A Triple Murder and a Suspicious Play in Early Nineteenth-Century Jiangnan

Abstract In the years 1803–1807, a dramatic triple murder case in Shouzhou, Anhui, convulsed officialdom in the Jiangnan region and drove the Jiaqing emperor to exasperation. At a time when many in power felt a sense of crisis as “High Qing” imperial ambitions receded, each stone turned over in this meandering investigation revealed another source of anxiety fitted to the age: incest, poisoning, negligent and corrupt officials, amoral and abusive local gentry, misbehaving yamen runners, pettifogging litigators, and, to top it all off, deadly serious rumors of a subversive opera. This article traces the investigations into both the murders and the theater rumor. What made the former so convoluted and vexing, while the latter was alarming yet easier to resolve? Surprisingly, the Imperial Household’s carefully cultivated relationship with the theater world of Jiangnan realized, in miniature, a level of state–society coordination Qing rulers wished for but which often escaped them elsewhere.