Shishuo xinyu and the Death of Cao Zhang

摘要

Having just enjoyed a fine meal prepared by anonymous hands from ingredients of unknown provenance, I thought it might be nice to talk a bit about death-more specifically, about food and death. But when we wish to talk about food and death in premodern China, we find ourselves in need of taxonomy. Food can be linked with death to make a moral point, as in Mengzi's famous passage on fish and bear paws. There is, of course, death by starvation, as in the cases of Bo Yi and Shu Qi ; there are the savory foods rhetorically displayed to lure back departed souls, as in "Zhao hun" and similar pieces, as well as those laid on for funerals, as in Tao Qian's (365?-427) "Xing ying shen" ; there are the foods found in tombs and even in the gastrointestinal tracts of their occupants-the 138.5 muskmelon seeds discovered in the innards of the presumed Lady Dai of Mawangdui Tomb No. 1, for example.~1 And then there are the treacherous foods, lovely perchance to behold and delicious to eat, that may transport us to another world not by their sweetness on our plates but by virtue of the microbes or viruses they harbor-possibly the fate of Meng Haoran (689-740), who may have been done in by a bit of raw fish.~2 But none of these will concern us here, nor, fortunately, will another area of consumption and mortality-Robber Zhi may have enjoyed a nice pate of human liver now and again, but there is absolutely no place in a post-prandial talk for even the slightest mention of cannibalism. That would be tasteless. Poison, or more precisely, an instance of poisoned food, on the other hand, fits the occasion nicely.