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not fully known. There was apparently some disturbing news passed along unseen lines of communication that a large group of unruly men, nearly 5,000 in all, had been rounded up in Wye-chow and urged on by Soo and another gentry collaborator, Wong Chik-wai, to sneak into Poklo and capture the district magistrate, Legge, and Ch'êa. Their intentions were apparently malevolent, fully inclined toward "punishing" all three if they were found. In fact, their progress toward Poklo was slower than the Hoppo anticipated. On October 10th, the day Legge left to return to Canton and then on to his young family in Hong Kong, the vigilantes had already "made prisoners" of the Prefect of Wye-chow and the District Magistrate of Kwye-sheen, capturing them as they returned from the previous day's festivities in Poklo.
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Ch'êa himself, Legge reflected, "was full of joy, as I was, and unsuspicious of danger." Apparently sometime during the evening of the 12th or 13th, a group of men surrounded the London Mission's house in Poklo and provoked Ch'êa to come to the door by having a small child knock on it. Having tricked him by this means, they grabbed him, beating him till they could control him by other means. Soon afterwards this kind of aggressive physical persecution spread to all the places where residents had become Christians, neighbours saving themselves by becoming informants, causing a desperate exodus from many places. News that finally did filter down to Hong Kong came from the mouths of a handful of refugees who managed to escape from the area.
Legge's daughter, Helen Edith Legge, put together a series of letters including translations of notes and verbal news received by Chalmers in Canton as well as passages from letters of her father to reconstruct the final days of Ch'êa's persecution. Even though one local Christian named Wong Shan Yen, possibly a wealthy farmer Ch'êa had often met over the years, offered a large ransom to have Ch'êa released, the vigilantes had other purposes in mind.85 First tortured with fire,86 and then later moved to another hamlet where he was hung overnight to a beam by his thumbs and big toes, reawakened into the consciousness of his pain by water dashed in the face, Ch'êa's enemies were merciless. Only if he promised to