In ancient times, "executioners" were not a profession with friends, because no one wanted to have anything to do with people who specialized in killing criminals, and it was said that the executioner family was also looked down upon, and the social status was not even as good as that of ordinary families. But the executioner's salary is not low, and the gray income is frighteningly large.
In ancient China, spring and summer can not kill people, so there is often a saying that the executioner works not long, and the maximum time of the year is 3 months. In these 3 months, I still earn enough to spend a year, or even spend a few years. But not everyone can become an executioner, it is also required, for example, the courage must be big, if it is difficult to kill a chicken and slaughter a sheep, it is doomed to be an executioner, and then there is great strength, beheading is definitely a hard work, people with bad health can't do it, so the executioners we see in film and television dramas are strong men.
But it still takes a long time to become a qualified executioner. Executioners are also divided into high and low ranks, high-level executioners are mostly executors ordered by the imperial court to carry out heavy punishments such as Ling Chi, etc. Generally speaking, the imperial court will give a specific number of thousands of knives, and the executioner must do a thousand knives to the prisoners and the last knife The prisoner can not ask for death, and must not die until the last knife.
Executioners were also high-paid professions in ancient times, not only with a large fixed salary, but also the imperial court turned a blind eye to their gray income. In ancient times, there were many ways to execute prisoners, but most of them were beheaded, and the families of those who were tortured wanted to make their relatives suffer a little (there are many examples of undead people who cut down with a knife), and stuffed the executioner with some silver in advance in the hope that he could be killed with a knife, so that he could die happily and suffer less. Of course, the executioner also received the full amount, but the prisoner's family would also give a lot of money to the prisoners.
It turned out that the executioner who had received the money in advance, in order to show his "sincerity", would deliberately wear a white silk pants, wipe it hard behind the prisoner's back, and at the same time kick a foot on his back, and the knife fell to the ground on the person's head, and his body would be loaded into the coffin prepared under the stage. The executioner, on the other hand, did not have a trace of blood on his body to show that he did not leave pain for the prisoners and did not earn money for his conscience.
Until the Qing Dynasty, the executioner was still a high-paying profession, it is said that the basic salary is at least one ocean per month, and for every head cut off, there are three ocean subsidies, and there are 7 oceans of income for cutting 2 heads a month, and the income of seven oceans is almost equivalent to the income of an ordinary family for half a year. And there are all kinds of gray income, such as money sent by the prisoner's family, money from selling human blood (folk people firmly believe that human blood steamed buns can cure diseases), nod Zhu pen (folk think that they can ward off evil spirits, so they often buy at high prices), and these incomes will definitely not add up to less than "wages". So some executioners not only do the executioner's job