Rituals of Punishment

The high degree of brutality and violence found in popular culture was paralleled by the tortures and punishments inflicted on criminals by the state. In late imperial China, as in Europe, punishments were meant to be frightful displays of terror and violence staged by the state for public viewing.

In traditional China flogging, tattooing and mutilation were all common types of corporal punishments meant to inflict both pain and shame on offenders. They were also used in conjunction with other more severe forms of punishments, including penal servitude, banishment and death. Judicial torture was part of the trial process and accepted as necessary for obtaining confessions. Prisoners were publicly tormented at trials, in jails and in streets and marketplaces. Although torture was legally sanctioned and regulated, nonetheless extralegal forms of torture were frequently also applied to prisoners as well. During trials the accused were subject to beatings with canes on their faces, backs and legs, or were made to kneel before the judge's bench on broken glass and chains. Witnesses, too, were flogged in court. Tattooing the crime on the face or shoulder of convicts was a common auxiliary punishment. Although less common, some prison­ers were mutilated in addition to receiving other punishments and tortures. Rebels who had received imperial pardons nonetheless routinely had one or both ears cut off before being released from custody. Other forms of mutilation included gorging out eyes and cutting off tongues, arms, feet and penises.^[933]

Although incarceration was not as bad a punishment, jails were never­theless places of great suffering and death, or as one writer put it, ‘habitations of cruelty'.

Besides incarceration in jails, many prisoners were also put on public display where they were ‘daily exposed to the scorn of all passers-by'. Typically, petty offenders - such as gamblers and common thieves - were made to wear cangues, heavy wooden collars a yard or so square and several inches thick: ‘The victim gets no rest, and he cannot even take his food without assistance as it is impossible for his hands to reach the mouth.' Offenders who were punished in this way wore the cangue both day and night for several weeks to three months and in a few cases in perpetuity. In Canton each morning they were taken from jail and made to stand at one of the main city gates, in front of popular temples or at some public hall, where they were treated as objects of humiliation. Those who had committed more serious crimes were confined in tiny cages or were chained to large stones or long iron bars. Most punishments also included parading prisoners through the streets. Handcuffed and bound in chains, they were led by runners beating gongs while lectors rhythmically flogged them on their backs.

The death penalty was the ultimate form of violence imposed by the state on its subjects. Executions were death by torture in the sense that they were calculated gradations of pain - from strangulation to decapitation to death by slicing. For the authorities executions were staged as solemn ceremonies, but for ordinary people they were festive occasions. In Canton on the appointed day condemned prisoners, dressed in red, were bound and carried in open baskets - like pigs to the market for slaughter - through the streets to the execution ground, a potter's field between the south gate and the river. They were fed hard liquor in the hopes of making them compliant victims. Soldiers, armed with spears, swords and matchlocks, marched in front and behind the prisoners, while a high-ranking official in formal attire, carried in his sedan chair, followed them. A herald on horseback at the rear of the procession carried a small yellow banner bearing the imperial command sanctifying the execution. Making its way through the crowded streets, the procession always stopped at the small temple of the Five Genii, near the place of execution. The officials prayed to these divine warriors for protection from the vengeful ghosts of the soon-to-be-executed criminals. There were always crowds of jeering spectators that followed the procession to view the

Figure 31.5 Punishment of beheading and public exposure of the head. Da Qing xinglu tu (Illustrated Penalties of the Qing Code), eighteenth century.

hideous spectacle. Vendors tagged along to sell food and drink. At a strangulation the condemned criminal was tied to a cross while the execu­tioner twisted a rope around the neck until dead; at a beheading the prisoner kneeled, facing in the direction of the imperial throne, as the executioner's sword severed the head.

In the early modern age, a time of mounting social disorder throughout south China, the spectacle of decapitated heads dangling in the air in markets and port towns must have been a pervasive sight. In the hundred years before the Opium War (1839-42), more pirates and bandits were executed in Guangdong than in any other province. Guangdong also had the third highest number of executions of people convicted for killings in affrays. Fujian pro­vince was not far behind in the number of bandits and executions. Banditry was such a severe problem that it was not unusual for groups of twenty, thirty, forty or more bandits to be summarily beheaded at a time. During the height of pirate disturbances during the first decade of the nineteenth century several thousand criminals were executed every year, and the numbers continued to remain high in the decades that followed. For example, the Indo-Chinese Gleaner reported that in 1817 over 1,000 and perhaps as many as 3,000 prisoners were executed in Canton. In 1829 one executioner, who had done his job for over thirty years, claimed that he had killed ‘upwards of ten thousand criminals' in his lifetime. With so many death-row inmates, each year just before the lunar New Year, a time for communal purging and purification, officials cleared the prisons in Canton with ‘wholesale executions'.^[937]

The death penalty was a form of ritual killing. The condemned became sacrificial victims whose deaths were necessary for the purification of society. Executioners, who were drawn mainly from the dishonourable trades of pig butchers and soldiers, were akin to sorcerers in that they too exorcised the polluting evils from the community with their swords.