1905: Fou Tchou-Li, by a thousand cuts
April 10th, 2008 Headsman
On this date in 1905, Fou Tchou-Li suffered the last execution by lingchi in Beijing, for the murder of a Mongolian prince.
Lingchi, or slow slicing, involved the public dismemberment of the victim. As such, it became iconic to westerners as an image of exotic Chinese cruelty — albeit iconic in a mythicized form, the accounts conflicting, undependable, Orientalist. (Many different ones are collected at the Wikipedia page.)
Lingchi is especially notable — apart from fathering the phrase “death by a thousand cuts” in the English lexicology — for its overlap with the era of photography.
Fou Tchou-Li’s death was captured on film, and the images famously captivated Georges Bataille for the expression of seeming ecstasy on the face of the dying (or dead) man.
Bataille was said to meditate daily upon the image below in particular — “I never stopped being obsessed by this image of pain, at the same time ecstatic and intolerable.”
In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag explained the mystical nexus of pleasure and pain Fou Tchou-Li’s torture suggested to the French theorist, aptly comparing it to graphic but pre-photographic exaltations of torture in the western artistic tradition, such as Saint Sebastian:
To contemplate this image, according to Bataille, is both a mortification of the feelings and a liberation of tabooed erotic knowledge — a complex response that many people must find hard to credit. … Bataille is not saying that he takes pleasure in the sight of this excruciation. But he is saying that he can imagine extreme suffering as a kind of transfiguration. It is a view of suffering, of the pain of others, that is rooted in religious thinking, which links pain to sacrifice, sacrifice to exaltation — a view that could not be more alien to a modern sensibility.
It’s no idle point to say that all this reads quite a lot into a single frame that may not be all that representative of the moment, though that wouldn’t necessarily diminish Bataille’s gist. More, these are western interpretations of — projections upon — an image marked as fundamentally outside in a tableau irresistibly blending the colonizer and the colonized.
The execution was ordered in the last days of the Qing Dynasty, which had long been substantially beholden to European states, especially the British; the prisoner was apparently administered opium to numb the pain, the very product Britain had gone to war to force China to accept.
Taiwanese video artist Chen Chieh-jen interpreted the photography that so captivated Bataille, and its colonial context, in Lingchi: Echoes of a Historical Photograph (review).
Two weeks after this date, China abolished the punishment for good.
On this day..
- 1821: Patriarch Gregory V, in his vestments - 2020
- 1945: Hendrik Nicolaas Werkman - 2019
- 2018: Zahid Iqbal - 2018
- 1863: The servile murderers of Isaac Strowd and John Lockhart - 2017
- 1725: James Dunbar, with paternal advice - 2016
- 1879: John Phair - 2015
- 1813: Albrecht Ludwig von Berger and Christian Daniel von Finckh, Oldenburgers - 2014
- 1934: Georges-Alexandre Sarrejani, vitriolic - 2013
- 1959: Leonard Shockley, the last juvenile executed? - 2012
- Unspecified year: Snowball's animal fifth column - 2011
- 1919: Mehmed Kemal, for the Armenian genocide - 2010
- 1548: Gonzalo Pizarro and Francisco de Carvajal - 2009
Entry Filed under: 20th Century,Arts and Literature,Capital Punishment,China,Common Criminals,Crime,Death Penalty,Execution,Gruesome Methods,History,Language,Lingchi,Mature Content,Milestones,Popular Culture,Public Executions
Tags: 1900s, 1905, april 10, beijing, chen chieh-jen, eroticism, erotism, fou tchou-li, georges bataille, opium, orientalism, photography, qing dynasty, susan sontag
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Entender las tradiciones de cada pais, en especial, aquellas que nos parecen “salvajes”, nos lleva a la interpretacion equivocada de los sentimientos de dichas culturas y por lo tanto al entendimiento inadecuado de sus actos.
Thanks, both — wiser heads than mine on Bataille by far. I think it’s this book you mean, Sal?
Fascinating. Check out this book on Bataille- by Stuart Kendall for a good, albeit sensational, introduction
one more. i’m looking at the picture and finding myself mortified at all the other people in it. imagine if you will, just for a minute, being one of the people slicing him up.
it’s hardly bearable just in the imagining.
staggering, really. the whole thing.
outstanding. really nice catch on the Bataille angle, here. I’ve not read Sontag on Bataille, and more’s the pity, since she captures the essence of the Bataille problematic in a couple of pithy sentences, a problematic, as she duly notes, that is utterly alien to so much that is modern. the result of this alterity (or as mark c tayolr would have it, altarity — note the religious pun) is that most people misunderstand bataille in critical ways that vitiate much of what they have to say about him.
and the class issues around this execution would not have been lost on bataille, either, by the way.
and thanks for the (quite appropriate) nod on sebastian. the link here with bataille is utterly appropriate there, as well — what with the eroticization of sebastian, and of course that sense of bliss in the midst of suffering. christ is of course the archetype here, for christians.
one other note in this rambling comment post — i suggest a contrast with the witch subjected to burning in Bergman’s “Seventh Seal,” and the (film’s) hero’s interpretation of the look on *her* face. but that means you’ll have to go watch it. 🙂