Reflections | Like the Taliban, Chinese once publicly displayed bodies of the executed, in a form called ‘abandoned in the marketplace’
- Examples of the ancient Chinese form of punishment suggest the victims’ bodies were left for public display as an indication of the severity of their crimes
- One famous case involved the vice-censor-in-chief of Empress Wu Zetian, whose corpse was left in the open and mutilated by his enemies.
Weeks after the United States abandoned Afghanistan and allowed the Taliban to take over, the acts for which the latter were infamous were put on display, literally. Taliban authorities in Herat executed four alleged kidnappers and hung their bodies in public. A note on the chest of one of the corpses read: “Whoever kidnaps others, will end up like this.”
There were notable examples in England, such as Henry VIII’s chief minister Thomas Cromwell (circa 1485–1540) whose decapitated head was placed on a spike on London Bridge; and Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658), a descendant of Thomas and England’s first and only republican head of state, whose head was posthumously removed from his exhumed body and displayed outside Westminster Hall from 1661 to 1685.
The most horrible punishment of hanging, drawing and quartering saw the victim hanged until almost dead, and then vivisected to remove his intestines, which were burnt before him. Finally, his head was cut off and the body hacked into four pieces, which would be publicly displayed.
The Chinese had the form of punishment called qishi (literally “abandoned [in the] marketplace”). There is some debate over what it entailed but the examples suggest the victims’ bodies were left for public display as an indication of the severity of their crimes.
