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This article considers how the Qing judiciary dealt with mentally ill individuals who had committed parricide. Archival cases show that parricide was always punished by dismemberment (lingchi), without taking the criminal's mental condition into account. Such inflexible attitude was not adopted without debate, however. It can be explained by the sacred nature of the filial relationship in traditional China, hence the barbarity of parricide; strengthening the legitimacy of the regime and the legality of the judicial process may also have been a factor. Yet an examination of the fundamental principles of traditional Chinese law and of the laws in force under the Qing shows that the punishment of parricidal lunatics was lacking firm legal grounds. Only with the first attempts at reforming Chinese law in depth in the early twentieth century did things start to change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]