Death by a thousand cuts

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For the Chinese medicial mushroom, see Lingzhi.


Língchí (pinyin for Chinese 凌遲/凌迟; also ling che) is a form of execution used in China before the modern era and is usually known in English as "slicing" or "death by a thousand cuts". The literal meaning of língchí is "humiliating and slow"; the method was officially outlawed in 1905.

Língchí was sometimes used for the torture and execution of a living person, or applied as an act of humiliation only after death. It was meted out for offences such as acts of treason, murder, or assault on one's parents. There are problems in obtaining details of how the executions took place. It seems however that executions consisted of cuts to the arms, legs, and chest, followed by decapitation or a stab to the heart. The term "death by a thousand cuts" is an exaggeration, since the fatal stroke was usually administered after several cuts. For those who could afford it, it was not unusual to bribe the torturer so that the coup de grace came more quickly, thereby reducing the victim's suffering (see a version as performed in October 1904).

This method of execution became a fixture in the image of China among some Westerners. It appears in various romantic accounts of Chinese cruelty, such as Harold Lamb's 1930s biography of Genghis Khan.

Contents

[edit] History

Língchí is known from the Five Dynasties period (907-960) and became very widespread in the Song Dynasty (960-1279). It first appeared in a Chinese code of laws for the non-Chinese Liao Dynasty (907-1125).

The punishment remained in the Qing Dynasty code of laws for persons convicted of high treason and other serious crimes. Língchí was abolished as a result of the 1905 revision of the Chinese penal code by Shen Jiaben (沈家本, 1840-1913; see [1]).

We know from Qing jurists such as Shen Jiaben that executioners' customs varied, as the regular way to perform this penalty was not specified in detail in the Penal code.

It should be pointed out that the Chinese were not alone in carrying out punishments regarded as cruel and unusual. However, as Western countries moved to abolish similar punishments, some Westerners began to focus attention on the methods of execution used in China. As early as 1866, the year after the last recorded case of hanging, drawing and quartering, Thomas Francis Wade, then serving with the British diplomatic mission in China, unsuccessfully urged the abolition of língchí.

[edit] Accounts

Below are some accounts from Western sources:

