Agony by proxy. Voices, views, and values about lingchi execution

Jérôme Bourgon
(11 novembre 2005)
Summary: A display of eyewitnesses account and reflections about lingchi reveal how much prejudiced views influenced the authors' first reaction and later written relation of it. Significant reaction can be set apart between Chinese and Westerners, and between Westerners of different cultural-religious background


Western witnesses unanimously assumed that Chinese had a specific attitude toward pain, which they called “insensibility”, “callousness”, “apathy,” and other quite pejorative terms. This “apathetic” attitude was allegedly evinced by the convicts, the executioner, the judicial authority, and the attendants as well. An attitude most of Westerners attributed to racial characteristics —not always detrimental: “These Chinese coolies walk to their death en grands seigneurs alike Aristocrats to Guillotine” wrote the French journal Illustration as headlines of bloody photographs of beheadings in Tianjin. Scientists like Dr. Matignon, the well-known Physician of French Legation during the Boxer crisis, gave “scientific” reasons, such like the “absence of nerves” (See Reference) . Morrison, the correspondent of the Time, and most famous journalist in China in the 1900s, remarked that "No people are more cruel in their punishments than the Chinese, and obviously the reason is that the sensory nervous system of a Chinaman is either blunted or of arrested development (See Reference) .
Although Morrison's explanation is clearly racist, we should keep from dismissing such sources as pure prejudice. When many, various, diversely motivated, otherwise trustable witnesses make some observation that you suspect biased, this observation should not be ignored, or disqualified; instead, this observation should be cautiously collected and analyzed, so as to discriminate objective information as well as cultural or intellectual preconception that might explain the misinterpretation of the fact. The source of Westerners' speculation about Chinese "nerves" lies in the profoundly different value attached to physical pain. It can be summed up in provocative questions about moral and legal assessment of lingchi and other cruel penalties: does pain really matter? Why do Westerners so deeply feel believe it does? And to what extent so deeply rooted conviction that suffering is essential dimension in lingchi, leads to the opinion that people that feel otherwise, and behave consequently, are cruel, barbarous, inhumane? The first part of this essay is devoted to “those for whom pain matters” —Westerners— and the second part on “those for whom it does not matter”— the Chinese of the imperial period. Some examples will show, hopefully, that concern about pain must not be equated with humanitarianism, and that sincere and eloquent charges against cruel penalties can be articulated without even alluding to physical pain. A third part is intended to show how the obsessive focus on physical pain led to two characteristic misinterpretation of photographs about Chinese executions, which were widespread by Georges Bataille’s Tears of Eros.

I. Those for whom pain matters: Westerners, between denial and lyricism

a. Prudish glances on pain by Anglo-Saxon authors

The best eye-testimony on a lingchi execution ever is Meadows’. The author was a translator of British consulate in Canton, who authored one of the most lucid narration of the Taiping rebellion. The report on the execution of bandits at Matou pottery market of Canton in 1858 is annexed to his book on Chinese Rebellions. The author being really familiar with Chinese civilization and way of life, his description is matter of fact, detailed, deprived of pathos and idiosyncratic judgments — in brief, Meadows is an almost ideal witness, who moreover wrote shortly after the facts he describes. In his highly reliable rendition the most remarkable thing are the swiftness of the whole operation — more than thirty three heads fall in less than three minutes, and lingchi lasts four or five minutes. "From the first stroke of the knife", writes Meadows, 'till the moment the body was cut down from the cross and decapitated, about four to five minutes elapsed.(...) Where we stood, we heard not a single cry, and I may add that of the thirty-three men decapitated, no one struggled or uttered any acclamation when the executioner approached him” (See Reference) .     