The zanzhi was a legal and non-lethal torture method for forcing women to confess, and for men there was the similar and more painful jiagun (夾棍) ankle crusher with three wooden planks that slowly compressed the feet.

Tean zu [sic] is a common misspelling of zanzhi (拶指) or zanzi (拶子) that was repeatedly copied in English-language sources from the mid-17th century to the present day.

When the lexicographer James Murray began editing the first volume of the Oxford English Dictionary, he discovered that "there is not, there never was, such a word" as abacot.

His article on this ghost word documents a "remarkable series of blunders and ignorant reproductions of error" from "a bicocket" (in the 1587 second edition of Holinshed's Chronicles) to "abococket" to "abocoket" to "abococke" to, at last, "abacot", which was copied into English publications for centuries (Murray 1882, 157).

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 1643 Italian translation by Giovanni Battista Giattini (1601-1672) gives Kia quen and adds the mistaken Chinese name Tean zu (Semedo 1643, 181).

In 1626 the Jesuit missionary Nicolas Trigault devised another Chinese romanization system, based mostly on Ricci's, in his Xiru Ermu Zi (西儒耳目資, literally "Aid to the Eyes and Ears of Western Literati").

Although there are several Chinese words pronounced tianzu, such as tiānzú (天足, "natural [unbound] feet", as opposed to footbinding), none of them refer to torture.

These judges do use two manner of torments to make them to confess the truth, when by fair means they can not, or by policy, the which first is procured with great care and diligence: the one is on their feet, and the other on their hands, and is so terrible that it cannot be suffered, but of force they do confess that which the judge doth pretend to know; yet do they execute none of them except first they have good information, or at the least, semiplena, or else so many inductions that it is a sufficient information for the same.

The torments on the hands is given with two sticks as big as two fingers, and a span long, turned round and full of holes in all places, wherein are put cords to pull in and out their fingers of both their hands are put into the cords, and little and little they do pinch them, till in the end they do break them at the joints, with an incredible pain unto them that do suffer it, and it causes them to give great shrieks and groans that will move any man to compassion.

And if it so come to passe that by this cruel torment they will not confess, and that the judge do understand by witness and by indiction that he is faulty and culpable, then doth he command to give him the torment of the feet, which is a great deal more cruel than that of the hands, and is in this sort: they take two pieces of wood, four square of four spans long and one span broad, and are joined together with a gume, and holes bored thorough, and put thorough them cords, and in the midst of these bords they do put the whole foot, and strain the cords, and with a mallet they do strike upon the cords, wherewith they do break all the bones, and cause them to suffer more pain and grief than with the torment of the hands.

For the feet they use an instrument called Kia Quen, it consisteth of three pieces of wood put in one Traverse, that in the middle is fixe, the other two are moveable, between these their feet are put, where they are squeezed and press, till the heele-bone run into the foot: for the hands they use also certain small pieces of wood between their fingers, they call them Tean Zu then they straiten them very hard, and seale them round about with paper and so they have them for some space of time.

If the first application fails to elicit the truth, it is lawful to repeat the operation a second time, if the criminal still refuses to make a confession.