My lord that is brutal.
Brutal, cruel, sad. Makes me angry at the universe.
the photograph is real, but the story behind it is, as far as we can tell, entirely conjecture on the part of the dude who took the picture. from my understanding, there’s reason to believe that this punishment was used the same as stocks in colonial times. they would stick you in there for a period of time so that you could be publicly humiliated and uncomfortable, and then you’d eventually be released. there are stories of Mongolian prisoners having food thrown to them in tiny coffin-like boxes, there’s not much reason to believe this is any different
Pardon my crude biology knowledge, but I believe it take two to commit adultery. So where’s the other?
Apparently there is little proof that she was in the box for adultery, or condemned to die at all.
More likely she was being transported.
https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mongolian_woman_condemned_to_die_of_starvation.jpg
https://www.famouspictures.org/woman-in-a-box/
https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/mongolian-woman-imprisoned-1913/
Can’t say for sure, but probably spared on account of being a man.
Societies, and especially older societies, are often insanely sexist.