Sandalwood Death (33 page)
Led by their commanding officers, the soldiers shouted in unison:
“Absolute fidelity to the Throne, devoted service to His Excellency!”
Yuan Shikai returned to his seat and nodded imperceptibly to his aide, Zhang Xun, who grasped his meaning at once.
“Let the execution begin!” he shouted.
Zhao Jia stepped up in front of Qian Xiongfei, where his apprentice handed him a knife of the highest quality, one made specifically for this purpose.
“My friend,” he said under his breath, “I ask your pardon.”
Despite his attempt to face death without flinching, Qian Xiongfei could not keep his pale lips from quivering, and his irrepressible terror was exactly what Zhao Jia needed to recoup his pride of profession. In that instant, his heart turned as hard as steel and he was as calm as still water. He no longer saw a living human being in front of him. Bound to the execution post was nothing more than blood, flesh, tendons, and bones, assembled in a pattern determined by heavenly forces. Without warning, he drove his fist into Qian Xiongfei’s chest directly above the heart. Qian’s eyes rolled up into his head, and before the effect of that blow had worn off, with a quick circular motion of the hand holding the knife, Zhao snipped a circle of flesh the size of a bronze coin off of the other side of Qian’s chest. He had neatly excised one of Qian’s nipples, leaving a wound that looked like a blind man’s eye.
In accordance with an unwritten practice of the profession, Zhao Jia held the nipple on the tip of his blade in full view of His Excellency Yuan and the officers behind him. Then he displayed the fleshy coin to the five thousand foot soldiers in front of him, as his apprentice announced:
“The first cut!”
The detached nipple seemed to him to jiggle. He heard the rapid, nervous breathing of the officers behind him and a forced little cough from Excellency Yuan. He did not have to look to picture the bloodless faces of the mounted officers. He knew also that their hearts, including Yuan Shikai’s, were pounding at that moment. And that thought instilled in him pleasant feelings of gratification. In recent years, many important men had fallen into the hands of Board of Punishments executioners, and he had grown used to seeing pitiful exhibitions on the execution ground by high-ranking officials who had swaggered through life when they were in power. Not one in a hundred was worthy of the manly Qian Xiongfei, who could suppress his feelings of terror while undergoing cruel torture to the point that they were virtually imperceptible. At that moment, at least, Zhao felt a sense of supremacy. I am not me; I am the agent of the Emperor and the Empress Dowager, the embodiment of the laws of the Great Qing Dynasty!
Sunlight flashed on his blade as, with a flick of his wrist, the piece of human flesh flew from the tip of the knife high into the air, like a pellet, before settling heavily on the head of a swarthy soldier, like a glob of bird shit. The man screeched, as if a brick had landed on his head; he wobbled uncertainly.
Based on an age-old executioner’s custom, the first piece of the victim is a sacrifice to heaven.
Fresh blood oozed from the hole in Qian’s chest like a string of bright red pearls. Some dripped to the ground; some snaked down from the edges of the wound to stain his muscular chest.
The second cut, taken from the left side, was as deftly and neatly accomplished as the first. The remaining nipple was cut away. Qian’s chest was now decorated by matching holes the size of bronze coins. Less blood flowed this time. The blow to his chest had made his heart contract, and that had abated the flow of blood throughout his body, a technique that had evolved out of the experience of generations of executioners in the Bureau of Detentions, perfection based on trial and error.
Qian maintained the noble expression of fearlessness he had worn before the first cut, but a series of moans so soft that only Zhao Jia could hear them emerged, seemingly from his ears, not his mouth. Zhao forced himself to look away from Qian’s face. He was used to hearing wretched shrieks of pain from condemned prisoners as they were being sliced, howls that did nothing to disturb his unfaltering composure. But not hearing a sound from the valiant Qian Xiongfei, who clenched his teeth to keep from crying out, actually rattled him, as if something terrible were about to happen. Forcibly controlling his emotions, he raised the fleshy coin on the tip of his knife, as he knew he must do, displaying it first to His Excellency, then to the officers, and last to the ashen-faced soldiers, who stood before him like clay statues. His apprentice announced:
“The second cut!”
