Torture Week: Death by a Thousand Cuts

Today we travel to ancient (and not-so-ancient, up to the early 1900s in fact) China to learn about Língchí, also known as Slow Slicing or the Death by a Thousand Cuts.  This method was used as punishment for only the most heinous of crimes, like treason or patricide (both of which violated the traditional order of filial piety).  In this method of torture, the victim was restrained in public, then multiple small (and not so small-- fingers, limbs, and... other appendages were often cut off, and eyes were often put out first thing, to amp up the psychological terror) cuts were made, until finally the victim either was beheaded or got a knife to the heart and died.

From The Big Book of Pain

 

 

There is some controversy over just how horrible this method was, however.  According to my Big Book of Pain, there were symbols on the knives used indicating which body part was to be cut.  Either the victim's family bribed the executioner to choose the "heart" knife very quickly, or else the victim just hoped for it really hard.  But Wikipedia states that usually the victim was already dead before the slicing started.  The real punishment here was that being all cut up violated the aforementioned filial piety thing-- you didn't want to show up to the afterlife in pieces.  In addition, it states that opium was often given to the victim-- but there is no consensus over whether this was an act of mercy (I've heard things don't hurt as much on opium) or further torture (you would be less likely to pass out from shock).