The Cruel Clerks

The secret police operated out of a compound reached through the Gate of Beautiful Scenery, or Lijing-men in west Luoyang. A wag among them renamed the gate by suggesting new characters with the same sound - the Gate of Legal Finality, implying that all hope should be abandoned by any who entered it. These 'cruel clerks' certainly did everything in their power to ensure that a suspect would confess to a crime, and thereby justify their arrest in the first place.

Prisoners were kept underground, in conditions that were not only dark and unsanitary, but at depths designed to ensure they were also unpleasantly cold. If sleep deprivation and repeated interrogations failed to result in a suitable statement of guilt, the clerks would move on to tortures as prescribed in the Classic of Entrapment - mud in the ears, hanging by the hair, and bamboo slivers under the fingernails. There was also a variant on the process known around the world as 'Chinese water torture', in which a victim was dangled upside down, and vinegar was dribbled into his nostrils. An even more fiendish method involved a metal cage around the victim's head, into which wedges could be introduced that gradually increased pressure on the skull, causing it to fracture.

One torture device was similar to a European medieval rack, twisting and bending a victim's limbs in progressive degrees. Another used the same process, but without the gradual intensity - instead, heavy counterweights would fall on the end of ropes, in order to savagely tug at the prisoner's limbs. Another seemed designed to squeeze the breath out of a prisoner by the slow application of weight to his chest. All had names that evoke the terrifyingly matter-of-fact nature of the cruel clerk's atrocities: Stop All Pulses, Pant No More, Howling on the Ground, Instant Confession, Horror Supreme, Dying Pig's Rattle and Beg for Instant Death. One, called Beg For Family Ruin, demonstrated a confidence that a prisoner would willingly implicate others if he were locked inside it. The last two, It Is True and I Am Rebel, display a cynical attitude towards the nature of these 'confessions', implying that people would agree to literally anything to escape the pain.

One Marshal Hao was dragged off kicking and screaming to his execution, yelling curses at Wu and her family, and, in an unexpected development, shouting out 'palace secrets' to the crowd. His guards attempted to keep him quiet, but he was somehow able to seize a branch from a nearby wagon, and began attacking them with it. Eventually, his executioners killed him on the spot, without the ceremonial usually associated with such punishments, and thereafter criminals were gagged and bound on their way to executions.

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Excerpt 1: Brute Beasts
Excerpt 2: Treacherous Fox