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[57]
The most ignominious of all penalties is slicing to pieces 凌遲 and extinction of the family. Here the offender is tied to a cross, and, by a series of painful but not in themselves mortal cuts, his body is sliced beyond regognition. The head of the offender is subsequently exposed in a cage for a period.
This punishment, known as “lingering death” is not inflicted so much as a torture, but to destroy the future as well as the present life of the offender — he is unworthy to exist longer either as a man or a recognizable spirit, and, as spirit to appear must assume their previous corporal forms, he can only appear as a collection of little bits. It is not a lingering death, for it is [58] all over in a few seconds, and the coup de grâce is generally given the third cut; but it is very horrid, and the belief that the spirit will be in need of sewing up in a land where needles are not, must make the unfortunate victim’s last moments most unhappy. 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. It should be added that if an offender sentenced to this penalty commuts suicide to avoid it, or otherwise dies before it can be carried out, the corpse is cut and slashed as if alive. So, in an instance wherein a son gave his mother a push, and kiled her thereby: his elder brother thereon buried the offender alive, as some sort of satisfaction, but the authorities, deeming this inadequite, ordered the body to be dug up and sliced (H.A.H.L Supp. vol. XII. p. 2 = 續增刑案彙覽 12.2).
Further, that a pernicious life may be utterly destroyed, and be doomed to starve in the spirit world without posterity to offer annuually the tribute of wine and pork, on the smell of which spirits live, his sons and grndsons are also executed, or if infants at the time of his offence, are emasculated, and so prevented from carrying on the race.
This punishment is inferior, considered artistically, to torturing a man to death, as for instance Damiens was tortured—burning the body and then sacttering the ashes to the four winds. The destruction of the future comfort of the offender's ghost is, howevern undoubtedly a refinement.
Simple slicing to pieces is a degree lower in severity than the foregoing.
