Parading Bandits on the Nanking Road

Here’s something you don’t see that often anymore – a bunch of bandits paraded down the Nanking Road. But in October 1925 it was a daily occurrence apparently. they had to walk all the way out to Lungwha to get themselves hung – 180 of them! ‘The Chinese people seem to enjoy it” says the article – but then where were public executions not popular? Certainly not in London and Paris where crowds would gather only a few decades previously for such displays. Still, public execution was long lived in China – in 1937 over 50,000 people turned out to see drug dealers and addicts executed in Peking.