HAVE YOU HEARD OF THE CHINA "DEATH BY A THOUSAND CUTS..? SOME SAY IT VERY BRUTAL...

  China - Death by a Thousand Cuts

From the Tang dynasty until the final years of the Qing, a form of capital punishment set itself apart from the rest for its particularly cruel and brutal practices. The ancient Chinese torture tactic known as lingchi — which translates loosely to “slow slicing,” “lingering death,” or “death by a thousand cuts” — was used as a method of execution from the seventh century up until 1905, when it was officially outlawed. 

There are some records and photographs of of this still being used “unofficially' into the 1930's – 1940's as punishment by local people in some areas of China. In one case, a woman was stripped naked in a town then town's people would cut her with small knifes as she tried to escape to safety in the the county side out of the town. (I saw the photo of her running – do not know if she made it to safety and survived).

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100 years ago today in 1919, as the established order of the world was seemingly being torn apart in a violent upsurge of nationalism and socialism everywhere,

in India, fifty Gurkha, Sikh, Baluchi, and Rajput troops led by the veteran military commander, Reginald Dyer – egged on by the old-school Irish governor of the Punjab, Michael O’Dwyer - opened fire on a gathering of thousands of unarmed civilians concentrated in the gardens of Jallianwala Bagh outside the Golden Temple of the Holy City of Amritsar, culminating in the notorious Amritsar Massacre. The slaughter outraged both Indians and Britons alike with both Dyer and O’Dwyer subsequently losing their positions thereafter. Many historians consider this to have been the watershed moment that prompted the push for Indian independence. 

Millions of Indians had laboured, fought, and died for Britain in the Great War yet the support of the jewel in the crown of the empire had by no means been wholly unswerving.

 In 1915 British intelligence had uncovered a plot known as the Ghadar Conspiracy to launch a pan-Indian mutiny akin to that of 1857. Coupled with this were a series of other schemes of collaboration between Indian dissenters and the Kaiser’s government. Though all these plots were nipped in the bud they led to the British ushering in the India Defence Act which curbed civil and political liberties. 

Given that it was wartime and that the fate of the British Empire was in the balance this had been somewhat tolerable. Yet when the war ended in 1918 the British Raj proved unwilling to loosen its grip as they still perceived themselves to be faced with manifold potential threats including a possible attack from Afghanistan and persisting infiltration of German and Bolshevik cells. To this was added the recent alliance of Hindu and Muslim interests with the Lucknow Pact of 1916 calling for further reforms.

 The Rowlatt Act, or the Black Act as it was known, was thus introduced which indefinitely extended emergency wartime measures that marginalised civil liberties. Rather unsurprisingly this was not taken well by the Indian people who rallied to Mahatma Gandhi’s call for action. Though the recently returned Gandhi had asserted that the protests be strictly peaceful, it did not take long for riots to start cropping up around the country. 

Protests were most vigorous and intense in the Punjab region where the government was close to being totally paralysed as the streets became jammed with protestors.

 Presiding over this was swiftly deteriorating situation was Sir Michael ‘Micky’ Francis O’Dwyer, a Tipperary man whom had been lieutenant-governor of the Punjab since 1912 but had been a civil servant in India since 1885 and harboured paternalistic views of how India should be governed, perceiving popular Indian aspirations for greater autonomy as the product of nefarious conspiracies, and rather unsurprisingly had been a vocal advocate of the draconian emergency measures. When Hindus and Muslims gathered together in Amritsar for the Ram Naumi festival he saw it as the manifestation of such a conspiracy and ordered the arrest of the Muslim leader, Saifuddin Kitchew, and the Hindu leaders Dr. Satyapal and Gandhi. 

This served only to provoke yet more rioting with British troops being stoned in the streets and the English missionary, Marcella Sherwood, being beset upon by a mob in a narrow street on her journey home wherein she stripped naked, kicked, beaten and left for dead. O’Dwyer convened with Colonel Reginald Dyer, a veteran colonial soldier. Both of them perceived the growing unrest as a precursor to a repeat of the Mutiny of 1857 and further draconian rules were announced for the Punjab, forbidding the gathering of any more than four people in public. 

The proclamation of these measures however went largely unheeded and coincided not only with the traditional Sikh festival of Baisakhi, marking the new Sikh year that would attract thousands of pilgrims to the holy city of Amritsar, but also with the intentions of the independence movement to hold a protest in Amritsar against their leaders’ detention. 

The crowd that gathered in Jallianwala Bagh was a mix of Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs, amounting to somewhere between ten and twenty thousand people. Upon hearing of this gathering Dyer rallied his men and set out to crush them. Though he brought along armoured cars armed with machine guns, the narrow entrances into the area meant that they had to leave them behind. Nevertheless, he and his soldiers filed in with their Lee-Enfield bolt-action rifles.

 Without giving any warning or any call on the crowd to disperse, they opened fire, aiming at the areas where there was the greatest concentration of people first before firing towards the narrow exits as the panicking crowd scattered, stampeding and trampling over one another in the desperate race for safety with some even jumping into a well. Dyer and his men kept shooting until they had run out of ammunition, having fired 1,650 rounds, then packed up and left, leaving the wounded and the dying to their own devices. 

O’Dwyer supported Dyer’s actions and brought in martial law. The day after the massacre Dyer gave a statement in Urdu to the people of Amritsar further intimidating them, asking: “Do you want war or peace? If you wish for a war, the Government is prepared for it, and if you want peace, then obey my orders and open all your shops; else I will shoot.

 For me the battlefield of France or Amritsar is the same… Speak up if you want war? You have committed a bad act in killing the English. The revenge will be taken upon you and upon your children.” After visiting the hospitalised Marcella Sherwood whose attack had served as the pretext for the massacre, Dyer ordered all Indian men to crawl on their hands and knees down the length of the street she had been attacked on, reasoning that “Some Indians crawl face downwards in front of their gods. 

I wanted them to know that a British woman is as sacred as a Hindu god.” Any Indians that came too close to a British policeman were also subjected to public whippings. Though Sherwood rather predictably viewed Dyer as “the saviour of the Punjab” for his actions, this view was far from universal. 

The news of the massacre and Dyer’s utter remorselessness was not received well either in India or Britain with even Winston Churchill condemning it as a “monstrous event.” At a time when Britain was in the middle of a peace conference aimed at depriving Germany of her colonies on the grounds of “German beastliness”, the use of terror on helpless Indian subjects did not sit well. Both O’Dwyer and Dyer were of an older colonial generation and were divorced from these developments back in Britain. 

Though neither of them were ever truly punished for their actions, Dyer was passed over promotion and was eventually forced to resign from the army, spending the rest of his days justifying himself to the British public that he had been right to open fire.

 O’Dwyer likewise was relieved of his position, spending the rest of his days also justifying Dyer’s actions while writing books on the history of his family in Ireland. In 1940 he was assassinated at Caxton Hall by Udham Singh, a survivor of the massacre who reasoned that O’Dwyer “was the real culprit. He wanted to crush the spirit of my people. So I crushed him.” Udham Singh remains a national hero in India to this day.

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