  • Sir Henry Norman, The People and Politics of the Far East, (1895). Norman was a widely travelled writer and photographer whose collection is now owned by Cambridge University. Norman claimed to have witnessed such an execution, and gave a graphic account in his book. "(The executioner) grasping handfuls from the fleshy parts of the body such as the thighs and breasts slices them away... the limbs are cut off piecemeal at the wrists and ankles, the elbows and knees, shoulders and hips. Finally the victim is stabbed to the heart and the head is cut off". (read and see complete Norman accounts)
  • G.E. Morrison, An Australian in China, (1895) differs from some other reports in stating that most Ling Chi mutilations are in fact made post mortem. Morrison wrote his description based on an account related by a claimed eyewitness "The prisoner is tied to a rude cross: he is invariably deeply under the influence of opium. The executioner, standing before him, with a sharp sword makes two quick incisions above the eyebrows, and draws down the portion of skin over each eye, then he makes two more quick incisions across the breast, and in the next moment he pierces the heart, and death is instantaneous. Then he cuts the body in pieces; and the degradation consists in the fragmentary shape in which the prisoner has to appear in heaven. " [2]
  • Tienstin (Tianjin), The China Year Book (1927), p 1401, contains contemporary reports from fighting in Guangzhou (Canton) between the Nanjing Government and Communist forces. Stories of various atrocities are related, including accounts of língchí. There is no mention of opium, and these cases appear to be government propaganda.
  • The Times, (December 9 1927), A Times journalist reported from the city of Canton that the communists were targeting Christians priests and that "Father Wong it was announced was to be publicly executed by the slicing process." A local Archbishop was said to have been so condemned. There is no evidence, however, that this sentence was carried out.
  • George Riley Scott, History of Torture, (1940) claims that many were executed this way by the Chinese communist insurgents; he cites claims made by the Nangking government in 1927. It is perhaps uncertain whether these claims were anti-communist propaganda. Scott also calls the it "the slicing process" and differentiates between the different types of execution in different parts of the country. There is no mention of opium. Riley's book contains a picture of a sliced corpse (with no mark to the heart) that was killed in Guangzhou (Canton) in 1927. It gives no indication of whether the slicing was done post mortem. Scott claims it was common for the relatives of the victim to bribe the executioner to kill the victim before the slicing procedure began.
  • Sterling Seagrave's Dragon Lady: The Life and Legend of the Last Empress of China (1993)—a semi-fictionalised biography of Empress Dowager Cixi—reports that "the Death of a Thousand Cuts ... is a classic form of execution practiced by every dynasty in China's history ... it was not at all exceptional in cases of high treason." (p. 80)
  • Louise Levathes, When China Ruled the Seas: The Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne, 1405-1433 (1994): "Huang was condemned to a particularly gruesome execution for high treason known as ling chi, or 'death by one thousand cuts.' Cuts were made on his chest, abdomen, arms, legs, and back, so that he very slowly bled to death over a period of time, perhaps as long as three days." (p. 71)
  • Mark Costanzo, Just Revenge: Costs and Consequences of the Death Penalty (1997): "'Death by a thousand cuts'—where small bits of flesh were carved away over a period of days—was sometimes used in ancient China." (p. 4)
  • Academia Sinica resources website: 1. /1912-1925 (民國元年壬子──十四年乙丑)/1915──中華民國四年乙卯/七月 (略 ...) - 190 - 7,17 (六 ， 六) 革 命 黨 人 鍾 明 光 炸 傷 廣 東 將 軍 龍 濟 光 (明 光 被 凌 遲 處 死)。This means that Zhong Mingguang, from the Revolutionnary Party Geming dang, would have been executed by língchí for an attempt at bombing General Long Jiguang. But on this event, the most reliable Boorman Biographical dictionaary, II, 456 (Lung Chi-kuang), reads: “Lung Chi-kuang, who had become one of Yuan’s most trusted henchmen, further enraged the Kwangtung populace when he ordered a lanter procession in Canton to celebrate Yuan’s diplomatic “success.” [acceptance of the 21 demands] When Lung went to visit his brother on 17 July, during a flood in Canton, Chung Ming-kuang, a member of the worker’s assassination group, seized the opportunity to throw a bomb at him. It killed 17 members of Lung Chi-kuang’s bodyguard and the assassin, but Long received only a foot wound”. So, Zhong Mingguang did not suffer língchí as a form of execution, for he died from his own bombing. It is not known whether he was mutilated after death.

The first Western photographs of língchí were taken in 1890 in Guangzhou (Canton) ([3]).

Critics charge that this method of execution (at least as related by some Western sources) is not reliably attested, and that any citations to the contrary are a mixture of works ranging from the poorly researched to unverified eyewitness accounts. It has been alleged that these accounts are either based on ignorance and prejudice, are historically inaccurate, or simply do not refer to the fictional "Death by a Thousand Cuts".[citation needed]

[edit] U.S. military accounts

One account reports that United States Marine Corps members stationed in and around Shanghai between 1927 and 1941 brought evidence of human rights abuses to the United States: "The prevalence of executions and torture is evidenced by the scrapbooks brought back from China by the Marines. There are photographs of firing squads, beheadings, disembowelments, rape and such torture as 'the death of a thousand cuts.'"

As the online Marine history notes, "Apparently these photographs were commercially available, because there are exact duplicates in many scrapbooks with the name of a commercial studio stamped on the backs of the photographs." Clearly, then, these 'curiosities' may have been widely circulating images bearing little relation to frequent practice, nor, indeed, any similarity with the reported practice that had existed prior to the 1905 prohibition of Slicing. Further perspectives may be revealed by the following statement: "Although morbid, these photographs are chilling testaments to the atrocities that were carried out by both the Chinese and Japanese in Shanghai between 1927 and 1941," suggesting that such gruesome occurrences, assuming they actually took place, may have been limited to instances of extreme brutality and war crime and did not necessarily bear any resemblance to any officially sanctioned practice which may or may not have actually existed.

Photographs from this same period, including lines of beheaded corpses, non-Chinese diplomats killed by gunfire, and a língchí victim, can be found in George Ryley Scott's A History of Torture.

