LING CHI

 

The executioner will sliced from breast to thighs

Ling Chi or known as execution by slow cutting was practiced in China until it was outlawed in 1905. Also known as death by a thousand cuts, the executioner’s task was to make as many cuts as possible without killing the victim. In the execution, the criminal is slowly cut in the arms, legs, and chest, until finally they are beheaded or stabbed in the heart. Many western accounts of the execution method are largely exaggerated, with some claiming that the execution could take days to perform. This is horrendously cruel towards the victims since they have to go through slow death. What makes slow slicing particularly horrific is that it continued into the 20th century and the era of photography. 

In 1895, Sir Henry Norman witnessed a Lingchi execution. In The People and Politics of the Far East, Norman wrote that the executioner sliced off pieces by “grasping handfuls from the fleshy parts of the body, such as the thighs and the breasts”. He went on to state that “then the limbs are cut off piecemeal at the wrists and the ankles, the elbows and knees, the shoulders and hip. Finally the victim is stabbed in the heart and his head cut off”. 

This form of execution was reserved for the most serious of crimes such as treason, killing one’s parents, mass murder or murdering one’s master.One reason for cutting the body into pieces even after death was it contravened certain Confucian principles and meant the victim would not be “whole” in the spiritual afterlife – so this was a punishment for both this life and the next. Ling Chi was one of the ultimate forms of the “Five Punishments”, a penal scale of increasing severity. These dated back to ancient China and included a range of punishments such as flogging, amputation of nose or feet, banishment, tattooing, fines or castration.