The jiagun (夾棍) ankle crusher was a Chinese instrument of torture consisting of three wooden boards approximately a yard in length that were connected with cords, which when placed around a suspect's feet and gradually pulled, caused agonizing pain in order to force a confession. Under traditional Chinese law, a person could not be convicted of a crime unless they confessed. The jiagun was a legal and non-lethal method for torturing men to confess, and for women there was the similar and less painful zanzhi finger crusher with small sticks and cords.
The word jiāgùn is written with two Chinese characters. The first jiā (夾) means "press from two sides; pinch; press; squeeze" and the second character gùn (棍) means "rod; stick; villain". Jiābàng (夾棒]), with bàng (棒, "stick; club; cudgel"), is a synonym of jiāgùn.
In terms of Chinese character classification, the former logograph is a compound ideograph combining three people, a 大 "big person with outstretched arms" between two smaller 人 "people", and the latter is a phono-semantic character; with the semantically-significant radical "wood" radical (木) and a phonetic element of kūn (昆 "elder brother"). Compare jiā (梜 "chopsticks") with the same "wood" radical and jiā (夾) phonetic, denoting "pick up with pincers or chopsticks".
Several early European-language descriptions of China describe Chinese: jiaogun (romanized as kiaquen) and Chinese: zanzhi (erroneously teanzu) ankle and finger crushers, and were repeated in numerous later books up to the present day.
The Spanish Augustinian Catholic bishop and author Juan González de Mendoza (1545–1618) published one of the earliest Western histories of China: the 1585 Spanish-language Spanish; Castilian: Historia de las cosas más notables, ritos y costumbres del gran reyno de la China (History of the Great and Mighty Kingdom of China and the Situation Thereof), which describes the Chinese: zanzhi and Chinese: jiagun without noting their Chinese names. In the wi English translation,
Álvaro Semedo (1585–1658), the Portuguese Jesuit priest and missionary in China, wrote a classic 1642 Spanish-language Spanish; Castilian: Imperio de la China... account of China that was subsequently translated into several European languages. It mentions two torture devices for the hands and feet, yet only describes the Chinese: jiagun (romanized as Kiaquen) without mentioning the Chinese: zanzhi (Semedo 1642, 187). Semedo had personal knowledge of the Chinese judicial system, he was "imprisoned for a year during the 1616 anti-Christian campaign and spent thirty days in a cage while being transported from Nanjing to Canton" (Brook 2008, 157). The front cover identifies the Portuguese historian Manuel de Faria e Sousa (1590–1649) as the publisher, but Faria e Sousa later claimed authorship (Pina 2018, 36–37).
Giovanni Battista Giattini's 1643 Italian translation of Semedo repeated the original description of the Kia quen ankle crusher and added one for the so-called Tean zu finger crusher (Semedo 1643, 181). Written and published in only one year, this text was flawed by typographical and printing errors, "some of which were quite significant" (Pina 2018, 38). Thomas Henshaw's 1655 English translation of Semedo capitalizes the second syllables as Kia Quen and Tean Zu (Semedo 1655, 143). The 1667 French translation by Louis Coulon hyphenates Kia-quen and Tean-zu (Semedo 1667, 209). The context in Henshaw's translation says:
George Staunton's 1810 Fundamental Laws of China was the first foreign translation of the 1740–1805 Great Qing Legal Code, and gives precise instructions for constructing legal torture devices, including the Chinese: jiagun and Chinese: zanzhi. Note: the approximate equivalents for the below Chinese units of length, 1 "Chinese foot" or Chinese: [[Chi (unit)|chi]] (che) is 33 cm and 1 "Chinese inch" Chinese: [[Cun (unit)|cun]] (tsun) is 33 mm.
George Ryley Scott's popular 1940 The History of Torture Throughout the Ages quotes Semedo (1655) and Staunton (1810), adding that the kia quen and tean zu were not to be used for "criminals under fifteen years of age or over seventy; to the diseased or the crippled". (Scott 1940, 103). This odd teanzu spelling exemplifies what linguists and lexicographers call a ghost word, an original typographic error that is repeatedly copied for generations.
Translating Chinese: jiagun (Chinese: 夾棍) into English is problematic owing to the lack of an equivalent word. Brodequin is an obsolete English name for a buskin or "a high boot reaching about half-way up the calves of the legs" (OED), and named a type of wooden torture boot. Chinese-dictionaries and books generally describe Chinese: jiagun:
Morrison adds that since the Chinese: jiagun is made of three pieces of wood, there is a Chinese saying, "Chinese: 三木之下何求不得 under the three-bar-torture, what evidence may you not procure?" Chinese: Sānmù (Chinese: 三木) is a word meaning "fetters, shackles, and pillory".
The near-equivalent word brodequin is an obsolete English name for a buskin or "a high boot reaching about half-way up the calves of the legs" (OED), and was recorded as a type of boot torture. The prolific author George Ryley Scott, who repeated the tean zu ghost word, describes brodequin torture, which was used in early modern Scotland and France:
This description closely resembles the Chinese Chinese: jiagun torture, except that the victim was sitting rather than lying down.