Few Europeans have experienced imprisonment in China. One Englishman, Lord Loch, has given an account of the sufferings he endured when treacherously captured during the war of 1860. “The discipline of the prison was not in itself very strict and had it not been for the starvation, the pain arising from the cramped position in which the chains and ropes retained the arms and legs, with the heavy drag of the iron collar on the bones of the spine, and the creeping vermin that infested every place, together with the occasional beatings and tortures which the prisoners were from time to time taken away for a few hours to endure, returning with bleeding legs and bodies and so weak as to be scarcely able to crawl, there was no very great hardship to be endured.... There was a small maggot which appears to infest all Chinese prisons: the earth at a depth of a few inches swarms with them; they are the scourge most dreaded by every poor prisoner. Few enter a Chinese prison who have not on their bodies or limbs some wounds, either inflicted by blows to which they have been subjected, or caused by the manner in which they have been bound; the instinct of the insect to which I allude appears to lead them direct to these wounds. Bound and helpless, the poor wretch cannot save himself from their approach, although he knows full well that if they once succeed in reaching his lacerated skin, there is the certainty of a fearful lingering and agonising death before him.” Punishment varies in cruelty and intensity with the crime; for the murder of a father, mother, or several people of one family the sentence is “ignominious and slow death.” This method is known as _ling che_, and the victim is attached to a post and cut to pieces by slow degrees, the pieces being thrown about among the crowd. This cruel death was more than once publicly inflicted in Peking during the year 1903. Some of the most horrible passages in the _Peking Gazette_ are those which announce the infliction of this awful punishment on madmen and idiots who in sudden outbreaks of mania have committed parricide. For this offence no infirmity is accepted, even as a palliation. A culprit condemned to _ling che_ is tied to a cross, and while he is yet alive gashes are made by the executioner on the fleshy parts of his body, varying in number according to the disposition of the judge. When this part of the sentence has been carried out, a merciful blow severs the head from the body. It is said that the executioner can be bribed to put sufficient opium into the victim’s last meal to make him practically unconscious, or even to inflict the fatal stab in the heart at first, which should ordinarily be the last. Common cases of capital punishment are comparatively merciful, for the executioners are so skilful that they generally sever the head from the trunk with one swift blow. The Chinese prefer death by strangulation to any other form, because it enables the body to appear unmutilated in the next