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Their public dancing and dresses were frowned upon by Chinese. Miao women were thought of as “barbaric,” with their unbound feet, scanty dress, premarital sexual freedom, and ability to hunt and farm alongside men, writes Louisa Schein in Minority Rules: The Miao and the Feminine in China’s Cultural Politics.Īfter not being able to successfully instill northern Chinese influence in these regions, gu poison lore and gossip spread throughout the land to enforce ethnic boundaries out of fear of intermarriage with the Miao people, writes Norma Diamond in the journal Ethnology: “It is the tribal women who are repeatedly cited as a source of danger, rather than armed men threatening the stability of Chinese rule over the area.” A representation of Miao women. Northern Chinese disagreed with the Miao’s agriculture, social structure, culture, and particularly the independence of women. Descriptions of gu poisoned victims increased just after the Miao rebellion of 17.
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The timing was no coincidence, according to Hanson. Gu poison connections with the Miao and Lingnan regions began popping up around the 17th century, with fears heightened in the mid-18th century. “During the later periods, particularly during the Sui (581-617) and Tang dynasties (618-907), Chinese sources begin to associate gu poisoning with specific methods of magic attributed to minority cultures.”
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“In medicine, gu poisoning became an indicator of sources of danger: sexual indulgence, sorcery, non-Han peoples, and native poisons,” writes Hanson. The moldy meat of a dead poisonous snake was cited in one recipe of gu. The body is ground into a powder and slipped into wine. The snake is left alone for a few days, until its meat decays and begins to grow mold. Xu also describes another recipe in which the gu sorcerer kills a poisonous snake, mixes it with an assortment of herbs, and sprinkles the body with water. The body of the remaining venomous creature, which has eaten the others in the jar, will become the source of the lethal poison. Some say that the jar is kept in darkness for up to the year.
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This done on the day of the Dragon Boat Festival, which is the fifth day of the fifth lunar month. The most well-known recipe is to gather different kinds of the “five poisonous creatures” and place them in a jar to fight. There are several methods for formulating the perfect gu poison, according to Xu Chunfu, an official in the imperial medical bureau, who wrote about gu in 1556. Dangerous poisonous centipedes in southern China were one of the creatures often used in gu poison. Gu poison has been associated with several regions and peoples in China throughout history, but was most commonly linked to the Lingnan and Miao women, minorities of the south-creating stigmas based on northern prejudice. The poisonous insects, worms, and reptiles, referred to as “chong,” were thought of as evil spirits or demons that possessed a vessel, or the human body. Concocting a strong formula of gu poison required the “five poisonous creatures” in China: the viper, centipede, scorpion, toad, and spider. But if he did not, he would be consumed from the inside out, the gu poison causing, “his heart and abdomen to swell and ache because the poison gnaws him from within,” writes John Hopkins University history of medicine professor Marta Hanson in Speaking of Epidemics in Chinese Medicine.ĭating as far back as 610, gu is also described as a form of black magic and witchcraft with the poison being a central part of the practice. In the mountains, if a man was poisoned with gu and managed to return to his lover’s home within the time he had promised, his lover would treat him with an antidote. It was said to have no taste, allowing unsuspecting victims to go about their normal lives for as long as 10 days before they started feeling ill. The surviving creature containing a concentrated toxin. Gu poison was considered a slow-acting poison. Gu poison, so the stories went, was collected by sealing venomous snakes, scorpions, and centipedes in a jar and forcing them to fight and devour each other. People told tales of women who seduced travelers, feeding men meals laced with a powerful poison known as gu poison to keep their lovers from returning to their homes in the north. In the mid-18th century, accepting the hospitality of women in the southern mountain regions of China presented an unusual risk. Minority women in southern China were accused of poisoning northern men with a special poison made of venomous creatures.