The Death of Woman Wang

The Death of Woman Wang by Jonathan Spence is a nonfiction history focusing on four crises in 17th-century rural China: problems with tax collection; a widow struggling to protect her child and inheritance from her husband’s relatives; a bloody feud; and the attempt of a woman named Wang to leave her husband.

It is from the last topic that the book takes its title. Although Spence does not use the term himself, The Death of Woman Wang is an example of microhistory. A microhistory focuses on a specific region or individual that would not traditionally be considered historically significant. In this case, The Death of Woman Wang focuses on four episodes drawn from local histories and the writings of the local magistrate. The book was originally published in 1978 by Viking Press.

Summary

The Death of Woman Wang is about four crises:

[T]he working of the land and the collecting of taxes from that land; […] the attempt by a widow to protect her child and her inheritance; […] the burst of violence that sprang from a local feud; and […] the decision of a woman named Wang, who was unwilling any longer to face an unacceptable present and chose to run away from her T’an-ch’eng home and husband (xi).

In the preface, Spence explains his goal is to write a rural history that includes the “poor and the forgotten” (xii). His main sources include the Local History of T’an-ch’eng, Huang Liu-hung’s memoir and handbook, and the short stories of P’u Sung-ling (xii-xiv).

Spence describes the conditions and culture of T’an-ch’eng, a “small, poor county” burdened by a series of natural disasters (34), famines, bandits, and heavy, unfair taxation. The local culture was fatalistic and filled with belief in magic and spirits. Landlords who used various tricks to get out of paying their fair share of taxes partially caused T’an-ch’eng’s poverty. An exceptionally corrupt landlord, Liu T’ing-yüan, thwarted magistrate Huang’s attempts to bring him to justice by intimidating witnesses and having the men bringing charges against him beaten up and taken out of T’an-ch’eng (57-58).

The next crisis involved a widow. 17th-century Chinese society expected widows to work hard and protect the interests of their children. However, they were often harassed by their late husbands’ relatives. Such was the case of the widow P’eng, whose son was murdered by her husband’s Ch’en relations. Chinese law punished the killer but also gave P’eng’s inheritance to the Ch’ens (72-76).

Then Spence discusses feuds, including “the effects of raw terror within a community and the ways that misery spawned recklessness and sudden, unreasoning violence that were almost impossible to deal with” (79). Such violence emerged in T’an-ch’eng with a feud over an inheritance between the Wangs, a family that were “gangsters as well as landlords” (90), and the Li family. The conflict ended with the murders of the Li family patriarch, Li Tuang-chen, and most of his sons. The magistrate arrested the Wangs, but only after he also raised a militia with the surviving members of the Li family.

Finally, Spence reaches the “crisis” that gives The Death of Woman Wang its name. The status of women in this period of Chinese history was precarious, and “marriage could prove to be a joyless trap” (109). The law also punished women and their lovers for adultery. A woman named Wang left her husband Jen, but her lover abandoned her, forcing her to return to her husband. At first, they lived together again, but then Jen strangled her to death. In the resulting trial, Jen received a reduced sentence because he was his father’s only heir and his wife had committed adultery. However, the magistrate Huang did arrange to give Wang a good burial to appease her spirit.