Torture in China
– N K Tripathi
Torture for political and religious cause has been a usual practice everywhere since pre-history. Chinese history is no exception. Sometimes back, I wrote about a remarkable book by John Keay, ‘ China A History’, unravelling three thousand years. I did not mention torture then in China, but now I recall and put some instances.
Han was the first dynasty of unified China. Its first Emperor Liu Bang died in 194 BC. His wife Dowager Lu was declared Empress. Emperor’s other wife was Queen Chi. Chi’s great sin was to give birth to an imperial contender to the throne. Empress Dowager Lu ordered Queen Chi to be made a human pig. This meant making her a blind, dumb and a miserable creature without ears, feet or hands. In this condition she was thrown into the toilet to die after several days.
The first Emperor ( without dynasty ) of China, Qin Zheng Shi Huangdi died in 210 BC. After six months of his death, his Prime Minister Li Si and general Zhao Gao captured the palace and took the minor prince under control, but Zhao Gao condemned Li Si for treachery. Li Si had to undergo five penalties – tattoo, amputation of ears, nose, fingers, feet, flogging, beheading and public display of the severed head. Rest of the body was cut to pieces.
In 654, at the behest of the Emperor Tang Taizong himself, a lower ranking woman of the Palace Wu Zhao suffocated to death her own little daughter and alleged that Empress Wang had killed her child. Wu Zhao endeared the Emperor and became the Empress. . Not to take any chance, she finished her coup by having the ex Empress, on the false charge of the murder of the baby, surgically dismembered her limb by limb and then drowned in a vet of wine. Empress Wu Zhao ruled the largest empire of China in its history for 50 years. She led the whole life of a very loose character.
In Chinese history, with sickening regularity, any treacherous or suspicious general or minister was not killed alone but also his friends and kinsmen, numbering several hundreds, were brutally killed. However, China is not the only place of such ghastly incidents. World history, including Indian, is replete with similar brutalities.
Even today, in spite of all the nations of the world signing the UN charter, torture continues in the world. Torture by the state agencies takes place in custody, in intelligence espionage and wars. We can wish and hope that sometime human conscience will prevail.
