Section: From Famine to Preference?

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It also seems that the consumption of human flesh during famines was not always driven by pure desperation, but that culinary choices could play a role as well. In the mid-1930s, the Sichuan province in the southwest was afflicted by several years of famine caused by natural calamities. According to records collected twenty-five years later (after the next big famine) by the People’s Political Consultative Conference, a political advisory body, human

flesh was bought in quarters, at prices that varied by a factor of one or two depending on whether it had been taken from a corpse or from a person killed for the purpose. In the east of Sichuan at the beginning of May 1936, the going rate was 500 copper pieces for a pound of flesh from a corpse and 1,220 copper pieces a pound if it was freshly killed.49

Flesh taken from a corpse would have been as suitable to face off starvation as that of a murder victim. Still, some buyers were willing to pay a considerable surcharge for the flesh of a “freshly killed” individual. Maybe they feared that the corpse of someone who had died of hunger or natural causes was infected with a disease, or that the flesh was close to going bad? This is conceivable, but is it enough to explain the price difference? Or were people willing to pay more because fresh flesh tasted better or because the victims of kidnapping and murder were, on average, younger than those who had died of natural reasons? If so, they were willing to put their culinary preferences over the lives of others.

While exact prices of human flesh are rarely recorded, during an earlier famine, in 1647, “man’s meat was sold for seven ch’ien and woman’s for eight ch’ien per chin.”50 Certainly, human flesh was equally nourishing regardless of whether it came from a male or female victim. It is therefore hard to explain this price difference except as due to a culinary preference.

Generally, the first half of the seventeenth century was a period of political unrest and economic instability. The Ming dynasty (1368–1644) was in decline and ultimately collapsed due to external attacks and internal difficulties. Famines became more frequent, in part due to economic and political troubles, but also because of an “unusually cold and dry weather that shortened the growing season”—part of a global period of cooling called the “little ice age.”51 The official histories recorded cannibalism for several of these famines. According to a folktale written down by the scholar Ji Yun (1724–1805), human flesh was also served in restaurants during this time of frequent famines. Innkeepers bought people (in the case of the folktale it was a young woman) and then washed and slaughtered them, and served their flesh to their customers, who generally seem to have known what was going on. Ji Yun treated the story as true—it was likely based on oral accounts he had received.52

Various tales and oral accounts circulating in later decades about the “Incredible Famine” of the late nineteenth century likewise claim that the flesh of kidnapped or purchased victims—usually “young women and children”—was served at inns “to undiscerning customers.”53 How much truth there is in such stories is difficult to determine. They may be more or less distorted depictions of actual practices, or they may be pure horror fantasies. But, in any case they are part of the oral record and, considering that cannibalism and the sale of human flesh are well documented for these times, it would be wrong to treat them as mere fanciful “fairytales.” If human flesh was really served in restaurants, this would also hint at a certain preference—not particularly for human flesh, but certainly for flesh of any kind over a meatless diet. The patrons in these tales do not seem to have been threatened by immediate starvation, rather they were apparently willing to accept human-based dishes over having to forgo meat altogether.

Two other folktales taking place in the late Ming dynasty cover the sale of women by their own husbands to butchers and sellers of human meat—a practice that has indeed been documented for several famines.54 They also claim that the sold women voluntarily sacrificed themselves in order to ensure the survival of their husbands and parents-in-law—something that may be doubted, though it certainly reflects the values of Chinese society, in which filial piety and a woman’s devotion for her husband were among the highest virtues.

During an earlier famine, culinary choices also seem to have played a role. In 1125, a war broke out between the newly established Jin (or Jurchen) dynasty (1115–1234), which ruled the northeast of today’s China, and the older Song dynasty (960–1279), which ruled the southeast. Due to severe attacks from the north, the Song rulers had to abandon their capital, Kaifeng, which was conquered by the northern forces in 1127. But the Jin troops did not stop there, even conquering two years later today’s Hangzhou (750 kilometers farther southeast). Realizing that they “had advanced too far and too fast” and were unable to properly secure the territory they had conquered, the Jin army soon decided to abandon the city and withdraw to the north—but only after they had thoroughly “pillaged” the city.55

A few years later, the scholar Zhuang Chuo finished the Jilebian, a book in which he describes his memories of the time.56 He writes that one year after the start of the war, a huge famine broke out in the regions which had been conquered and plundered by the northern soldiers. During the next six or seven years, people resorted to cannibalism and human flesh appeared on the marketplaces:

Thieves and bandits, civil servants and soldiers, the entire population were eating each other. The price of human meat was lower than that of dog meat or pork. A fat, sturdy man was worth only 1500 coins. Human bodies were exposed to the sun in order to be processed into dried meat.57

Zhuang adds that when the Song troops returned to Hangzhou in 1133, after several years of chaos and lawlessness, they found that its inhabitants consumed human flesh—whether only by necessity or also by choice is not quite clear. In any case it seems that a culture had developed in which human flesh was sold almost openly, without any real attempt to hide its origin. While in other famines, this flesh was often mislabeled as “pork” or some other kind of animal meat, here it was known as “two-legged mutton”—a euphemism that hinted at its true origin in a not so subtle manner.58

Zhuang mentions several additional euphemisms which indicate that the buyers had become quite discriminating in regard to the origin of the meat they acquired, and the sellers readily told them (in a slightly veiled language) whether the victim had been young or old, female or male, chubby or skinny: “An old and skinny man was designated under the covert name . . . ‘forcing the fire’ (?); a fairly young woman was called . . . ‘sheep with a hundred beauties’; a little child was named . . . ‘tender including the bones’ (?).”59 Key Ray Chong interprets these names as indicating that “because of their superior tastiness children could be eaten whole, including their bones, when they were well-boiled,” while “women’s meat [was] more delicious than mutton” and “men’s meat was . . . the least tasty of all human meat.”60 He also notes that “a suckling pig or a young ram” was often roasted or steamed whole (including the bones) after “remov[ing] the entrails, and fill[ing] the belly with dates”—the name used for young children might have suggested that they could be prepared in a similar manner.61 Whatever the exact meaning of the used euphemisms, they leave little doubt that the flesh of little children and young woman was considered preferable to that of old men—and likely fetched a higher price. Such distinctions clearly went beyond the necessities of mere survival.

(end of this chapter, more to come)