Chinese Crime & Punishment in the 19th Century

In such a large country with an Imperial Court that was often leagues away from anywhere, the role of dispensing justice to the people was left in the hands of the regional governors. As with most elements of the outsourced Chinese system of government, this was often open to corruption.

Magistrates were part judge, part detective, needing to look into the cases that were brought before them and to determine the truth. Once having unearthed the facts, they were responsible for meting out appropriate compensation and punishment. Oftentimes this work was relegated by a magistrate to a junior official; in most cases, the obvious answer was assumed to be the correct one and punishment exacted accordingly. The series of ‘Judge Dee’ books, translated by the Dutch sinologist Eric van Gulik from the original AD 600 novels are a great insight into the life of the Chinese magistrate-detective.

Magistrates were in a tight position: generally, they were appointed the heads of districts in which they grew up and were expected, under Confucian morality, to be lenient of their relatives and to show favour; this led to extreme forms of nepotism. In other regions, the distance from the capital meant that the magistrate was forced to bow down before the might of local warlords or bandits, for want of any military power to back up their commands. Too often, the magistrates simply allowed themselves to be bought by the local powers and lived an easy life supported by ‘squeeze’.

Due to the decentralised nature of the Chinese government, doling out punishments for crimes was an ad hoc affair left in the hands of the governors and other rural administrators. To the Western eye this arrangement often looked arbitrary and consequently cruel and unusual. The punishers were tempered by the fact that excessive harshness could be opposed by mob rule and also by the fact that they were being watched by those in the administration directly above and below them: the village headman of the local yamen had a fine line to tread.

“We are in the worst prison in China; we are in the hands of the torturers; this is the Board of Punishments”

-Sir Harry Parkes, Beijing 1860

Wherever a government representative was sent to work, they operated out of a large central building called a ‘yamen’ or office. In very small villages, the yamen was often the house of the head man. The yamen was used to entertain travellers to the village, to hear reports from the villagers and to issue judgements in local trials. At the capital city, one of the major Government offices was the Hsing Pu, or ‘Board of Punishments’; they were in charge of dealing out justice to enemies of the state and also for extracting information from captured spies and any seditious individuals. Over time this office became notorious for its cruelty and the harshness of its tortures; a sentence of detention at the Board of Punishments was tantamount to a death sentence. The horrors of this office were legendary and were well-employed to keep radicals and law-breakers in line. Sir Harry Parkes spent a lengthy period incarcerated here and only avoided execution by the intervention of anti-Manchu elements in the Court.

Due to the populous nature of China, life has always been looked upon as a cheap commodity and as often as not the punishment for most crimes was a quick death by decapitation. It was more punishing to humiliate a person, causing them public shame, to therefore dishonour their family: beheading an individual had the double benefits of quick despatch and the leaving behind of an incomplete corpse, which was considered shaming from a Confucian point of view.

Of course not all crimes resulted in death, especially where an individual had skills that were in short supply or where the family of the criminal had rallied ‘round to pay a sufficient bribe to the authorities. In these cases imprisonment sufficed but here again there were dangers:

Chinese prisons were the most rudimentary of operations. Essentially they were simply high-walled compounds equipped with guards and little else. Prisoners were crowded in and generally left to their own devices: in this situation, only the most canny and strong-willed survived, notwithstanding the threat of disease. The families of the inmates could bring food and other necessities – along with enough ‘squeeze’ to get these essentials past the guards – to make life easier but holding onto these gifts once they got inside the prison was a full-time job. Occasionally, the inmates would be conscripted onto heavy labour schemes, road building and the like and would be transported under guard to and from these occupations. If disease broke out in the jail, the guards would simply lock the place down and leave: this type of containment was seen as a sure fire way of preventing outbreaks of illness within the larger community.

“Here I saw for the first time in my life a man carrying a cangue, and a horrible, sickening feeling seized me as I tramped through the densely-packed street and watched the poor fellow. The mob were evidently clamouring for his death, and were prepared to make sport of his torments. There is nothing more glorious to a brutal populace than the physical agony of a helpless fellow-creature, nothing which produces more mirth than the despair, the pain, the writhing of a miserable condemned wretch.”

-Edwin John Dingle, Across China on Foot, 1911

Sometimes a prisoner would be held within the yamen for a set period and be made to wear the ‘cangue’. This punishment was usually reserved for wrongdoers who were of a higher rank in the community or who had dabbled in ‘white collar’ crimes. The cangue was a square collar of heavy wooden boards with a central hole which locked around the victim’s neck; the hands of the wearer were usually chained to the side of this collar while another chain tethered them to a pole or other fixed position in view of all passers-by. Slips of paper were pasted to the cangue and on these were written the name and crimes of the occupant so that all would know what they had done to deserve such treatment. Usually, such prisoners were placed under the control of a guard who would make them march or invite onlookers to abuse their charges by throwing refuse or slapping their faces. The benefits of such a punishment were that the prisoner garnered much dishonour but were still available afterwards. It should be noted that this type of punishment was often used in instances where it was uncertain if the death of the prisoner might offend an officer higher up within the administration: keeping them alive with a little unpleasantness was a correctable fault; death was not.