Speaking of the devil, let us quote a brief earlier passage on the executioner: "He was a well-built, vigorous-looking man of the middle size: he had nothing of the ferocious or brutal in his appearance, as one is led too suspect, but on the contrary had good features and an intelligent expression." Chinese executioner’ action and behavior, as described by Meadows, are deprived of all cruelty: a good professional, making all his possible to deliver his patients with celerity and avoidance of unnecessary pain. Worthy of notice is Meadows’ non-denying of suffering, either from the beheaded or from the dismembered men. He gives discreet, but accurate signs of it. Second, there is no doubt that dismemberment is performed on a man who is still alive, from start to finish. What perspires from his text is not that Chinese would not suffer, or would not be afraid, but that the whole unfolding of the event is completely deprived of what would be the main characteristic of a similar scene in a Western country: spectacular manifestations of pain. There is no doubt about the omnipresence of suffering and fear, on a physiological, or if I dare, animal plan. What is absent is the cultural shaping, and the spectacular staging of it.     Meadows’ description worth being kept in mind for assessing other authors’ relations. It helps become aware of two frequent biases. I will start with the authors who tended to minimize pain, then to those who highlighted it in an exaggerate manner. Ernest Alabaster is an English Consul at Beijing who published in 1899 a valuable, still oft-quoted, Notes on Chinese law. Here is the presentation of lingchi: "This punishment, known as 'lingering death' is not inflicted so much as a torture", he says "but to destroy the future as well as the present life of the offender (…). It is not a lingering death, for it is all over in a few seconds, and the coup de grâce is generally given the third cut". And he concludes "In short, though the punishment is severe and revolting, it is not so painful as the half-hanging, disemboweling, and final quartering practiced in England not so very long ago" (See Reference) . What a dazing self-confidence! Would you not believe the author experimented both? Worthy of notice is the way Alabaster systematically plays down the pain that any one associate to lingchi. So weird it may seem, it is characteristic of an attitude common among Westerners, more often than not Protestant Anglo-Saxon. Morrison, for instance, makes similar remarks: "Ling-chi", he writes, is "a punishment whose cruelty has been extraordinarily misrepresented". Certainly "The mutilation is ghastly and excites our horror as an example of barbarian cruelty; but it is not cruel, and need not excite our horror, since the mutilation is done, not before death, but after” (See Reference)     It is symptomatic that their concern to contest that “cruelty” is an accurate notion for understanding lingchi leads both authors to squarely deny physical pain, at cost of dubious observation. Thus, the speculation of the patient being alive or dead, stunned by opium, etc. Cooling, the forgotten author of The Encyclopedia Sinica published in 1917, naively but faithfully synthesized this point of view in his stunning notice on lingchi: Ling-ch’ih: The punishment translated “Cutting into the thousand pieces”. It was not quite so bad as that, but did include the horror of cutting away portions of flesh from the living victim before the coup de grace was given” (See Reference) .     This playing down of suffering is hard to understand nowadays, when the trend could well be the other way round. I would explain it by the protestant background of these authors. Protestants have been taught to distrust visual display of sufferings and bodily damages inflicted to the Martyrs and Saints as Papist propaganda to manipulate feelings of the illiterate. This made protestant countries less receptive to the representations of Chinese cruelties than countries with a Catholic background.

b. Baroque gaze on lingchi from Catholic watchers

Writings by authors from Southern Europe — France, Italty, Spain — sharply contrast with those sketched above. Far from denying pain or questioning the cruelty of lingchi, they indulge in lavish description of tortures, with open research of the gloomiest details on the damages inflicted to the body. Here below is how a Catholic Archbishop, Mgr Fenouil, related the martyr of a Chinese convert during anti-Christian riots of 1885. The village butcher, Tseu-ta-hong had refused to flee, saying “they will kill my body as they please, but they cannot anything against my soul”; then he faced his tormentors, refusing to abjure: “Exasperated by his bold resistance, his tormentors tie him tight and hang him by the arms, after completely stripping him from his clothes; then they pounced on him. While they were cutting his flesh, alluding to his butcher trade, each of them said: “Give me one half-pound”, the other “For me, four ounces”, etc. Some others find more amusing to slice the fleshes without taking them off from the trunk. So many bloody strips on a human body still so alive, what a sight!” (See Reference)     Well, this can be called highlighting pain! And “What a sight” indeed!