120 years ago today, the shadow-cloaked hills of the Ili
Valley silently witnessed the murder of a woman and her daughter.
The story begins with Zulpiqar, a man from Kashgar who
had come north across the mountains to Ghulja in the Ili Valley. Zulpiqar, a
Turkic Muslim (“Turki,” or chanmin in Qing official parlance), owned his
own horse, and he worked as a guide for some of those traders and travelers
along the north-south route between the two cities.
Zulpiqar’s work brought him into regular contact with a
trader whom Qing records call A-pa and his wife, Aysha Khan. It seems that A-pa
was often away on one kind of business or another, and during those long months
when he was out carting goods from settlement to settlement, though she lived
with her little daughter Cholpan, Aysha got lonely. Sometime in February of
1891, Zulpiqar came by the house, and his relationship with Aysha went from
flirtation to adultery. From then on, Zulpiqar would come over and give her
gifts, and their affair continued for some time.
Now, at this point, it is critical to understand our
sources and the narrative they provide. I am working from a palace memorial
written almost a year after the events. This is a special document meant for
the eyes of the Emperor and the deliberation of the Board of Punishments, the
ministry that maintained the legal code and recommended to the Emperor his
final decisions regarding difficult cases and capital punishments. By the time
this memorial got to Beijing, the case had passed all the way up the regional
bureaucratic hierarchy, from the Ningyuan county magistrate, to the Ili prefect,
to the Ili-Tarbaghatai circuit intendant, to the judicial commissioner and
governor in Dihua (Urumchi). At every step, the main goal was to establish the
exact motivations and guilt of everyone involved.
The memorial doesn’t tell us a love story, or even a lust
story. What it does is establish Aysha’s guilt by complicity in the affair and
the special financial relationship between the adulterers, in accordance with
Article 366 of the Qing Code, on determining consent between fornicators. If
someone had reported them, and case had stopped at this point, then Zulpiqar
and Aysha would each have received the same punishment: Both would have been
beaten 90 times with the “heavy stick,” a massive length of wood that often
caused severe internal injuries. A-pa would have to sell Aysha or marry her off
to someone else. Before 1884 and the formal establishment of provincehood, their
crime might not have even gone to the magistrate, but rather would have been
handled through the local aqsaqal or beg and a Muslim judge.
After 1884, however, Turkic Muslims found themselves subject to the same laws
as Chinese.
But it didn’t stop there. A-pa was away for quite some
time, and Aysha eventually spurned Zulpiqar and took up with another man, a
local named Tolai. Tolai’s name suggests that he was a Mongol. Indeed, he
belonged to one of the military units stationed around Ghulja under the Ili
General, which included Mongol forces, though which unit was his is unclear. Tolai
and Aysha must have got on well: In July 1892, when Aysha heard that her
husband A-pa would soon return, she hatched a plan to abscond with Tolai to
Samarqand. Tolai agreed, and they began to make arrangements.
This is the point where the judgment of the actors
involved becomes seriously questionable, and not just because running off
together entailed another level of punishment. A month later, Aysha approached
Zulpiqar, her former lover. Aysha told him that she and Tolai were going to run
away to Samarqand, quite a long journey to the west, to make a new life for
themselves. She asked to rent his horse and services as a guide for the journey
down the valley, westward to the Russian border. He refused, of course, and gave
the excuse that he was unfamiliar with the route. Aysha pressed him. She
probably felt that only Zulpiqar could be trusted to keep her flight a secret. Aysha
suggested that Zulpiqar hire someone else to act as a guide, while Zulpiqar and
his horse could provide protection and transportation.
Now the seed of jealousy planted long before in Zulpiqar’s
heart grew into a thorny and tangled vine. Zulpiqar was extremely upset, or at
least that’s what he told the magistrate: Aysha had rejected him, and now she
wanted him to help her escape with her new beau. Zulpiqar envisioned himself on
the nighttime journey, escaping down some isolated mountain pass, just him,
Aysha, and Tolai… He pretended to agree to this latest plan and went off to “hire
a guide.”
The man that Zulpiqar found was Nawruz, a close friend
and associate who sympathized with his plight. After a long talk, Nawruz
consented to join Zulpiqar in his grim task. Now Zulpiqar put on his friendly
face and reported to Aysha that they would depart at dusk on the evening of 11
August 1892. They may have wanted to take advantage of the visibility afforded
by the full moon.
That night, a little after seven o’clock in the evening,
Zulpiqar and Nawruz armed themselves with daggers and wooden poles. They led
their horses to nearby Nanyuan, where Aysha lived. Tolai was there, carrying
clothing and traveling gear in a pack on his back, and Aysha had her daughter
Cholpan, only four sui (three years) old, swaddled and ready for a hard
ride.
They all mounted their horses. Tolai and Aysha rode in
front, sharing a saddle, while Nawruz took the middle horse, and Zulpiqar held
up the rear with Cholpan seated safely in his lap.