Zhao Jia had figured out that the legal and psychological foundation for the ritual of displaying fleshy parts sliced from the prisoner’s body to the officials in charge of the execution and to the observers was built on three principles: First, it was a display of the harsh rule of law and the unflinching dedication to it by the executioner. Second, it served to instill the fear of retribution in the minds of witnesses, who could be counted on to turn away from evil thoughts and criminal behavior. That was why the Imperial Court had staged public executions and encouraged attendance by the populace throughout the nation’s dynastic history. Third, it satisfied people’s bloodlust. The finest play ever staged cannot compete with the spectacle of a public slicing, and for this more than any other reason, executioners in the capital were contemptuous of actors, who were so highly favored in royal circles.
As he held up the second piece of Qian’s flesh for all to see, Zhao was reminded of scenes from his youth, when he was learning the trade from his shifu. In order to perfect the fine art of the slicing death, executioners for the Bureau of Detentions worked closely with a butcher shop just outside Chongwen Gate. During the off-season, the shifu took his students to the shop to practice their skills; there they helped turn the meat from countless pigs into filling for dumplings, and in the process developed a dexterity of hand and eye as accurate as a scale. If the call was for a pound of meat, a single cut would produce exactly sixteen ounces. When Grandma Yu was the keeper of the Bureau of Detentions official seal, the execution team opened a butcher shop on Walking Stick Lane in the Xisi, or West Fourth, District, where they slaughtered animals in back and sold the meat up front, enjoying a brisk business until one day someone revealed their identities. People not only stopped coming to buy their meat, they obsessively avoided the area, fearing they might be taken off the street and butchered.
He recalled that his shifu kept a secret book with brittle, yellowing pages and crude drawings, with coded writing. According to Grandma Yu, the book,
Secrets of a Penal Office
, had been passed down by a Ming Dynasty grandma; it comprised lists of punishments, their concrete applications, matters to take into consideration, and copious illustrations. In a word, it was a classic text for executioners. Shifu pointed out to him and his fellow apprentices an illustration and accompanying text that described in detail the particulars of the slicing death, of which there were three levels. The first level required 3,357 cuts. For the second level it was 2,896, and for the third, 1,585. Regardless of how many cuts there were to be, he recalled hearing Shifu say, the final cut was the one that ended the prisoner’s life. So when the cutting began, the spacing between cuts must be precisely designed to fit the sex and physique of the condemned individual. If the prisoner died before the required number of cuts had been reached or was still alive after, the executioner had not done his job well. His shifu said that the minimum standard for the slicing death was the proportional size of the flesh removed—when placed on a scale, there should be only minimal differences. To that end, during an execution, the man with the knife must have his emotions under complete control. His mind must be clear and focused, his hand ruthless and resolute; he must simultaneously be like a maiden practicing embroidery and a butcher slaughtering a mule. The slightest hesitancy or indecision, even a spur-of-the-moment thought, would affect the hand in unwanted ways. This, the pinnacle of achievement, was exceedingly difficult to attain. The musculature of a human being varies from spot to spot in density and coherence. Knowing where to insert the knife, and with how much pressure, requires a skill that, over time, had become second nature. Gifted executioners, such as Elder Gao Tao and Elder Zhang Tang, sliced not with a knife and not with their hands, but with their minds and their eyes. Among the thousands of slicing deaths carried out down through the ages, none, it seems, had achieved perfection and been worthy of the term “masterpiece.” In virtually every case, what was accomplished was merely the dissection of a living human being. That appeared to explain why fewer cuts were required for slicing deaths in recent years. In the current dynasty, five hundred was the apex. And yet, precious few executions lasted nearly that long. Board of Punishments executioners, in respectful devotion to the sacred nature of this ancient profession, performed their duties in accordance with established practices handed down over time. But at the provincial, prefectural, sub-prefectural, and county levels, dragons and fish were all jumbled together—the good mixed with the bad—and most practitioners were hacks and local riffraff who did shoddy work and exerted minimal effort. If on a prisoner sentenced to five hundred cuts they made it to two or three hundred, that was considered a success. Most of the time, they chopped the victim into several chunks and quickly put him out of his misery.
Zhao Jia flung the second piece of meat cut from Qian’s body to the ground. To an executioner, the second piece of the victim is a sacrifice to the earth.