—or maybe a better rendering for “Quel spectacle”! would be “What a show”! Above all, independently of the veracity of details and facts, this is what makes from this Chinese scene of torture a supplice in the genuine acceptation of the term: the facts are turned into a baroque show, with picturesque deeds, spectacular staging, and a cast-iron plot: the fight between Holy spirit and earthen power, ended with the ineluctable victory of the former. A paradoxical victory, apparently, as he triumphs at cost of his life, but of course, Victory par excellence, as he gains eternal salvation. Pain gives its price to victory: it is a necessary ordeal, and the touchstone of the holy spirit; as such, it must be evidenced with all available signs (hence details of blades entering flesh, the sound it makes, etc.). This Chinese convert, like all Martyrs worthy of the name, does not suffer; more exactly, his body suffers, but he is not in his ‘body of death,’ he has already left it, he is all in his glorious soul, which tormentors cannot reach, as it is already in the Kingdom. This is how earthly pain turns to heavenly beatitude. In so many pictures, this paradoxical victory is conventionally represented by a martyr’s tormented body, crowned with his joyful, “ecstatic” face whose eyes already contemplate Heaven’s felicity. (See Reference)     European latin languages have conserved a term that appropriately frames this perception of executions: “Supplice.” This paradigm is the basic pattern of interpretation that shapes the perception and, therefore, the descriptions and commentaries, of all Westerners, including those who do not share the religious creed it is based upon. The “supplice” conception is the framework in which pain matters, because it has function and meaning. This baroque framework remains effective even though the religious plot —salvation through tormented agony— is replaced, or accommodated in a different way. Louis Carpeaux’s narrative of the “decoupage de Fou-tchou-li” is a striking example of the reworking of Christian beliefs and Baroque esthetics into an eroticized, Sado-Masochistic show. As is well known, Carpeaux’s narrative of Fu-zhu-li’s execution is given —mistakenly — as a commentary of the lingchi photograph in Georges Bataille’s book. Beyond the facts, Carpeaux’s style, devices, and mood, anticipate Tears of Eros of fifty years. For instance, when Carpeaux writes: “The vast crowd watched with indifference this beautiful ivory body whose harmony of sculptural forms was promised to infamous butchery” , or shows “The tormented man clenches on his pole, with more and more striking resemblances with a crucified Christ, without he can shout, as required by the respected rites. (…)The awful trunk, all what remained from the handsome Fu-zhu-li with so perfect ivory forms, was still tied to the pole in front of a silent and indifferent crowd will pass along”, he already plays on the sado-masochistic register that will seem so audacious fifty years later. (See Reference) Who would believe that Carpeaux and Meadows witnessed the same kind of execution, one in Beijing, the oher in Canton? The event is easily identifiable, and many details overlap, but what a huge differences in the description! In fact Meadows witnessed a lingchi for true, while Carpeaux reconstituted the whole event several years later, relying on photographs taken by French soldiers, and, very likely, details narrated by the photographers and other attendants. The viewing of the photographs does not support Carpeaux’s narrative: it seems above contest that Fu-zhu-li died at the third stroke, from a stroke right through his heart, as noticed Matignon who had already given a “clinical description” of the same execution some eight years earlier. Carpeaux’s narrative maintains the convict in life, maybe because the author is mislead by the posture of the body, which is actually maintained standing with ropes; more probably, because he needs that the convict be alive, for unfolding a narrative that is held together from beginning to end by the progression of suffering. Thus, what is presented in Bataille’s Tears of Eros as an eyewitness account, and, therefore, a trustable historical source, is in itself the artificial reconstitution of a baroque supplice. The son of Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, a very great sculptor who was one Rodin’s favorite, Louis Carpeaux fills his gruesome narrative with esthetic remarks — visual inserts indeed, some of them remindful of his father’s works. This estheticisation confines to eroticization: behind this long narrative, with its bizarre convoluted style, its vulgar preciosity, already crawl the future inventions of gory “Grand Guignol” theater-plays and popular novels: the convict’s body is eroticized for assimilating his torment to carnal possession, lingchi appearing as a kind of extreme, hard-core strip-tease. The perversion of baroque canons that represented holy, redemptive, pain of Christ or martyrs, to serve a show in which redemption is replaced by esthetic, and implicit erotic pleasure results into a kind of morbidpornography. II. The Chinese look elsewhere For Westerners, those who denied pain as well as those who trumpeted it, physical suffering was obviously the key issue, the only