There are perhaps few subjects more difficult for scholars to address than past forms of capital punishment, especially those that do not simply punish, but literally torment the victim to death. Following in the footsteps of Michel Foucault's account of the execution of François Damiens in Discipline and Punish (New York: Vintage, 1979), the authors of this volume take on the daunting task of making cultural and historical sense out of one of the more disturbing forms of such torment—imperial China's execution of the criminal through the systematic dismemberment of the living body (lingchi). Seeking neither to sensationalize nor to project current values onto the past, the authors insist that it is necessary to provide a detailed history of capital punishment in China and to place such events in a comparative frame with European practices. While readers may shudder at the images reproduced here, the authors succeed in making sense out of what Europeans since the Enlightenment have viewed as an especially barbarous form of public execution by a society that claimed to be civilized.

The book opens with the execution of Wang Weiqin in Beijing in 1904, one of the last lingchi executions before the legal reforms of the following year. From this event, the authors introduce themes and questions that run throughout the book. The first involves a sequence of photographs of Wang's execution that exist in France. They make up one instance among several in which European and American cameras recorded, from roughly 1895 forward, public executions in China. What are we to make of the Euro-American fascination with these events, the authors wonder, especially when we realize that the images also circulated on postcards, and, I might add, in the illustrated press in Europe and North America. They address these issues by tracing the role of Chinese torture in the Western imagination and exploring the place of such images from the early sixteenth century onward in animating this imaginary. In a sense, the gruesome photograph simply reinscribed more vividly what was already held to be true about Oriental despotism. Such photo opportunities also made late imperial China into a living museum of a supposedly now transcended European past.

The photographs could serve other purposes as well. The attraction and repulsion evident in the production, circulation, and collection of the images made them available at later times for other kinds of projects (including, as the authors aver, this one). Unmoored from their context, images of the tormented body could illustrate universal, timeless realities. As Jérôme Bourgon explains, Georges Bataille, in his Tears of Eros (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1989), saw the victim, in the midst of suffering, as expressing a transcendent ecstasy.

The second big question concerns the relationship between Chinese forms of punishment and Western perceptions of Chinese law. From early contact, Europeans were fascinated with Chinese laws and forms of punishment. Moreover, not all discussions of punishment in China were necessarily negative until at least the nineteenth century. Even then, Chinese lingchi and beheading could be rationalized on the grounds that such acts helped discipline an unruly population. However, once settlements appeared in China's treaty ports, one motive for Euro-Americans to establish extraterritorial rights was to ensure that none of their numbers would be victimized by such uncivilized punishments.

The third and richest set of questions involves how lingchi became a form of execution in China in the first place. It is a late arrival, appearing in the Liao dynasty (907–1125 ce). The authors hypothesize that harsher punishments emerged with the conquest of North China and with a growing sense of institutional decay among China's literate class. In the case of lingchi, the harshness lay in a dismemberment “beyond which the body could not reassume its integrity or its dignity” (p. 93). This moment, the authors argue, was a “leveling” of the victim, an act directed as much at the criminal's family as against the individual, which effectively ended the family's ritual continuity. Such state ruthlessness had its Chinese critics. From its inception in the Liao dynasty through the Ming and Qing, some argued that lingchi was cruel and unusual punishment, but state actors ignored their entreaties, preferring instead to reserve the practice for heinous crimes (regicide, patricide, mass murder), which also offered an opportunity to demonstrate in spectacular form the power of the state.

This is an outstanding study of a very difficult subject. Having had some experience in dealing with the ethical issues raised by the reproduction of similar images, I commend the authors on their thoughtful, sensitive use of the images presented here. They also should be commended for rigorously historicizing lingchi and, in so doing, providing a model for collaborative, comparative, and transregional history.