Democratic Sentinel, Volume 17, Number 50, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 December 1893 — A HORRIBLE FATE. [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

A HORRIBLE FATE.

The Cruel Punishment Inflicted on a Chinese Malefactor. It has been said that the Chinese Inflict crueler punishment for legal crimes than any other people. This seems true if the latest reports of the execution of a malefactor there can be believed. Four

men were captured some time ago at Chin -Kiang, near the mouth of the Yang-tse-Kiang, who had, for some months past; carried on a systematic course of kidnaping children, ono of the most heinous crimes known to Chinese law. They hvereduly tried and finally sentenced t o

death by the slow process of starvation and exposure in a cage. This sentence was first carried out on the ringleader aud ono morning, early in September, he was placed in the cage, standing upright on a pile of bricks a foot high, with his head projecting above, and his neck tightly fitted into a hole in the roof. Thero ho stood in a crowded street, the burning sun pouring its flerco rays upon him, without food ordrink, and jeered at by the passers-by who regarded tho whole thing as a very good joke. His sufferings must have been imaginable for the three days that his wretched life lasted. On the evening of the third day one of tho attendants, possibly moved by pity, possibly wearied by his long watch, knocked the pile of bricks from under the malefactor’s feet, leaving the body. suspended by the lower Jaw and slow strangulation put an end to what remnant of life there was in about twenty minutes. The body, the following day, was removed in tho cage to an open space beyond the city to bo exposed as a warning to evil doers before final burial.

A CHINESE CAGE.