WARNING: There is a real photograph of the practice included in the article - it’s extremely graphic and disturbing. The last execution of this kind was in 1905, so photography was available to capture it. In fact, there exists a surprisingly large number of such photographs of different criminals being killed in this manner, so be careful when checking the references or searching online.

I highly recommend the book ‘Death By a Thousand Cuts’ by Timothy Brook et al. It’s also available digitally, if you know where to look for free books. The book does a lot to demystify the practice and the reasons for its specificity, and provides many photographs and detailed accounts of each prisoner and what crimes lead him to his fate. It also goes into Chinese criminal law more generally, as well as the racist manner in which such brutal punishments were described in the Western world at the time. Suffice it to say that no amount of demystification can reduce the practice of lingchi to anything less than a nightmarish display of state cruelty, but this isn’t something unique to China at the time, or indeed the East as a whole. Western states were fond of public displays of overwhelming violence as well. Prisoners being hanged, drawn and quartered in Britain, for example.

There is a lot of nonsense about lingchi online, including the claim that one photograph shows a female victim. This is untrue; it’s a man, who happens to have feminine appearance. His name and criminal deeds are also in the aforementioned book.