Lingchi

An illustration in the French newspaper Le Monde illustré (1858) depicting the execution of the French missionary Auguste Chapdelaine by means of Lingchi. In fact, Chapdelaine died of abuse in prison and was beheaded after his death.

In Lingchi ( Chinese 凌遲or陵遲 / 凌迟or陵迟 , Pinyin Lingchi , something like "Creeping Death" - literally, "bad treatment slow") or Ling-Tch'e is a special form of to-Tode- Torture, which was legally practiced in China until 1905.

Method and reports

Here, the victim, who is tied upright to a pole, is separated from the body one after the other: first the chest, parts of the thigh, the arms, legs and finally the head.

Lingchi became known in Europe through illustrated travel reports, for example through Louis Carpeaux's Pekin qui s'en va ( Beijing as it was ) from 1913. The book shows photos of the last official Lingchi, the execution of Fu Zhuli富珠哩 (old transcription Fou Chou Li), a guard in the service of the Mongolian Prince Ao-Han-Quan . On the eve of the Chinese New Year in February 1905, he murdered his master and was then sentenced to death by Lingchi. The sentence was carried out on April 9, 1905.

Processing in literature and media

This form of the death penalty received a special intellectual, religious and cultural-philosophical status through its mention in Georges Bataille . In his texts L'expérience intérieure from 1943 (The inner experience) and Le coupable from 1944, he reports on his persistent erotic reactions to Lingchi photographs. In 1934 Bataille came across the third volume (1933) of the Nouveau traité de psychologie by the French psychologist Georges Dumas. Bataille later learned about the old original photographs of the execution, which were kept in the Musée de l'Homme . He used five photos for his illustrated art story Les larmes d'eros , 1961, The Tears of Eros . The illustration of torture in Bataille's famous essay on the sacred, Le sacré (1939), shows an Aztec sacrifice.

In the novel The Sandelholzstrafe of Nobel Mo Yan , this method of execution is a central literary theme. Chapter 9 "masterpiece" is a detailed description of the execution of the officer Qian Xiongfei by the executioner Zhao Jia by fragmentation into 500 parts.

Web links

Commons : Lingchi - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

↑ Kate Millett : Dehumanized - Trial About Torture. Junius Verlag GmbH, Hamburg, 1993, ISBN 3-88506-225-9 , p. 148.
↑ Lingchi pictures can also be found in the second, probably unknown to Bataille, volume (1932) of this eight-volume work (Paris, 1930–1943).
↑ There is some evidence that Lo Duca, the editor of the Tears of Eros, was actually its author or an editor of minutes of conversations with Bataille, according to the thesis of the outstanding western Lingchi expert, Jérome Bourgon; Timothy Brook, Jérome Bourgon, et al. Gregory Blue, Death by a Thousand Cuts , Harvard UP, Cambr., Mass., 2008, pp. 235f. Bataille was ill long before his death in 1962 and was actually no longer able to work.

[Kate_Millett-1] Kate Millett : Dehumanized - Trial About Torture. Junius Verlag GmbH, Hamburg, 1993, ISBN 3-88506-225-9 , p. 148.

[2] Lingchi pictures can also be found in the second, probably unknown to Bataille, volume (1932) of this eight-volume work (Paris, 1930–1943).

[3] There is some evidence that Lo Duca, the editor of the Tears of Eros, was actually its author or an editor of minutes of conversations with Bataille, according to the thesis of the outstanding western Lingchi expert, Jérome Bourgon; Timothy Brook, Jérome Bourgon, et al. Gregory Blue, Death by a Thousand Cuts , Harvard UP, Cambr., Mass., 2008, pp. 235f. Bataille was ill long before his death in 1962 and was actually no longer able to work.