one that deserved to be talked about it, described, and pictured. At the opposite, the Chinese never made of physical suffering a topic of debate, description, or representation. Certainly, this traditional attitude has been somewhat changed under foreign influence, since the 1920s (see Lu Xun). Nowadays in Taiwan as well as in China mainland, a new generation of artists and writers currently focus on suffering and torture almost obsessively, just as though they wish to compensate centuries of censure in a few years. Developments below are devoted to Chinese who lived before the abolition of lingchi, and who were contemporaries of the Western authors quoted above. Perusing them, one gradually become aware of a blind spot concealing the execution ground and the tortured body.          I.a: Chinese voices and views about executions     Chinese eyewitnesses of lingchi execution are seldom, the most notable being Li Yizhi’s. A famous scientist specialist in hydraulics in the first half of twentieth century, Li wrote his biography in the 1950’s. In the first years of the 20th century, he came to the Capital from his native Shaanxi to follow a curricula at Jingshi daxuetang (the future Beijing University). He then stayed at the Guildhall of his province, very close of the execution field of Caishikou. He thus attended the lingchi execution of Wang Weiqin, which he misbelieves to be the last one . Li provide information on the place, the attitude of the crowd, Foreigners included, the criminal and the circumstances of his crime. The narrative reaches its climax with the appearance of Wang Weiqin at close range: “Wang Weiqin, whom I saw sitting in the chart when it passed by, had an air but very natural. This day went out a dozen of these charts, and there is an inn where it is a rule that the convicts led to their death are granted with some glasses of wine, till they get drunk, or, some other say, only three glasses”. (See Reference)     This text can be held as a standard Chinese description of an execution: it is detailed, about the reasons and proceedings of the execution. Moreover, it evinces a sincere, though discreet, compassion. Besides, the author has not even a word on what happens to the condemned. The reader has to understand that it was awful, thanks to a concise notation that a foreigner fell from a roof “with awe”. This kind of description, focusing on the legal, institutional, social aspects of execution, with total embargo on the physical consequence on the body and pain, is an almost exact opposite of the Western approach. But the reading of classical Chinese literature show that Li Yizhi’s testimony is in line with tradition. If we now turn toward fiction, we just meet the same reluctance to describe physical damages caused by punishments. A typical case is the execution of sorcerers in a short novel by Feng Menglong, studied by Vincent Durand-Dastès. (See Reference) As Durand-Dastès concludes : “The scene is, as a whole, terrible: the rhymed prose piece depicts in a gripping way the anguishes of the rebel leaders promised to slow death (…) However, we have to admit that the sight of the torture properly speaking is, in some respect, blurred. The writer, after a long description of the preparations, skips the execution itself (…).”     Quite the same happens with Chinese pictures executions. Let us take this representation of a lingchi executed on an adultery woman who killed her husband with the help of her lover. The artist focuses on the institutional, legal, and social aspects, deliberately blurring the visible signs of suffering —cut limbs do not bleed, and the tortured look at them with a light grin! In fact the real focus is not the picture itself, but the characters printed in the upper right: these are the titles of the articles of the code providing lingchi penalty. In this picture, just like in the novel quoted above, the last word must belong to the law. All gruesome detail about physical suffering would obscure this message, and must therefore be concealed, or blurred.     Just a look on Chinese export watercolors is enough to highlight the contrast between Chinese and Western representation. Although they were painted in Canton workshops, these watercolors were exclusively aimed at Western market, and Chinese artisans more often than not copied models provided by their foreign customers. So, what is often presented as Chinese works of art is in fact a Western representation made by Chinese hands. These two pictures focus on gruesome signs of pain and distress (blood, grins, etc.) These images give the most striking contrast between a civilization focusing on pain as a basic value, and a civilization whose basis are elsewhere.          