Over the years, we think we’ve done a commendable job here at the Infographics Show in disturbing
you with tales of government-approved torture. But today we have something special for you,
which is perhaps the most revolting punishment we’ve ever talked about.
Welcome to the wretched world of the waist chop.
Many of the punishments we’ve talked about in the past have involved some pretty complex machinery.
Other tortures, such as having rats eat into a person’s belly, must have been thought
up by some outstandingly creative sadists. But today, the punishment is about as simple
as you can imagine. In terms of creativity, it scores a one out of ten, but in terms of
how vile it is, we’ll give it a resounding 10. Simply put, the waist chop was sawing someone in
half. Yep, just like magicians used to do but in this case there wasn’t any magic involved.
It’s hard to believe anyone would do such a thing. Not only would such a punishment cause a big mess,
but it would also have been quite labor intensive. But you have to remember,
some punishments were supposed to inflict as much pain as possible while keeping the person alive.
A simple decapitation in this case was pretty much letting someone off the hook.
We read a paper on this torture called, “Demystifying ancient torture: the history
of ‘half-cutting’ from its appearance to its disappearance.” We had to translate the document,
and even though the translation wasn’t great, the picture was clear enough.
Here’s a little snippet: “Perhaps the ruler was afraid of
the turbulent character of these intellectuals, so he was murderous and sacrificed the torture
of ‘half-cutting’ in an attempt to break the ‘backbone’ of the Chinese people and
cultivate servile obedience.” So, the torture was symbolic.
It was designed to break a person in two, literally and metaphorically.
The writer of the paper said the torture was actually progressive given that some
punishments back then, 1046 BC – 256 BC, involved cooking people alive. He added
that sometimes a person would be roasted, and other times, bits of them would be cut off and
made into “meat sauce.” We kid you not. The paper said, “In the Zhou Dynasty,
‘chopping’ gradually replaced ‘cooking’ and became the mainstream of the death penalty.”
He said that the executioner had to be skillful. The cut had to be clean. If this didn’t happen,
much shame would be brought upon the executioner. The cutting technology improved over time, which
made the job of the executioner a little easier. It was explained like this. The prisoner first had
to strip naked. He was then told to lie on a kind of large chopping board or in some cases, over
two blocks with his waist exposed over the middle. As an example, the writer mentioned some troubles
at the end of the Qin Dynasty. This involved a man named Han Xin. He was a brilliant military
leader. For a long time, he remained undefeated, which bestowed on him the title, “God of War.”
It’s a complicated tale and Chinese historians might not agree about what happened to Han, but
it seems he had a downfall. He was executed, which may have come by way of being pierced
to death with spikes. But, it seems he did at one point go to the chopping block, too.
According to that same Chinese historian, bribes could be paid to ensure that the job was done
fast. But, if the person couldn’t pay a bribe and the authorities wanted to draw the operation out,
they would cut slowly. “It is extremely cruel,” said the historian, adding that the process
could take up to three hours. He explained it like this:
“If the executioner gets the money, he will be sharp and fast, so that the prisoner can die
quickly, so as to avoid prolonged suffering. If he is not paid, he will deliberately slow
down the death, and the flesh and blood will be cut off inch by inch. The pain is unimaginable.”
It seems that a Chinese politician named Fang Xiaoru went this way. He was arrested
after being involved in a rebellion, after which he was told the punishment
would be the “execution of nine kinship.” This was a rare kind of punishment in
ancient China, and only reserved for the worst of the worst, treasonous fellas or
soldiers that ignored orders. It basically meant not just executing that one person,
but also killing nine of his family members. The form of execution was usually slow-slicing,
but it might also have been waist severing. In the case of Xiaoru, the history books say that
when he was told nine of his family members were going to be executed, his reply was,
“Why not make it ten!” You can imagine he wasn’t very popular with his relatives after saying that.
The story goes that first, he had to watch his brother being sliced to death. When it
came to his turn, he dipped his fingers in blood and wrote the word, “usurper”,
which if you didn’t know, means someone who illegally takes someone’s position by force.
The legend also states that he somehow managed to do this after his body was chopped in half. That
story says he crawled for a while on the floor, just managing to write that word before he died.
There’s another similar story which takes place in the year 1734. This time,
a guy named Yu Hongtu was sent to the chopping block for waist severing. Hongtu was a clever
man indeed, serving as a scientist at the Henan Academy of Political Science.
He also caused a lot of controversy, since it’s said for the right price, he’d leak answers to
questions on exams that could propel students towards the good life. He was investigated and
subsequently reported to the Criminal Ministry where he was handed down a death sentence.
He was subsequently sentenced to be cut in half by the waist, and apparently, no one paid the bribe
to the executioner. The process was slow. It’s also said he crawled on the ground for a bit,
writing words with his own blood. According to some sources, he wrote “miserable”, but other
sources say he wrote “cruel” and “awful.” When the emperor heard about this,
he banned this form of execution, or at least that’s what the legend says.
You’d be right to be suspicious regarding people chopped in two writhing around on the
floor and writing some text just before they died. Such instances might well be legends,
but the punishment itself no doubt happened in China. There are ample documents to prove it.
