3. An Emperor’s Degenerate Sons
Prince Chu, Prince Tuan’s brother, was worse. He once had one of his concubines whipped, then personally chopped off her head. He had another concubine tortured with red hot irons. Chu’s wife accused one of his concubines of infidelity. So he had the accused whipped, then gathered the rest of his harem and made them burn her with hot needles. Horrible as they were, though, princes Tuan and Chu were kittens compared to their brother, Prince Chien, a completely sadistic monster. Unlike his brother Tuan, who did not like the ladies and felt sick looking at them, Chien liked the ladies – in a variety of sick ways, to their detriment and misfortune. Chien carried on incestuous relationships with his own sisters, and forced himself on some of them when they did not willingly submit to his advances.
Chien also liked to torment them the wives and concubines in his harem. Some of the harem women who displeased him, he forced to sit naked in trees for days on end. Others, he forced keep time to a drum all day long. Others, he simply starved to death. Chien also liked to drown young boys and girls in a palace lake, as their desperate thrashings amused and aroused him. Princes Tuan, Chu, and Chien were not the only degenerates in that family, and ancient Chinese sources hold that quite a few of Emperor Jing’s other relatives were also sick sadists. Per contemporary sources, male members of the imperial family routinely had incest with their sisters and other female relatives, and often assaulted any married woman that caught their eye.