Caishikou — The Vegetable Market Execution Grounds
The Qing dynasty's chief execution ground — where the 1898 reformers died — now a busy crossroads whose ghost stories older Beijingers still trade.
Case File No. 153
FILE 01 The Legend
For roughly five centuries Beijing executed its condemned at Caishikou, the 'vegetable market entrance' — deliberately beside a crowded market so death would be public lesson. Wikipedia carries the ground's history: a Qing-dynasty execution site where the condemned were dispatched before holiday crowds, the knife-wielding executioner a figure of professional pride and terror. Its most famous blood is that of 28 September 1898, when six reformers of the Hundred Days' Reform — among them Tan Sitong and Liu Guangdi — were beheaded here, Tan Sitong famously meeting his death with a smile. The ground was retired in the early 20th century; the crossroads today is malls, subways and a pharmacy trade.
FILE 02 The Sightings Log
Beijing ghost lore — collected in English by WildChina's ghost-stories of the capital, among others — holds that the ground never fully quieted: night-time figures in Qing dress kneeling by the road, cold pockets at the crossing in summer, and the classic tale of the herbal medicine shop nearby that did a strange nocturnal trade, selling wound salves to customers who left no footprints. Old residents' talk of 'heavy yin' at the junction has outlived every reconstruction around it.
FILE 03 The Skeptic’s File
Nothing supernatural was ever documented at Caishikou — what is documented, thoroughly, is state violence: the reformers' executions are history, the ghost trade is folklore. The tales follow the standard pattern of execution-site lore worldwide (dark figures, cold spots, night customers), and today's glass-and-subway intersection gives a storyteller nothing to work with but the name.