Authors:Timothy Brook, Jérôme Bourgon, Gregory Blue,
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Keywords: cuts, thousand, death
Number of Pages: 336
Published: 2008-03-15
List price: $29.95
ISBN-10: 0674027736
ISBN-13: 9780674027732

In a public square in Beijing in 1904, multiple murderer Wang Weiqin was executed before a crowd of onlookers. He was among the last to suffer the extreme punishment known as lingchi. Called by Western observers “death by a thousand cuts” or “death by slicing,” this penalty was reserved for the very worst crimes in imperial China. A unique interdisciplinary history, Death by a Thousand Cuts is the first book to explore the history, iconography, and legal contexts of Chinese tortures and executions from the tenth century until lingchi’s abolition in 1905. The authors then turn th