The Big Book of Pain: Torture & Punishment Through History

by Mark P. Donnelly

  To make this complicated system workable, the Code was divided into two sections; the first dealt with basic principals of civil and criminal law, and the second with portioning out the proper penalties for every conceivable type of crime – taking into consideration the various circumstances under which it may have been committed as well as the social class of both perpetrator and victim. Because the Chinese are a philosophical people, the Code also contained lengthy justifications as to why one punishment was more appropriate for a given offence than another. If this seems impossibly complex, at least it ensured that justice was portioned out according to law rather than the whim of the presiding judge, as was so often the case in Western Europe. To make this system work as efficiently and impartially as possible, the guilt of the accused had to be established beyond any shadow of doubt, and the only way this could be accomplished was through a confession. In all fairness to what is about to come, it should be mentioned that those who confessed to the crime prior to their trial – thus saving the court a lot of time and money – were subject to receiving a much lighter sentence than those refusing to confess even in the light of overwhelming evidence of guilt. Today we would call this plea-bargaining. For those who obstinately refused to confess, there were a variety of ways to make them reconsider.

  One such method of confession-extracting torture was called ‘kneeling on chains’. The prisoner’s thumbs and big toes were bound together, behind their back, forcing the entire weight of their kneeling body to fall on the toes and knees. As if this weren’t uncomfortable enough, a coil of sharp-edged chain was placed under the suspect’s knees, inflicting excruciating pain and lacerating the knees, sometimes cutting so deep that it severed the tendons. If it was allowed to continue long enough, permanent damage would be done to the knee joints.

  Even if such torture was not employed, a few days, or weeks, in a Chinese jail should have been enough to loosen the tongue of even the most recalcitrant prisoner. While prisoners were allowed to roam free in communal cells during the day, at night each man was locked into their bunk with a device nearly identical to the stocks. The prisoner was laid on their back, on their bunk, and their feet were locked in a stock-like device attached to the foot of the bed, making it impossible for the prisoner to shift position or turn over in their sleep. Just to make sure the victim did not, somehow, wriggle out of the stocks, their hands were locked in manacles attached to the wall with chains and another chain, attached to the bunk, was pulled tight across their chest and locked into place. There are no accounts of prisoners escaping from Chinese jails during the night.

  When a confession was finally elicited and sentence had been duly passed, lesser crimes were often punished by the imposition of a fine, as they were in most other societies. In China, however, this fine might well be accompanied by a loss of social rank. In instances of petty crime, this loss of position might only be temporary; for more serious offences it could be permanent. If the judge considered a fine or loss of rank too severe a punishment, the guilty party might simply have their ears twisted. Two burly guards held the prisoner immobile while grabbing his ears and twisting with all their might; not hard enough to tear the flesh, but certainly hard enough to leave a lasting impression. For slightly more serious offences such as petty theft, public drunkenness or insulting someone of a superior social rank, a good flogging might be imposed and this was always carried out immediately – in the courtroom. To determine the proper number of blows, the judge again referred to the Tang Code. The crime might call for the use of a light whip or a heavy whip and could, depending upon the nature and circumstances of the incident, demand anywhere from 10 to 100 blows. The punishment must precisely fit the crime. When the severity of the flogging had been determined, the punishment was inflicted with a whip made of lengths of split bamboo. While it may not have broken the skin, enough pain and damage were inflicted that the prisoner’s entire back and rump were soon a mass of subcutaneous blood-blisters.

  The Chinese punishment of ‘kneeling on chains’. Although not precisely an image of what is described in the main body of the text, this beautifully rendered painting should serve to illustrate the sort of punishment being described.

  Here we see a Chinese version of the prison cell. Whether attempted escapes were commonplace is unknown, but this prisoner has been secured by wrist, ankle and neck to his cell bunk, which was also presumably contained behind some sort of locked door or cage and would have had armed guards as well.

  One possible alternative to a sound whipping was for the convict to be forced to wear a pillory-like collar known alternatively as the fcan hao, cangue, tcha and ea. Like the European pillory, this device consisted of a massive wooden collar into which the victim’s head was locked. In this case, however, the collar was not mounted on a stake. Rather, it was just a chaffing, cumbersome collar the prisoner was forced to wear for a proscribed period of time. To make the punishment even more uncomfortable, the outer rim of the collar was sometimes fitted with three iron spikes, making it impossible for the condemned to lie down or rest his head. Generally, if someone did something which warranted being locked into this collar, they had also been bad enough to receive a flogging; so they were first whipped and then pilloried.

  As a vast country populated by people who spoke many different languages, translators were an integral part of Chinese society. For interpreters who knowingly mistranslated either their boss’s words, or those of another party, a special punishment was devised. The convict was forced into a kneeling position with a thick bamboo rod placed behind their knees. When their knees were on the ground and their full weight on the bamboo rod, a guard would stand on either end of the rod. The pain was excruciating but no permanent, physical damage was inflicted. Special punishment was also reserved for women convicted of the crime of ‘lack of modesty’ – a polite way of saying prostitution. For this particular crime, the prisoner was forced to kneel while small slivers of wood were placed between her fingers. Heavy cord was then wrapped around the fingers and drawn tighter and tighter, forcing the knuckle bones against the wood. Note that during the majority of these punishments the prisoner was made to kneel. This subservient posture not only showed deference for the judge, but was yet another form of humiliation inflicted on the guilty party.