But as for the writing part, that sounds like someone didn’t let the
facts get in the way of a good tale. If you should ever find yourself cut
into two pieces, so many arteries would be severed that the blood loss alone would
likely finish you off very quickly. You’d go into what’s called hypovolemic shock and you’d die.
Nonetheless, if you were split at the waist and a surgeon was on hand to stop the loss of blood,
you could survive because you’d still have all your major organs intact.
There’s actually a medical procedure called a hemicorporectomy, which is when a person
is surgically chopped in half, usually a consquence of certain cancers or massive
trauma. This surgery to date has only been reported 66 times in the medical literature.
Then there’s the strange case of a man named Truman Duncan, who is 2006 was working on the
railroad in Texas when he fell onto the tracks. He was subsequently hit by a train. In his own words,
he said, “It just felt like a monster. I couldn't get away from it; like it was just pulling me in,
and I'm pushing away, and I was cut in two.” He was in shock at this point, but still
beathing. He said, “I knew if I just lay there and lay there and lay there,
eventually I was gonna die.” He said while waiting for help to arrive, he just kept
getting sleepier and sleepier, but the thought of his wife and kids made him want to stay awake.
This is what one of the paramedics later said, “It didn't seem humanly possible to be cut in
half by a rail car and still be alive to survive that injury. So when we arrived on the scene
and found him pinned under the train wheels we were surprised to find him awake and talking.”
With that in mind, we think we are going to give those Chinese scribblers a chance of
really doing what the legends say they did. They didn’t stay alive for long,
like Mr. Duncan, but they could have dragged themselves on the floor and written those words.
Perhaps a worse way to die would be to be chopped in half vertically. Yep,
it seems people did that in the past, too.
It happened in various places in Medieval Europe, during the Roman Empire,
and also in parts of the Middle East. It wasn’t common in the Roman Empire,
but it seems the Emperor Caligula took a liking to it. He was known for being
a bit of a sadist. Some texts state that like the Chinese, he would have people
cut across the middle. He even had this done to some members of his family, and
he’d watch it while he was eating as he said it acted as a kind of appetizer to his main course.
Then there was the vertical cut, which we’d say must have been far worse. This sometimes
involved the condemned being strung up by the feet and the sawing starting at the groin.
Another variation was placing the person in the upright position between two boards and
then sawing from the head, which can’t have been very nice at all.
What you want to hear, though, are real cases and how they went down. So, here you go.
One case was featured in the 1706 January edition of the book,
“Present state of Europe.” The story explains that a man named Alcaide Melec was sawn in half
in Morocco after taking part in a rebellion. Melec was bound in chains and taken to the
town square on a mule. At this point, he hadn’t been told what was going to happen
to him. There many of his relatives and tribe members were waiting, some not bothered by the
event and others crying their eyes out. Melec was placed between two boards and
cut him from the head down, but then it was decided that this way was too fast. So,
they started sawing through his groin. They then went back to the head.
It was apparently hard to watch, especially seeing as Melec was conscious for a good
bit of it. It’s said at one point he just “fell apart.” As for his co-conspirators, many of them
had their arms and legs sawn off while others were impaled. You could say it was a bit of a
ghastly time, that day in January 1706. Then there was Mahomet the Conqueror,
who in the 15th century ordered a lot of sawing of his enemies,
as well as other brutal punishments. He was just 21 years of age when he conquered Constantinople
and put an end to the Byzantine Empire. He wasn’t very nice to those he captured, either.
In one book, it is written: “On the inhabitants the most
unremitting barbarities, destroying them by every method of ingenious cruelty.
Some they roasted alive on spits, others they starved, some they flayed alive, and left them
in that horrid manner to perish; many were sawn asunder, and others torn to pieces by horses.”
It even happened in the USA before the place became the USA. The event
is sometimes called the “first mutiny on US soil.” In short, a French officer was felled by his own
men in 1757 on Cat Island just off Mississippi. The soldiers had had enough of the bad conditions
they lived in, so decided to start a mutiny. This got back to the French governor,
and he sent in men to capture the wrongdoers. Two Swiss soldiers and one French solider were
taken to New Orleans to stand trial. They were all found guilty and handed a death sentence,
which in those days involved a lot of pain. Two of the men were broken on the wheel
and their bodies cut into four pieces and thrown into the river.
One of the Swiss soldiers was placed inside a coffin-shaped box, after which two other soldiers
used a two-man saw to cut the man in half. Yep, this looked just like the famous magic trick,
except there was no “Ta da!” moment in this case. Just to let everyone know how mutiny
would be dealt with, one of the man’s hands as well as his head were nailed to a post.
You might have thought that such a thing wouldn’t have happened in that day and age
when European societies were supposed to be a bit more enlightened. That’s exactly what most
French people thought, too, who after hearing about the macabre deaths, protested. This ended
with the governor being sent back to France. Thankfully, all over the world, cutting people
in half fell out of fashion by the time the 1800s arrived, although unfortunately, it seems
something similar happened to some people at the hands of the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s in Cambodia.
Let’s hope sawing people in half never makes an appearance in this world ever again.
Now you need to watch a video on something we just mentioned,
“The Catherine Wheel - Worst Punishments In The History of Mankind.” Or, have a look at…