In 1999, Chinese archaeologists unearthed a human skeleton with the right foot missing. Recent medical analysis of the incomplete remains of the female, who was discovered at a site in Shaanxi province, determined that she had been the victim of yue , a cruel form of punishment in ancient China where a criminal’s foot was amputated. Yue was one of the Five Punishments meted out as penalties for the most heinous crimes in China for close to a millennia before the early imperial period. These punishments were marked by extreme cruelty and designed to cause the most intense physical pain and psychological anguish for the individuals found guilty and the people around them. Although there were written statutes in the Chinese kingdoms and states that matched the crimes to the punishments, more often than not, the rulers’ personal whims, political considerations and other factors decided the type of punishments that the victims suffered. The first, and lightest, among the Five Punishments was tattooing. Indelible markings were made on the criminal’s face or other visible parts of the body, usually words that described their misdemeanours or the location of their exile or hard labour camp. These tattoos permanently and very visibly marked out their bearers as ex-criminals for life. Hated by generations of Chinese, their reappearing statues teach not to forget Then came rhinotomy, or cutting off the criminal’s nose. Like tattooing, it left the victim scarred for life. But because blades and bloodletting were involved, rhinotomy and the next two penalties often resulted in death because of attendant infections. Next up the scale was yue . There were variations in the punishment in different periods, where the choice of the foot removed depended on the severity of the crimes committed: amputation of the right foot for very serious crimes, and the left for lighter offences. It would seem that the woman, who was determined to be in her early 30s when she died, had committed the former. The fourth punishment was gong , the permanent removal of a person’s reproductive function. Male victims of this punishment were castrated. A very famous casualty was Sima Qian (145BC-86BC), the emasculated father of traditional Chinese history-writing. Gong punishments for female victims might have involved pounding the women’s abdomen with a stout stick to induce some kind of damage to the womb. The last of the Five Punishments was death. However, there were different varieties of deaths, from simple strangulation or decapitation to boiling or grilling a person alive, and making literal mincemeat of a person’s flesh and salting it. The cruelty was deliberate and designed to cause maximum pain to the victims and their families, as well as to shock and deter others from committing similar crimes. Thankfully, by the early Han period in the early 2nd century BC, Chinese society had evolved to a point where rulers saw fit to replace the barbaric punishments with the “new” Five Punishments, which evolved over the centuries. They were whipping, flogging, hard labour, exile and capital punishment. Death was still the ultimate price to pay, but gone were the cruel and unusual ways to die. This is not to say that the older punishments were not meted out any more – tattooing persisted until the end of the Qing dynasty in the early 20th century – but their frequency was greatly reduced and punishments like rhinotomy and yue disappeared altogether. Collective punishment in China: a thing of the past? In the present day, capital punishment is still carried out in many countries, including developed ones like Japan, Singapore and the United States. I am against the death penalty because I believe no person, in the absence of clear and present danger, has the right to decide who should live or die. It’s as simple as that.