In ancient China, the punishment was severe, with waist beheading and five horses splitting corpses in the front, and ten major Tortures in the Manchu Qing Dynasty. The more torture there is, the more a group will be derived: cool officials. Today, I would like to introduce you to a cool official during the reign of Empress Wu Zetian, who was deeply favored by Wu Zetian, and he was Suo Yuanli.
According to historical records, Suo Yuanli was a foreigner with deep eyes and a high nose and a beard. Why did the Empress like this foreigner? Because Suo Yuanli will have a unique skill: good at torturing to extract confessions. After Wu Zetian ascended the throne, in order to consolidate the imperial power, he issued an edict: as long as there is a whistleblower in various places, local officials cannot stop it, and they must also provide carriages, and they must also provide meals when they rest at the station.
In order to encourage whistle-blowing, Wu Zetian ordered the production of four poster boxes similar to today's, known as Tongzai, which were named "Yan En", "Redress", "Tongxuan", and "Solicitation". These four brass daggers were placed outside the facing door and received various whistleblower letters. Whistleblowers and cool officials are closely linked, and it is time for Suo Yuanli to appear.
When Wu Zetian was cleaning up the Power of the Li family, she used suo Yuanli and Zhou Xing's two groups to torture those who opposed her. Suo Yuanli invented a torture, whenever there was a prisoner, he first asked the jailer to wear a porous iron hat for the prisoner, and then smashed the iron nails into it with a hammer, resulting in the prisoner's brain plasma bursting out and dying.
Cruel or not? More cruelty is yet to come. Suo Yuanli also creatively changed the name of torture, citing several tortures: "phoenix sunburning wings", this kind of torture is to tie the prisoner's limbs to a piece of wood, and then twist the limbs like a rope, and the prisoner is hanged alive; "Jade Girl Climbing the Ladder", as the name suggests, is to drive the prisoner with a wooden shackle around his neck to a high wood, and then the jailer uses a rope to tie the wooden shackle, if the prisoner confesses, it is good, otherwise he will be dragged to suffocate and die, or fall to the ground and die.
In addition, Suo Yuanli and Lai Junchen also jointly invented ten kinds of wooden shackle torture: one is to determine a hundred pulses, the second is to breathe, the third is to roar suddenly, the fourth is to accept, the fifth is to lose the soul, the sixth is to be true, the seventh is to be true, the eighth is to die, the ninth is to die, and the tenth is to break the family. If you look at these names, it is already a tool for the shackles to be used as a cruel and torturous tool.
There are many more such tortures above, and once a prisoner falls into the hands of Suo Yuanli, it is impossible to survive. However, Wu Zetian was very conniving at Suo Yuanli's actions, "thinking that he was loyal and favored." By 697 AD, the second year of Wu Zhou's long life, Wu Zetian saw that there were very few opponents of him, and "flying birds exhausted, good bows and hidden bows" were staged again, not to mention that Suo Yuanli itself was not a "good bow".
Many acts of injustice will kill themselves, and Suo Yuanli has too much blood on his hands when he forced a confession from a prisoner, and the people's resentment is rife. Wu Zetian came to a "Shunshui people's feeling" and killed Suo Yuanli.