There is scarcely a government gazette published at Peking; almost daily, placards are posted at the principal places about Canton and its suburbs, giving accounts of murders, and insurrections, robberies, shocking and unnatural crimes of kidnapping, infanticides, suicides, and of all the beastly and unnatural crimes of which the world ever heard or read. The various modes of punishment resorted to by the government, and the unequal distribution of justice, are revolting to humanity, and most disgusting and loathsome in the recital. I will relate one case to show, that, in modern times, the Chinese are not less refined in their cruelties, than when Ta-he, the queen of Chow, among many other horrible inventions, caused brazen rollers to be heated, and then smeared with an unctuous matter, so that she might have the supreme pleasure of seeing miserable culprits, fruitlessly endeavouring to pass this burning bridge, and continually slipping into a tremendous fire, there to meet with a death horrible in the extreme. The case to which I have alluded, took place in the year 1813, when the emperor of China convicted a eunuch of being concerned in a treasonable conspiracy. The victim had been a favourite servant of the emperor’s father, Keen-lung, who had conferred upon him many favours. The poor wretch was bound round with cords and canvass, to which was added a quantity of tallow and other combustible matter, so as to convert him into a _gigantic candle_, and he was slowly consumed at his father’s grave: the wretched being died in tortures the most excruciating that imagination can conceive! [Sidenote: COURT CEREMONIES.]