Sli-kwang Conspiracy
The Sli-kwang Conspiracy (寺工之牧) or also the Gross Conspiracy (太牧) was an 1906 conspiracy by various officers of the Royal Guards to abduct Emperor Gwai and create a military junta to replace the Government of Themiclesia. The conspirators met regularly at a warehouse outside of Kien-k'ang and sought the concurrence or acquiescence of both civil and military officers who worked at the Q'in-lang Palace. As the government became aware of the plot, it foiled the conspiracy at a very early stage and arrested many officers and men involved in the plot between May and June 1907. In total, 276 people were sentenced to penal slavery under unreformed Penal Code for the crime of high treason (牧反); they were the final convicts to be sentenced to slavery in Themiclesia, the punishment being abolished weeks after the last conviction.
Conspiracy
Origins
Planning
Arrests
Trial
Owing to the fact that the conspirators belonged to more than 40 different civil jurisdictions and military units, and witnesses must be called in succession to testify at each, the trials of the conspirators lasted almost four years before the list of convictions was considered final. The regimental courts generally had no difficulty in admitting enough evidence for impanelled juries to convict the conspirators. The judges charged the juries according to this formula:
At the law it is treason to conspire to kill the Sovereign, his Consort, or his Heir Apparent; or to conspire to imprison them; or to conspire to compel or prevent them to exercise their powers in manner not provided by the law. By conspire it is meant if he has made a material contribution to the said unlawful confederacy. The court therefore commands the gentlemen and members of the jury to find, by their unanimous assent, the prisoner either guilty, if he has done any of these things, or to find the prisoners not guilty, if he has done none of these things. I am required by the law to remind you now that the giving of a false verdict is punished as perjury.
According to contemporary reports, many juries took no longer than a few hours to return a guilty verdict, and the fastest jury returned the verdict within 10 minutes. Immediately, all military defendants appealled to examine the lawfulness of the guilty verdict (求鞠) before the Court for the Correction of Errors in Regimental Tribunals (正旅師虞廷). After the verdict was upheld, actions were filed at the Chancery, demanding the issuance of writs in suspension and transferral to the Imperial Court of Appeal. With only a few exceptions, the convictions were upheld in each court of the hierarchy, including the House of Lords sitting as the Council of Barons-in-Waiting, the court of last resort.
At the last minute before the sentence was delivered, 43 defendants co-authored a petition to the Privy Council with a full confession of the whole plot, including details not yet revealed by other defendants in questioning. They claimed that at no time was there a suggestion that the Emperor's life be harmed, and their plans did not necessarily require the killing of any of his ministers. The Privy Council read the petition on Aug. 3, 1911 and resolved to make no response. The sentences were thus read on the same day with no variance from the general expectation: all 276 convicted conspirators were sentenced to be "delivered into the Sovereign's household" (賚于公家), which meant their legal existences were suspended, and their persons and estates became the Crown's property.
The 43 defendants who co-authored the confession were not spared the sentence. But as the Central Railway went into construction in the same year, the Government secured a bill to lease its slaves to the builder of the railway. Those who worked on the Central Railway all died of exhaustion, exposure, malnutrition, or abuse by 1915, as the board of the railway refused to feed or clothe them to any reasonable extent. The Government assured it would not prosecute the railway for injuring the slaves as the Crown's property. Sak-ni Tem, the general supervisor on the excavation, threatened to drive a railway spike through one of the slaves should the others not work at speed. Thus, according to witness accounts, the slaves worked "not according to the natural limit of their bodies, but only to the limit of noise complaints at night."
Eight of those who confessed survived until the general amnesty of 1947, when their sentences were commuted to 7 more years in prison, but none survived until release.
Legacy
Central Railway
The Central Railway made little effort to conceal the fact that slaves made up as much as half of its workforce during its initial construction between 1910 and 1916. Records were left intact until a redactor was commissioned by the board in 1948 to expunge references to "Crown slaves" and substitute "labourers furnished by the Government", ostensibly to obviate the putative comparison with the "Railway of Death" that Menghean forces compelled enslaved prisoners-of-war, of primarily Casaterran descent, to built across Dzhungestan. In the same year, the Central Railway was bought out by the Government, and its line became known as the Central Line of the Kien-k'ang Rapid Transit system.
In 2021, the KRT publicly acknowledged that the Central Line was built with slave labour and dedicated a memorial:
This stone stands to the memory of those individuals who worked on this railway against their own will, in a time and place when a person's freedom of choice was pride to our nation and no stranger to our laws. Though it is true they were sentenced to lose this freedom for their crimes, let the fact that this line was built by slaves, in a manner contrary to the decency of that time, be not forgotten by reason of ignorance, hubris, or the passage of time.