Imagine a time before CSI’s sonorific autopsies. Before Squid Game’s gratuitous slaughter. Before Indiana Jones’s melting red wax faces. The only way for human beings to indulge their thirst for gore, death, and the macabre was to either attend an execution or to buy a souvenir from one. The travelers who made their way to Peking or Shanghai in the late 1800s and early 1900s could pick up photographic postcards that showed torture techniques like lingchi, the humiliation of death cages, or just straight-up beheadings. I guess it’s easy for us a century later to look at these with some disdain and disgust, but then we’ll Netflix and chill to Texas Chainsaw Massacre—so to date, we haven’t really made any progress on our bloodthirsty ways. Check out the gore of yore in a couple dozen of these Chinese execution postcards.
