Kanibalizm w Chinach (uwaga, mocne!)

Wrzucam jako ciekawostka, chociaż ciężko się to czyta.

Po raz kolejny przypominam sobie że Europejska cywilizacja > Każda inna cywilizacja.

Trochę się o tym dzisiaj zapomina bo to niepoprawne politycznie, ale taka jest prawda.

My dear Mrs. Budd, In 1894 a friend of mine shipped as a deck hand on the Steamer Tacoma, Capt. John Davis. They sailed from San Francisco for Hong Kong China. On arriving there he and two others went ashore and got drunk. When they returned the boat was gone. At that time there was a famine in China. Meat of any kind was from $1 to 3 Dollars a pound. So great was the suffering among the very poor that all children under 12 were sold to the Butchers to be cut up and sold for food in order to keep others from starving. A boy or girl under 14 was not safe in the street. You could go to any shop and ask for steak—chops—or stew meat. Pan of the naked body of a boy or girl would be brought out and just what you wanted cut from it. A boy or girls behind which is the sweetest part of the body and sold as veal cutlet brought the highest price.

Hungry Ghosts: Mao's secret famine /Jasper Becker.— Chinese literature is filled with accounts of Epicurean canni-balism. One of China's most famous works of literature, Shui hu zhuan, or The Water Margin (also translated as Outlaws of the Marsh and All Men are Brothers), contains frequent references to the sale of human meat and descriptions of cannibalism. Cooking methods are described in graphic detail. For example, when one of the main characters, Wu Sung, visits a wine shop, he is led into a room 'where men were cut to pieces, and on the walls there were men's skins stretched tight and nailed there, and upon the beams of the roof there hung several legs of men'. Human flesh was regarded as part food, part medicine. In 1578, Li Shizhen published a medical reference book (Ben cao gang mu, or Materia Medica) which listed thirty-five different parts or organs, and the various diseases and ailments that they could be used to treat. Some parts of the body were especially valued because they were thought to boost sexual stamina. In the Ming dynasty, powerful eunuchs tried to regain their sexual potency by eating young men's brains. During the last Chinese dynasty, the Qing, numerous Western accounts testified to the Chinese belief that drinking human blood would increase a man's sexual appetite. Whenever a public execution took place, women whose husbands were impotent would buy bread dipped in the fresh blood of the executed. As late as the nine-teenth century, it was not unusual for Chinese executioners to eat the heart and brains of criminals. Cannibalism was also a gesture of filial piety. Records from the Song dynasty (A D 960-1279) talk of how people would cut off part of their own body to feed a revered elder. Often a daughter-in-law would cut flesh from her leg or thigh to make soup to feed a sick mother-in-law and this practice became so common that the state issued an edict forbidding it. Throughout Chinese history, cannibalism was also ex-tremely common in times of war. Not only was it the last

resort of inhabitants trapped in besieged cities or fort-resses, but in addition, prisoners of war or slain enemies often became a staple source of food. Under the Emperor Wu Di (AD 502-49) prisoners were purchased in cages. When there was a demand for meat, they would be taken out, killed, broiled and consumed. During the Yellow Turban rebellion in the Tang dynasty (AD 618-907), thousands were butchered and eaten every day. A century later Wang Yancheng of the Min kingdom was said to have salted and dried the corpses of enemy soldiers which his men would take with them as supplies. Such practices continued into modern times. During the Taiping rebellion of 1850-64, the hearts of prisoners were consumed by both sides to make them more bold in combat. Human flesh and organs were openly sold in the marketplace during this period and people were kidnapped and killed for food. Chinese soldiers stationed on Taiwan before the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-5 also bought and ate the flesh of abor-igines in the marketplace. Cannibalism is also an expression of revenge and was recom-mended by Confucius. It was not enough, he said, to observe the mourning period for a parent murdered or killed in sus-picious circumstances. Heaven would praise those who took revenge. Killing alone, however, was not sufficient. Enemies should be entirely consumed, including their bones, meat, heart and liver. Chinese historical records are littered with examples of kings and emperors who killed and ate their enemies, among them some of the greatest figures, such as the Emperor Qinshihuangdi, who first unified China. Liu Bang, the founder of the succeeding Han dynasty, distributed small pieces of his enemies for his vassals to consume as a way of testing their loyalty. Traitors were chopped up and pickled. In some cases, the victor of a struggle would force his enemy to eat a soup made from his son or father. Even buried enemies were not safe.