When Zhao was displaying the piece of meat on the tip of his knife for all to see, he was, he felt, the central figure, while the tip of his knife and the flesh stuck on it were the center of that center. The eyes of everyone in attendance, from the supremely prideful Excellency Yuan down to the most junior soldier in the formation, followed the progress of his knife, or, more accurately, the progress of Qian’s flesh impaled on that knife. When Qian’s flesh flew into the air, the observers’ eyes followed its ascent; when Qian’s flesh was flung to the ground, the observers’ eyes followed its descent. According to his shifu, in slicing deaths of old, every piece of flesh cut from the victim was laid out on a specially prepared surface, so that when the execution was completed, the official observer, along with members of the victim’s family, could come forward to count. One piece too many or too few was a serious transgression. According to his master, one slapdash executioner of the Song Dynasty made one too many cuts, and the complaint by the victim’s family cost him his life. Public executioner has always been a precarious profession, since a poor performance can itself be a death sentence. Consider: you must remove pieces of roughly the same size, the last cut must be the fatal one, and you must keep track of every cut you make. Three thousand three hundred and fifty-seven cuts require a full day, and there were times, by order of the sentencing authority, when the process was stretched out to three or as many as five days, making the work that much harder. A staunchly dedicated executioner invariably collapsed from fatigue at the end of a slicing death. As time went on, executioners heeded the travails of their predecessors by flinging away the excised flesh rather than laying it out for others to count. Old execution grounds were known for the wild dogs, crows, and vultures that prowled the area; slicing deaths provided feast days for these visitors.
He dipped a clean chamois into a basin of salty water and wiped the blood from Qian’s chest. The knife holes now resembled the fresh scars of severed tree branches. Then he made his third cut on Qian’s chest. Also about the size of a bronze coin, it was made in the shape of a fish scale. This fresh wound abutted the edge of one of the earlier wounds but retained its distinct shape. His shifu had said that this had a name of its own—the fish-scale cut, for that is exactly what it resembled. The flesh exposed by the third cut was a ghostly white, from which only a few drops of blood poked out, the sign of a good beginning; that augured well for the entire process, to his immense satisfaction. Shifu had said that a successful slicing death was marked by a modest flow of blood. He had told him that the blow to the heart before the first cut constricted the victim’s major arteries. Most of the blood was then concentrated in his abdomen and calves. Only then can you make a series of cuts, like slicing a cucumber, without killing the victim. Absent this technique, blood will flow unchecked, creating a terrible stench and staining the body, which has a powerful effect on the observers and destroys the symmetry of the cuts—a real mess. To be sure, a lifetime of experience had equipped these men with a talent to deal with any unanticipated situation. They were not easily flustered or caught unprepared. For instance, if a heavy flow of blood made cutting difficult or impossible, the immediate recourse was to empty a bucket of cold water on the victim. The shock would constrict his arteries. If that did not work, a bucket of vinegar would. According to the
Compendium of Materia Medica
, vinegar is an astringent whose properties work to stanch the flow of blood. If that too failed, removing a piece of flesh from each calf served as a bloodletting. This last technique, however, normally led to an early death from a loss of blood. But Qian’s arteries appeared to be well constricted. Zhao Jia could relax, for indications were that today’s affair had a good chance of success, and the bucket of aged Shanxi vinegar on the ground near the post would not be needed. In the unwritten code of the profession, the shop that supplied a bucket of vinegar received no payment for it and was required to give the executioner a “vinegar reclaim fee” if it was not used. The vinegar had to be donated by the merchant, not sold, and a fee for its non-use was an extravagantly unreasonable demand. And yet the Qing Dynasty placed greater value on ancestral precedents than on the law. However outmoded or irrational a practice, so long as there was a historical precedent, it could not and must not be abandoned. To the contrary, it gained increased inviolability over time. In Qing tradition, a criminal who was about to be executed enjoyed the privilege of sampling food and drink at any establishment passed on his way to the execution ground, free of charge. And the executioner enjoyed the privilege of receiving a free bucket of vinegar as well as a fee for not using it. By rights, the vinegar should have been returned to the shop that supplied it, but it was sold to a pharmacy instead, for now that it had soaked up the blood airs of the executed criminal, it was no longer ordinary vinegar, but a cure-all for the sick and dying, and had acquired the name “blessed vinegar.” Naturally, the pharmacy paid for this bucket of “blessed vinegar,” and since executioners were given no fees for the tasks they performed, they were forced to rely upon such earnings to make a living. He flung the third piece of flesh into the air, a sacrifice to the ghosts and gods. His apprentice announced:
