A large crowd gathers as a man whimpers while being bound to a wooden post.
What he has coming to him is beyond horrifying, so barbaric that it will send shockwaves around
the world.
An executioner holds a sharpened knife aloft as the onlookers shuffle nervously.
The first slice is made, a deep incision in the man’s chest.
The next side comes next.
Skin, flesh, and blood are now accumulating around the man’s feet.
He will be cut all over until his bones are exposed, but with a deftness of hand, the
executioner will make sure this man will keep breathing for as long as possible.
He is forced to be a spectator in his own very painful, infinitely traumatic execution.
This is the story of slow-slicing.
It was the Chinese who came up with this terrifying form of slow execution, giving it the name
“lingchi.”
That loosely translates as slow slicing or lingering death.
How long it actually lasted and how many cuts were made differed over the centuries throughout
different parts of China, but it was never a nice way to go.
Westerners tended to call it “death by a thousand cuts”, although it’s questionable
if 1,000 slices were ever made.
Whatever the case, it was one hellish way to die.
Let’s first have a look at some early examples of people being executed this way.
We don’t know exactly when it started, but there are some very old Chinese texts that
suggest it goes back to the second century BC.
The emperor Qin Er Shi was said to have killed people this way, folks he’d accused of not
being loyal to him.
He also subjected people to the “Five Pains” punishment, which usually involved a person
losing their feet and their reproductive organs, among other things.
Throughout the centuries it remained, although it was abolished from time to time by some
rulers who took a dim view of the act.
For instance, in the 12th century the poet named Lu You had this to say about lingchi:
“When the muscles of the flesh are already taken away, the breath of life is not yet
cut off, liver and heart are still connected, seeing and hearing still exist.
It affects the harmony of nature, it is injurious to a benevolent government, and does not befit
a generation of wise men.”
Still, as you’ll see today, it happened right up until modern times and not surprisingly
shocked a lot of people in the West – even though their own histories included a fair
amount of flaying, evisceration, and other horrific forms of punishment.
So, what kind of criminal act would result in a person dying this awful way?
It seems throughout Chinese history the main culprit was treason, but whether the person
was actually guilty of the crime or just accused of it by a paranoid and vicious ruler is up
for debate.
It didn’t only happen in China, either, and it wasn’t always Chinese people that
were executed this way, as readers of French history will tell you.
But let’s stay with China for now.
In 1402, a man named Fang Xiaoru was put to death this way after getting on the wrong
side of the Yongle Emperor.
This guy really irked the powers that be, so the emperor also demanded the punishment
of nine familial exterminations.
It’s said Xiaoru said “make it ten”, so ten it was.
He had to watch family and friends being executed in front of him.
He was apparently later cut to pieces and then sawed in half at the waist.
In the early 1500s, a peasant was subjected to lingchi for merely starting a rumor, although
you could say what he said wasn’t very prudent given the times.
He said the emperor’s mother wasn’t actually his real mother, and that was that, off to
the chopping block he went.
Fast-forward to the mid-1500s and there was something called the Renyin Plot.
This involved a bunch of palace women plotting to murder the emperor.
They almost succeeded, too, if it wasn’t for a snitch and the pesky Empress Fang.
Since the emperor was in a bad way after being attacked by the women, it was Fang that oversaw
the slow-slicing of the 16 women involved.
Ten members of the women’s families were also executed, but by beheading.
Apparently, when the emperor woke up, he was peeved that one of his favorite consorts had
gone by way of lingchi.
As the years passed, it seems revolts and disloyalty to a leader were the main reasons
why people were sliced, but at times it happened for other serious offenses.
In the early 19th century there was a man named Zhang Liangbi.
It seems he was a kind of early serial killer, abducting and assaulting a number of girls
and killing 11 of them.
He was subsequently sliced to death.
Around the same time, a man was put to death by lingchi for having gone crazy and killed
his own mother.
Another person went the same way for poisoning his father.
Not long after, a village leader named Kumud Pazik was executed in public this way for
trying to help indigenous Taiwanese people fight against the Chinese expansionists.
Then there was the bandit named Kang Xiaoba, who according to Chinese historians, used
a revolver made in Japan to rob people all over the countryside.
He grew a fierce reputation and even threatened rulers in Beijing.
They didn’t take kindly to the threats, so an example of this man had to be made.
He was arrested and it was ruled that his crimes had been appalling enough to merit
the punishment of lingchi.
According to one Chinese writer talking about Xiaoba, in those days there were ways to make
the ordeal less painful.
The writer said if you had the money, you could pay to be blindfolded.
Remember, watching your body being torn off must have been pretty shocking.
Secondly, a person could sometimes pay for pain drugs.
The writer was likely referring to opium, something often used in lingchi executions.
A person could also pay for someone to go straight to the heart, which meant they wouldn’t
have to endure all the cuts.
Some western historians have said that opium was given to the person anyway, and they didn’t
have to pay.
Other scholars have also written that many times the person’s death might have happened
quickly since the major organs were torn out not so long after the first cuts.
As for Westerners suffering lingchi, there’s the story of the French missionary named Joseph
Marchand.
He was working in Vietnam, but then in 1833, there was a royal decree there that said all
foreign missionaries must go.
Marchand wasn’t the only French missionary to be executed, but it seems he was the only
one to be killed by a kind of lingchi.