The party made for Yellow-grass Lake, which lay about
seven miles to the west. This cannot have been an arbitrary choice. According
to the local gazetteer, written fifteen years after these events, the road to
Yellow-grass Lake was narrow and rarely-traveled – perhaps Aysha and Tolai
wanted to avoid running into anyone on their way out of town. But it was also
plied by bands of Kazakh bandits, and Zulpiqar and Nawruz may have wanted to
cover up their crime. Three dead travelers on the road to Yellow-grass Lake
would have surprised no one, and certainly the bandits would be blamed.
By the time they reached Yellow-grass Lake, it was the
middle of the night. Zulpiqar flung the
little Cholpan away into the grass, and he gave Nawruz the signal that it was
time to strike. Nawruz used his long wooden pole to knock Tolai to the ground,
and, as Tolai fell, he dragged Aysha with him. Zolpiqar dismounted and rushed
over. He chopped at her with his dagger, ignoring Tolai and the child.
Eventually, he noticed that Cholpan was sitting in the grass, wailing in
despair. He told Nawruz to finish Aysha off with his dagger while he slit the
child’s throat.
Tolai, his dream inverted, managed to escape the bloody
scene into the lake. Zulpiqar and Nawruz searched for him, but he was nowhere
to be found, so they tossed the gear he was carrying in the water, hoping to
hide it and perhaps suggest that Kazakh bandits had robbed the party of their
goods. They turned around and led the horses back to town, leaving the corpses
of Aysha and her little daughter to lie in the dirt at the side of the road.
The next day, a man named Qurban was traveling to
Yellow-grass Lake when he ran across their broken bodies. He sped back to
Ghulja to report the crime to the Chinese country magistrate, Gao Jingchang. At
the time, only about 28,000 civilian adults lived in the whole area of Ghulja,
half of whom were locally-born Turkic Muslims. Tolai belonged to a military
garrison. In such small communities, it was probably quite easy to connect the
deceased with her lovers and her murderers and track them all down.
The magistrate handled their interrogations locally, and
his judgments were fairly straightforward. Article 287.8 stated that someone
who murdered two members of a family was to be beheaded, after which his head
would be exposed publicly, and that half of his wealth should go to the family
of his victims. Zulpiqar had not just killed a couple of adults in a crime of
passion, however – he had committed the premeditated murder of a child, which
the Qing Code and the magistrate rightly considered to be inordinately cruel. Yet,
there was no way to increase the punishment to a higher degree. The warden
tattooed Zulpiqar’s face to show that he was a murderer, and the execution was
carried out in short order.
Per the provisions in Article 30, the accomplice to such
a crime was to receive a lower grade of punishment. Nawruz was sentenced to be
strangled. In the eyes of Qing law, this punishment was milder, as it did not
dismember or mutilate the body – to do so was itself a high crime, unless
ordered by the imperial state. For his role in the killing, Nawruz was held in
the county jail until the autumn excises, at which time his case would be
reviewed. He might have received a reduced punishment; he might have been bound
by a cord to a pole and strangled to death in the market.
Tolai, entirely apart from his adultery, had knowledge of
and abetted a wife fleeing her husband. Tolai, however, was a soldier and so was
punished according to the military statutes: He was exiled the considerable
distance of 4,000 li to continue his military service elsewhere. Technically,
4,000 li was over a thousand miles, but the actual system of military
exile was hardly transparent. One wonders where he ended up. Xinjiang, and the
Ili Valley in particular, were the sites of exile for many criminals from China
proper. But where did one go when exiled from Xinjiang? Some were sent
to the most miasmic and disease-ridden regions of the Southeast. Perhaps Tolai died
of malaria in Guangxi.
What do we learn from tragedies? Often, violent conflict
arises along social fault lines. It tells us about the tensions in a community.
My research so far suggests that the greatest percentage of murders in Xinjiang
in this period arose directly or indirectly from marital strife. This might
seem to tell us more about individual couples’ problems than about society at
large, but the patterns are consistent: Partners’ distance bred uncertainty and
enmity, so traders and those who were forced by poverty to labor away from
home, particularly as miners, frequently found themselves involved in murder
cases as victims, aggressors, or instigators.
We also learn that ethnic boundaries were not as rigid as
we might think, despite the Qing institutionalization of ethnicity. This was a
time when Qing officials were figuring out where the Turki fit into the
administrative schema available to them. The Ili Valley was a place where multiple
ethnic groups from different countries and different regions across Asia lived in
overlapping communities: Taranchis, Turki from the South, Chinese from the
Interior, Chinese from Ili, Manchus, Mongols, Kazakhs, Tatars, Russians, even
Chinese Catholics exiled generations before. Some answered to Chinese officials
and others to a Manchu military general. How did they learn to coexist?
Perhaps most importantly, however, we can begin to
empathize with our historical subjects. The history of Xinjiang is dominated by
high politics, punctuated by violent episodes. Shouldn’t it proceed in equal
measure from the lives of farmers, laborers, traders, and garrison soldiers?
Despite the distance down the valley’s narrow path, can’t we still discern something of their
halos in the moonlight, what Zulpiqar was, what Cholpan might have been?
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