Cannibalism

A Perfectly Natural History

BILL SCHUTT

In total, Chong's exhaustive research efforts yielded 153 and 177 incidents of war-related and natural disaster-related cannibalism, respectively. With no statistical difference in the numbers reported from the Han Dynasty (206 BCE-220 CE) to the Ch'ing Dynasty (1644-1912), incidents of cannibalism (in which varying numbers of people were consumed) seem to have been a fairly consistent occurrence throughout China's long history—until recently, that is. But rather than the decrease in reports of cannibalism one might expect to find in modern times, the opposite turns out to be true. The greatest number of cannibalism-related deaths in China came as a direct result of Mao Zedong's "The Great Leap Forward" (1958-1961), a disastrous attempt at utopian engineering. Scholar Key Ray Chong wrote that the first documented use of organs and human flesh to cure diseases in China took place during the Later Han period (25-220 CE) and that medicinal cannibalism became increasingly popular beginning in the Tang Dynasty (618-907 CE), when it became associated with filial piety. By the end of the Ch'ing Dynasty (1644-1912), Western missionary doctors were reporting that the Chinese medical treatments in-cluded the consumption of "the gall bladder, bones, hair, toes and fingernails, heart and liver?' Thomas Chen, a pathology professor at the New Jersey Medical School, tells us that "nail, hair, skin, milk, urine, urine sediments, gall, placenta and even flesh" were used in China for a variety of medicinal purposes. It is under the banner of learned cannibalism that the Chinese appear to have exhibited attitudes toward cannibalism that differed significantly from the Western taboos. For a start, author Key Ray Chong provided a list of circumstances that might lead to an act of learned cannibalism. These were "hate, love, loyalty, filial piety, desire for human flesh as a delicacy, punishment, war, belief in the medical benefits of cannibalism, profit, insanity, coercion, religion, and su-perstition?' Some of these, Chong asserted, were uniquely Chinese. As anyone who has ever visited China (or to a lesser extent, any big-city Chinatown) can attest, the Chinese consume a diverse range of creatures and their parts. Many of these, like scorpions and chicken testicles, fall outside the range of typical Western diets and, as writer Maggie Kilgore pointed out in 1998, some, like rats, snakes, shellfish, and things with paws, are specifically banned by Judeo-Christian law.

Without our long list of forbidden foods, it's Judeo-Christian law. Without our long list of forbidden foods, it's not a surprise that the Chinese felt less strongly about consuming other humans. Throughout their long history, body parts were such import-ant ingredients in Chinese cuisine that Key Ray Chong devoted a 13-page chapter to "Methods of Cooking Human Flesh" with a sub-heading entitled "Baking, Roasting, Broiling, Smoke-drying, and Sun-drying" And rather than an emergency ration consumed as a last resort, there are many reports of exotic human-based dishes prepared for royalty and upper-class citizens. T'ao Tsung-yi, a writer during the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368), wrote that "children's meat was the best food of all in taste" followed by women and then men. In Shui Hu Chuan (The Tales of Water Margins), a novel written in the lath century, there are numerous references to steamed dump-lings stuffed with minced human flesh, as well as a rather nonchalant regard by merchants and customers over the sale of human meat. Even if epicurean cannibalism isn't limited to the Chinese, the extent to which it was set down in detail certainly was. Amidst in-formation on "five regional cuisines" (Szechwan, Canton, Fukien, Shantung, and Honon), the San Kuo Yen Ki (Dramatic Epic of the Three Kingdoms), written in 1494, contained "many examples of steaming or boiling human meat:' Prisoners of war were preferred ingredients, but when they ran out (figuratively or literally), Gen-eral Chu Ts'an's soldiers seized women and children off the street, killed them, and then ate them. As recently as the 19th century, executioners reportedly ate the hearts and brains of the prisoners they executed, selling whatever cuts were left to the public. Widespread epicurean cannibalism was still taking place in the late 196os during the Cultural Revolution, although there was cer-tainly an element of terror involved. Chinese dissident journalist Zheng Yi wrote the following in 2001: Once victims had been subjected to criticism, they were cut open alive, and all their body parts—heart, liver, gallbladder, kidneys, elbows, feet, tendons, intestines—were boiled, barbecued, or stir-fried into a gourmet cuisine. On campuses, in hospitals, in the canteens of various governmental units at the brigade, township, district, and country levels, the smoke from cooking pots could be seen in the air. Feasts of human flesh, at which people celebrated by drinking and gambling, were a common sight.