July 19, 1900.
A man sits down for his morning coffee and reads his favorite newspaper, The San Francisco
Call.
He quickly turns to the story of a missing catboat and its two unfortunate occupants,
but there’s one headline that day that really piques his curiosity.
It reads, “Terrible Tortures Practiced by the Chinese.”
He pushes his specks up his nose as he reads that nowhere on Earth is any country “so
cruel and so devoted to fearful tortures”, and that no place is “so adept at devising
new forms of martyrdom for the people they hate” than in China.
He reads on and discovers a slow kind of horror he’s never heard about: The Cangue.
That newspaper article in the San Francisco Call was real, if not more than a little racially
biased.
Here is another line from the same article: “A Chinaman would take no artistic pleasure
in anything that killed quickly or that reached its culmination of pain quickly.
His victim must suffer a little more each hour.
In that way, he makes his delight last long and can keep a whole string of wretches to
charm him by their slow dying for months.”
Yes, that part was unashamedly racist, and perhaps the writer was not too well-read on
the history of his own ancestors’ cruelty.
But the cangue was certainly a real thing, and indeed, it could have been a long, drawn-out
punishment.
It might have sometimes ended in death, but as you’ll see today, it took on lots of
forms.
Let’s talk about perhaps the most basic form first, something you could find in China
around the time that article was written.
If you’ve ever seen the stocks that they used in Europe and the US back in the day,
it looked very similar.
The main difference is that even though the offender’s head was surrounded by two pieces
of wooden board fastened together, he or she could actually move a bit more.
There were variations on this, too, such as sometimes the boards prevented him from getting
his hands to his mouth, which meant he could neither eat nor drink by himself.
In this case, he had to rely on family or passersby for their charity.
Maybe he could use his hands, but since the boards might weigh as much as 15kg (33 pounds)
getting around and living a normal life was not easy in the slightest.
The yoke was no joke.
As the descriptive writer in that newspaper article wrote, he might be kept in his cangue
“till madness or death ends his sufferings.”
You can only imagine how painful it must have been to have been strapped inside one of those
things.
Sure, the victim might have stayed low down to the ground, but for how many weeks can
a person do that?
The other thing is this was supposed to be a form of public humiliation, just as the
stocks were, and like victims of the stocks, the public might have been the opposite of
charitable.
Maybe the man in the cangue had stolen from people in the village, or worse, maybe he
had committed a violent crime.
What do you think would have happened to him in this case?
Yep, he might have been pelted with rocks and his life might have ended soon after.
It goes back a long way, too, but we can’t say how far back exactly.
There’s some text from the Great Ming Legal Code of 1397 which states that the victim
should be held in the cangue in relation to the nature of the crime he has committed.
The weight of the cangue was also correlated with the gravity of the crime, a crime that
would have been stated on paper nailed to the device.
At first, the sufferer might be able to take the weight, but over time, it became hellish.
Again, in the words of that news story, “In a week the torturers have the felicity of
seeing a maddened wretch stumble and fall around blindly, weeping and yelling with anguish.”
That’s if he could eat by himself or the local people felt sorry enough for him and
fed him.
If not, his life expectancy in the cangue was likely only a few days since the lack
of water would have killed him.
As for lack of food, starvation might have taken a few weeks.
On the bright side, a well-liked person in the cangue could have been taken care of and
in the end, he might have just lost a bit of face.
The newspaper story failed to mention that part...
There was also beating by guards that might have happened in the cangue, which under the
Yuan dynasty by law might have just been with a light stick 7 to 57 times.
But it might also have been with a heavy stick 67 to 107 times, which could have resulted
in death if a bribe hadn’t been paid to lessen the force of the blows.
The death would have been slow and usually a result of infected cuts.
Remember this was for lesser crimes, too.
For example, under the Yuan Code of 1277, 133 offenses could lead to execution, but
under the Ching Code of 1740, a whopping 813 offenses merited the death penalty, usually
by strangulation or decapitation, and to a lesser extent, slow slicing.
With that in mind, cangue really was the least of an offender’s worries.
Believe it or not, though, what we’ve talked about so far is the less brutal form of the
cangue.
We guess that’s a matter of perspective, though.
Would you prefer the chance to live on or just have your death over and done with quickly?
Let us explain.
Sometimes the person could move with the cangue, but other times the person would have the
board fastened around their head and they would also be kept in a kind of wooden cage.
Again, this might have happened in a public place as means to show others what happens
if someone created disorder.
They might also have been left there until they died.
The fear factor was described like this in legal text:
“If you govern by punishment the people will fear.
Being fearful they will not commit villainies.
There being no villainies, people will be happy.”
It’s reasoning as old as time, but time has shown us that sometimes the real villains
might be the ones doing the punishing.
That’s why in China like elsewhere more barbaric rulers who had a penchant for the
cruel and usual were often replaced with reformists.
In this respect, the killer form of the cangue might be seen as less brutal than other Chinese
punishments in history such as being cut into pieces, or boiled alive, or being slow-sliced
to death.
Then there was beheading, which was seen by people in China back in the day as less preferable
to hanging.
The reason is a person wanted to keep their head for the afterlife.
This is why the cangue and the cage as a slow form of hanging, never mind if it took a long
time, might have been a better way to die than a quick chop with the sword.
Cangue hanging went like this.
The offender was placed in the cangue and then placed inside the cage.
The cangue was then attached to the top of the cage.
His feet couldn’t touch the ground, but he wasn’t left just hanging there because
supports were placed under his feet.
This was supposed to be a slow death, so only little by little were the supports removed
and the pressure on his neck would be incremental until he died.
This sounds like something that happened a very long time ago, but it was exactly how
some rebels in the 1900 Boxer Rebellion were treated after they were arrested.
There is a photo to prove it, with a note saying that it was done to “appease foreign
powers.”
The Boxers were not keen on foreigners, and certainly Christian missionaries, but it’s
a complex story we won’t get into today.
We’ll just say that when it came to the cangue, this form meant certain death and
it wasn’t an express kind of execution.
We’ve also seen other photos, one of them likely taken by a French person because it
explains in French that a woman is sentenced to death by strangulation in the cangue.
Now you need to watch, “Weird Punishments Handed Out Instead of Prison.”
Or, have a look at, “Smallest Crimes That Will Get You the Biggest Punishments Around
The World.”