PREFACE.
THE Chinese code of penal laws is compiled in such a manner as to
have a punishment appropriated for every crime ; a series of these is
displayed in the following Plates.
The wisdom of the Chinese Legislature is no where more conspicuous
than in its treatment of robbers, no person being doomed to
suffer death for having merely deprived another of some temporal property,
provided he neither uses, nor carries, any offensive weapon.
This sagacious edict renders robbery unfrequent ; the daring violator
of the laws, hesitating to take with him tliose means, which might
preserve his own life, or affect that of the plundered, in the event of
resistance, generally confines his depredations to acts of private pilfering,
and a robbery, attended with murder, is, of course, very rarely perpetrated.
This instance of justice, moderatioii, and wisdom, in the Laws
of China, receives an unfavorable contrast in the decree, which pronounces
the wearing of a p.irticular ornament to be a capital crime ;
and in the custom of attending to the fallacious information, extorted by
the Rack.
Various writers have mentioned other punishments, in addition to
those represented in this publication, of a mucii severer nature, which
have been inflicted by the Chinese upon criminals, convicted of regicide,
parricide, rebellion, treason, or sedition ; but drawings, or even
verbal descriptions, of these would be committing an indecorous violence
on the feelings, and inducing us to arraign the temperance and wisdom,
so universally acknowledged in the government of China.
Exclusive of their novelty and information, the principal recommenm