The Armenians
Designate China By The Name Nankas, Which I Take To Be Chinese
Nan-Kuo, 'southern Country,' The Manzi Country Of Marco Polo." - H. C.]
But like charges of cannibalism are brought against both Chinese and
Tartars very positively.
Thus, without going back to the Anthropophagous
Scythians of Ptolemy and Mela, we read in the Relations of the Arab
travellers of the ninth century: "In China it occurs sometimes that the
governor of a province revolts from his duty to the emperor. In such a
case he is slaughtered and eaten. In fact, the Chinese eat the flesh of
all men who are executed by the sword." Dr. Rennie mentions a
superstitious practice, the continued existence of which in our own day he
has himself witnessed, and which might perhaps have given rise to some
such statement as that of the Arab travellers, if it be not indeed a
relic, in a mitigated form, of the very practice they assert to have
prevailed. After an execution at Peking certain large pith balls are
steeped in the blood, and under the name of blood-bread are sold as a
medicine for consumption. It is only to the blood of decapitated
criminals that any such healing power is attributed. It has been asserted
in the annals of the Propagation de la Foi that the Chinese executioners
of M. Chapdelaine, a missionary who was martyred in Kwang-si in 1856 (28th
February), were seen to eat the heart of their victim; and M. Huot, a
missionary in the Yun-nan province, recounts a case of cannibalism which
he witnessed. Bishop Chauveau, at Ta Ts'ien-lu, told Mr. Cooper that he
had seen men in one of the cities of Yun-nan eating the heart and brains
of a celebrated robber who had been executed. Dr. Carstairs Douglas of
Amoy also tells me that the like practices have occurred at Amoy and
Swatau.
[With reference to cannibalism in China see Medical Superstitions an
Incentive to Anti-Foreign Riots in China, by D. J. Macgowan, North China
Herald, 8th July, 1892, pp. 60-62. Mr. E. H. Parker (China Review,
February-March, 1901, 136) relates that the inhabitants of a part of
Kwang-si boiled and ate a Chinese officer who had been sent to pacify
them. "The idea underlying this horrible act [cannibalism] is, that by
eating a portion of the victim, especially the heart, one acquires the
valour with which he was endowed." (Dennys' Folk-lore of China, 67.) - H.
C.]
Hayton, the Armenian, after relating the treason of a Saracen, called
Parwana (he was an Iconian Turk), against Abaka Khan, says: "He was taken
and cut in two, and orders were issued that in all the food eaten by Abaka
there should be put a portion of the traitor's flesh. Of this Abaka
himself ate, and caused all his barons to partake. And this was in
accordance with the custom of the Tartars." The same story is related
independently and differently by Friar Ricold, thus: "When the army of
Abaga ran away from the Saracens in Syria, a certain great Tartar baron
was arrested who had been guilty of treason. And when the Emperor Khan was
giving the order for his execution the Tartar ladies and women interposed,
and begged that he might be made over to them. Having got hold of the
prisoner they boiled him alive, and cutting his body up into mince-meat
gave it to eat to the whole army, as an example to others." Vincent of
Beauvais makes a like statement: "When they capture any one who is at
bitter enmity with them, they gather together and eat him in vengeance of
his revolt, and like infernal leeches suck his blood," a custom of which a
modern Mongol writer thinks that he finds a trace in a surviving proverb.
Among more remote and ignorant Franks the cannibalism of the Tartars was a
general belief. Ivo of Narbonne, in his letter written during the great
Tartar invasion of Europe (1242), declares that the Tartar chiefs, with
their dog's head followers and other Lotophagi (!), ate the bodies of
their victims like so much bread; whilst a Venetian chronicler, speaking
of the council of Lyons in 1274, says there was a discussion about making
a general move against the Tartars, "porce qu'il manjuent la char
humaine." These latter writers no doubt rehearsed mere popular beliefs,
but Hayton and Ricold were both intelligent persons well acquainted with
the Tartars, and Hayton at least not prejudiced against them.
The old belief was revived in Prussia during the Seven Years' War, in
regard to the Kalmaks of the Russian army; and Bergmann says the old
Kalmak warriors confessed to him that they had done what they could to
encourage it by cutting up the bodies of the slain in presence of their
prisoners, and roasting them! But Levchine relates an act on the part of
the Kirghiz Kazaks which was no jest. They drank the blood of their victim
if they did not eat his flesh.
There is some reason to believe that cannibalism was in the Middle Ages
generally a less strange and unwonted horror than we should at first blush
imagine, and especially that it was an idea tolerably familiar in China.
M. Bazin, in the second part of Chine Moderne, p. 461, after sketching a
Chinese drama of the Mongol era ("The Devotion of Chao-li"), the plot of
which turns on the acts of a body of cannibals, quotes several other
passages from Chinese authors which indicate this. Nor is this wonderful
in the age that had experienced the horrors of the Mongol wars.
That was no doubt a fable which Carpini heard in the camp of the Great
Kaan, that in one of the Mongol sieges in Cathay, when the army was
without food, one man in ten of their own force was sacrificed to feed the
remainder.[8] But we are told in sober history that the force of Tului in
Honan, in 1231-1232, was reduced to such straits as to eat grass and human
flesh.
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