The WORST Crimes that Could Never Be Pardoned in Ancient China: Ten Abominations

Hey everyone, it's Amy. Today, let's take a look at the 10 Abominations, or the 10 Abominable Crimes of Asian China, and the reasons behind them all. These were the 10 crimes that were considered the most heinous and unpardonable. And at the end of the video, we'll also explore the forms of punishment sentenced for these crimes. So first of all, let's take a look at its history. These laws first took shape in the roughly about 1500 years ago. Initially, it was called the 10 Articles of Serious Crimes, Zhong Zui Shi Tiao. And then later, the Sui Dynasty formalized it as the 10 Abominations, Shi Le. During the Tang Dynasty, senior officials such as Zhangsun Wuji and Fang Xuanling officially incorporated them into the Tang Code. And from there, the system of the 10 Abominations lasted until the end of Imperial China in 1912. So what made these crimes or offenses so unforgivable? Well, that's because they directly threatened the three pillars of imperial rule in ancient China. First, the undebatable authority of the emperor. Second, the ethical structure of the family and clan. And then lastly, the fundamental moral principles that defined how people should treat each other. And these pillars reflected Confucian moral philosophy, which deeply influenced how laws were structured in later dynasties. The 10 Abominations can be broadly divided into three main categories. The first category was actions that directly targeted imperial authority, such as threatening the safety of the emperor and stealing or damaging sacred imperial properties. The most severe crime in this category was plotting rebellion, Mou Fan, which meant plotting to overthrow the court or usurp the throne. And not only is this most severe in this category, it's also the most deadly one in all of the 10 Abominations. So obviously, it would carry the most extreme penalties. It typically carried capital punishment. And in the most severe cases, rebellion could trigger collective punishment under the principle of Lian Zuo, called extermination of the nine clans. I'll talk more about these punishments later. Now, not all rebellion would trigger the punishment of the nine clans, because for obvious reasons, when an imperial family member commits the act of rebellion, obviously, the emperor will not order the punishment and have the rest of the imperial family executed. So when a prince or other imperial families rebelled, most of the time they were exiled and can never return to the capital. Like the crown prince Li Chenqian, he rebelled against his father, Emperor Taizong, and was exiled. In some cases, some princes were sentenced to death by poison. And another dark side of this offense is that accusations of rebellion were often a powerful political tool, especially when emperors needed to eliminate powerful officials. Okay, the next crime was great sedition, Mou Da Ni, which was destruction or robbing of imperial ancestral temples, mausoleums, or palaces. Now, you might ask, how much threat can this cause? Well, in the ancient Chinese mindset, ancestral temples and tombs represented the emperor's roots and lineage. So damaging them was not just vandalism, it was an attack on the emperor's legitimacy and sacred lineage. So that's why, legally, it was treated as comparable to rebellion. For instance, the looting of the Eastern Qing tombs by Sun Dianying during the Republican era would have been a classic case of the great sedition during the Qing dynasty. And under the Qing dynasty law, he would have likely been punished for committing the great sedition. Another crime in this category was treason, Mou Pan, which involved betraying the country and defecting to an enemy state, essentially becoming a traitor. Unlike rebellion, though, which aimed to replace the emperor, treason was an act of disloyalty and was considered a grave capital offense. Even just the act of planning treason was enough to warrant the death penalty. And here's the last crime in this category, and personally, I think the scariest. It was the great in reverence, Da Bu Jing. I say it's the scariest because it has the most ambiguous description for the actions that could be considered an offense. And it basically boils down to any act that challenged the emperor's dignity or threatened his safety. So some examples would be stealing or misusing objects used in imperial sacrifices, or making mistakes when preparing imperial food or medicine that endangered the safety of the emperor, or mishandling imperial documents or seals. There is a famous saying in Chinese that goes Ban Jun Ru Ban Hu, which means accompanying the emperor is like accompanying a tiger. It was used to describe how easily officials could fall into this category with a simple, mindless mistake. Okay, by now you might be thinking, wait, wouldn't the emperor just be able to execute someone on the spot? Because you have probably seen it in sea dramas. Well, in theory, the emperor's power was absolute. But in practice, most emperors still wanted to appear as a benevolent ruler and not go down in history as a tyrant. So they operated within established legal frameworks. So that meant even the emperor would