YELLOW FIENDS.

Auckland Star, Volume XXXI, Issue 196, 18 August 1900, Page 1 (Supplement)

YELLOW FIENDS.

DIABOLICAL CHINESE TORTUKES

The Chinese have for long been famous fdr the peculiarity and flendishness of their tortures. Mr Charles Hannan. has introduced into, his new novel, "The Captive of Pekin," an account of some of the methods of torture, which are appar-

ently still employed in the Celestial Empire. There is, to begin with, the torture of molten lead. The victim is bound hand and foot with ropes, arid a barber shaves his head till it is speckless. Then a cloth is bound tightly round the skull while lead is being melted under intense heat in a pot. Binding his prisoner to an upright post until movement is impossible the executioner removes the cloth from the skull and takes a small spoon, holding one drop of the molten lead. The exposure creates a feeling of cold, and before this has died away the drop of lead falls upon the bared head, eating into the flesh.

Another favourite torture acts upon the mind and palate. All the prisoner's food and drink is tainted with a peculiar, all-pervading flavour. It is never absent. The victim in all probability believes that he is being slowly poisoned, and, moreover, the constant recurrence of the flavour in everything- lie touches creates nausea. In a third torture, that of the White Bird, the prisoner is bound in a sitting posture at the foot of a tree._ His ankles are secured in a species of stocks. He can see his legs as far as the ankles, but he cannot see what goes on at the other side of the stocks, where his feet project. A little distance above the toes a little rod of wood, like a bird's perch, is placed. On the perch is a white bird with a strong and piercing beak. In that position it is starved until sooner or later it begins to eat the toes and feet of the agonised victim.