The Magistrate Who Climbed Down a Well into Hell / 酆都知县

In which a new magistrate is told that if he wants to abolish the tribute to the dead, he can walk down the well and say so himself

From What the Master Would Not Discuss (子不语), Volume I — by Yuan Mei (袁枚, 1716–1798) · Translated and annotated by Cathay Tales

In the town of Fengdu in Sichuan, the people had a well. Every year they fed it three thousand pieces of silver. If they did not, plague came. When the new magistrate forbade them, the elders said: Then climb down the well yourself, and tell the dead.

The Story

There is a place in Sichuan (四川) called Fengdu (酆都). In Yuan Mei's time, and for centuries before, it was known as one of the kǒu (口) — the mouths — where the world of the living touched the world of the dead.

The town had a well. The well was not for water.

Every year, the people of Fengdu lowered three thousand strings of silver paper down into it^{[1]Paper money for the dead (纸钱 / zhǐqián) — joss paper, often printed with silver or gold leaf, has been burned as offerings to ancestors and ghosts since at least the Tang dynasty. The amount Yuan Mei specifies — three thousand strings of bóqiáng (帛镪, paper ingots) per year — would have represented a substantial cash equivalent in the Qing economy, suggesting Fengdu's "tribute" was less folk custom and more institutional protection racket.}. They called this nà yīnsī qiánliáng (纳阴司钱粮) — "paying the tax to the courts below." If they failed, or if a household tried to keep its coins, plague came through that household's door within the season. Children went first. Then mothers. Then fathers. Everyone in Fengdu had a story.

In the early years of the Qing dynasty, a new magistrate was appointed to Fengdu. His name was Liu Gang (刘纲). He had passed the imperial examination, he had read the classics, and he was, by training, a Confucian rationalist. The first thing he heard about his new posting was the business with the well.

He forbade it.

There was an uproar. The town elders came to his office in a body. They explained, with the patient anger of people who had buried children, that this was not a custom — it was protection money. The dead set the rate. The dead enforced it. A magistrate from the capital could not just declare the contract void.

Liu Gang asked them where, exactly, the dead lived.

The elders said: At the bottom of the well. But nobody has ever gone down to see.

Liu Gang said: I am a magistrate. I serve the people. If a man must die to free his town from a bandit, he dies. Tie a rope around me. I will go.

His staff begged him to reconsider. He refused. They began to lash a long rope around his waist.

His private secretary, a man named Li Shen (李诜) — Yuan Mei describes him as a háoshì (豪士), a swashbuckler, the kind of man who collected curiosities the way other men collected antiques — stepped forward and said, Let me come with you. I want to see what's down there.

Liu Gang told him no. Li Shen ignored him and ordered the staff to rig a second rope.

They were lowered together into the dark.

The well went down five zhàng (丈, roughly 50 feet of depth, the height of a five-story building). For most of that distance there was only black, and the sound of the rope creaking, and the smell of old water.

Then the black ended.

Liu Gang and Li Shen stepped onto solid ground in the middle of a city.

It was lit, but there was no sun. A pale, even light came down from a sky neither man could resolve when he looked up at it. The streets and the courtyards and the rooftops were the same streets, courtyards, and rooftops they had left above — gateposts in the Qing style, official compounds with their proper number of halls, low-walled gardens. Everything down here was a working copy of the world they had just left.

The people, though.

The people were small. Smaller than children. They walked through the streets without touching the ground — miǎoxiǎo and yǐng bù dòng (藐小, 影不动), the text says: miniature, casting no shadow even in the strange light, treading on air. They did not seem aware that the air was not solid. They simply lived as if the ground was somewhere else, in a country they had stopped visiting.

The dead recognized the two living men by the smell of breath. They came running, knelt in the street, and asked, What does an official from above want with us?

Liu Gang gave his statement clearly. I have come to ask, on behalf of the people of Fengdu, that the tribute be lifted.

A murmur went through the crowd. That is not for us to decide, said the elders of the dead. You must speak with Lord Bao.

The hall they were led to was vast. At the head of it sat a man in his seventies, in the formal robes and miǎn liú (冕旒, the bead-fringed ceremonial crown of a high official) of an emperor's court. His face was severe and squared off. The dead bowed when his name was spoken, and a clerk called out, The magistrate from above has arrived.

This was Bāo Gōng (包公) — Lord Bao, known in Chinese folk religion as the just judge of the underworld^{[2]Lord Bao (包公), or Bao Zheng (包拯, 999–1062 CE), was a real Song dynasty official renowned for incorruptibility and willingness to prosecute powerful men. After his death he was elevated in folk religion into the chief judge of the underworld — a position whose mythological weight, by Yuan Mei's time, rivaled that of the Buddhist King Yama (阎罗王 / Yánluó Wáng).}.

Lord Bao came down the steps. He bowed to Liu Gang, returned him to a seat of honor, and said, The road between living and dead is closed. Why have you opened it?

Liu Gang stood and spoke.

Fengdu has been struck by droughts and floods every year. The people are exhausted. The imperial tax itself cannot be collected in full. How can they also pay tribute to the dead — becoming, in effect, tenants in two worlds? I have come, at the cost of my life, to ask you to release them.

