preface
Beheading is an extremely cruel punishment in Chinese history, which requires the prisoner to be split in half alive from the waist. This type of torture has a very early origin, dating back to the Zhou Dynasty. In the "Twenty-fifth Year of Spring and Autumn Zhaogong", it is recorded that a monarch saw that his courtier was sentenced to beheading, and he could not bear it, so he directly pardoned this punishment and changed it to a more merciful beheading.
The cruelty and misery of the slash
How painful is it to be beheaded? The answer is: it's so painful that you can't imagine it.
In fact, the correct way to slash the abdominal aorta should be severed, so that the prisoner will die of excessive blood loss within 30 seconds. But there is no "right way", and the cruelty of the waist chop is that it can be deliberately extended.
The executioner can avoid the main blood vessels, allowing the prisoner to live a little longer. Prisoners can also be given "fast knives" or "slow knives" by pre-emptive dots. If the prisoner's family is willing to pay a bribe, they can give him a pain. Otherwise, the executioner will deliberately cut the person in half, leaving him to die slowly and painfully in a state where life is better than death.
Such cruelty has been repeated throughout history. For example, in the early days of the Ming Dynasty, Zhu Di, the king of Yan, launched the Battle of Jingyan and after he seized the imperial throne, many ministers loyal to Emperor Jianwen were beheaded by him. Among them, such as Fang Xiaozi, he was deliberately tortured to death slowly.
After Fang Xiaoxiao's waist was cut off, he still supported his upper body with both hands and wrote 12 "usurpation" words on the ground with his own blood before finally breaking his breath. The 12-character strokes are so numerous that it is laborious and painful to write. This fully shows how much torture he endured before he finally died.
It can be imagined that normal prisoners who beheaded their backs also died tragically like this. Their lower bodies are completely separated, but they remain conscious. Without any anesthesia and pain relief measures, the wound is severely painful, and excessive blood loss leads to dizziness. But life has not yet been completely cut off, and they can only crawl and struggle on the ground, watching their blood run out, but have no dignity to speak of.
This torture is very bearable. Many prisoners were written in blood to show their despair and abhorrence of this torture at the moment before they died. The reason why the waist chop is cruel is that it is a double torture of physical and psychological nature.
Physiologically, pain is the greatest affliction. The waist is the area where important nerve plexuses in the body are concentrated, and the pain when cut off is difficult to express in words. The severe pain caused by the amputated limb is persistent, and the pain will continue to increase when the wound is squeezed. Due to the damage to the circulatory system, prisoners soon develop shock and lack of oxygen to the brain, but they are unable to completely lose consciousness, and this half-alive and half-dead state is a great pain.
Psychologically, the fear of death and the reluctance to lose life are another torture. The prisoner remains conscious at all times and can clearly see his tragic situation and approaching death. They know that they are going to die, but they still have a glimmer of life, and this pessimism and despair are unbearable. Especially for those who were originally in a noble position, falling into such an unbearable situation is another kind of torture.
It can be said that the waist chopping pushes people's fear of death and attachment to life to the extreme. It is cruel and miserable, an extremely dark criminal law used by ancient rulers to break people's will and fight against rebels. But it is precisely because of its cruelty that it also inspires people's love of life and has become an extreme microcosm of history.
Yu Hongtu: Yongzheng was angry and tortured to death by a waist beheading
Yu Hongtu, who was publicly beheaded in 1734, was such an unlucky prisoner. Yu Hongtuben is a genius in a field of fame in Henan. He is in charge of education and the imperial examination in Henan, and is naturally very concerned about maintaining the integrity of the examination room. This time, several students wanted to bribe him to obtain exam questions, but he strictly refused.
Who knew that these students actually bought Yu Hongtu's concubines and servants, and finally got their wish. This fraud case was soon discovered by the imperial court, and Yu Hongtu, as a Henan scholar, should be mainly responsible. But in fact, he is not the real culprit, it can only be said that the person in charge should give him a chance to explain, or take it lightly.
However, he happened to run into Yongzheng, an emperor who dared to kill his head and show off the public and carry out heavy ceremonies. When Yongzheng saw this case, he was furious, and directly sentenced Yu Hongtu to be beheaded, and also put Yu's in-laws Zou Shengheng in charge of the beheading, intending to give Yu a way to die without asking for mercy. Zou Shengheng was most afraid of the emperor in his life, how dare he defy the holy will? So Yu Hongtu was guillotined without the slightest way back. Looking at his familiar relatives and colleagues, he was filled with grief and knew that he could not escape death.
When the guillotine fell, a huge pain exploded from his waist, and Yu Hongtu's eyes were black, and he almost fainted. He used all his strength to stay awake, only to find that he had split into two halves, and his lower body was completely out of control. Blood rushed out, and he knew that death was slowly approaching not far away...
As a reader, Yu Hongtu could have been said to have a noble family and a promising future. He was quite successful in the imperial examination, and could have sat back and continued to serve the imperial court, even climbing to a higher position. But an accident made him fall into the dust and fall to such a miserable end.
This also reflects the cruelty of feudal society from another side. At that time, regardless of your origins, if you broke the law, you could be executed with extreme cruelty, without the slightest humanity. As a scholar, Yu Hongtu is destined to suffer more cruel treatment than ordinary people. Because he represents Confucian culture, it must be dealt a heavy blow to manifest his power.
In fact, he was only used by students, not deliberately covering up fraud. But before the law of absolute monarchy, a person's character and motives are not important, only so-called "facts". As a competent official, Yu Hongtu could not be blamed, so his tragedy was doomed under the logic of criminal law at that time.
This is one of the reasons why the fate of many learned people in ancient times ended up tragic. They understand human feelings and see social injustice, but personal ability can never save the fate of when it comes. Yu Hongtu's vain calamity to a certain extent represents the fate of the readers under feudal rule.
Seven blood words, one law sealed forever
Although the person has been cut into two, Yu Hongtu's consciousness still exists on this broken body. His fingers could still move slightly, so with a force that came out of nowhere, he touched the blood he had shed and wrote a word "miserable" on the ground. After writing the first one, he felt dizzy, as if he was going to break his breath at this moment. Yet he knew that he still had something to say, and he had to tell the world about the cruelty of the slash. So he gathered all his strength again and wrote the second and third "miserable" words ...
There are a total of seven "miserable" characters, and each one is written, Yu Hongtu is fighting with death. He felt that his destiny had come to an end and that it was too late. He used these seven blood words to tell the greatest pain in the world and express his indictment of this cruel punishment... When the seventh character was finished, he could no longer feel his presence. The few remaining wills collapsed in the last stroke, and he fell crookedly in a pool of his own blood, silent.
These seven "miserable" words became the final indictment of this cruel criminal law by the offenders. They seem to condense the sorrow of more than 2,000 years of beheading prisoners, becoming the epitome of this era. When Zou Shengheng reported the tragic death of Yu Hongtu, he focused on these seven blood characters. His original intention may have been to curry favor with the emperor, show that he was strong in oversight, and fulfill the emperor's order
After Yongzheng saw it, his expression was solemn and silent for a long time. Then, he made a decree that shocked everyone: from now on, the inhuman punishment of beheading will be abolished forever and will not be used again.
epilogue
From that moment on, the chopping officially became history. It has existed for more than 2,000 years and represents the extremely cruel side of China's rulers. And now, in the hands of an enlightened emperor, it is finally sealed forever. This may be a small sign of historical progress.
The end of the death of the slash forever from the stage of history and becoming the last torture to be abolished explicitly in China has revealed many questions worth pondering. History is not completely dark, there is always light to discover and protect.