Cannibalism in Asia

The Official Histories also document multiple instances of voluntary cannibalism, often involving young individuals offering some of their flesh to ill family members as a form of medical treatment.

In Sumatra, cannibal practices are documented especially for the 14th and the 19th centuries, with purchased children, killed or captured enemies, and executed criminals mentioned as typical victims.

[12] While these acts were (at least nominally) voluntary and the donors usually (though not always) survived them, several sources also report of children and adolescents who were killed so that their flesh could be eaten for medical purposes.

[13][14] During the Tang dynasty, cannibalism was supposedly resorted to by rebel forces early in the period (who were said to raid neighbouring areas for victims to eat),[15] and (on a large scale) by both soldiers and civilians during the siege of Suiyang, a decisive episode of the An Lushan Rebellion.

[18][19] An Arab traveller visiting China during this time noted with surprise: "cannibalism [is] permissible for them according to their legal code, for they trade in human flesh in their markets.

[28][21] In later times, wealthy men, among them a son of the 4th-century emperor Shi Hu and an "open and high-spirited" man who lived in the 7th century CE, served the flesh of purchased women or children during lavish feasts.

[29][30][31] The sinologist Robert des Rotours [fr] observes that while such acts were not common, they do not seem to have been rare exceptions; the hosts did not have to face ostracism or legal prosecution.

[32] Key Ray Chong even concludes that "learned cannibalism was often practiced ... for culinary appreciation, and exotic dishes [of human flesh] were prepared for jaded upper-class palates".

While survival cannibalism during famines was regarded as a lamentable necessity, accounts explaining the practice as due to other reasons, such as vengeance or filial piety, were generally even positive.

[39] A few years later in Sichuan, "hundreds of the young and weak" were kidnapped, killed, and eaten; in the markets, men's flesh was sold at a somewhat lower price than that of women, which was considered tastier.

[40] Contemporary reports indicate that in Shaanxi – located between Henan and Sichuan – cannibalism became so common in the early Qing period that the local government "officially sanctioned" the sale and consumption of human flesh.

[38] Centuries later, during the Taiping Rebellion in 1850–1864, "human flesh and organs" – gained by dismembering corpses or by butchering kidnapped persons – "were sold openly at the marketplace", and "some people killed their own children and ate them" to alleviate their hunger.

[43] Zeng Guofan, the general leading the army that suppressed the rebellion, confirmed the open sale of human flesh in his diary – once even complaining about its high price, which had risen again.

The kidney, liver, heart, and soles of the feet were considered the most desirable portions, and were ordinarily cut up into very small pieces, boiled, and eaten somewhat in the form of soup.

[58] Cannibal acts occurred at public events organized by local Communist Party officials, with people taking part in them to prove their revolutionary passion.

[62] According to the 14th-century traveller Odoric of Pordenone, the inhabitants of Lamuri, a kingdom in northern Sumatra, purchased children from foreign merchants to "slaughter them in the shambles and eat them".

[65] When the German-Dutch botanist and geologist Franz Wilhelm Junghuhn visited Sumatra in the 1840s, a Batak raja served him a soup containing the flesh of freshly slaughtered captives.

James Brooke, who founded the Raj of Sarawak in northwestern Borneo, collected eyewitness accounts of the consumption of killed enemies after war campaigns.

[71] The Norwegian explorer Carl Bock, who visited Borneo in the late 1870s, met a Dayak chief named Sibau Mobang who told him that "his people did not eat human meat every day", but rather in the context of "head-hunting expeditions".

Both captured enemies and those found guilty of a crime (such as theft) were killed and eaten out of revenge and due to an "appetite" for human flesh, which was considered uniquely tasty.

[73] In Joshua Oppenheimer's film The Look of Silence, several of the anti-Communist militias active in the Indonesian mass killings of 1965–66 claim that drinking blood from their victims prevented them from going mad.

[74] During a massacre of the Madurese minority in the Indonesian part of Borneo in 1999, "more than 200 people, including young babies, [were] decapitated and cannibalised", according to reporter Richard Lloyd Parry.

[75][non-primary source needed] Parry saw "two arms, numerous pieces of heart and liver, and a dismembered torso being cooked over a fire by the side of the road" in a "human barbecue".

"[76][non-primary source needed] Parry also saw at least seven severed heads, some of them apparently taken just hours before and placed on "oil drums on either side of the road" as trophies in a revival of the traditional practice of headhunting.

"[75] When visiting a town market, Parry saw "a charred femur ... among the embers of a fire" and met a Dayak man who held "a lump of what he said was human meat" and then started to eat it.

[89] On the other hand, Barbara Demick concluded in her book, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea (2010), that – though there were actual cases – the practice does not seem to have been as widespread as some people feared, with rumours exaggerating what occurred.

[94] In his book Flyboys: A True Story of Courage, James Bradley details several instances of cannibalism of World War II Allied prisoners by their Japanese captors.

One of them, Fujioka Akiyoshi, stated that local Moro resistance fighters killed a thousand soldiers during the first month of the Japanese occupation, afterwards routinely removing their gold teeth for melting and their livers for consumption.

[104][105][106] While the Moro cannibalism seems to have been largely symbolic and limited to the livers, another Japanese soldier, Yano Masami, recorded in his diary that, to escape starvation, he had eaten the flesh of a sergeant in his group who had committed suicide.

[107] Fujioka was happy when he could finally surrender to the Americans, knowing that this meant his escape from the double risk of dying of starvation or being killed by local fighters.