A Mongolian woman facing capital punishment for adultery, 1913
Stéphane Passet was touring Mongolia and taking pictures in 1913, when he came across the Mongolian woman in a box. In the photograph you can see two bowls on the ground for water and food.
Immurement is a form of imprisonment, usually for life, in which a person is placed within an enclosed space with no exits.
This includes instances where people have been enclosed in extremely tight confinement, such as within a coffin.
When used as a means of execution, the prisoner is simply left to perish from starvation or dehydration. Immurement was practiced in Mongolia as recently as the early 20th century. It is not necessarily clear that all thus immured were meant to perish of starvation, though.
In a newspaper report from 1914, it is written: “..the prisons and dungeons of the Far Eastern country contain a number of refined Chinese shut up for life in heavy iron-bound coffins, which do not permit them to sit upright or lie down. These prisoners see daylight for only a few minutes daily when the food is thrown into their coffins through a small hole”.
