Imagined Violence: Representing Homicide in Late Imperial Crime Reports and Fiction

Abstract

This essay seeks to explore the culture of writing in late imperial China by focusing on one common topic: the representation of violence. Materials examined here include vernacular fiction of the Ming and Qing periods that continued to be popular through the Qing period, and crime case reports and related documents from the Qing. Through examinations of the effects of violent rage, a struggle over a weapon that ends in death, and a battle between heavily armed warriors, I conclude that writers of fiction narrated violent acts in the most concise manner possible, leaving the details to the imagination of the reader. This technique is intended to entertain by actively involving the reader in the creation of the scene. By contrast, descriptions of wounded bodies form the central evidence in Qing period crime case reports. These highly detailed descriptions are contextualized by using the narrative of the official investigation and the narrative testimony of the principals and the witnesses of the crime. The intended effect is to preclude imaginative interpretations of the facts; there could be only one reading, which had to lead directly to an identification of the violent act, with a punishment as described in the Da Qing luli, the Qing penal code. Narrative testimony as it was represented in legal documents shares some characteristics with fictional narrative, namely its lack of detailed description. Excerpts from three Qing crime cases support these conclusions. Ming-Qing gong'an xiaoshuo, the legal fiction that would seemingly combine these two approaches to writing, in formal terms is clearly more like other fiction than like legal documents: it emphasizes narration rather than description of violence to spark the readers' creative imagination.