Fang Yangyang, who was beaten to death, was in fact sold to you for a certain amount of money after her death as an instrument of wealth. In fact, in tradition, and in some areas that are still backward today, women have always been the object of exploitation.
If you haven’t heard of another real-life incident, I’ll tell you about it again.
On July 6, 2009, a murder occurred in Tancheng, Shandong Province: Chen Guoxiang, a villager, ran into a private school, killed his cousin Chen Lian, and then voluntarily surrendered to the police.
When questioned by the government, the murderer Chen Guoxiang claimed that the father of the deceased, Chen Lian, had killed his own father twenty-seven years ago, and that although he was a blood relative, he happened to drink some wine out of filial piety and hatred.
And what is the truth of the matter?
In order to understand this story, one needs to know a little about the murdered Chen Lian. His father had died just the year before, leaving his widow Peng and the young Chen Lian with a small fortune: a cow, a piece of plowed land, a horse, and a little money.
As you know, the Qing dynasty had high moral standards for women, but especially for widows. Peng had to be faithful to her husband, which meant that she had to rely on herself, on her modest inheritance, to make ends meet and to raise Chen Lian to be a successful student.
If she had endured the world’s cruelty and remarried, she would have had a better life. However, the Qing Law stipulates that if a woman remarries, her original property, including her dowry, will belong to her ex-husband’s family. Therefore, for Peng, keeping the rules was still the best way to keep her property.
However, there was another clause in the Qing Law, and it was this clause that killed her son, Chen Lian.
Which one was this: If a woman was childless after the death of her husband, she had to be succeeded by someone chosen by the head of the family from the next of kin to inherit her husband’s estate.
See the key word: “childless”?
In other words, if Chen Lian died, his cousin Chen Guoxiang would be passed on to the Peng family because of his next of kin, and he would naturally inherit his uncle’s estate.
So Chen Guoxiang’s dilemma was: how to kill his cousin and get rid of the death penalty to get the inheritance with as little punishment as possible.
On second thought, he decided to work on another moral “filial piety” advocated by the Qing Dynasty. It so happened that his father had disappeared during the military invasion more than twenty years earlier, and with no surviving corpse, he decided to fabricate the story that his father had died at the hands of Chen Lian’s father, and thus the murder at the beginning of the article occurred. Chen Guoxiang dragged Chen Lian out of his private school while he was still studying in the morning, dragged him to a nearby temple, and beat him alive to death.
According to the Qing Law, a murderer who kills his parents needs only one hundred blows of the cane. Chen Guoxiang thought he would be spared death because of his “filial piety and filial deeds”.
However, he misunderstood many of the subtleties of the law, whether because of his desire for profit or his poor intelligence.
For example, even if his story was true, it would not make sense to delay taking revenge after twenty-seven years.
Another example is that revenge can only be taken against the murderer of one’s parents, which means that Chen Guoxiang’s enemy should be Chen Lian’s father, not Chen Lian.
In the past twenty years, Chen Lian’s father died only last year, and you have never tried to take revenge on Chen Lian.
Chen Guoxiang was left speechless and was finally sentenced to hang.
The case was quickly solved, but behind the flow of human greed, the evil is sad.
We can even take a deeper look at the root cause of the murder, in fact, is the two unreasonable legal provisions on the widow’s property. In the Qing Dynasty, there was a very contradictory and dramatic scene: on the one hand, this article encouraged women to keep their husbands’ property, but on the other hand, the deceased husband’s clan was often desperate to seize the widow’s property and force her to remarry. This is the Qing dynasty’s magical spectacle.
The women had no say in the matter and were always exploited and abused. As in the case of Peng, her husband was dead, her son was killed by his peers, and no one cared about her. Even so, she was unable to keep the inheritance that should have been hers.
Yes, the cow and the money were stolen and fled by another clan member. And since her son was dead, the matriarch had chosen a branch relative to be her heir, and soon the designated heir would legally take the rest of her money, the land, and the last remaining horse.
The above story is from Mr. Shi Jingqian’s work “The Death of the Wang Family”, which is a history book based on the local history of a small county.
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