133
strangled by three pieces of string or cord. Travers Humphreys asserts: 'The method is peculiarly Oriental, and indicated that she had been sitting on the ground when someone, with the string held in both hands, had suddenly drawn it tightly round her throat and knotted it behind'.42 Strangulation by this method — a ligature — is not, surely, 'peculiarly Oriental'? It was adopted, for example, by the murderer in the celebrated Yarmouth case of 1900, where the victim was strangled by a mohair bootlace.4 Another source of perplexity, to repeat, was language: people who do not speak your language are apt to be regarded as dense or odd. Miao often declared he had been misunderstood. Thus at first he believed his wife's body had been found by Miss Crossley, and he is alleged to have asked 'Did she go to the place where they bathe?' (indicating that he knew where she had been murdered). Later, Miao's counsel urged that what he really said was, 'Had she gone to look for his wife at the place where people take the bus'.
The three pieces of paper, with the cabbalistic or arcane questions on them, also worried Travers Humphreys. One of the statements made by Miao, he relates, 'to the Appeal Court was that he was in the habit of asking God which of two or more courses he should take, when he would put the alternatives on separate pieces of paper, would then pray for guidance and decide by drawing a lot. Does not that statement indicate a confusion of mind sufficient to account for almost any action?'44 But the art of divination — the drawing of lots — has a long history in China; so, too, has fortune-telling, once a normal custom when a marriage was projected between families. The mysterious I Ching has also been widely used by Chinese for centuries as a means of grasping the future. One should also refer to a widely-held belief in the efficacy of feng-shui, certainly in the 1920s. The rational Travers Humphreys, in the quotation given above, was suggesting, of course, that Miao was suffering from religious mania or acute superstition; but, if so, why should this provide a motive for the crime unless he believed his wife was the Antichrist?
On balance, it seems obvious that Miao's crime was a murder for profit. He had little money in his possession when he married; the planned two-months vacation appears to have been financed