An informer out of Handan who destroyed a crown prince to save himself and was trusted for it. He rode with a shaman to read the ground and heated iron to make men confess.
There is the breath of the poison-wood in the palaces. Your Majesty's illness is a curse laid with carved figures; let them be sought and dug out of the ground.Jiang Chong's report to Emperor Wu on the cause of his sickness, made after Ban Gu notes that Chong saw the emperor old and feared the prince after him; Hanshu, juan 45, Biography of Jiang Chong
Appears in
Relations
- Liu Ju enemies — He dug in the prince's own courtyard and drove him to the killing that finished the house of Wei and the heir together.
- Emperor Wu commander — The emperor called him loyal, upright, law-bound and unafraid, and made him commissioner of the witchcraft cases with nothing behind him but the emperor's own fear.
Myth vs record
Jiang Chong was a conjurer working real sorcery, undone only when the prince saw through the magic.
Ban Gu records procedure and no magic at all. He was an informer of legal training who had already destroyed a king of Zhao, was admired for his looks and given a staff against the extravagance of the imperial kin, and rode through the palaces with a shaman of the northern peoples reading the ground and heated iron clamps laid on men until they confessed. The searching ran in a stated order set by rank, hope first and the empress next, and the record says he faked the curse because he feared the prince. He was roasted alive in the imperial park after his death, and the emperor later learned he had been lying and wiped out three kin-groups of his (Hanshu, juan 45).