I just discovered The punishments of China: illustrated by twenty-two engravings (note that there are two pages there). It’s part of the New York Public Library’s collection.
This instantly made me think of a Qin Shihuang (秦始皇, first emperor of China) museum of torture I once visited in Xi’an. It was full of displays with life-size mannequins being hacked, sawed, sliced, crushed, and torn to pieces. There was even plenty of fake blood. It was pretty bizarre. (Has anyone else been there? I can’t find it on the web, although one Italian site refers to a “Xiányáng Bówùguan” which could be it…)
Is it in one of the gates of the city wall? Whan I was there, somebody told me down the north gate there was a horrible museum, but that they was closed. Anyway, I have seen lots of blood in the anti-Japanese museums.
January 9th, 2008 at 11:37 amA new book on the history of Chinese punishments, “Death by a Thousand Cuts” by Timothy Brook, is coming out in March.
January 9th, 2008 at 2:11 pmI haven’t been there, but my dad has a collection of 24 pictures of a similar style on torture. I’m not sure what the point of these paintings are, perhaps to show the public how they can be punished if they do something wrong. But they’re too flimsy to be passed around.
January 10th, 2008 at 3:13 amDoes anybody know whether or not “Chinese water torture” ever existed? In three years in China, I never heard it mentioned. Then again there were a lot of other things which supposedly happened but I never heard mentioned so who knows?
January 10th, 2008 at 1:51 pmBen,
I could be wrong, but I think the water torture is a fairly recent method used in the korean war? That was my assumption.
January 11th, 2008 at 5:49 amHahahahaha! I was first drawn to your site by the Nalencia orange (surfing web for fruit stickers), but now I’m looking around and I think I’m getting hooked. I like that you take the whole “Engrish” concept a little beyond the mere picture of the offending label with a snide line or two. Besides, there seems to be a lot more on here than just that. I’m going to dig around some more, and I think I’ll link to your site on my blog, if you don’t mind. Drifty http://drifty-sez.blogspot.com/
January 15th, 2008 at 12:24 pmBeing not politically correct and all, is it possible that torture is the one thing that may not have been invented by the Chinese, especially with the timing of Olympics? I’ve never heard anyone speak of the torture museum, perhaps it has disappeared or its contents shipped to a different city? Oh, I didn’t really say that did I?
January 17th, 2008 at 9:00 pmBoth Hong Kong and Singapore have these incredible “museums” built with Tiger Balm money - the Haw Par Museums which have incredibly grotesque scenes (both painted, and also in sculpture/wax relief) from Chinese Buddhist “hells/afterlife” which looked a lot like these prints.
January 23rd, 2008 at 7:11 pm