Jiagun
Chinese torture method
The jiagun ( 夾棍) ankle crusher was a Chinese instrument of torture consisting of three wooden boards approximately a yard in length that were connected with cords, which when placed around a suspect's feet and gradually pulled, caused agonizing pain in order to force a confession. Under traditional Chinese law, a person could not be convicted of a crime unless they confessed. The jiagun was a legal and non-lethal method for torturing men to confess, and for women there was the similar and less painful zanzhi finger crusher with small sticks and cords.
Names
The word jiāgùn is written with two Chinese characters. The first jiā (夾) means "press from two sides; pinch; press; squeeze" and the second character gùn (棍) means "rod; stick; villain". Jiābàng (夾棒]), with bàng (棒, "stick; club; cudgel"), is a synonym of jiāgùn.
In terms of Chinese character classification, the former logograph is a compound ideograph combining three people, a 大 "big person with outstretched arms" between two smaller 人 "people", and the latter is a phono-semantic character; with the semantically-significant radical "wood" radical (木) and a phonetic element of kūn (昆 "elder brother"). Compare jiā (梜 "chopsticks") with the same "wood" radical and jiā (夾) phonetic, denoting "pick up with pincers or chopsticks".
Western accounts of Chinese torture
Several early European-language descriptions of China describe jiaogun (romanized as kiaquen) and zanzhi (erroneously teanzu) ankle and finger crushers, and were repeated in numerous later books up to the present day.
The Spanish Augustinian Catholic bishop and author Juan González de Mendoza (1545–1618) published one of the earliest Western histories of China: the 1585 Spanish-language Historia de las cosas más notables, ritos y costumbres del gran reyno de la China (History of the Great and Mighty Kingdom of China and the Situation Thereof), which describes the zanzhi and jiagun without noting their Chinese names.
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