need legal justifications for punishment, because ruling through law enforced legitimacy. The second category is of crimes targeted family ethics. Now we all know that Chinese people valued filial piety greatly, even in modern days. But in ancient China, filial piety was not just a cultural ideology, it was the law. The first crime in this category is heinous rebellion, E Ni. And in terms of the 10 abominations, it referred specifically to killing or violently attacking one's parents or senior elders within the family hierarchy. In a way, it's parallel to rebellion mofan, which targeted the emperor heinous rebellion targeted the head of the household. And the next crime is unfilial conduct. This one has a broader scope. And the term is still being used constantly in modern day. In simple terms, it's basically when you're not being nice to your Here are some examples, physically harming or verbally abusing a parent or grandparent, failing to provide support for elderly parents, or demanding division of family property while parents were still alive, and concealing a parent's death to avoid the mandatory mourning period, or engaging in celebrations like marriages or music during mourning. In the Princess Xingchen's video, we talked about how her wedding was delayed for three years, because that was the mourning period for her father, Emperor Taizong. And three years was the standard mourning period for father in the Tang Dynasty. But sometimes in practice, it's 27 months. And when her brother, the new emperor Gaozong wanted to push forward her wedding during the mourning period, in an effort to cheer her up, it was pushed back by government officials. And they argue that proceeding with the wedding during the mourning period would violate established ritual norms. But why was this a big deal? That's because Confucian ideology treated the family as a miniature version of the empire. So when someone failed to show filial piety, that means this person is more likely to also lack loyalty to the ruler. And the ancient Chinese also believed that if a person lacked basic filial piety, they could not be sincere in any other relationship. But it is important to differentiate unfilial conduct from heinous rebellion. Unfilial conduct is the failure in duty, while heinous rebellion is the act of violence against elders, which has harsher or sometimes more severe punishments. Okay, the next crime in this category is discord, bumu. This one broadens the scope even more, and is not limited to your immediate family. It refers to serious harm within the kinship hierarchy. So actions that violated the order of relationships inside the family. Again, back then, the law treated the family as a structured hierarchy, with clear ranks based on age, gender, and generation. When that order was broken, it wasn't just a private matter. It was considered a legal threat to social stability. And here's a shocking story that's kind of related to the crime of discord about the famous Song Dynasty poet Li Qingzhao. After enduring domestic abuse from her second husband, she filed a lawsuit against him. But according to the Song Dynasty legal code, regardless of the husband's guilt, a wife's act of reporting her husband was itself a crime similar to discord. But fortunately, in her case, she was released just after a few days, because she had some powerful friends, and her husband was eventually punished. The legal logic behind this code was about preserving marital hierarchy. So I've mentioned this in some comment replies before, that if the Tang Dynasty was considered a relatively more open era for elite women, with greater social mobility and visibility, the Song Dynasty is basically the complete opposite. And some modern historians now believe it is because they saw the influence that some of the powerful women in the Tang Dynasty held, and thought, hmm, can't let that happen again. So in the Song Dynasty, the ideology that flourished was the Neo-Confucianism, which had more tightening expectations for women's behavior and social roles. So while the Tang and Song Dynasties were both deeply Confucian societies, the social atmosphere in the Song Dynasty became more conservative in certain respects. Now on to the last crime in this category. Some of you may have guessed it already, and that's incest. This is the sexual relationship within the family, especially relationships that violate generational or family boundaries. And you may be thinking, wasn't marriages between cousins really common in ancient China? Well, yes, some types of cousin marriages were socially acceptable or even preferred, depending on the kinship line. But the key was which cousin? So what is not allowed? Your father's brother's children and your mother's sister's children. Because they belong to the same family line, especially on the father's side, they share the same ancestral line and were considered too close. And what was allowed was your mother's brother's children and your father's sister's children. One example was Princess Xingchen. Taizong bestowed the marriage between her and her cousin Jiangsunquan, and he was the son of her mother's brother. Another famous and controversial example was Wu Zetian. She first entered the imperial harem as a concubine of Emperor Taizong, and later became the consul and eventually empress of his son, Emperor Gaozong. Now, under strict ritual hierarchy, a father's concubine belonged to the senior generation, which was why this marriage faced a lot of criticism from the court. However, because the reigning emperor himself authorized and legitimized the marriage, it was not prosecuted as a crime. Imperial authority ultimately determined legal boundaries. The third and last categories of crimes targeted social morality, as in undermining the basic norms of human relationships. And the first crime is unrighteousness, buyi. So this one is tricky because it doesn't really translate well into English. It's referring to severe violations of moral obligations within hierarchical relationships, especially when a subordinate harmed or betrayed a superior. So it's more like heinous rebellion or unfilial conduct. But instead of harming your own parents, this is toward a superior. So for example, a soldier harming his commanding officer, or a student harming his teacher. The core issue wasn't just violence. It was violating social hierarchy. And just like with heinous rebellion and unfilial conduct, this is one of the 10 abominations because Confucian society was built on righteous obligations and accounted on everyone acting according to their assigned role in the society. Okay, the last crime is probably the most disturbing. And that is depravity. And this one is not about hierarchy. It's about inhumanity. So the literal translation is against the way or against human decency. In a context of the 10 abominations, it refers to the acts of extreme cruelty or moral monstrosity. So it's crimes that are so brutal, and they violated basic human conscience. Some examples are to murder three or more innocent people, or to desecrate a victim's body, and witchcraft or curses to harm others. In the classic novel Dream of the Red Chamber, Honglou Meng, concubine Zhao's attempt to harm Wang Xifeng and Jia Baoyu using witchcraft would likely have been classified under this crime. So what happened if someone was convicted of one of the 10 abominations? Well, the standard punishment of the Tang dynasty were the five punishments, wuxing. And these penalties were designed to increase in severity with varying degrees for each. There's the beating with the light stick, chi, which is usually 10 to 50 blows. And then there's the beating with the heavy stick, zhang, and that's 60 to 100 blows. After that, there's penal servitude, tu, and that's forced labor ranging from one to three years. And next is exile. And finally, death or capital punishment. Now, the 10 abominations were defined as capital crimes, and the punishment was almost always death. And there were also many extreme variations of the death penalty, intended to be public spectacles to deter others from similar crimes. Earlier, we talked about one of the most severe form of punishment that could be sentenced for these crimes, the extermination of the nine clans, zhu jiu zu. We went over the exact nine layers within the clan in another video, so we won't repeat it here. But in essence, this punishment means their entire bloodlines and lineage are destroyed literally overnight. But before we imagine the pure brutality, we need to understand the legal logic behind it. The foundations of this system was not the exterminations itself. It was a principle called lian zuo, collective responsibility. Lian zuo literally means to be seated together. In other words, to be implicated together. It was a legal principle that extended punishment beyond the offender themselves to those who were connected to them closely. And this principle actually predates the 10 abominations. Versions of collective punishment can be traced back to the Qin and Han dynasties. And in these systems, the family was not just a private unit, it was a moral political structure. If someone committed treason or rebellion, it was assumed that they did not act entirely alone. Families shared responsibilities for supervising their members. So the goal is to put pressure on everyone to take responsibility for governing or policing their own household. And lian zuo wasn't limited only to family members. It could also extend to close associates, students, subordinates, and even colleagues who were believed to have known about or failed to report the crime, similar to guilty by association. But what made the 10 abominations unique was that they were excluded from mercy. In imperial China, many crimes could be reduced due to age, status, surrender, or special circumstances. And on top of that, the state regularly declared general amnesties during new reign, royal celebrations, or even natural disasters. Prisoners were released, sentences were reduced. And this goes across the empire. But the 10 abominations were especially excluded. These were crimes that attacked the very foundation of the world that imperial China was built on. And once that foundation was threatened, forgiveness was no longer possible. That's it for today's video. If you enjoyed this topic, don't forget to like and subscribe. Thanks again for watching, and I'll see you in the next one. Stay curious, stay magical.