The Chinese possess very long, sharp, well-balanced swords, a single blow of one of which will sever the head from the body.  Besides, they administer their blows as neatly as the most fastidious of customers might desire, and the victim does not really undergo much pain.  The executioners, too, are picked out from among the strongest men, and are so well trained that they never miss a blow.  The whole affair, consequently, is over in less than no time; a few seconds being quite sufficient to do away with one comfortably.  Truly enough, were it to be one’s lot to be executed, I would desire nothing more delightful than to have one’s head “done” by a Celestial executioner.  The Coreans, on the contrary, have not developed the same skill in these difficult matters; and, what with their blunt and short swords, what with their misjudgment of distances, they bungle matters most cruelly.  Of course, they are, nevertheless, supposed to kill their victims with single blows, instead of raining them down by the dozen, hacking the unfortunate creatures in a most fearful manner, and lopping off their arms or gashing their bodies before the heads are finally cut off.

The little blocks, upon which the men were laid down, were so arranged that their chests rested on the upper portions, the head in consequence being raised several inches from the ground.  The idea in this was to make things easier for the executioner; the same reason also explaining why the straw rope was tied to each man’s top-knot; for in this way another man could hold him fast to the stool when the decapitation was to take place.  A somewhat closer examination of the first body in the illustration will at once show how distorted it is.  This is what must have happened:  in the final struggle with death the owner had attempted to resist his fate, when several soldiers had immediately pounced upon him, with the inevitable result that, in his desperate struggling, the spine had been broken; a strange, yet very natural accident, under the circumstances.  The arms being tied together at the elbows behind, the spine had been at great tension, like a set bow, so that a violent assault could not but result in its being fractured, especially considering the weak and frozen condition in which the derelict before us was.  That I am probably correct in this explanation seems to be further proved by the fact that his head, when severed, had been taken up and swung to a distance by the angry executioner.

Now, though this way of doing away with criminals may appear a very cruel one to European minds, it is, nevertheless, a decided improvement on the older method of executing prevalent in Corea, as practised for example, many years ago, on some French missionaries and their followers.

The execution of these martyrs was preceded by terrible floggings and tortures, and when they were led to the execution-ground they had two arrows thrust into their flesh, like modern St. Sebastians.