We’ve all seen the parades and street performances at theme parks like Disney World or Universal Studios. Well, this is a little different. The description for Qingming Riverside Landscape Garden in China’s Henan Province makes it sound like a tourist trap, though it looks to be a beautiful tourist trap built to resemble the old city of Kaifeng during the Song Dynasty. The entertainment here includes reproduction of famous scenes from literature about that era. One such performance is a scene from the famous novel Water Margin, in which one of the main characters, Song Jiang, was being escorted to his execution when his outlaw friends show up, clog the street with the bodies of slain villains, and rescue Song Jiang.

Here’s a clip of the show. There’s a lot of talking at the beginning of the clip. Skip to about the 2:30 mark and the excitement starts.

Playing with sharp objects, wanton slaughter, ground littered with the slain corpses of your enemies, and one of the good guys getting a knife in the back (which, by the way, wasn’t in the novel). Now THIS is theme-park entertainment. Of course, if they did something like this at a family theme park in the U.S., somebody would probably lose their mind over it and cry about the “inappropriate” violence. It’s just another one of those reminders from daily life about how different cultures have different levels of tolerance for various vices, whether it be violence, sex, drugs, or rock & roll.

Also, apparently Qingming Riverside Landscape Garden isn’t the only place where you can watch this scene acted out. Here’s a clip of a different show in Hangzhou, a much higher-quality production than the show in Henan:

Here’s that same scene from the TV series based on the novel. Skip to the 3-minute mark. It’s in Chinese, but as you can probably guess from the previous two clips, you don’t really need to speak the language to know what’s going on in the scene. Warning for the faint of heart: Heads literally roll in this one.