Postcards of slow slicing during Qing Dinasty

Slow Slicing and Its Postcards

Part of our China History Archive

The Postcards

A series of French postcards depicting one of the most gruesome punishments in China: death by a thousand cuts (Lingchi, 凌迟). Death by a thousand cuts or slow slicing was a form of torture and execution used in China from roughly AD 900 until its abolition in 1905.

The Execution

The condemned was killed by using a knife to methodically remove portions of the body. The process involved tying the person to be executed to a wooden frame, usually in a public place.

The flesh was then cut from the body in multiple slices in a process that was not specified in detail in Chinese law and therefore most likely varied. In later times, opium was sometimes administered either as an act of mercy or as a way of preventing fainting. The punishment worked on three levels: as a form of public humiliation, as a slow and lingering death, and as a punishment after death.

Who Received This Punishment

Lingchi was reserved for crimes viewed as especially severe under the Qing Dynasty legal code, chiefly treason and parricide, the killing of one’s own parents. Rulers sometimes extended it further, ordering it for minor offences as a means of intimidation, and, in some cases, applying it to the family members of political enemies. The historian John Morris Roberts noted that it was even ordered, though ultimately not carried out, against Kang Youwei, a leading advocate of political reform in China in the 1890s.

Abolition

Lingchi was formally abolished by imperial edict on 24 April 1905, drafted by the legal reformer Shen Jiaben. The abolition was immediate and definitive: no official sentence of lingchi was carried out in China after that date. The postcards that circulated in France and the rest of the West originate from three sets of photographs taken by French soldiers stationed in China in 1904 and 1905, documenting some of the final cases before the practice ended. These images later became a fixture of Western depictions of China as backward and cruel, reproduced in newspapers and popular fiction well into the twentieth century.