His executioners didn’t actually use a knife.
They pulled off his flesh using red hot tongs.
That probably hurt more than the knife.
The church made him a martyr after that.
The problem with getting detailed explanations from all these people who were subjected to
lingchi in China is that the act wasn’t actually written into the criminal code.
As we said earlier, how it went down could have been different from time to time.
The one thing which was always the same is that it was at least supposed to last a good
few minutes.
This was because as well as being a method of killing someone, it was also supposed to
serve as a way to humiliate someone.
A simple beheading just wasn’t good enough for certain people.
There’s also the fact that the act destroyed the body.
It kind of made the person impure, monstrous.
This was why it was usually reserved for the very worst crimes, including treason, mass
murder, and the murder of one’s mother or father.
Saying that, some historians write that people were killed for more minor offenses and some
people who were sliced were actually wrongly accused of the crime.
As for how long the person lasted, it seems in many instances quite some time.
The chest was often the first place of contact, with so much flesh being taken that the ribcage
was exposed.
This would not result in death, however, or at least for most people it wouldn’t have.
The arms and legs came next, and sometimes limbs were completely removed.
The death would usually happen when the heart was stabbed.
How long it took to get to that differed and was probably related to the gravity of the
crime.
Others have since argued that after the first few deep cuts, and we are talking chunks of
flesh, the person would likely lose consciousness.
It all depended on how deep the cuts were.
There are details in Chinese texts that say the Yuan dynasty did 100 cuts, but the Ming
Dynasty tried to do 3,000 cuts.
Still, many of those cuts could have happened after the person died.
Nonetheless, other scholars have pointed out that some emperors demanded that the death
was a slow one, lasting as long as three days.
In this case, the cutting must have been less extreme.
Take the case of the military general Yuan Chonghuan.
On the orders of the emperor, he was arrested on January 13, 1630.
He’d been accused of helping the enemy, although it’s written that there wasn’t
much evidence to support this.
He was asked to say his final words, whereby he said:
“A life's work always ends up in vain; half of my career seems to be in dreams.
I do not worry about lacking brave warriors after my death, for my loyal spirit will continue
to guard Liaodong.”
Chinese official records show that it took half a day for him to die, and while they
were cutting he was screaming all the time.
When they were finished with him, they’d cut almost every part of him but the head.
That was taken off and later buried.
But what really cemented this kind of execution in the minds of people outside of China was
when a man named Wang Weiqin was sliced up.
Prior to his arrest, he’d been quite a rich landowner, but he was also a criminal who’d
ordered the murder of a rival family consisting of 12 people.
This was in 1904, so when some French soldiers were on the scene with a camera in their hand
they took photos.
Those photos made it into the western media and lingchi soon became infamous.
It was also a useful way to portray the Chinese as brutes.
There was worse to come.
A year later, a man named Fou Tchou-Li was subjected to this punishment and yet again
French soldiers were on hand to photograph the event, except this time the pictures were
what you might call super-gruesome.
Fou Tchou-Li had been a slave for a Mongol prince, but as the story goes, the prince
tried to take advantage of the man’s wife.
For that, the slave killed him.
Needless to say, this type of action was frowned upon, so on April 10 poor Fou Tchou-Li was
horrifically sliced apart.
The entire event was captured by those Frenchmen, including the scenes of the crowds and the
guy being dragged to the wooden block.
It is a sight to behold, and not for the sensitive.
He is naked when tied up, with an expression on his face that looks somewhere between blank
and quietly terrified.
The first cut takes off pretty much of his left breast.
He’s photographed just looking down at it, again not screaming, but looking distant and
petrified.
They then take the other breast, and we are talking about a large chunk.
They subsequently cut parts of his legs off so the bones are completely exposed, and then
they start on the arms.
Is he dead at this point?
It seems not, because his head is still upright.
Although his facial expression is almost ghostly as if he is half dead.
They then hack off most of his arms and go to work on the legs again.
Finally, off comes his head.
It would be an understatement to say those photographs were frowned upon in the west.
The somewhat alternative French philosopher named Georges Bataille was obsessed by some
of the photos, noting that at some points the man’s face showed a kind of ecstasy
while looking skywards.
He later wrote, “I have never stopped being obsessed by this image of pain, at once ecstatic
and intolerable.”
Any of you that know your horror movies will recall the absolutely terrifying French film,
Martyrs, which was undoubtedly inspired in part because of Bataille’s discovery of
those lingchi photographs and what he thought about them.
As for what happened to lingchi after that, well, as the whole world was castigating China
for such grotesque acts, the practice was soon abolished.
It seems it didn’t happen after that, although there are a few books that state Chinese Communist
insurgents were killed this way in the 1920s.
Other reports state the Communists did the same in return, but how true these accounts
are we don’t know.
Perhaps the most terrifying story from that time was written by the Russian Tibetologist
George de Roerich.
In his book, “Trails to Inmost Asia.”
He writes that a governor named Yang Tseng-hsin was executed by way of lingchi in 1928, but
before that, he was forced to watch his daughter go the same way.
The book states he was cut 10,000 times, which would seem impossible, so it’s not surprising
the author wasn’t there to see it.
Now you need to watch, “The Blood Eagle - Worst Punishments in the History of Mankind.”
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