The Fifteen Strings of Cash / 十五贯戏言成巧祸

A Southern Song Miscarriage of Justice from the Sanyan Collection

From Sanyan — Stories to Awaken the World (醒世恒言), Volume 33 · Originally a Southern Song huaben titled The Wrongful Execution of Cui Ning (错斩崔宁), retold by Feng Menglong (冯梦龙, 1574–1646)

Lin'an, the Southern Song capital, sometime in the late twelfth century. A small textile dealer named Liu Gui (刘贵) borrows fifteen strings of copper coin from his father-in-law to set up a new shop. Coming home drunk that night, he finds his teenaged second wife Chen Erjie (陈二姐) waiting up for him. He decides to tease her. He tells her, with a straight face, that the fifteen strings of cash on the table are not seed money for a shop — they are the price he just received for selling her to another man. He laughs himself to sleep. Before sunrise, he is dead, the cash is gone, his wife is on the road, and the joke has begun the worst chain of mistakes in the history of Southern Song urban fiction.

The Joke

Liu Gui^{[1]Liu Gui (刘贵): A small-merchant character in Southern Song urban fiction. The original huaben gives him the typical portrait of the over-extended Lin'an shopkeeper of the late twelfth century — three failed businesses, two wives, one demanding father-in-law, and a chronic alcohol problem. Modern Chinese-literature scholarship reads him as a representative of the new commercial class created by the explosion of Lin'an's urban economy after the Jin invasion of 1127 forced the Song court to relocate to the south. These men were often the first generation in their families to live by trade rather than agriculture, and their stories are full of the financial and domestic anxieties of recent commercialization.} had been a moderately prosperous shopkeeper before his luck turned. By the year of this story he was technically bankrupt — the textile shop on Qiantang Lane was closed, the inventory was gone, and he was living on small loans from his father-in-law, the wealthy old merchant Wang. His first wife, the daughter of old Wang, had given him no son. He had taken a second wife, Chen Erjie^{[2]Chen Erjie (陈二姐): "Chen the Second Daughter." In Southern Song naming convention, junior wives and daughters of poor families were often known publicly only by their family name and birth order, never by a personal name. The fact that the original story never gives her a personal name — even when she is on trial for her life — is one of its quietly devastating details. The senior wife is the great madam. Chen Erjie is the second one.} — a girl from a poor family, perhaps seventeen, perhaps eighteen — without ever managing to give her a child either. The household was three adults and no children: Liu Gui, the senior wife (always called the great madam in the original), and the junior wife Chen Erjie. The senior wife had been away for two days at her father's house when this story begins.

That morning, old Wang had given his son-in-law one more loan — fifteen strings of copper cash^{[3]Fifteen strings of cash (十五贯): A guàn (贯) was a string of one thousand standard copper coins. Fifteen guàn — fifteen thousand copper coins — was, in late twelfth-century Lin'an, roughly the cost of: (a) a year's living expenses for a modest household, (b) a small commercial loan for a stall vendor, or (c) the bride-price for a junior wife from a poor family. The fact that the joke price Liu Gui assigns to Chen Erjie is exactly the same as a plausible loan amount, and exactly the same as a plausible bride-price, is what makes the joke immediately credible to Chen Erjie. The number was chosen by the original storyteller to be ambiguous on purpose.} — with the understanding that this was the last. Open a small business with it. A pawnshop, a grain stall, anything. Stop coming to me. Stop disgracing my daughter. Liu Gui had thanked him, taken the cash, and on his way home had stopped at every wineshop between his father-in-law's house and his own. By dusk he was thoroughly drunk. He arrived at his front door already weaving on his feet, the heavy strings of copper cash slung over his shoulder, and pushed inside calling for Chen Erjie to bring water.

Chen Erjie had waited dinner for him. She came out, helped him take off his outer robe, and pointed at the strings of cash piled on the table.

"Where did this come from?" she asked.

Liu Gui sat down. He looked at her. He looked at the cash. And he made the decision — fatal as it turns out, but at the time merely the stupid impulse of a drunk man trying to tease a young wife who had been more dutiful all evening than his hangover deserved — to play a small joke.

"This?" he said. "This is your sale price."

Chen Erjie froze.

"My what?"

"Your sale price," Liu Gui said, warming to the joke. "Listen. Things are not going well for me. The shop is gone. Your father-in-law has cut me off. The senior madam complains that I cannot give her a son. So I have made arrangements. There is a man — a fairly decent man, as these things go — who has been wanting a junior wife. He paid me fifteen strings of cash for you. He is coming tomorrow morning. He will be here at dawn. Pack tonight."