  This image comes from a twentieth-century postcard of Chinese prisoners of war wearing the cangue, which served very much like a portable version of the European pillory.

  No matter what form the punishment was to take it was customary, in this highly ritualistic society, for the prisoner to grovel before the judge – on their knees, of course – and beg for forgiveness, under-standing and leniency. Whether or not this ceremonial display of repentance had any effect on either the court or the sentence is open to debate but there are instances where the prescribed sentence would undoubtedly have brought even the most hardened criminal to the point of begging. One of the most shocking, non-capital crimes in old China was reserved for Buddhist monks convicted of having sexual relations. There was only one punishment for this crime. A hot iron rod was driven through the neck muscles of the victim and a length of chain was then threaded through the raw, charred hole and tied around his neck. Like a dog on a horrible leash the monk was led through the streets of town, naked, begging for money. Only when a court-specified amount of cash had been collected was the poor wretch released and returned to his monastery. There were even harsher, non-capital punishments, one of the more common being blinding. The condemned was held down while a guard rubbed their eyes with a cloth soaked in lime. In a matter of minutes the eyes were entirely eaten away.

  In addition to covering a myriad of lesser civil and criminal offences the Tang Code also dictated the nature of, and punishment for, what was known among the Chinese as ‘abominable crimes’. There were only ten of these but the terms in which they were couched allowed a fair amount of latitude in determining exactly what acts might constitute an abominable crime. According to the Code, these crimes i
ncluded: plotting rebellion, plotting sedition, plotting treason, resistance to authority, depravity, great irreverence, lack of respect for a parent, discord, unrighteousness and incest. In the first case, plotting rebellion, simply being involved in discussions with other rebels was sufficient for conviction. For the next two offences, the seditious or treasonous act must actually have taken place for the accused to be found guilty. For all three crimes, decapitation was the only possible punishment but the sentence did not end there. Under the assumption that such dastardly plots are never carried out alone, a person found guilty of one or more of these offences was also assumed to have confided their plans to their relatives and household. Consequently, a collective punishment was inflicted on the condemned man’s family. His father and sons over fifteen years of age were strangled; younger sons, brothers, grandfathers, concubines and servants were sold as slaves and all female relatives were driven into exile. A similarly grim, collective fate was visited on the extended family of anyone convicted of murdering three or more members of their family.

  This nineteenth-century engraving was one of the earliest depictions of Chinese justice to which Western Europe was exposed. It would have probably seemed a cruel and barbaric torture to nineteenth-century Western civilization who had moved on to imprisonment and penal reform.

  Because the family unit was so central to the Chinese way of life, crimes against the family were considered as heinous as crimes against the government; it was an affront to the natural order of things and therefore must be punished by the harshest means possible. Plotting to kill one or both parents, or either grandfather, was punishable by death, as was the act of striking a parent. In fact, if a child wrongly accused a parent of a criminal act the child was put to death for their audacity. Even if the accused parent was subsequently convicted of the crime, the child was sentenced to 100 blows with a heavy whip and three years in prison for exposing their parent’s dishonour. Curiously, because familial order could only be maintained when children obeyed their parents, hitting a child, or turning them in for the commission of a crime, was not considered a punishable offence. As harsh as this all sounds, the Tang Code did make exceptions. Punishment for crimes against the family was always less severe and sometimes suspended altogether when the convicted party was under seven years of age, or over ninety. Those between seven and fifteen and those between seventy and ninety were exempt from torture and physical punishment, and could redress all but the most severe crimes by paying a fine. The mentally and physically handicapped were exempt from all forms of torture and those who were the sole support of aged or physically handicapped parents often had their sentences commuted so the parents were not made to suffer for their children’s crimes.

  This image shows a Chinese variation on the brodequin. While the victim is stretched out on his stomach (presumably so that he might be flogged or be subject to other torments), the torturers are driving wedges into the slats which hold his legs in order to break the bones of his ankles. It is likely that this was done more as a painful punishment than as a means of extracting a confession.

  In those instances where the death penalty was imposed, but where beheading was not called for, as it was in cases of treason, sedition or plotting rebellion, the method of execution could vary greatly. Looking at the nature of these executions one can easily believe that the condemned might have been a lot better off if they had tried to kill the emperor and been hauled off to the block. One method involved stretching the prisoner on a rack-like device before the guards kicked and stamped on him until all his bones were broken; then they beat him to death with heavy clubs. In addition to beheading, being stomped to death and strangulation, there was a particularly grizzly form of execution reserved primarily for those unwise enough to kill their father. In what was known as Ling Che, translated alternately as ‘Death by a Thousand Cuts’ and ‘Death by Slicing’, the condemned was, quite literally, carved up like a Christmas turkey. Having centuries to perfect this particularly nasty form of execution, the torture master could make it last as long, or short, a time as the crime and the judge warranted. Once the prisoner had been hauled to a public place and tied down to a table or framework, the executioner appeared with a covered basket containing the tools of his job; a collection of razor-sharp knives, each one marked with the name of a specific body part. Sliding his hand inside the basket, the executioner withdrew a blade at random and proceeded to hack off the designated part. A leg muscle might be cut away, or the ears or, if the condemned was extremely lucky – or the victim’s family had sufficiently bribed the torturer – the ‘heart knife’ might be withdrawn first. A description of such an execution comes to us from an English visitor to China, Sir Henry Norman, and runs as follows:

  Grasping hand-fulls from the fleshy parts of the body, such as the thighs and the breasts, [he] slices them off. The joints and the excrescences of the body are next cut away one by one, followed by amputation of the nose, the ears, the toes and the fingers. Then the limbs are cut off piecemeal at the wrists and ankles, the elbows and knees, the shoulders and hips. Finally, the victim is stabbed in the heart and his head cut off.

  Far more than just an unimaginably painful death, the Ling Che was intended to dishonour the victim and make it impossible for him to rejoin his ancestors in the after-life. It was a horrible punishment in the here and now, with an eternal punishment to follow.

  Like the Chinese, their off-shore neighbours, the Japanese, developed a rigid system of punishment wherein honour, and the loss of honour, were as integral to the judicial system as was punishment itself. Also like the Chinese, the Japanese punished minor infractions of the law by whipping the miscreant with a bamboo whip and/or with an elaborate system of fines. When the crime was serious enough to warrant death, however, the highly developed sense of personal honour peculiar to the Japanese played a large part in ridding society of its worst offenders. Among the Japanese, high-ranking men and women were often given the opportunity to commit hari-kari (ritual suicide) rather than face the humiliation of public execution. Death was more acceptable than dishonour and death at one’s own hands more acceptable than death at the hands of someone else. For crimes such as treason, where such respectable ends were not likely to be an option, the ‘Death of Twenty-One Cuts’ mirrored almost exactly the Chinese practice of Ling Che. Compare this description of the Death of Twenty-One Cuts – given by English traveller Richard Jephson, around 1865, when it was imposed on the captured rebel leader Mowung – with that of the Ling Che, above.

  Translating roughly as Death by One Thousand Cuts, the Chinese Ling Che may well be the most lingering and painful death imaginable. According to tradition, the victim was tied to a table while the executioner appeared with a cloth-covered basket filled with knives, each knife bearing a symbol denoting a particular portion of the body. Reaching under the cloth he would extract a knife at random and slice off the specified body part. Fingers, calf muscles, breasts, thigh muscles, nose, eye lids, it was all in the luck of the draw. Given the right random set of circumstances the torture could go on for hours on end. Inevitably, one knife was marked with the symbol for the heart. When this item appeared the victim’s suffering would end in a matter of seconds. Presumably, there were instances where the condemned man’s family bribed the executioner to find the heart knife immediately.

  With superhuman command of self, the unhappy Mowung bore silently the slow and deliberate slicing-off of his cheeks, then of his breasts, the muscles of upper and lower arms, the calves of his legs, etc., etc., care being taken throughout to avoid touching any immediate vital part. Once only he murmured an entreaty that he might be killed outright – a request, of course, unheeded by men who took a savage pleasure in skillfully torturing their victim.

  Another equally cruel means of dispatching those convicted of capital crimes was to wrap their bodies in bundles of twigs and set them alight. This crowd-pleasing variation on the old European custom of being burnt at the stake provided the added attr
action of watching the poor creature dance around wildly, in excruciating pain, while they were cooked alive.

  In Japan, like China, torture was an acceptable means of convincing accused criminals to confess to their crimes and, as was true in the West during the Middle Ages, of making reluctant witnesses provide testimony. Such judicial torture often employed a split-bamboo whip, but unlike the whip used in China to administer punishment for minor infractions of the law, the Japanese whip was constructed so the sharp edges of the bamboo pointed outward, slicing as deep into the flesh of the victim as razor blades. By judicial order, the flogging could last until the victim volunteered to speak, or up to 150 lashes. Beyond that point, further punishment would almost certainly have resulted in death. Another method of loosening tongues and refreshing faulty memories was known as ‘Hugging the Stone’. In this basic but brutal torture, the accused was forced to kneel in a pile of knife-sharp flint fragments while heavy stones were piled in their lap.

  He we see a combination of the torture of the pulley and of flogging with ‘the broom’. Depending on where that cord binding his wrists leads, the victim here might be subjected to any one of a number of horrific torments.

  Yet another such torture, known as Yet Gomon, mirrored almost exactly that used by the Spanish Inquisition. Here, the prisoner’s wrists were bound behind their back and they were lifted into the air by means of a rope, where they were either left to dangle and dislocate their shoulders or dropped, by degrees, and have them jerked out of the sockets in a matter of seconds. This grizzly torture could only be employed in cases of murder, arson, theft, robbery and forgery of a document or an official government seal.