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Clifford Coonan

Death by a Thousand Cuts
by Timothy Brook, Jerome Bourgon and Gregory Blue
Harvard University Press, HK$264
The Forbidden City
by Geremie R. Barme
Harvard University Press,  HK$160
China's Great Train
by Abrahm Lustgarten
Times Books, HK$208
The  west has been fascinated by the idea of Chinese cruelty ever since its earliest encounters with China, creating stereotyped villains  such as Fu Manchu or idealising  ideas of torture or torment to titillate and horrify people fascinated by the 'mysterious' Orient.
These visions were often a way of holding a mirror up to the  west's own dark soul. (Warning to squeamish readers: the following passages are gruesome.)
French philosopher Michel Foucault's  groundbreaking work of criminal justice, psychology and sociology, Discipline and Punish, opens with a lurid description of how, on March 1, 1757, Damiens the regicide  was 'taken and conveyed in a cart, wearing nothing but a shirt, holding a torch of burning wax weighing two pounds'; then, 'in the said cart, to the Place de Greve,  where, on a scaffold that will be erected there, the flesh will be torn from his breasts, arms, thighs and calves with red-hot pincers, his right hand, holding the knife with which he committed the said parricide, burnt with sulphur, and, on those places where the flesh will be torn away, poured molten lead, boiling oil, burning resin, wax and sulphur melted together and then his body drawn and quartered by four horses and his limbs and body consumed by fire, reduced to ashes and his ashes thrown to the winds.'
Nearly 150 years later, in the autumn of 1904, Wang Weiqin  was led through Beijing's  Gate of the Dark Military Lord to Caishikou,  the entrance to the  Vegetable Market, where he was tied to a tripod before the executioner sliced flesh off his chest, his biceps and upper thighs, then stabbed him in the heart.  Then his limbs were methodically severed, before the executioner cried out, 'Sha ren le! [The person has been killed!]' This was linchi chusi,  or to put someone to death  by lingchi, and it has become  known in the  west as 'death by a thousand cuts'.
Foucault's work explicitly informs Death by a Thousand Cuts but the purpose of this new book is different from that of the French philosopher. This fascinating and necessarily appalling study describes how photographs of the executed man were circulated by French soldiers and other  westerners in the imperial capital - and the images added to others of 'oriental despotism'.
Be warned: this is a close reading of lingchi and its significance, which means it contains plenty of toe-curling descriptions of slicing flesh and gougings. Not for the  faint-hearted, it offers an engaging insight into the way China's highest legal punishment came to feed into  western notions of imperial China as a cruel society.
There is cruelty too in   Geremie  Barme's The Forbidden City, part of a short series of books focusing on the world's greatest monuments, alongside intrigue, tales of courage and betrayal.  Barme opens his book with a quotation from Franz Kafka's 1917 story The Great Wall of China,  boldly signalling that the Australian academic, filmmaker and writer is not interested in providing a simple history of the Forbidden City or some kind of elevated guidebook.
Barme's book has an ironic heart and is a carefully constructed exploration of a cultural institution that sweeps the reader along as it examines the intrigues, absurdities and grotesques of everyday life in the Forbidden City; in doing so it brings the collection of buildings  to life.
The decision to open the book with Mao Zedong's  use of the Forbidden City to unleash the Cultural Revolution in 1966 heralds a mischievous take on one of the world's greatest icons, avoiding the more traditional route of describing lavish imperial ceremonies in the Hall of Supreme Harmony.
This puckish approach can be seen in the relish  Barme takes in quoting the pornographic, senile writing about the empress dowager by the  charlatan   sinologist Edmund Backhouse.  And there is a mischievous streak of cruelty in the way the writer puts Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's Mao: The Untold  Story  in the same category as the works of fantasist Backhouse, indicating how the book 'reduces a complex history to one of personal fiat and imperial hauteur'.
Barme is also scornful of  western journalists who see imperial aspects in the current regime's insistence on ruling from within hidden enclaves: 'the modern-style Party oligarchy  is a creature born more of revolutionary privilege and economic modernisation than dynastic empire'.
If you are going to the Forbidden City soon, read this book. It ends by noting how 20th-century writer Lu Xun  remarked how Chinese culture has an 'unsettling ability ... to transform and homogenise anything that came within its thrall. He called it a soy sauce vat  that darkened anything, or anybody,  that entered it.'
This  vat of homogenising culture is something the people of Tibet are all too familiar with, according to Abrahm Lustgarten's book China's Great Train, about the construction of the Tibetan railway.
The book highlights how the highest and steepest train track in the world came to be  built across legendarily tricky terrain before opening two summers ago.
'Perhaps the greatest alarm sounded around building the railway to Lhasa is the threat that ethnic Tibetans will be relegated to a state of irrelevance,  through a drip, drip, drip process of cultural dilution ... Whether such integration is a form of planned cultural genocide, as the Dalai Lama has asserted in several speeches, or simply reflects a necessary movement of goods and people from China's supersaturated east to its less populated areas, remains to be seen.'
By sympathetically intertwining several personal histories, Tibetan and Han Chinese, Lustgarten produces a diverting account of the railway's construction and the way large parts of Lhasa have been systematically torn down to make way for Chinese shops and arcades.
There are fine characters here: Zhang Luxin, the mild-mannered railway engineer who spent more than 30 years developing the route from Qinghai to Lhasa.  The physician Han Mei, who treated a spate of altitude sickness among the workers, and  a young Tibetan, Kalden, whose village in Tolung-Dechen  county was cleared to make way for the track.
The story is frankly told and the broader geopolitical picture of the impact of the 'Go West' campaign, the invasion of Tibet by the People's Liberation Army in 1950 and the descriptions of how indigenous Tibetan culture has been damaged by the influx of Chinese settlers  will not go down well on the mainland, where sensitivities  have been heightened by the recent anti-Chinese riots in Lhasa and other Tibetan areas.
China's Great Train does not subscribe to the view that Tibet is, was and always will be China.



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Tibet

Death by a Thousand Cuts; The Forbidden City; China's Great Train