He laughed. He laughed for some time. He thought it was funny. Chen Erjie did not laugh. She stood at the side of the table looking at the heap of copper cash and at the husband who, by the only law she knew anything about, had every right to do exactly what he was claiming to have done. The Song legal code permitted a husband to re-marry out a junior wife who had failed to produce a child. The transaction was technically a resale and required only the husband's seal. There was no need for the wife's consent. There was no court hearing. There was, in many cases, no announcement to the wife at all until the new husband arrived to collect her.

Liu Gui, still laughing, lay down on the bed and was asleep within five minutes.

Chen Erjie stood in the kitchen for a long time, alone, with the jokes of a drunk man hardening into facts in her head.

The Flight, the Burglar, and the Stranger on the Road

What Chen Erjie did, by perhaps the second hour of the night, was the worst thing she could possibly have done from the standpoint of her own safety, and the most reasonable thing she could possibly have done from the standpoint of a frightened seventeen-year-old whose husband had just told her she was being sold at dawn.

She did not wake him. She did not argue with him. She did not wait for the senior madam to come back. She put on a travelling cloak, slipped out of the house, walked next door to a neighbor named Old Zhu (朱三老儿)^{[4]Old Zhu (朱三老儿): "Old Zhu the Third." A neighbor figure who appears in many Sanyan stories — the half-asleep middle-aged shopkeeper next door whose half-remembered testimony, given to the constables in the morning, becomes the prosecution's key witness. In the Cui Ning tradition Old Zhu is a sympathetic character; he has done nothing wrong, and his evidence is given honestly. He is just one more piece in the chain of small honest acts that send two innocent people to the execution ground.}, and asked to spend the rest of the night there. To Old Zhu she said only: The master has sold me. I am going to my parents' house at dawn to clear up the matter. Please tell him in the morning that I am at my father's. Old Zhu, half-asleep, agreed.

She did not sleep. She left Old Zhu's house at first light and started walking down the road toward her parents' village, alone, with no companion and no money.

What happened in Liu Gui's house that night, after she left, was not what she imagined.

A petty burglar — a broke gambler named Jingyi (静一) in the original, though most readers know him simply as the burglar — had been watching the house all evening. He had seen Liu Gui come home with the strings of cash. He waited until the lamps went out. He climbed the back wall, picked the latch, and slipped into the bedroom in the dark. He felt his way to the bed, located the heap of cash on the table beside it, and was carefully transferring the strings into a sack when Liu Gui woke up.

What happened next is described in the original with the precision of a court deposition. Liu Gui, still half-drunk, accused the burglar — You owe me money, you have come to steal it, this is no way to pay a debt — apparently confusing the intruder with one of his own creditors. The burglar punched him. Liu Gui dodged, jumped out of bed, and chased the burglar into the kitchen. There, in the kitchen, the burglar's hand fell on the firewood axe propped against the wall.

The original phrase is yě shì rén jí jì shēng (也是人极计生) — also: when a man is desperate, the plan comes. The burglar struck Liu Gui once in the face with the axe. Liu Gui fell. The burglar struck him again to make sure. Liu Gui did not get up.

The burglar then said aloud, to no one — and the line is preserved exactly in the original — yī bù zuò, èr bù xiū (一不做, 二不休), the deed once begun, why stop halfway — and went back into the bedroom, took every one of the fifteen strings of copper cash, wrapped them in the bedcover, and walked out the front door, pulling it shut behind him. By the time the eastern sky was light he was gone, and the case had begun.

While the burglar was wrapping cash in Liu Gui's bedcover, Chen Erjie was perhaps three li down the road, walking toward her father's village in the dawn. The road was empty except for one other traveller — a young silk vendor named Cui Ning (崔宁)^{[5]Cui Ning (崔宁): The eponymous figure of the original Southern Song huaben, Cui Ning Wrongfully Beheaded (错斩崔宁). A silk-trading commissioner from Jianyang in northern Fujian — by trade, by the way, exactly the same county and exactly the same period as the great forensic theorist Song Ci. Modern critics have noted the irony that the Xi Yuan Ji Lu and the Cui Ning story were written within the same generation in the same county, the one teaching magistrates how to wash away wrongful verdicts, the other recording the wrongful verdict that nobody washed away. There is no evidence Song Ci and the storyteller of Cui Ning knew of each other, but the parallel is too close to ignore.}, from out of town, who had been to the capital to settle some accounts and was walking home with the proceeds of his trip in a string-tied bundle slung over his shoulder. The bundle, as Cui Ning later confirmed under torture, contained exactly fifteen strings of copper cash.

He had earned it honestly, over six months, selling silk on commission. He had no idea that a man had been killed three li behind him, in the dawn, by a burglar with the same amount of money in a sack.

