Male Anxiety and Female Chastity: A Comparative Study of Chinese Ethical Values in Ming-Ch'ing Times

BRILL (Toung Pao Monographie 14), 1988, 172 pages  [gbook]

ISBN 9004083618, 9789004083615

topics: |  china | history | social |

Filial piety and Cannibalism : the practice of ko-ku

the origin of this cannibalistic practice has been generally ascribed to Pen Ts'ao Shih Yu (Repairing Omissions of Chinese Materia Medica) published by Ch'en Ts'ang Chi in 739 AD, which listed human flesh as an effective medicine for the physical and mental decay of senility... p.152

FN. According to traditional performances of the Peking opera, the filial daughter practices this rite at night with a censer on a small table and medicinal herbs boiling in a pot on a charcoal stove nearby. She kneels down and prays, grips her arm firmly with her teeth, tears off the flesh from her arm, and then decocts it with herbs for her ailing parents to drink. p. 153-4

Mortality rate was rather high. In one region during the Ch'ing dynasty, among a total of 97 women who practised ko-ku, eight were said to have died from inection. (Hui-chou fu chih, 1839 edition, chuan 13 part 1). [same text chuan 15, etc discuss other ko-ku episodes] In 1621-27, a boy mistook the word "thighs" for "abdomen" owing to dialectical differences in pronunciation, and he died of hemorrhage (Ch'i-men-hsieh chih, 1873 edn, chuan 29). FN. p.154

About fifty-five years ago when I was a young boy, I persuaded two old ladies
over eighty years of age, known for their having honored the virtue of ko-ku
to describe how they performed this rite.  One of them said she did it by
tying up her skin with a piece of strring, but then refused to give further
details.  The other woman, a great grandmother in a collateral branch of my
family, consented to tell me the whole procedure on condition that I should
later propagate her noble act when I became famous in the world of letters.
Her method was to first raise a portion of the skin of her left arm by
pinching it with a pair of eyrbow tweezers controlled by a sliding bar and
then tying it off with a piece of string held tightly between her teeth.  She
then cut the raised flesh swiftly with a pair of small sharp scissors. 




practice of selling young widow as concubine