b. Cruelty (can) disconnected from physical pain in Chinese legal and ethical concepts     This striking reluctance to evoke the physical consequences of execution certainly explains the impression of “insensitivity,” “callousness,” resented by many Westerners, who assumed, quite ingenuously, that focusing physical sufferings and their physical signs were a mark of compassion, sympathy. Revealingly, our vocabulary to label emotions felt in such circumstances supposes an ability to share suffering. Therefore, a disability or unwillingness to evoke suffering, implies absence of compassion, lack of sympathy; or, in other words, “callousness,” or even cruelty. The texts quoted above give empirical evidences that this common opinion is biased. Carpeaux’s narrative of Fu-zhu-li’s lingchi is deprived of sincere sympathy for the tormented man, though it is compulsively focused on suffering; at the opposite, the two Chinese texts — Li Yizhi’s eyewitness report and the fictional execution of Wang Ze — perspires communicative compassion, even though deprived of any evocation of physical pain.     This statement confronts us with a challenge: imagining, or rather reconstituting, the legal and ethical background that allowed Chinese to perceive that lingchi execution was tragic, and cruel, without referring cruelty to pain. Understanding this strange disconnection of cruelty and pain requires a short evocation of the function of pain in the Chinese penal system, and a careful examination of the Chinese debates that the use of lingchi arose throughout centuries, which gives insights on the ethical and religious issues at stake.     In the Chinese legal system, singularly enough, pain was not the criterion for grading penalties. In the West, though penal law remained unsystematic till the late 18th century, the very notion of punishment was tightly connected to pain. Penal, penalty have a common origin with “pain’ and “painful”, as in all Western penal system, the essence of “penalty” is to cause pain. As the degree of pain caused by a penalty is the exact measure of its severity the scale of penal sanctions must have for basic criterion a gradation of sufferings. Chinese law was systematized at a very early date, with at its core the penal scale of the Five Punishments at the end of the 6th century. Each of these five punishments was itself subdivided, to provide a general scale of 25 to 30 degrees, allowing judges to modulate their verdicts. Now, were these penalties graded according to the degree of painfulness? Yes, certainly for the two first punishments: 1. beating with light bamboo (10 to 40 blows); 2. beating with heavy bamboo (40 to 100 blows). But 3. Penal servitude, and 4. Relegation (or exiles) were graded according to time (1 to 3 years) and remoteness (1500 to 3000 li): longer time, longer distance might supposedly cause “greater pain”. In fact, “penal servitude” meant forced labor in public service, and was therefore more painful than “Relegation”, which was a transfer for life: so the link with painfulness is far from clear. The Fifth punishment, death penalty, was the keystone of the penal edifice, in China like elsewhere, but the Chinese death penalty presents a case of complete disconnection between severity and painfulness. There were officially two ways of executing death penalty, a “milder” one : strangulation with garrote; and a “more severe one” : decapitation with the sword. Actually, as strangulation was long and painful, and could be prolonged at will by executioners, while decapitation was swift and much less painful. However, an elaborate system of revision, grace and modulation of death penalty was built on this assumption that strangulation was milder than decapitation, which no one ever questioned till the end of imperial law. Thus, the criterion of severity was not painfulness, but the cutting of the body into pieces. This is confirmed with the additional death penalties that were legalised between the 11th and 14th century. These were: 1. Exposure of the head after decapitation; 2. Dismemberment (Lingchi); 3. Exhumation and dispersion of a corpse (or posthumous lingchi). These three penalties were regularly ranked “illegitimate”, irregular (runxing, feixing) by Chinese jurists, as they were “mutilating” or “defacing” (rouxing)— and, finally, “cruel” (canku). This “cruelty” had no obvious link with pain, however, as exposing the head or dispersing the remains was painless. Indeed, the severity criterion in these three additional penalties was the fate of the body after death. Keeping in mind this general framework helps discern what exactly mattered in lingchi: not pain, but dislocation of the body. This is confirmed, a contrario, by arguments that renown Scholars and Jurists developed against additional penalties, particularly against lingchi. The most influential opponent to lingchi was certainly the famous poet and official Lu You (1125-1210), who proposed that lingchi be definitively forbidden in a memorial to the emperor, ca. 1205. His arguments were transmitted across centuries to finally feed the 1905 memorial for abolition. (See Reference) . Lu You deemed lingchi fundamentally illegitimate because it overpasses in severity the standard “five punishments”, because