The cart carrying the condemned rolled south through Beijing, past the Xuanwu Gate, and stopped at a wine shop on the east side of the road. The shop was called the Broken Bowl. The proprietor offered the prisoner a bowl of rice wine, a final kindness codified by custom. After the wine was drunk, the bowl was smashed against the ground. Then the cart continued to the crossroads of Xuanwumen Outer Street and Luomashi Street, where the executioner waited. This was Caishikou, Beijing's principal execution ground during the Qing dynasty, a place whose name translates simply as Vegetable Market.
Executions at Caishikou followed a precise choreography. The condemned were transported from their jail cells by cart, the journey itself a form of public spectacle. The stop at the Broken Bowl wine shop was not mere tradition; it carried symbolic weight, a last moment of human dignity before the state's ultimate exercise of power. Executions were typically carried out at 11:30 in the morning, timed to the traditional division of the day. Large crowds gathered for the deaths of notorious prisoners, and the Catholic bishop Alphonse Favier wrote about the execution ground in the 1890s with the clinical detail of a European observer confronting a practice he found both fascinating and horrifying.
The list of those who died at Caishikou reads as a compressed history of Qing dynasty conflict. When the Manchu Qing conquered the Ming dynasty, they executed the Hongguang Emperor, Zhu Yousong, the first ruler of the Southern Ming, along with several Ming princes, at this crossroads. Zheng Zhilong, father of the famous resistance leader Koxinga, met his end here. Taiping rebels Lin Fengxiang and Li Kaifang were brought to Caishikou after their capture. The Uyghur rebel leader Jahangir Khoja suffered the agonizing punishment of lingchi, death by a thousand cuts, a sentence reserved for the most serious offenses against the empire.
The most politically significant executions at Caishikou came on September 28, 1898, when six reform-minded officials were beheaded for their roles in the Hundred Days' Reform. Tan Sitong, Lin Xu, Yang Rui, Yang Shenxiu, Liu Guangdi, and Kang Guangren had supported the Guangxu Emperor's attempt to modernize the Qing government. When the Empress Dowager Cixi staged a coup and reversed the reforms, these six were arrested and executed without trial. Tan Sitong reportedly declared that he was willing to die for his cause, making him a martyr in the eyes of later reformers and revolutionaries. Their deaths at the Vegetable Market became a symbol of the Qing dynasty's resistance to change.
The exact location of the execution ground is debated today. Contemporary sources and photographs place it across from the Heniantang Pharmacy, a traditional medicine shop that still existed in the twentieth century. The crossroads has been absorbed into the modern streetscape of Xicheng District, its grim history invisible beneath commercial buildings and traffic. Xu Jingcheng, a Qing diplomat executed during the Boxer Rebellion for advocating negotiation with the foreign powers, and Qixiu, a Manchu official who supported the Boxers, both died at this spot, on opposite sides of the same conflict. The Vegetable Market showed no preference for politics. It served the state, whatever the state demanded.
Located at 39.89°N, 116.37°E in central Beijing's Xicheng District, at the historical crossroads of Xuanwumen Outer Street and Luomashi Street. The site is now a commercial area with no visible markers of its former use. Nearest airport: Beijing Capital International (ZBAA), approximately 26 km northeast. The area is south of the old inner city walls, near the Xuanwumen intersection.