Bibliographic Essay

Although there are no scholarly studies dealing specifically with public spectacles of violence in early modern China, nonetheless there is an enormous amount of primary and secondary sources, mostly in Chinese, scattered in newspapers, journals and books.

A topic that has received very little attention is the annual rock fights that were apparently common not only in south China but also in some areas of northern China, Korea and Japan up until the 1940s. There is a brief mention of Taiwan's rock fights in Donald DeGlopper, Lukang: Commerce and Community in a Chinese City (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), but little else is available in the literature in any language. Cockfights are dealt with in a literary study by Robert Joe Cutter, The Brush and the Spur: Chinese Culture and the Cockfight (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1989), as well as in the seminal 1972 study by Clifford Geertz, ‘Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight', in his Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), pp. 412-53.

There is a vast literature that covers bloody rituals, exorcisms and self-mortifications in traditional China. The best place to start is Jan J. M. de Groot's six-volume study, The Religious System of China (Leiden: Brill, 1910), particularly volumes v and vi. More recent are two studies by Avron Boretz: ‘Martial Gods and Magic Swords: Identity, Myth, and Violence in Chinese Popular Religion', Journal of Popular Culture 29.1 (1995), 93-109, and Gods, Ghosts, and Gangsters: Ritual Violence, Martial Arts, and Masculinity on the Margins of Chinese Society (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2011). Another useful study is Donald Sutton, ‘Rituals of Self-Mortification: Taiwanese Spirit-Mediums in Comparative Perspective', Journal of Ritual Studies 4.1 (1990), 99-125.

On judicial violence see Virgil Ho, ‘Butchering Fish and Executing Criminals: Public Executions and the Meanings of Violence in Late Imperial and Modern China', in Goran Aijmer and Jon Abbink (eds.), Meanings of Violence: A Cross Cultural Perspective (Oxford: Berg, 2000), pp. 141-60; Paul Katz, Divine Justice: Religion and the Development of Chinese Legal Culture (London: Routledge, 2009), especially chapter 3, and his ‘Fowl Play: Chicken-Beheading Rituals and Dispute Resolution in Taiwan', in David Jordan, Andrew Morris and Marc Moskowitz (eds.), The Minor Arts of Daily Life: Popular Culture in Taiwan (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2004), pp. 35-49; Nancy Park, ‘Unofficial Perspectives on Torture in Ming and Qing China', Late Imperial China 37.1 (2016), 17-54; Timothy Brook, Jerome Bourgon and Gregory Blue, Death by a Thousand Cuts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); and Robert Antony, Unruly People: Crime, Community, and State in Late Imperial South China (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2016), especially chapter 12.