[edit] Photographs from 1905

French soldiers in Beijing had the opportunity to photograph three different língchí executions:

  • Unknown, reason unknown, possibly a young deranged boy who killed his mother, and was executed in January 1905? Photographs were published by Dumas in 1934 Nouveau traité de psychologie (not in 1923 Traité de p.!), and again namely by Bataille, in fact by Lo Duca, who mistakenly appended abstracts of Fou-tchou-li's executions as related by Carpeaux (see below). See the complete set: http://turandot.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/Event.php?ID=10
  • Fou-tchou-li (pinyin Fúzhūli 幅株哩), a Mongol guard who killed his master, the Mongol prince of Aohan Banner, and who was executed on the 10 April 1905; as língchí was to be abolished two weeks later, this was presumably the last attested case of it in Chinese history (See the complete set) . Photographs appeared in books by Matignon (1910), and Carpeaux (1913), the latter claiming (falsely) that he was present. Carpeaux's narrative was mistakenly, but persistently, associated to photographs published by Dumas and Bataille. Even related to the right set of photos, Carpeaux's narrative is highly dubious; for instance, an examination of the Chinese judicial archives show that Carpeaux bluntly invented the execution decree below:

The execution proclamation is reported to state "'The Mongolian Princes demand that the aforesaid Fou-Tchou-Le, guilty of the murder of Prince Ao-Han-Ouan, be burned alive, but the Emperor finds this torture too cruel and condemns Fou-Tchou-Li to slow death by Leng-Tch-e (cutting into pieces). Respect this!" [4]

Photographic material and other sources are available online at the Chinese Torture Database (Iconographic, Historical and Literary Approaches of an Exotic Representation) hosted by the Institut d'Asie Orientale (CNRS, France) at http://turandot.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/.

Other uses or citations of the 1905 photographs include:

  • Georges Bataille
Adrien Borel, Georges Bataille's analyst, introduced Bataille to the photographs. Bataille became fascinated by the photographs, reportedly gazing at them daily. He included the photos in his The Tears of Eros. (1961; translated to English and published by City Lights in 1989) [5]

This book is dubious in its content, as well as in its authorship, and the getting from Borel is very likely a belated invention [6]

  • Julio Cortàzar
Julio Cortàzar in his 1963 novel Rayuela apparently refers to Língchí in chapter 14, where Oliveira is looking at a set of Chinese execution pictures owned by Wong.
  • Hannibal
The 1905 incident inspired a brief reference in Thomas Harris's novel Hannibal (2000): "...police photographs of his (Lecter's) outrages were bootlegged to collectors of hideous arcana. They were second in popularity only to the execution of Fou-Tchou-Li." [7]
  • Susan Sontag
Susan Sontag mentions the 1905 case in Regarding the Pain of Others (2003). One reviewer wrote that though Sontag includes no photographs in her book—a volume about photography—"she does tantalisingly describe a photograph that obsessed the perverse philosopher Georges Bataille, in which a Chinese criminal, while being chopped up and slowly flayed by executioners, rolls his eyes heavenwards in transcendent bliss." [8]
  • John Zorn
Saxophonist and composer John Zorn used at least one of the 1905 photos with his 1992 Naked City album, Leng Tch'e.
  • Chen Chien-jen
Inspired by the 1905 photos, Chinese artist Chen Chien-jen created a 25-minute motion picture called Lingchi, which has generated some controversy. [9]

[edit] Western perceptions of língchí

In some Western mythology the condemned was stripped and bound to a pole. The torturer, wielding an extremely sharp knife, typically began by putting out the eyes, rendering the victim incapable of seeing the remainder of the torture and, presumably, adding considerably to the psychological terror of the procedure. Successive cuts chopped off ears, nose, tongue, fingers, toes, and such before proceeding to grosser cuts that removed large collops of flesh from more sizable parts, e.g., thighs and shoulders.

