Pao-ge, Pickle and Jerky: What Can Be Known About Shang Punishments

In the Shiji's annals of Yin, a few sentences about the last Shang king stand close together. The chapter has already described him as given to wine and women, 'making a pool of wine and hanging up meat for a forest', and letting men and women run naked through it in night-long drinking. Then: 'When the people murmured and the lords revolted, Zhou then made punishments severe, and there was the pao-ge method.' The chapter has already built its portrait: quick-witted, strong enough to fight beasts, eloquent enough to talk down remonstrance. Three people follow: the daughter of the Marquis of Jiu would not consent, Zhou killed her 'and had the Marquis of Jiu pickled'; the Marquis of E argued hotly, 'and was cut into dried meat'; the Lord of the West sighed, was denounced, and was imprisoned at Youli.

Three punishments in one passage

The chapter's method is visible in its order: a general measure first — 'made punishments severe, and there was the pao-ge method' — then named persons. 'Pickled the Marquis of Jiu' and 'cut the Marquis of E into dried meat' are two men, not two clauses of a code. Later the Lord of the West's followers 'sought beautiful women, rare objects and good horses to present to Zhou', and he was released; he then offered land west of the Luo 'to ask for the abolition of the pao-ge punishment', and Zhou granted it. In one chapter the same ruler establishes the punishment and agrees to abolish it — narrative, not statute.

The Han Feizi's 'Yu Lao' tells the same matter by another road. Jizi saw Zhou using ivory chopsticks and was afraid: ivory would not be paired with earthenware but with rhinoceros-horn and jade cups; would not eat beans but the fatted meats of rare beasts; would not wear short hemp or live under thatch but would want brocade, high rooms and towers. 'After five years Zhou had a meat park, set up pao-luo, climbed the hill of wine lees and looked down on the wine pool, and so perished.' The chapter's moral is explicit: Jizi saw a small thing and knew a great one, 'seeing the small is called clarity'. Here there is one name, pao-luo; no pickling, no jerky.

Variant: pao-ge or pao-luo

The two books write it differently: pao-ge in the Shiji, pao-luo in the Han Feizi. They are also far apart in time: Han Fei at the end of the Warring States, Sima Qian in the Western Han. This article sets the two forms side by side, does not fuse them into one 'original', and does not decide which character is right. The material reaches only as far as 'the two books differ'. That difference is not a slip that can be corrected: it is how each book received the word, and both are late enough to have received it in different shapes.

Their uses differ too. The Han Feizi makes pao-luo one link in a chain of ruin, its point being Jizi's reading of small signs; the Shiji turns pao-ge into a measure ('there was the pao-ge method') and adds the pickling and the jerky as particular cases, in a story of lost lords and a fallen dynasty. One word, two jobs: argument in one book, narrative furniture in the other. Neither book explains the word itself.

No code

No Shang law code survives. The material used here contains no oracle bones and no Shang judicial documents — the oracle bones are the only contemporary Shang writing, and this article does not use them. The two texts that can be cited are both later: a Warring States philosophical work and a Western Han history. So 'Shang punishments' is a phrase pieced together from later writers, not read out of a Shang archive. What later books call Shang punishment may also include practices of other times and places; the material cannot sort them out.

The gap in time matters. The Shiji was written about a thousand years after the fall of the Shang; the Han Feizi about eight centuries. Both are deliberate retrospectives, and both use the last king for a purpose. That does not make them useless — they are the only accounts there are — but it does mean that what they give is the memory of a punishment, not the record of one. The Shiji says at its close where its early material came from: 'from Tang onwards I gathered it from the Documents and the Odes.'

The rhetoric of a tyrant

Each book uses the story for its own end. The Han Feizi uses Zhou to argue that 'seeing the small is called clarity': from a pair of ivory chopsticks a ruin is deduced, and the punishment is only the end of the inference. The Shiji uses Zhou to tell a fall: severe punishments, pickling, jerky, the imprisonment of the Lord of the West, the cutting open of Bi Gan, the imprisonment of Jizi, the defeat at Muye, the fire on the Deer Terrace. In neither place is the punishment a judicial record; it is argument and narrative. The Han Feizi names no victims at all; the Shiji names four — Jiu, E, the Lord of the West, Bi Gan.

The detail must be kept at that level. The Shiji does not say how pao-ge worked; the Han Feizi does not mention the pickling or the jerky; neither gives a case, a year or a count. Nothing is supplied here to fill those gaps, and the violence is kept to the names of the punishments — no descriptions of the body, no relish. A reader who wants the machinery will not find it, because the books did not have it. The restraint is not squeamishness; it is the limit of the evidence.

What can and cannot be said

The limits: no Shang code; no Shang judicial archive; no oracle bones used here; the two texts are later accounts, not Shang documents; the pao-ge/pao-luo variant is recorded without merging or deciding; no verdict that the Shang were cruel; no later penal code used to fill the gap; no procedure or victim count invented; and the violence stops at the names. A name is not a procedure, and a procedure is not a code.

What can be said is therefore narrow: the same story of a fallen dynasty was written twice, by a Warring States philosopher and a Western Han historian; one says pao-luo, the other pao-ge; one names a single punishment, the other adds a pickling and a jerky-making. Together the two passages show how the phrase 'Shang punishments' was built by later writers. The Shang themselves remain out of reach; what is within reach is how they were written about. Two spellings, three names, and a silence where the code should be.