Lord Bao smiled.

Magistrate Liu, he said, what you do not understand is that we did not invent this tribute. The world is full of charlatan priests and crooked monks who use the names of the dead to extract money from the living. They lead grieving families into bankruptcy with rituals and chanting and false promises of protection. The dead cannot reach the living directly to refute these lies. So the lies harden into customs. And the customs harden into law.

You are doing what we cannot. You are correcting the record. Of course the tribute is lifted. Even if you had not come, who among the dead could have justified collecting it?

He stood, and then he stopped, and looked up.

A red light was falling through the hall from above.

Lord Bao said, very quickly: The Demon-Subduing Emperor is arriving. You must withdraw.

He waved Liu Gang and Li Shen behind a screen at the back of the hall.

They watched from behind the screen as a second figure descended into the underworld court.

He was robed in green. His beard was long and unkept. He moved without hurry, settling onto the seat Lord Bao had vacated as if returning to a chair he had used many times. This was Guān Shén (关神) — Guan Yu himself, the Three Kingdoms general elevated, over the centuries, into the divine guardian of the Underworld's upper court^{[3]Guan Yu (关羽, 160–220 CE) — a Three Kingdoms general whose centuries of posthumous deification eventually placed him in the underworld bureaucracy as the "Demon-Subduing Emperor" (伏魔大帝 / Fúmó Dàdì). The title is striking: Guan Yu outranks even Lord Bao in this scene, and his arrival forces a sitting judge to vacate his seat.}.

The two gods spoke in low voices. Liu Gang could not catch the words. After a long time, Guan Yu lifted his head and said, quite suddenly, There is the smell of a living man here. What is this?

Lord Bao explained.

Guan Yu said, Then he is a worthy magistrate. I would like to meet him.

Liu Gang came out from behind the screen, terrified, and bowed.

Guan Yu looked at him for a long moment. He spoke briefly to Lord Bao, who agreed. Then a clerk produced a sword — a single, plain, well-balanced sword — and Guan Yu placed it in Liu Gang's hands.

Carry this when you go home, he said. And tell the people of Fengdu that the contract is closed.

He waved a hand. A pair of escorts — Yuan Mei describes them only as tóng bèi, "fellow officers" — appeared with peach branches in their hands^{[4]Peach branches (桃枝) — in Chinese folk religion, peach wood is the standard apotropaic material for warding off ghosts and demons. The escorts carry them because Liu Gang, as a living man traversing the underworld, would otherwise attract any unattached spirits looking for a vehicle back to the surface.}, and together they led Liu Gang and Li Shen back to the bottom of the well.

The men above hauled them up.

Liu Gang lay unconscious for three days.

When he woke, his black hair had turned white. He never spoke of what he had seen, except to confirm the order he had given on his first day: the tribute to the well was abolished. No one was to lower paper money down. No priest was to be paid for ceremonies of "feeding the dead."

Plague did not come that year. It did not come the next year. It did not come the year after that.

The town of Fengdu, the original text says, was finally free of it.

For the rest of his life, Liu Gang refused to engage in any Buddhist or Daoist ritual. He kept the sword Guan Yu had given him in his office. People noticed that he never sat near a woman, not even his wife, after that day in the well — Yuan Mei does not explain why, and the silence in the text is its own kind of comment.

Li Shen, the háoshì who insisted on going down with him, lived a long life and told the story to anyone who would listen.

This is how Yuan Mei heard it.

A Note from the Dark

Yuan Mei loved this story, and you can feel it.

He was, by temperament, the wrong man to write about the underworld. He was a hedonist. He resigned from his own magistracy young so he could go home and host dinner parties and tend his garden and write love poems. He thought Confucian moralists were tedious. He thought Buddhist priests were running a racket. When he sat down to compile Zibuyu, he picked the title — "What the Master Would Not Discuss" — as a direct middle finger to Confucius, who, the Analects tell us, refused to discuss the strange, the violent, the chaotic, and the supernatural.

So of course Yuan Mei wrote a story in which the underworld itself agrees with him about the priests.

What I cannot get out of my head is the architecture of the place. The dead don't live in some Dantean inferno of fire and ice. They live in a Qing dynasty city. Same gateposts, same compounds, same bureaucratic hierarchy. The afterlife is a working office building. You file paperwork to abolish a tax. The judge calls a meeting. The decision gets made.

And the people are small. They cast no shadow. They walk on air without noticing. They have been dead long enough that the ground stopped meaning anything to them, and they kept the city around them mostly out of habit.

That detail is small enough that you could miss it on a first read. It is the detail that has been quietly haunting me all afternoon.

The other thing is Liu Gang. He goes down the well to argue about a tax. He comes back with white hair and a sword from a god. The original text never tells us what he saw between Lord Bao's hall and the bottom of that rope. Yuan Mei is too good a writer to fill the silence. He just shows us a man who never sat near his wife again.

I think about him every time I pass a place where people leave money for the dead.

Next tale: tomorrow returns to the brushed-paper world of Ji Yun and the Tang chuanqi tellers. → [Coming soon]