On April 10 in 1905, Fou Tchou-Li suffered the last execution by lingchi in Beijing, for the murder of a Mongolian prince.

In 1925 his psychoanalyst presented Georges Bataille with a photograph. It showed Fou-Tchou-Li, a young Chinese man, being tortured to death by the punishment of the ‘hundred pieces’. The victim is tied to a post with the flesh sliced from his chest and blood streaming down his body. The executioner slices through his leg at the knee, and the upturned face of the tortured man bears a strange expression. He appears to be smiling, perhaps his face is contorted in agony or perhaps in ecstasy, or the expression may be the result of the administration of opium to prolong his torture, we do not know. At the conclusion of his last work, The Tears of Eros (1961), Bataille turned to this photograph, which had obsessed him throughout his life. He saw it as representing ‘the identity of these perfect contraries, divine ecstasy and its opposite, extreme horror’ (1989: 207). This photograph was, for Bataille, the image of ecstasy and horror.

Noys, B., (2005), "The Culture of Death", Berg, p. 101