it is a mutilating “flesh punishment” (rouxing) unworthy of the civilizing mission the imperial State is endowed with. Moreover, cruelty is counterproductive, as a sensible penal system must rely on a balance between severity and benevolence. All this argumentation sounds very modern, at this reserve that it does not even allude too the intense and senseless pain caused by lingchi as a cause of abolition. When Lu You describes damages caused to the criminal’s body: “Flesh has been stripped of, but breath has not ceased yet; liver and heart are lain bare, but sight and hearing still persist”, this is not to highlight physical pain, but the breach of cosmic Harmony caused by opening the body and showing the organs bare. The criterion of cruelty is not the infliction of suffering, but the defacement of the human body. This point is confirmed by outstanding legal authors. Wang Mingde, an official of the Board of Punishment under the reign of Kangxi emperor (1662-1723), wrote ca. 1680 one of the most authoritative treatises about the Qing penal code. The chapter on “illegitimate punishments” (runxing 閏刑) starts with an impressive list of cruelties committed by the worse tyrants of Chinese antiquity, with gruesome details like evisceration of pregnant women, opening of the skull, pulling out of the ribs (See Reference) . Connecting lingchi, a legal torture at Wang’s times with the most abusive atrocities in history is by itself a denunciation. Moreover, this connection reveals the common criterion, defacement of human body, that lead to qualify these acts as atrocities. Of course, Wang Mingde and Lu You were aware that this amounts to inflicting unbearable pain to the convicts, but this was not for them the scallion to measure severity or cruelty. For the most eloquent Chinese opponents to lingchi, cruelty consists of the defacement of the body, independently of the pain it supposes. Therefore, the climactic moment in lingchi was not during the execution, but immediately after, when the dismembered body was lying on the ground, or in one of these baskets that were shot by photographers. The focus on the phases of execution in search of cruel details is a typicalWestern misconception, and Alabaster was right, in a way, to remark that lingchi was inflicted “ not so much as a torture” , but completely failed to recognized cruelty where it lay for a Chinese: in the exposure of human remains. III. Typical misrepresentations of pain in lingchi photographs The focus on pain also explains the fascination that photographs of lingchi exerted on artists, and, more generally, its impact on Western esthetics since the early twentieth century. Nowadays, lingchi photographs are renown since their publication in Georges Bataille’s Tears of Eros, in 1961. No remembering had been kept from the wide circulation of two more complete other sets before World War II, so these photographs had a tremendous impact, which is still tightly connected to Bataille’s sulfurous reputation. He had discovered them in Georges Dumas’s Nouveau traité de psychologie, with comments that directly inspired his own.     Dumas was an outstanding psychologist in 1930s France, and the handbooks he edited were contributed by the flower of the profession. Their general plan is revealing of the ambition of a complete description of psyche, from physiological foundations to the “noblest constructs of the mind”. In his graduation from unconscious motions toward feelings, emotions and thoughts, Dumas devotes chapters to the link between “reflex motions” and “feelings”. He comes to question how facial expressions or reactions of the body convey feelings like fear or pain. Here, he and his colleagues meet a limit as experimenters. After careful analysis of various expressions of pain artificially reproduced in his laboratory, he has to admit that “extreme pain” is not an easy topic for experimentation. Indeed, Dumas writes, “We should need photographs of tortured men enduring tormented executions (supplice). Thanks to Dr Desfosses, I can publish photographs of a tormented execution dating around one half-century, which were shot by someone on a tortured man alive and dying.” (See Reference) Dumas then publishes two photographs of lingchi in support of the reasoning discussed below. I is to be noticed that he uses these awful photographs in the most neutral way: he does not mention China, and even exaggerates the time lapsed since the event and finally says that such torture was abolished “for long” in this anonymous country. These are precautions that the future author of the Tears of Eros would not bother himself about.     Dumas framed the two expressions of awe and pain that Bataille later turned into myths: horripilation (hair-raising) and ecstasy, which he discussed in two different volumes, but relying on the same photographs. Horripilation is addressed with similar phenomena, like “gooseflesh” and other behaviors related to skin reaction and ‘pilo-motricity" (See Reference) .
