By Justin Kirangacha| The Common Pulse/latest news /US/ Kenya/Abroad/Africa / OCTOBER2025.
Among the countless monuments scattered across China, few evoke such visceral disgust as the kneeling statues of Qin Hui and his wife, Wang. Every day, in Hangzhou’s West Lake, visitors spit, curse, and sometimes slap the life-sized bronze figures, their heads bowed in eternal shame before the tomb of Yue Fei, the legendary Song dynasty general they betrayed. This daily ritual of contempt is not merely an act of cultural theater, but a living reminder of how treachery, hypocrisy, and political cowardice can echo through the ages long after empires fall and dynasties crumble. The story of Qin Hui is a study in disgrace, a political fable about power’s corrosion of the soul, and a warning carved in metal about the enduring memory of betrayal.
Qin Hui was born in 1090, during the Northern Song dynasty, and rose through the imperial bureaucracy as a talented scholar and official. By all accounts, he was intelligent, calculating, and ambitious, the perfect archetype of a man who could thrive in the snake pit of court politics. But his name would forever be stained by his role in the death of Yue Fei, the military hero who became a symbol of Chinese loyalty and national pride. Yue Fei had fought valiantly against the invading Jurchen tribes of the Jin dynasty, recapturing lost territories and inspiring his soldiers with a fierce sense of patriotism. The Song court, however, was divided between those who wanted to fight to the end and those, like Qin Hui, who advocated appeasement. Qin believed that peace, no matter how humiliating, was preferable to endless war. His argument found favor with Emperor Gaozong, who feared Yue Fei’s growing popularity and military independence.
When Qin Hui became the emperor’s chief councilor, his true colors emerged. Using his position, he engineered the recall of Yue Fei from the front lines, where he was on the verge of victory. The order, legend says, came in the form of twelve golden tokens, symbols of imperial command that could not be questioned. Yue Fei, though bewildered and loyal to a fault, obeyed. Upon returning to the capital, he was arrested on charges of “not following orders.” The evidence was flimsy, the trial a farce. When asked for proof of Yue Fei’s alleged crimes, Qin Hui reportedly muttered the now-infamous phrase, “莫须有”, “perhaps there was.” Those three words would define his legacy. Yue Fei was executed in prison in 1142, his body buried in disgrace.
Years later, Yue Fei’s name was cleared, his honor restored, and his remains reburied at West Lake with full ceremony. Qin Hui, however, did not enjoy such redemption. The people reviled him even before his death. Folk songs cursed his name, street plays mocked his cowardice, and poems damned his betrayal. Over the centuries, he became a universal symbol of treachery in Chinese culture, the face of deceit and submission to foreign power. While Yue Fei ascended into the pantheon of national heroes, Qin Hui’s spirit was condemned to kneel in shame for eternity.
That eternal punishment was made literal in the Southern Song era, when artisans sculpted statues of Qin Hui and his wife, along with two accomplices, kneeling before Yue Fei’s tomb. Their hands are bound behind their backs, their faces contorted in remorse or fear, and their bodies forever frozen in the act of contrition. To this day, the statues stand exposed, unguarded, and unloved. Locals and tourists alike spit on them, throw stones, or slap their heads for good luck, a macabre but enduring tradition of moral cleansing. Signs nearby even read, “Do not spit or hit the statues,” though the warnings go largely ignored. The ritual persists not out of mere habit, but as a form of cultural catharsis. In every strike against the bronze traitor, there is a symbolic blow for justice, an act of remembrance for Yue Fei, and a reaffirmation of collective moral order.
The cultural resonance of these statues extends far beyond the act of vengeance. They are, in many ways, a mirror of China’s deep moral consciousness, the belief that actions, especially acts of betrayal, carry consequences that transcend time. In a society where loyalty to the state and family has long been exalted, Qin Hui’s duplicity represents the ultimate violation. His kneeling form reminds people that political convenience cannot erase moral failure, and that those who sell their integrity for power will be judged not by emperors, but by history itself.
