[VOL II] PUNISHMENT OF THE TCHA, OR CANGUE, TING-HAI

PUNISHMENT OF THE TCHA, OR CANGUE, TING-HAI

Cover Image: Punishment of Tcha, or Cangue, Ting-hai / DingHai ZhouShan China / Drawn by T. Allom Engraved by G.Paterson – ALAMY Image ID:2X55MR8

*This depicts a prisoner on the streets of Dinghai.In the crowd, there are onlookers enjoying the spectacle and women who appear to be sympathizing with the unfortunate prisoner.

Tis not restraint or liberty,
That makes men prisoners, or free;
But perturbations that possess
The mind, or equanimities.

BUTLER.

THE question of apportioning punishments to crimes, has occupied the reflections of our wisest legislators; and many eminent writers on jurisprudence have treated the subject with learning and mercy. Still, civilized governments have not arrived at a fixed conclusion as to the abolition of capital punishments, or the limit where secondary should begin. The present state of British criminal law in this respect is now truly anomalous, where the most heinous offences against the public credit, the grossest examples of peculation, crimes which only a few years since would have been visited with the ultimate vengeance of offended justice, are now dismissed with banishment to a British colony. The total inadequacy of the punishment, as applied to the patricians of this age and nation, to a commercial community, and where the loss of caste alone would have already operated in driving the criminal into exile, is obvious. It is plain, therefore, that the question of secondary punishments in England, requires further consideration; and, if our statesmen were to procure a transcript and a translation of the Chinese criminal code, they would find many punishments, not belonging to the class of tortures, but of exposures, more likely to operate upon educated minds, in deterring from the commission of crime, than banishment from a country in which the offender is not longer desirous to remain, having already forfeited his social position.

The stocks for plebeians, the pillory for patricians, were secondary chastisements long in use, and abuse, in England; but laid aside precisely at the moment when they became most efficient; that was, when wider-spread education gave such a controlling power to the law of opinion, that few who were ever deemed worthy of public confidence would not have preferred death to the shivering shame of the pillory.

Experience, not of centuries only, but of millennia, has taught the Chinese lawmakers the value of variety in punishments—how to suit correction to the different degrees of guilt, and how palpable was the error of the Stoics; for those

“ Who hold all crimes alike, are deep distrest
When we appeal to Truth’s immortal test.
Sense, custom, social good, from whence arise
All forms of right and wrong, the fact denies.”

In one of our most effective illustrations, Mr. Allom has represented the punishment of the pantze, or bastinado, which of course admits of being regulated by the degree of criminality in the culprit.

For offences of a somewhat grave description, the Tcha, or Cangue, is one of the most frequent and distressing. Its severity, however, is referable rather to mental agony than bodily suffering, and in this property consists its virtue. The instrument itself is a heavy wooden frame-work, formed of two sections fastened at one end by a hinge, and at the other by a lock or screw. The neck of the culprit passes through a hole in the centre, and his hands through smaller apertures on each side. Sometimes he is indulged with the freedom of one hand, which he employs in relieving the weight of the cangue from his galled shoulders.

Over the screw which secures the sections enclosing the offender’s neck, a paper is generally pasted, to which is affixed the seal or chop of the committing mandarin; and over another part of the log, a placard setting forth the crime which is visited by this degradation.

The weight of these moveable pillories is from sixty to two hundred pounds avoirdupois, and the time of endurance is proportioned, according to the judgment of the magistrate, to the magnitude of the offence. A criminal has been known to endure a heavy cangue for half a year, passing his nights in the dungeons of the city-gate, and when day appeared, led by a chain to the most frequented of the city-gates. The keeper, armed with a thick bamboo, or large thong-whip, conducts him to some position where he may recline against a wall, and ease his shoulders of their ponderous load. If both the culprit’s hands be confined, he cannot raise food or drink to his mouth, in which case the attendant feeds him with the wretched jail-allowance; or some compassionate occupants of the adjoining houses, near to which he happens to be placed for the day, supply him with refreshments. One of the aggravations of this collar of infamy is the ridicule to which the wearer is exposed from all the idle urchins that crowd the streets, at his inability to feed himself, and at the total dependence of one, who was once as powerful as profligate, upon the compassion and benevolence of those whom possibly he may formerly have wronged.

But the offended majesty of Chinese law does not become appeased on all occasions by the imposition of the cangue; sometimes the mandarins think proper to inflict a number of blows with the bamboo on the liberated wearer; sometimes banishment from the district is added; and, should the offence be deemed unpardonable, though still not deserving of capital punishment, perpetual exile from the empire is pronounced.

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