- List of Illustrations*
- Acknowledgments
- 1. The Execution of Wang Weiqin
- 2. The Laws of Punishment in Late Imperial China
- 3. The Origins of Lingchi and Problems of Its Legitimacy
- 4. Lingchi in the Ming Dynasty
- 5. Tormenting the Dead
- 6. Chinese Torture in the Western Mind
- 7. Misreading Lingchi
- 8. Georges Bataille’s Interpretation
- 9. Lingering On
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- * Illustrations:
- 1. The first phase of the execution of Wang Weiqin, Beijing, 1904
- 2. William Hogarth, The Reward of Cruelty (1751)
- 3. The Capital Punishment of the Cord, an early European adaptation of a Chinese watercolor showing strangulation
- 4. A postcard dated 1900 representing the carving up of Chinese territory—by implication, a just retribution for a country that dismembered its criminals
- 5. A court minion administering a beating with a long flogging stick
- 6. A prisoner in a heavy cangue
- 7. A prisoner under interrogation, showing wooden manacles, restraining board, and ankle press
- 8. Selected implements of torture in the Ming dynasty
- 9. Two executioners about to perform a decapitation
- 10. A lingchi execution as depicted in late Ming fiction
- 11. China: “Death by the Thousand Cuts,” as reproduced in Henry Norman, The Peoples and Politics of the Far East (1895)
- 12. The court of the Chu River King
- 13. The court of the Emperor King of Song
- 14. The court of Son-of-Heaven Yama
- 15. Portrayal of the beating of a mandarin
- 16. Portrayal of a tortured woman trussed up naked
- 17. William Alexander, Punishment of the Tcha
- 18. Finger Torture
- 19. Strangling and Disembowelling
- 20. Legs Nailed to a Board, Cutting the Body in Two, and Disjointing
- 21. Judicial Torture
- 22. Head of a Malefactor, exposed at Nankin
- 23. Supplice chinois, Chinese watercolor
- 24. Executioner and onlookers at the lingchi execution of Wang Weiqin, Beijing, 1904
- 25. A woodblock illustration inscribed with the word “Lingchi”; Xu Wenda, Da Qing lüli tushuo (Annotated illustrations of the Qing Code and substatutes)
- 26. A woodblock illustration of lingchi, with an inscription listing the crimes for which this is the legal punishment; Zuiming tushuo (Annotated illustrations of the terminology for crimes)
- 27. The lingchi of Fuzhuli, executed April 10, 1905
- 28. The lingchi of “pseudo-Fuzhuli”
- 29. A prisoner displaying the characteristic unshaven head
- 30. Illustration of the head of a lingchi victim
- 31. Detail of the head of Saint Sebastian
Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library
I Tatti Renaissance Library
Loeb Classical Library
Murty Classical Library of India