In some Western accounts, the Death by a Thousand Cuts involved having small bits of skin or flesh cut from an individual over a period of days. Some victims were reportedly given doses of opium. The Western version of a Death by a Thousand Cuts bears little or no resemblance to língchí as it was actually practiced. There are strange, occasionally funny, discrepancies between descriptions and evaluations according to the authors' moral and religious background: Protestants tend to understate, while Catholics exaggerate, physical ordeals. [10]

The distinction between the Western myth and the Chinese reality was noted by Westerners as early as 1895. That year, Australian traveller G.E. Morrison wrote that "Ling Chi" was "commonly, and quite wrongly, translated as 'death by slicing into 10,000 pieces'—a truly awful description of a punishment whose cruelty has been extraordinarily misrepresented." (read Morrison's original text)

Some modern writers suggest that língchí -- as a genuine adjunct to execution -- was exaggerated in some retellings to become the more sensationalistic "death by a thousand cuts." This apparent confusion might be due to the novelty of slicing to Western observers, or attributed to mistranslation, cultural differences, racism or other factors. This idea is perhaps supported by at least one source: J. M. Roberts, in Twentieth Century: The History of the World, 1901 to 2000 (2000), writes "the traditional punishment of death by slicing ... became part of the western stereotype of Chinese backwardness as the 'death of a thousand cuts.'" Roberts then notes that slicing "was ordered, in fact, for K'ang Yu-Wei, a man termed the 'Rousseau of China', and a major advocate of intellectual and government reform in the 1890's." (p. 60, footnote 8)

Although officially outlawed by the Qing government in 1905, língchí became a widespread Western symbol of the Chinese penal system from the 1910s on. Three sets of photographs were shot by French soldiers in 1904-1905 were the basis for later mythification and gruesome fancies. The abolition was immediately enforced, and definitely: no lingchi was ever performed in China after April 1905, the reported cases are all based on mistaken dating of the last executions. For instance, the 4th Marine website quoted above confuses atrocities committed in 1927-31 Shanghai by Nationalists and Communists with much older photographs; although the two examples are mentioned in the same sentence, as part of the same intolerable Chinese reality, they are in fact separated by a distance of 25 years in time.

Regarding the use of opium, as related in the introduction to Morrison's book, Sir Meyrick Hewlett insisted that "most Chinese people sentenced to death were given large quantities of opium before execution, and Morrison avers that a charitable person would be permitted to push opium into the mouth of someone dying in agony, thus hastening the moment of decease." At the very least, such tales were deemed credible to British officials in China and other Western observers.

[edit] Uses in fiction

In his novel The Journeyer, author Gary Jennings demonstrates the distinction between Western myth and Chinese reality by referring to the "Death of a Thousand" as a torture procedure he explains thus: One thousand pieces of paper are placed in a container, and a paper is drawn out by the Fondler (the torturer) to determine where the cut will be made. Having determined that there are 333 body parts, each of these parts is represented three times (for a total of 999 - the 1,000th paper represents immediate death). For example, the pinky finger - when the first paper is drawn denoting the pinkie finger, perhaps the digit will be removed to the first joint. The second time the pinky finger paper is drawn, another section to the next joint is amputated. The third time the pinky finger paper is drawn, the rest of the finger is amputated. Jennings also fictionalizes in the book that, in an extended form of the torture, the body parts and blood are fed to the victim as the victim's only nourishment.

In the novel Flashman and the Dragon by George MacDonald Fraser, reference is made to a prisoner being bound tightly in a thin wire mesh through which nubs of flesh protrude. These are then cut off by the torturer with a sharp razor. In order to kill the prisoner, the razor is run quickly over many nubs of flesh at once.

In Malcolm Bosse's novel "The Examination", Hong, the brother of Chen, is subjected to this torture, although he is not killed.

In the film Barbarella, Jane Fonda plays the lead role who is sentenced to death by being placed in a container of Budgerigars where the multitude of cuts from the birds' claws and beaks are intended to kill her.

[edit] Other uses of the term

The phrase "death of a thousand cuts" is often used metaphorically to describe the gradual or incremental destruction of something, such as an institution or program, by repeated minor attacks. The term is also used in business management to describe a product or idea that is damaged or destroyed by too many minor changes.

[edit] Reference

  • Bourgon, Jérôme. "Abolishing 'Cruel Punishments': A Reappraisal of the Chinese Roots and Long-Term Efficiency of the in Legal Reforms." Modern Asian Studies 37, no. 4 (2003): 851-62.
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