Under Confucian thinking, leaving behind an incomplete corpse was a great insult to the ancestors. Often, a victim would be given an opportunity to strangle themselves first when faced with the possibility of decapitation...or worse. This usually occurred only when families could raise sufficient funds to bribe the jailers. The worst fate to befall a prisoner was to suffer the execution of ‘slicing’, or the ‘lingering death’: while in China, Sir Thomas Wade campaigned strongly to curtail this form of execution and largely succeeded, although local governors still kept it in their arsenal as a means of instilling terror. Known to the West as the ‘Death of a Thousand Cuts’, this entailed a public execution wherein the victim was tied to a frame and slowly dismembered with an extremely sharp knife. The victim usually had their breasts sliced off first (regardless of gender), then their ears, nose and genitals. Next their arms were cut off by sawing through the biceps and then their legs were removed at the knees. They were finally disembowelled. Usually, the victim was drugged with opium to numb their sensations and to prolong their agonies and, if so, they were generally blinded first to increase the psychological impact. The removed pieces of the victim were displayed to the assembled crowds and then tossed into a waiting basket; the victim was finally carried away piecemeal in the same basket to be disposed of or claimed by relatives. This horrific process was outlawed under Manchu rule, through Western pressure but instances of its use have been recorded as late as 1927.

There are several main factors to be considered when discussing punishments in China. First, the predominant Buddhist beliefs taught that any life is followed by a further reincarnation, so death becomes less frightening as a result: a period in which to make your peace followed by a quick despatch was not as bad as it could be. Second, in a structured society where everyone serves at the will of the Emperor, life was often very harsh; a boost along to the next life offered possibilities of better luck next time. Third, China has always been very populous; the Powers That Be tended to place a very low value on human life. What concerned people most was not the going, but how you went. Public execution cast dishonour upon one’s ancestors; leaving an incomplete corpse was also thought to be shaming. With these two facts in mind, the Chinese engineered some truly horrific deaths.

Decapitation was the standard form of execution; it had the double benefit of being an ignoble death, causing a loss of ‘face’ to the victim’s family, and also of saving ammunition. Oftentimes, especially where the prisoner was a court official or a member of the literati, in order to spare the family of the victim, the sentence was commuted to strangling. In this instance the victim was presented with a silk cord whilst in captivity and expected to ‘do the honourable thing’. Occasionally, this failed and there are reports of captives who drank the mud in their prison cells to choke themselves or who paid guards to give them knives with which to cut their own throats.

The bodies of the executed were normally disposed of in mass graves to the west of the settlement: normal burials took place in southern-facing cemeteries which was thought to be the direction that peoples’ spirits needed to head in order to achieve rest. These mass graves were not guarded and many families journeyed there after dark to retrieve the corpses of their loved ones for proper burial. Sometimes it was possible to bribe the executioner to only appear to kill the victim, so that the still-living body could be retrieved and nursed back to health.

Exile was another punishment in the artillery of the magistrate but it was usually reserved for felons who were still at large and not able to be beheaded in a more expedient fashion. Oftentimes it was considered a ‘lip service’ sentence, given to criminals who had been tipped off about their impending trials and who had fled. Usually, the tip-off came from the magistrate or from the Imperial Court itself and such criminals were routinely ‘rehabilitated’ at a later date and allowed to return.

The use of torture to gain confessions was also a fairly commonplace procedure. Prisoners were forced to endure gallons of water pumped into their noses until they were close to drowning; sometimes, this water was mixed with chilli oil for extra effect. They were regularly beaten, especially on the soles of their feet, or suspended horizontally, face downwards, by their wrists and ankles (a punishment known as ‘duck swimming’). A favourite tactic was the ‘tiger bench’: this consisted of a stout pole against which a bench was placed lengthways. The prisoner was tied to the pole and their thighs bound down to the bench; each day a brick was placed under their heels forcing their legs upwards until their knees, or their hips, broke from the strain. All of these hideous practices enjoyed a resurgence during Mao’s Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s and early ‘70s.

China is, however, a place where money and connexions have a great deal of impact and relatives were sometimes given an opportunity to buy their relations out of trouble. Knowing someone in a high position or being related to an important political figure was usually enough to get a charge dropped no matter how severe. This normally involved a lot of delicate negotiation and could lead to a loss of ‘face’ if mishandled. It goes without saying that debts and obligations were rarely forgotten when the time came to repay a favour.

Foreigners in their own areas were largely free from the cruelty of the Chinese torture chambers. Under extraterritoriality regulations, no foreigner could be tried by a Chinese court; rather, they had to be tried by a court of their own nationality - if the foreign community felt that a trial was warranted. Further, there was no extradition rule to remove a foreigner from their nation’s enclave if they had conducted a crime in another area. Usually, it was enough to commit a crime in someone else’s enclave and return to your own, or another’s, to avoid any kind of legal repercussions (personal vendettas were another matter entirely). The only foreign parties exempt from ‘extrality’ were the Germans and the Japanese, who had not taken part in the more important Unequal Treaty provisions of the 1800s. Foreign enclaves existed in most treaty ports in China, including Tianjin and Beijing (after 1860), but the best known were the legations in Shanghai.

A grating provision under extraterritoriality that particularly annoyed the Chinese was the right for missionaries to practise within their country. The Treaty of the Bogue allowed missionaries free reign to wander across China and proselytise as they saw fit; it also exempted them from punishment by Chinese magistrates. Further, and most galling for the Chinese, any Chinese citizen who converted to the Christian faith fell under the sanctions of the treaty also. Compounding the issue was the fact that Christians settling in China felt compelled to build churches, in flagrant disregard to the dictates of local feng shui etiquette, and that the conversion of townsfolk drew funds away from local festivals, directing them towards the Christian observances instead. Since Chinese festivals benefitted the entire community while Christian ones seemed – at least to the Chinese – to only benefit the Church, a sense of inequity was generated by the missions amongst the townspeople. Many of the poorest Chinese became converts initially in order to obtain food: the other Chinese called these people ‘rice Christians’, insinuating that they had converted only to obtain handouts. The Imperial Court saw Christianity as a burgeoning ‘state within the state’ and felt a need to do something about it.

*****