convicted of capital crimes, which is by putting them into a large iron caldron, and pounding them to pieces with wooden pestles, because none of their royal blood must be spilt on the ground, it being, by their religion, thought great impiety to contaminate the divine blood by mixing it with earth.”[1] Other Siamese modes of executing a royal person are starvation, suffocation, stretching him on a scarlet cloth and thrusting a billet of odoriferous “saunders wood” into his stomach,[2] or lastly, sewing him up in a leather sack with a large stone and throwing him into the river; sometimes the sufferer’s neck is broken with sandal-wood clubs before he is thrown into the water.[3] When Kublai Khan defeated and took his uncle Nayan, who had rebelled against him, he caused Nayan to be put to death by being wrapt in a carpet and tossed to and fro till he died, “because he would not have the blood of his Line Imperial spilt upon the ground or exposed in the eye of Heaven and before the Sun.”[4] “Friar Ricold mentions the Tartar maxim: ‘One Khan will put another to death to get possession of the throne, but he takes great care that the blood be not spilt. For they say that it is highly improper that the blood of the Great Khan should be spilt upon the ground; so they cause the victim to be smothered somehow or other.’ The like feeling prevails at the court of Burma, where a peculiar mode of execution without bloodshed is reserved for princes of the blood.”[5] In Tonquin the ordinary mode of execution is beheading, but persons of
- ↑ Hamilton’s “Account of the East Indies,” in Pinkerton’s Voyages and Travels, viii. 469. Cp. W. Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, i. 349, note 2.
- ↑ De la Loubere, A New Historical Account of the Kingdom of Siam (London, 1693), p. 104 sq.
- ↑ Pallegoix, Description du Royaume Thai ou Siam, i. 271, 365 sq.
- ↑ Marco Polo, trans, by Col. H. Yule (2d ed. 1875), i. 335.
- ↑ Col. H. Yule on Marco Polo, l.c.
