When it comes to the ancient criminal law of our country, it is really innumerable, and the waist beheading is one of them, this kind of criminal law is very cruel, it directly divides people from the middle into two halves, not to mention the prisoners who will be executed, even if the people who are watching around will inevitably feel "scared" after seeing this scene.
In fact, the reason why such cruel criminal laws were invented in ancient times was in the hope of using their deterrent power to achieve the purpose of maintaining national tranquility.
The punishment of waist beheading has continued for a long time in history, and it is rumored that it has been invented as early as the Shang Dynasty, and after more than two thousand years, it has been used until the Qing Dynasty, which was still used at the beginning of the Qing Dynasty, and was not abolished until after the Yongzheng Emperor came to the throne.
And the reason why the Yongzheng Emperor abolished this punishment was also very simple, because the executioner was really unbearable to see, and Yongzheng himself had witnessed the scene of Yu Hongtu being beheaded, and the picture really made him unbearable to look at it directly.
In addition to the enormous deterrent effect of such punishment on death row inmates and onlookers, what about the executioners?
In fact, the executioners of beheading are also the "hard wounds" of the executioners, and before the execution, they do not randomly choose the executioners to execute, but let them voluntarily take over the work, which requires the executioners to have a high psychological quality.
Most of the executioners in ancient times were relatively fierce, and killing a person was nothing to them, but in the waist beheading, it still embarrassed many executioners, which is enough to see the cruelty of this criminal law.
In ancient times, executioners were a job that was easy to hate for themselves, but the income of this job was very high, and because few people were willing to do this job, the imperial court offered them a high salary.
As for the "bribe" money they received, most of these bribes came from the families of the executed prisoners, and this is also the will of the death row inmates.
So what is it that causes prisoners and families who already know they are going to die to do such things?
In the eyes of many people, such a thing is "laborious and unflattering", in fact, there are deep reasons why they bribe executioners.
First of all, from the perspective of the families of the prisoners, the executioners were bought, and although they could not save the lives of the prisoners from their hands, they preferred that the executioners would let their families die a little happier and leave a whole corpse after death.
Secondly, from the perspective of the prisoner himself, it is certainly impossible to live by being beheaded, but the degree of pain in that process is large and small, if the executioner is stuck below the waist, even if the body is divided into two halves, but they will still live for a period of time, the degree of pain during that time we can not imagine, only the executed people have experienced.
If the knife is cut above the waist, most of the death row inmates will die on the spot.
Therefore, the prisoners stuffed money in the executioner's pockets, not wanting to bear the pain of the period of death after the waist chop.
In addition, for the executioners' own psychological reasons, they took a great risk to carry out this job, but also hoped that the criminals would give them money, which is not difficult to guess.
If the prisoner and his family did nothing before the execution, the prisoner could only pray that the executioner would be merciful at the time of the execution.