The Little Cabbage Case in the Late Qing Dynasty: Why did a small cabbage cause hundreds of officials in the Qing Dynasty to be dismissed

How difficult it is to vindicate an unjust, false and wrong case, just look at the case of Yang Naiwu and Xiaobaicai!

Yang Naiwu was a Juren in the Tongzhi period. Xiaobaicai was born in Yuhang County and her original name was Bi Xiugu. Because of her fair skin and beauty, her neighbors called her Xiaobaicai. Xiaobaicai married Ge Pinlian, a tofu shop assistant when she was 17, and after marriage, she and her husband rented a house in Yang Naiwu's house. Since they live in the same courtyard, they can't see their heads down, so Yang Naiwu and Xiaobaicai have a better relationship and often eat together.

But after a long time, rumors and rumors came out. There is a rumor that Yang Naiwu and Xiaobaicai have an affair. Yang Naiwu is a juror, afraid that rumors will affect his reputation, so he deliberately increased the rent and forced the Xiaobaicai couple to move out of their home. The matter came to an end after the couple moved out of Xiaobaicai, but unexpectedly a year later, another branch suddenly appeared, which changed the fate of Yang Naiwu and Xiaocai.

On the seventh day of October in the twelfth year of Tongzhi (1873), Ge Pinlian felt weak when he was working in a tofu shop. He had a fever. After returning home, Ge Pinlian asked his wife, Xiaobaicai, to drink longan and oriental ginseng decoction for herself. Unexpectedly, these two things would kill Ge Pinlian.

After Ge Pinlian died, his face turned blue and his nose and mouth were bleeding. His mother, Shen Yu, suspected that she was poisoned to death, so she reported the matter to the government. Liu Xitong, the prefect of Yuhang County, sent Gu Zuo Shen Xiang and Men Ding Shen Caiquan to Xiaobaicai’s home for an autopsy, but both were confused. Shen Xiang pierced the silver needle into Ge Pinlian’s throat. The silver needle turned black. Afterwards, he stumbled on a copy of Ge Pinlian arsenic poisoning. And dead report.

Xiaobaicai became a suspect in the poisonous killing of her husband. After she was arrested by the government, she was beaten into a move and was forced to admit that she had poisoned Ge Pinlian with Yang Naiwu. Later, Yang Naiwu was also taken to prison. He and Xiaobaicai conspired to kill Ge Pinlian, Yang Naiwu denied. As Yang Naiwu was a Juren, Liu Xitong, the county magistrate, could not directly torture him. He reported to his superiors and requested that Yang Naiwu be a Juren, so that he could sentence Yang Naiwu. There were many confused officials in the superior yamen, and he immediately agreed to Liu Xitong's application.

After Yang Naiwu was not a man, the government began to torture him and forced Yang Naiwu to admit to the poisoning of Ge Pinlian. Because it was fabricated, it was naturally full of loopholes. Yang Naiwu was the owner of the drugstore. The names were all wrong, but in order to avoid trouble, the government forced the pharmacy owner to give false testimony to prove that Yang Naiwu had bought arsenic in his pharmacy. After the evidence was complete, Chen Lu, the prefect of Hangzhou, sentenced Xiaobaicai and Yang Naiwu to death.

Yang Naiwu was wronged, so he wrote a complaint in prison and asked his sister Yang Juzhen to go to Beijing to kowtow for him to appeal his grievances. Yang Juzhen continued to appeal the case and finally allowed Chen Lu, the prefect of Hangzhou, to review the case, but to no avail, Chen Lu still maintained the original verdict.

The local officials were unwilling to take over, so Yang Juzhen could only go to the capital to avenge justice. Yang Juzhen was funded by the red-top businessman Hu Xueyan. Hu Xueyan was willing to help Yang Juzhen because the case involved Yang Changjun, the governor of Zhejiang. Hu Xueyan hoped to overthrow Yang Changjun through this case, so as to replace Yang Changjun in raising military expenses for Zuo Zongtang and profit from it. With the help of Hu Xueyan, the Infantry Commander Yamen accepted the case of Xiaobaicai.

The imperial court asked Zhejiang governor Yang Changjun to "promote the case", but Yang Changjun didn't take it seriously. He asked the prefect of Huzhou Xiguang and the prefect of Shaoxing Gong Jiajun to retry the case. These officials were also not very responsible. In the case of checking the evidence, they still upheld the original judgment based on the existing evidence. However, during the trial again, Yang Naiwu and Xiao Baicai both overturned their confessions, saying that they were a violent attack and did not poison Ge Pinlian. Unfortunately, Xiguang, the prefect of Huzhou, and Gong Jiajun, the prefect of Shaoxing, did not adopt it and did not verify the facts.

This case aroused the attention of Shen Shen. They wrote a large number of articles on Yang Naiwu’s Xiaobaicai case, and therefore it is well known by more people. Yang Naiwu’s identity has attracted the attention of the Zhejiang-born Beijing official from Yang Naiwu’s hometown. Yang Naiwu’s fellow criminal minister Xia Tongshan and more than 30 Zhejiang-born Beijing officials asked the court to send an official to investigate the case. This incident shocked Cixi, and she asked Zhejiang Xuezheng Hu Ruilan to review.

Hu Ruilan is also an unreliable person, he went to HangzhouLater, he still tortured Yang Naiwu and Xiaobaicai, and beat the two of them again into tricks, confessing to poisoning Ge Pinlian. At this time, the case has been reviewed many times, and it has basically become an iron case, and it is difficult to reverse the case.

However, Zhejiang Shilin did not want to give up. The cabinet Zhongshu Wang Shuping and other 18 Zhejiang officials jointly filed the lawsuit. At the same time, the local scholars in Zhejiang also jointly filed a letter stating that there were problems in the trial of this case that the officials protected each other, sheltered from the top and bottom, and turned into tricks. They asked the court to bring the case to Beijing for trial. However, some officials objected to the retrial. Sichuan Governor Ding Baozhen said: "If this iron case is to be reversed, no one will dare to be a local official in the future."

The case was hopeless for retrial, but because the case involved Yang Changjun's Xiang family. Officials. The Hunan clique with Zeng Guofan at its core has spread all over the country and is very powerful. The Qing court also wanted to use this case to suppress the Hunan clique. Therefore, at the request of the central court ministers Weng Tonghe, Zhang Jiaxiang and others, the Queen Mother of the Two Palaces ordered the Ministry of Justice Review the case. After the Criminal Department took over the Xiaobaicai case, an autopsy revealed that Ge Pinlian died of illness, not because of arsenic poisoning. Therefore, Yang Naiwu and Xiaobaicai's were wronged, and they were acquitted.

After being released from prison, Yang Naiwu lost his status as a man. For the rest of his life, he lived by raising silkworms. Xiaobaicai saw through the world and became a nun. In this case, hundreds of officials were dismissed from their posts due to the protection of the officials. The governor of Zhejiang Province, Yang Changjun, who was born in the Hunan Army, was also dismissed from the court. However, due to his strong power behind him, he soon made a comeback and made a comeback. The governor of Zhejiang, the governor of Shaanxi and Gansu, and the Minister of War and other important positions.