After a long discussion of Darwin’s observations on various animals that ruffle their feather or hair when scared, Dumas has some remarks on human cases, which he illustrates with lingchi photographs, pointing at the convict’s “hair-rising”. He concludes: “We have found no notice of this influence of torture on hair-raising, and we think that there are good reasons to suspect that pain and awe are involved. Here is the first misinterpretation of lingchi photographs, which the author of the Tears of Eros will later just mention, with an exclamation point: “l’horripilation !”, no doubt to express awe and fear. This is a characteristic misinterpretation, which originates in the exclusive focus on pain and fear. The pain endured is so obviously intense that the watcher cannot imagine other reason to the convict’s aspect. In fact, everyone familiar with scenes of Chinese justice knows that not only people submitted to torture or condemned to death, but all convicts, or at least most of them, were “hair-raised”. The reason has nothing to do with awe or pain: all male Chinese had to shave the forepart of his head, and let the hair grow at the back to form the famous ponytail. This was prescribed as a mark of submission to the Manchus, under harsh punishments. Once in jail, most of the convicts could not keep on their shaving and the forepart of their head turned to bush-like mess. This happened so regularly that hair-raising became a common-place representation of convicts in Chinese paintings. On typical watercolors, we see a hair-raised convict walking to his Relegation place (See Reference) . His hair is merely the sign that he belongs no more to the civilized world: he is an outcast, an outlaw, with the stigmas of the “homo sacer” as defined by Giorgio Agamben.     “Ecstasy”, the second term that Bataille famously employed for depicting the tortured convict’s expression, is quite unfaithful to Dumas’s interpretation. The dominant mood in the psychologist’s comment, is perplexity: “paradoxical,” “unclassifiable,” “unimaginable” are the adjectives that repeatedly qualify pain or its expressions, which ultimately “challenge all explanation.” Dumas indeed starts by observing that “The face [of the convict] expresses a kind of ecstatic joy”, but the following analyses show that “ecstasy” is just a “paradoxical expression”: in other words, the man’s real feeling is not “ecstatic joy”, but just the opposite, “extreme pain.” His face expresses “naked suffering” (la douleur à nu) that one fails to recognize because it can almost never be observed in this state of purity. Therefore, one misread it as its opposite, joy, pure joy, or “ecstasy”. Dumas is never ambiguous on what the “patient” resents: it is pain, all along, extreme pain. If scientists were more familiar with extreme cases like this one, they would gradually become able to discriminate paradoxical expressions of extreme pain, from real expressions of joy or ecstasy (See Reference) . Dumas cannot therefore be liable of the ambiguity between pain and pleasure that will be much later cultivated by the author of the Tears of Eros. Even so, Dumas’ approach departs from sane scientific methodology. He should have been aware that the most careful observations are unconclusive when made on only one case. We have on him the advantage to know three photographic sets of lingchi. The two other sets, though much more complete than this one, let appear nothing like a “paradoxical expression of ecstatic joy.” Moreover, none of the descriptions or pictures of lingchi that were made along centuries hints at something like that. In such circumstances, Dumas’ s approach proves wrong, event under the form of questions: the expression of the convict’s face is neither “ecstatic”, nor “paradoxical”, it is just strange. This strangeness may have various causes -— for instance: madness, as there are several cases of madman liable of lingchi at this moment; or defiance, as witnesses report that some daredevil bandit manage to mock their tormentors while they suffer torture. Pain is the less convincing of all, if we stick to the evidences provided by photographic and written documentation. However, this interpretation prevailed until now, under its worse version, since the author of the Tears of Eros got rid of all Dumas’ s precautions, to contend for “ecstasy” in its most ambiguous and potentially perverse acceptation. A suspicion that the most extreme suffering meets the most extreme pleasure was the proper apotheosis for a book devoted to celebrate the weddings of Eros and Thanatos. The pompous and void Sadistic rhetoric in Tears of Eros, far from elucidating the strong attractive power of these photographs, just reiterates the pornographic readings by Carpeaux and other Belle Epoque writers. More elevated works are more helpful for understanding the esthetic and spiritual dimension of the “supplice chinois” mood. Pierre Jean-Jouve published in 1934 Vagadu, a novel in which the heroin’s mind is haunted by the photograph of “the Chinese” — Actually seeing the picture, one recognises Dumas and Bataille’s tormented man. Interestingly, what Jouve’s heroin, Catherine Crachat, contemplates is not the photographs, but a drawing made after one of them, a portrait that shows only the man’s face, which allows escape the pervasive presence of the wounded body (See Reference) . Far from reducing the fascination, it concentrates on the facial expression and on its spiritual impact (See Reference) . Finally, the confrontation turns to an enigma: “What do you want to tell me, Chinese…” In the Tears of Eros, the enigma of “ecstatic joy” found its resolution in sado-masochism, and offered its pompous conclusion to a so-called “history of eroticism”. Jouve’s heroin finally reads apparent ecstasy as a “celestial joy,” which is the answer to her anguished question. Indeed, what “the Chinese means to say,” what more exactly his tormented body means and what can be read on this face, is the “celestial joy” that illuminates the soul of the Martyr while his body is still being tortured (See Reference) (See Reference) . This penetrating author helps realize that the permanent power that these images exerted on generations of westerners originates less in morbid curiosity or sexual perversion than in its reviving figures of life triumphing from death and suffering. The Chinese stands as a San Sebastian whom we would see martyred today, a true martyrdom almost next door: a living Caravaggio (See Reference) (See Reference) .