The punishment of "playing the pipa" can be listed as the first of the ten major tortures of the Manchu Qing Dynasty, founded in the Ming Dynasty, is a means used by the Jinyi Wei and dongchang secret service organizations to extort confessions by torture, because it is too cruel, the historical records are obscure, and in general, it is as follows: the prisoners take off their clothes, tie their bare hands and hold them up, at this time the ribs are convex, only a layer of skin and nerve tissue, with dagger knives, such as the bull bone pluck of the pipa, with the side of the blade on the ribs back and forth, like plucking the lute. Whether you are a great thief of Jiangyang or a mountain bandit, after this punishment, all the flesh and blood are blurred, the white bones appear, and its pain is like digging the heart, but it will not immediately lose its breath, once the criminal is pulled into the Jinyiwei execution room, all the souls are scattered, the feces and urine are flowing, and any heinous crime is immediately confessed!
Jinyi Wei was originally one of the twenty-six guards of tianzi guarding the capital and the palace, and this guard was originally the children of recruited cadres, because they could easily travel to and from the residence of the Wenwu Hundred Officials, unconsciously grasp their words and deeds, become the eyes and ears of Tianzi, and have their presence in all major cases in the early Ming Dynasty.
Wu Han, a researcher of Ming history, has a book, which is a compilation of his papers on the history of the Ming Dynasty, called "Wu Han on the History of Ming", and one of the papers is called "The JinyiWei and Dongxi Factory of the Ming Dynasty", which quotes the above text about the lute punishment. Wu Han commented that this passage is quoted from the "Ming History" volume 73 "Criminal Law Chronicle", which is actually wrong, and it should be the "Ming Book" volume 73 "Criminal Law Chronicle".
The steel knife cut through a hundred ribs, fluctuating back and forth, the intensity was different, the shouts of the torturers were uneven, and the trembling sound of the inmates and the ugly laughter of the torturers were mixed together, known as "playing the pipa", also known as "pipa punishment". In the cell, I saw criminals who had been punished by playing the pipa, some of whom committed suicide by biting their tongues, and those who also hit the wall and died, preferring to die rather than be poisoned by the cell boss's "playing the pipa". It is said that there is a person who is not afraid of pipa torture, and did not die after being tortured by pipa, this person is Yang Lian, but in the end he did not escape the doom of death, and was nailed to death on the torture device of the cell with iron nails.