The beheading at the hour of the Horse; executioners stopping after their ninety-ninth beheading; three thousand cuts for a death by a thousand cuts; raw meat hidden in the condemned man's final meal. Most of what you firmly believe about these things was probably invented by storytellers.
This is a Chinese history that tells you everything about beheading.
From the cauldrons in the Shang dynasty that boiled people alive into meat paste, to the yellow dog Li Si wanted to take with him to his execution; from Ji Kang playing a final tune of Guangling Melody at the execution ground, to the afternoon when the people of an entire city fought over the chance to eat Yuan Chonghuan's flesh; from Deng Haishan's lonely life, having beheaded three hundred people yet finding no one willing to marry him, to Shen Jiaben's memorial that abolished a thousand-year-old form of torture.
A history of the death penalty reveals the imperial throne, the human heart, and an entire system of obsessions with life and death.
