This scene was presented outside the west gate of Tientsin one October day in 1870 after the massacre at the French convent. The French compelled Li Hung Chang to give them satisfaction. Li held the execution at dawn so that a mob might not gather. The criminals were flattered as martyrs. None of them was bound. New silk clothes, fine shoes and the ornaments of females were put upon them. Arriving at the execution ground, they were given opium. They shouted to the crowd, “Are we showing a shamed face?” And the answer came back: “No.” “Call us brave lads for being given to the foreigners as a sacrifice,” they cried again. A shout of approval came back. Then they sang a war song, and while their relatives cried, they knelt and stretched out their own necks before the blow of the heavy, short, mercury-loaded Taifo sword of the executioner. The shedding of a cock’s blood, even in the British courts of Hongkong, when an oath is taken, is a survival of the ancient Chinese custom, practised in Confucius’ day (550 B. C.), when the ministers of the various states of Lu, Wu, Tsin, etc., had a criminal killed, and wetting their lips with his blood, took oath to keep the treaty, which was inscribed on wood, each party taking a broken portion. The following incident will throw a flashlight on a section of Chinese legal practise, just previous to the revolution of 1911. It is well known that Wu Ting Fang, two and a half years before the revolution, had revised and modernized the Chinese code, but it was not even in part put in practise before the revolution. In Tungkadoo, a town of Kiangsu province, a bonze (priest) murdered a fellow-bonze and confessed under third-degree torture. The native authorities brought him to Shanghai to be strangled, but the chief bonze, with headquarters at Chingkiang, requested that the criminal should be turned over to him to be burned to death according to the code of the Order. Cremation of dead bodies was more common in China when Marco Polo visited the land than it is now, though it is practised in the Honan Island section of Canton.