Qin Hui’s name became shorthand for treachery in Chinese idiom. Parents warned their children not to “be a Qin Hui.” Playwrights and novelists resurrected his image as the eternal villain, the corrupt minister whispering poison into the emperor’s ear, the weak man cloaked in moral rationalizations. Even in modern China, his name carries a sting. Online, when public figures are seen as betraying national interests or pandering to foreign powers, they are sometimes mocked as “modern-day Qin Huis.” The power of that comparison, almost nine centuries later, shows how deeply his story is woven into the nation’s moral DNA.
The kneeling statues themselves have also become a fascinating case study in cultural memory. They are not grand or imposing, not meant to inspire awe like an emperor’s monument or a revolutionary’s statue. Instead, they are humbling, almost pathetic. Their positioning, kneeling, heads bowed, forever facing Yue Fei’s tomb, forces the viewer to look down upon them, both physically and morally. The statues invert the typical relationship between monument and spectator. Instead of commanding reverence, they invite disgust. Instead of glorifying power, they humiliate it. This reversal is what gives them their potency.
Over time, the statues have been vandalized, replaced, and restored countless times. During the Cultural Revolution, Red Guards, ironically, in their zeal to destroy symbols of feudal history, spared the statues, seeing them as the embodiment of reactionary treachery. Later, in the reform era, as tourism flourished, they became a must-see attraction at Yue Fei Temple, a blend of moral education and entertainment. Tour guides recount the story with theatrical indignation, emphasizing Qin Hui’s villainy and Yue Fei’s sacrifice. Visitors pose beside the kneeling figures, sometimes mimicking their stance, sometimes striking them playfully. What was once sacred anger has, in part, turned into ritualized folklore. Yet the emotional core remains intact: Qin Hui’s shame is not forgiven.
In recent years, scholars have debated whether Qin Hui deserves such eternal damnation. Some argue that he was a pragmatic statesman, trying to preserve a weakened empire through diplomacy. The Song dynasty was economically prosperous but militarily fragile, and continued war against the Jin might have led to complete annihilation. In that light, Qin Hui’s peace efforts could be seen as a strategic necessity rather than betrayal. Others point out that much of what is “known” about his treachery was shaped by later historians eager to craft a clear moral narrative, heroes need villains, and Yue Fei’s martyrdom required a Judas. But public opinion has little patience for revisionism when moral clarity feels so satisfying. In popular imagination, Qin Hui’s guilt is absolute, and the kneeling statues are the physical embodiment of that judgment.
The endurance of this story tells us something profound about how societies construct their moral history. Every culture needs its saints and sinners, its symbols of virtue and vice. Qin Hui and Yue Fei represent two poles of that moral spectrum, one defined by loyalty unto death, the other by the cowardice of self-preservation. Their story is not just about two men, but about the eternal conflict between principle and expediency, between courage and compromise. In the long arc of Chinese history, where dynasties rose and fell in cycles of corruption and renewal, this moral lesson never lost its relevance.
In the modern era, as China grapples with its identity in a globalized world, the kneeling statues at West Lake continue to speak with quiet authority. They remind citizens that moral integrity cannot be outsourced to convenience or political calculation. In a society increasingly driven by power, wealth, and pragmatism, the story of Qin Hui endures as a warning: the price of betrayal is eternal infamy. The stones beneath his knees are worn smooth by centuries of contempt, the bronze dulled by countless hands and spittle, yet his punishment feels timeless. No monument to him will ever stand tall, no rehabilitation will erase the sight of his groveling form before Yue Fei’s spirit.
As dusk falls over West Lake, tourists drift away and the air grows still. The faint scent of incense lingers around Yue Fei’s tomb, the whispers of history almost audible in the rustle of trees. There, in the fading light, Qin Hui and his wife remain on their knees, shadows cast long across the ground, frozen in a posture that outlived their bones and reputations. They are the rare kind of monument that exists not to commemorate greatness, but to preserve disgrace. In that kneeling silence lies one of China’s most enduring moral parables, a lesson in loyalty, power, and the unrelenting judgment of time.
Qin Hui’s story is not only about the man who betrayed a general, but about a civilization that refuses to forget. Each act of spitting, each slap of the bronze head, each contemptuous glance at those kneeling figures reaffirms a national truth: treachery may bring momentary comfort, but honor, once betrayed, leaves a wound that history will never let heal.
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