Pingnan establishing their princely courts.

After receiving the order from Guangdong, Zhaoqing Prefecture immediately sent a directive to Deqing, and regardless of the miners' lives, forcibly raised the output, working more than ten men to death in the process.

At first, Zheng Laoquan, Tie Yi, and the other miners had no thought of resistance. The Qing army was powerful, and the Luo sect's strength was weak.

The sect followers in various places had several times cooperated with Li Dingguo's great army in attacking Guangzhou, all without result.

Now that Li Dingguo's army had withdrawn to Guangxi, they had no one to rely on, and could only oppose the Qing court in secret, not daring to rashly raise the banner of rebellion.

But who could have expected that Guangzhou would still find the mine's copper output too slow, and send an overseer to the Old Phoenix Village mine — a man said to be of Han Banners origin, a trusted steward in the Prince of Pingnan's household.

After taking office, this man went from bad to worse. Not only did he drive the miners into the pits day and night, he also embezzled their rations on a grand scale, cutting their original two meals a day down to one.

The miners could not eat their fill, yet still had to go down into the pits day and night. On top of that, the overseers, to curry favor with their new master, flogged them daily without cease, until the miners' grievances filled the air.

One day, when Zheng Laoquan could no longer stand it and exchanged a few words with the Han Banners overseer, he was flogged to death. Tie Yi could bear it no longer, and in a fury smashed the man's skull with a rock.

He was immediately seized by the other overseers at the mine, brutally beaten, and then handed over to the Deqing authorities, who sent a report to the Ministry of Justice for execution.

Tie Yi had killed a Han Banners overseer. The Han Banners were all the Qing court's adopted sons, the second-class people of the Great Qing, always serving as the Manchus' thugs in oppressing the Han.

When a Han killed a Han, the authorities might still ask who was right and wrong, weigh the severity, and deal with it as circumstances warranted. But when a Han killed a bannerman, there was no need to ask anything — the sentence was always the heaviest.

Even cases that did not call for beheading would end in beheading!

Knowing he was doomed beyond doubt, Tie Yi did not rail against heaven or blame others. He only grieved for his master, wondering whether anyone in the sect would come forward to handle the funeral affairs.

After dozing against the wall for a while, a jailer brought in the food: a bucket of blackened, sour, stinking slop, and a bucket of greaseless soup made from rotten vegetable leaves.

Tie Yi shuffled over to the bars, scooped up a little soup with his broken bowl, and after tasting it found it astonishingly bland — there was not a grain of salt in it.

He frowned slightly, then silently carried the bowl back to the base of the wall, watching the other three out of the corner of his eye.

The old man was called Liao Ruixiang. It was said he had once been a Shaoxing legal secretary, and had been thrown into prison for writing some seditious poem. After being locked up, he cried out his innocence every day.

The burly man was called Chen Mo, a genuine bandit. A kidnapping had gone wrong and he had killed the hostage, whereupon the victim's family spent heavily to have constables arrest him. Most likely he too was headed for execution after autumn.

The fifteen- or sixteen-year-old youth was called Pan Mengzi, a Deqing local. He had been thrown into prison for accidentally injuring his master's son, and it was said the master's family had slipped silver to the county to have the boy put to death.

Seeing that all three had filled their bowls and were sitting there eating, Tie Yi stopped watching them and lowered his head to wolf his food down. This was the only meal of the day — if he didn't eat it, it would be wasted.

The four were devouring their food when a voice outside shouted, "All of you, get up!"

The four put down their broken bowls and looked up toward the bars. It was the head jailer, standing outside with several Green Standard soldiers.

"What for?" Chen Mo yelled, and went on eating without a care, paying no attention at all to the soldiers outside.

Secretary Liao and Pan Mengzi, however, hesitantly stood up, the former gazing at the head jailer with a face full of expectation.

Tie Yi merely set down his bowl, but did not rise at once.

"What for?" The head jailer shot a cold glance at the bearded Chen Mo. "Your cases have been approved by the Ministry of Justice. You're being taken out now for execution!"

"What? Execution!"

When Secretary Liao heard this, his vision went black and he collapsed to the ground. Pan Mengzi too grew afraid, standing there trembling.

So it's come at last. Damn it all — the sooner you die, the sooner you're reborn. Eighteen years from now I'll be a hero again!

Tie Yi was not afraid. Instead he let out a breath of relief, as though a heavy stone pressing on his chest had finally fallen away.

"You've got to at least let me eat my fill before I go! Where's the last meal? Bring it here!"

The burly Chen Mo cast a contemptuous glance at Secretary Liao, who was scared half to death, then spat at the head jailer, smashed his broken bowl against the wall with a crack, and cursed, "You're going to execute me, and you feed me this? Is there no proper custom anymore?

Damn it, go get me a roast chicken and a jar of wine, and be quick about it!"

"You son of a bitch, you're about to die and you still want chicken and wine?" The head jailer's mouth twitched. He signaled his men to unlock the door, then pushed it open and went in, landing a punch square on Chen Mo. "How about a fist instead?"

"****..."

Chen Mo's hands were bound in iron chains, so he could not resist. He took the head jailer's punch full on, and refusing to back down, opened his mouth to curse. Before the curse could come out, two Green Standard soldiers rushed up and stuffed a rag into his mouth.

"Mmph... mmph..."

Tie Yi, Secretary Liao, and Pan Mengzi also had their mouths gagged by the Green Standard soldiers. The four kept struggling and crying out, but no sound could escape.

After gagging the prisoners, the Green Standard soldiers pulled black cloths over the four men's heads, and in an instant the four could see nothing. As he was dragged outside, Tie Yi faintly heard someone counting.

"Ninety-one, ninety-two, ninety-three..."