A Chinese man's head after garrotting exposed in a wooden cage hanging from a pole; his four children standing in front of it. Wood engraving, 1857.

"The penal code of China, arranged under no fewer than fifteen hundred and fifty-seven heads, is marked by great barbarity. The punishments are in general most cruel, and ill proportioned to the crimes for which they are inflicted: for the slightest offence a mandarin is degraded, banished, and even deprived of all property. We have engraved three specimens of the Chinese tortures, selected from a series of beautifully-executed drawings in colours, upon rice paper, in a small folio volume, which has been obtained in Canton by an officer of the Hon. East India Company's Service. Some of the tortures which are pictured in this volume are most repulsive, and altogether too cruel and barbarous for reproduction. Those which we have selected will serve to convey some idea of the cruelties by which the penal code of the Chinese is to this day disgraced. First is a criminal being led by a chain to execution. A flat lath, or strip of wood, which is attached to his neck in such a manner as to project above his head, bears, in Chinese characters, a description of his crime, the nature of which however it is difficult to guess, on account of the number of capital offences in the Chinese code. The second illustration shows the next stage in the criminal's doom—the garotte, with which, partly through "ticket-of-leave" experiments, the people of this country have of late become acquainted. The Chinese infliction is a terrible torture. In the accompanying illustration the criminal is seen attached to a cross by cords, which the executioner gradually tightens by means of a lever till the blood gushes from the eyes, nose, ears, and mouth of the culprit. The last scene shows the head of the criminal exposed in a cage whilst, as a climax to the punishment, his children are, by the merciful consideration of the Celestial authorities, made to take a mora[l] lesson by looking at the disfigured head of their dead father. A drawing illustrative of decapitation and disembowelling (which intervenes between that of the garotte and the exposure of the head) is too horrible for publication."--Illustrated London news, loc. cit.