Chen Erjie and Cui Ning fell in step together on the road, as country travellers will. They were the only two people on the road. They started talking. They were going in the same direction — Cui Ning's village was past Chen Erjie's — and after a while they were walking together as casually as any two strangers who had decided to share the road for safety.

It was at this point that Old Zhu, back in town, was knocking on Liu Gui's front door, finding it open, walking inside, finding the body in the kitchen, finding the cash gone, and running into the street shouting.

The Arrest, the Confession, and the Execution

The constables who came to the murder scene were given, within twenty minutes of arrival, what looked to them like a complete case. Old Zhu told them that the junior wife had said, the night before, that the master has sold me. The senior madam, summoned from her father's house, confirmed that her husband had, indeed, been planning something with the fifteen strings of cash. The body in the kitchen was real. The cash was gone. The junior wife was gone. The fifteen strings of cash were gone with her.

The conclusion the constables drew was the one anyone in the neighborhood would have drawn. The junior wife had murdered her husband to prevent the sale, taken the cash, and run.

A pursuit was organized within the hour. Constables on horseback overtook Chen Erjie and Cui Ning on the road by mid-morning. The two travellers were stopped, searched, and immediately marked as guilty by every piece of physical evidence: Cui Ning was carrying exactly fifteen strings of copper cash in a bundle. Chen Erjie was the absconding wife. They had been walking together on the road from the murder scene. The constables tied them up and brought them back to the magistrate.

The magistrate's interrogation followed the standard Southern Song procedure for a capital case in which the suspects refuse to confess: he had them tortured. The original is restrained but specific about this — yán xíng bī gòng (严刑逼供), severe punishment to force confession. Chen Erjie, after some hours, signed a confession to the murder of her husband. Cui Ning, after some hours, signed a confession to being her accomplice — the lover she had run away to meet, who had helped her swing the axe and split the proceeds.

Neither confession bore any resemblance to what had actually happened. The two suspects had only met, in fact, on the road that morning. Cui Ning had never seen Chen Erjie before in his life. He certainly had not killed her husband. The fifteen strings of cash in his bundle were the result of six months of silk-trading and could be vouched for by any of three named brokers in the capital.

The magistrate did not call the brokers. The case was complete on paper. The suspects had confessed. The evidence — fifteen strings of cash, two suspects walking together, a corpse, a fleeing wife — was overwhelming. The magistrate signed the verdict and sent the file up to the prefectural court for review. The prefectural court, reading the same dossier, signed the death warrant the same week.

Chen Erjie and Cui Ning were beheaded together at the public execution ground, having known each other for approximately three hours of road-walking and approximately three days of shared interrogation, for a murder neither of them had committed and for an affair that had never existed.

The Senior Madam, the Bandit, and the Truth

The story does not end at the execution ground.

Some months later, the senior madam — Liu Gui's first wife, the daughter of old Wang — was traveling by herself through the mountains south of the capital on a journey home from a temple, having decided to take the Buddhist vows of widowhood, when her boat was attacked by river bandits. She was taken upriver and presented to the bandit chief, a man known only by his title Jingshan Daiwang (静山大王) — the Lord of Mount Quiet — as a prospective new wife.

The bandit chief was, as bandit chiefs in Southern Song urban fiction tend to be, a man of complicated antecedents. He had been, before turning to banditry, a small-time gambler and burglar working the streets of Lin'an. The senior madam, who was beautiful and well-spoken and had no good options, agreed to the marriage in exchange for her life. They lived together for some months in the bandit village. He treated her well. He talked to her in the evenings. He was, by his own account, a reformed man.

One night, drunk on rice wine, he started telling her about the worst thing he had ever done.

There was this house in Lin'an. Years ago. I climbed the wall meaning only to take a sack of cash. The owner woke up. We fought in the kitchen. There was an axe. I struck him twice. I took fifteen strings of cash and I left. I have never told anyone.

The senior madam recognized the house. She recognized the night. She recognized the fifteen strings of cash. She kept her face still through the rest of the conversation, served her husband more wine, waited for him to fall asleep, and at first light went to the nearest county yamen and turned him in.

The bandit was arrested, brought to court, and confessed to the murder of Liu Gui in full. The wrongful execution of Chen Erjie and Cui Ning was now a matter of record. The Southern Song judicial system, to its limited credit, did what it could: the bandit was executed for the original murder, the magistrate who had signed the death warrant was demoted three grades, the prefectural reviewer was fined, and the families of Chen Erjie and Cui Ning each received a small posthumous indemnity from the imperial treasury. The senior madam took the Buddhist vows she had originally been planning to take, entered a nunnery near Hangzhou, and was never heard from again.

The narrator's final comment, in the original, is one of the bleakest sentences in Sanyan: kě lián jī gè rén mìng, dōu yīn xì yán zhī gù. (可怜几个人命, 都因戏言之故.) — Pity these several human lives, all lost because of one piece of teasing.

Translator's Notebook

I was prepared, when I first started reading this story, for it to be a moralistic anti-joke fable. Don't lie even in jest. That is how the title — Xì Yán Chéng Qiǎo Huò (戏言成巧祸), A Joke That Becomes a Strange Calamity — gets quoted in modern Chinese textbooks. See what happens when you do not take your wife seriously, students.

The actual story is much darker and much more interesting than that.

Chen Erjie does nothing wrong. She does not deserve to die. She does not even deserve to be inconvenienced. She is a teenaged girl who has been told, by the only adult man who has any legal authority over her, that she has just been sold to a stranger and will be collected at dawn. Her response — go to the neighbor's house, leave for her parents at first light — is the most rational response any rational person could possibly have. The system she lives in actively legalizes the thing her husband joked about. Her flight is not panic. It is procedure.

Cui Ning does nothing wrong. He is a small-time silk trader who happens to be carrying the wrong amount of money on the wrong morning down the wrong road. The fifteen strings of cash in his bundle are the entirely legitimate proceeds of six months of work. The fact that they match, to the coin, the amount stolen from Liu Gui's bedroom is one of the great cruel coincidences in Chinese vernacular fiction.

The magistrate does almost nothing wrong, by the standards of his own job. He has a corpse, an absconding wife, an unrelated traveler with the right amount of money, two confessions extracted by methods that were considered routine in the Southern Song judicial system, and a tight chain of circumstantial evidence. He signs the warrant. He goes home. He probably does not lose any sleep.

What Feng Menglong is doing, when he picks up the older Southern Song huaben Cui Ning Wrongfully Beheaded and rewrites it for his Ming-dynasty readers as The Fifteen Strings of Cash: A Joke That Becomes a Strange Calamity, is something that I think no English-language summary I have ever read of this story has gotten right. He is not writing a fable about jokes. He is writing a procedural about the collapse of evidentiary judgment — about what happens when a criminal-justice system that was supposed to xǐ yuān (洗冤, "wash away the wronged" — the same phrase Song Ci uses in the title of his forensic manual) instead manufactures the wrong from scratch, in fifteen pages, with everyone playing the part assigned to them by their station.

The husband plays the drunk. The wife plays the runaway. The stranger plays the lover. The neighbor plays the witness. The magistrate plays the magistrate. None of them is malicious. All of them are wrong. Two innocents die.

The senior madam — who is, in fact, the only character in the entire story to do anything that actually changes the outcome — does not get her sister-wife back. She does not get her husband back. The man who killed her husband is dead, but so are two people who did not kill her husband. The compensation paid to their families by the imperial treasury, the original tells us with no editorial comment, was about a hundred strings of cash apiece. Less than seven times the price of the joke that started the whole thing.

I had to put the story down for a while when I got to the line about the cash.

The other thing that has stayed with me is the bandit's confession. He tells the senior madam — his new wife, who he has no particular reason to suspect — about the worst thing he has ever done, while drunk, late at night, the way men who have done bad things sometimes tell women in the dark about the bad things they have done. He is not asking forgiveness. He is not bragging. He is just unloading. And the woman he has chosen as his confessor turns out to be the only person in the entire province who has both the standing and the motive to put a noose around his neck.

That is the sort of detail you cannot make up. Feng Menglong did not make it up. The story, in some form, was almost certainly a real Southern Song case — the huaben genre was based on professional storytellers retelling actual court records to crowds in the marketplaces of Lin'an, and Cui Ning Wrongfully Beheaded shows up in a thirteenth-century manuscript with the editorial note jīn àn (今案) — current case. Somewhere in the records of the Lin'an prefectural court, in some month of some year in the late twelfth century, two innocent people were beheaded for a crime committed by a man who confessed it years later in bed to the dead man's first wife.

The seventeen-year-old who walked out of her husband's house at midnight and the small-time silk trader she met in the dawn were, on the day they died, the two most unlucky people in the entire Southern Song empire.

Five hundred years before Twelve Angry Men, six hundred years before In Cold Blood, Feng Menglong and his anonymous Southern Song predecessor wrote the case down because they thought somebody ought to.

Next tale: The Oil-Seller and the Courtesan — how a poor oil vendor saved up for a single evening with the most expensive woman in the capital, and what happened when she came home drunk to his rented room. → [Coming soon]