Chapter XXVI: Sin-Tien-Tze to Tze-Tung Hsien

On this second long journey, involving a distance of three hundred and thirty miles, I was persuaded into a slightly more luxurious style of travelling, _i.e._, I took an additional man, well acquainted with the province and its ways, who went on first, towards evening, cleaned out a room, and had hot water ready for tea. I got new oiled sheeting and an apron for the chair, and with some unleavened bread, curry for three days, a supply of Paoning smoked beef and some chocolate for lunch, I felt myself in luxury. Yet, with eight men, my expenses were only seven shillings per day.

At Sin-tien-tze I had to quit my companions, who are as full of brightness, intelligence, and culture as they are of goodness. Mr. Williams walked with me through thawing snow the first eight miles to the great market-place of Shang-wa-li-tze, where, not being market day, the only living creature was a deformed cat. I had excellent cooking, and we made long journeys, accomplishing thirty miles on some days. The snow soon disappeared, and though the roads were slimy, straw shoes, grippers, and the cold, keen air enabled me to walk a good deal, which was very pleasant.

At the first midday halt there was considerable confusion, for a young married woman had committed suicide with opium, and was lying apparently dead. In great fear of something—I know not what—the villagers appealed to me for remedies, which I succeeded in forcing down her throat, and also put plasters of hot vinegar and cayenne pepper behind her ears. I was proceeding to put them on the soles of her feet, but there were no soles, only a crumple of deformed toes, a cleft, and a heel. Then I tried for the calves of the legs, but there were no calves, only a bone, a few muscles, and a great bag of crinkled skin. I was more fortunate in finding that she had a back to her neck! I was told that it was a quarrel with her mother-in-law which had driven her to suicide. I had a bad quarter of an hour before she became conscious, for, had she died, the opium would have been acquitted, and the blame would have been laid on the foreigner. When she came sufficiently to herself to be herself, she was demented with rage, and tore and scratched everybody near her. I did not think that her husband was interested in her recovery.

An idea, though possibly only a local one, is, that when a person commits suicide by opium, the spirit is refused entrance at the gate of Hades, because it has not completed its natural term of life, and it seeks, by inducing another to do the same, to transfer its crime to that person.

The relations showed me the courtesy of offering me food, which I reluctantly ate out of coarse, unglazed basins: a strip or two of fat pork, some bean curd floating in grey sauce, some black beans, tasting like rotten cheese, some small onions, pickled dark brown, some rice, mixed with chopped cabbage, and some chopped capsicum.

I had previously eaten bean curd, and old eggs which are an expensive delicacy, and formed part of a Chinese dinner given to me at the English Legation at Seoul. At the next village I saw the process of preparation. Ducks’ eggs alone are used, and they must be quite fresh. They are steeped in a solution of lime, with the addition of salt. The lime penetrates the shell and turns the white into a dark, bottle-green jelly, while the yolk becomes hard and nearly black. After this the egg is wrapped up in clay, which is dried by gentle heat. It will then keep a year or more. Such eggs are very good, indeed they are one of the few Chinese delicacies which I can eat with equanimity. The variety of food eaten by all classes in China is amazing. It would require four or five pages to put down what I have myself seen in the eating-houses and food shops on this journey.

After leaving Sin-tien-tze, I entered a richer and more prosperous region, with a very productive soil, much mineral wealth, and important industries both in towns and villages; and the food shops reflected the prosperity. There was fresh pork everywhere. Every village seemed to have killed a pig that morning. In most places bread made of wheaten flour was to be got in the form of dumplings, leavened, but steamed, not baked. These make good toast. Bean curd is everywhere also, and is universally liked. It is pure white, as if made with milk, and resembles in insipidity unflavoured _blanc mange_, made with Carrageen moss. There is scarcely a hamlet in which it is not sold. The beans are ground between two millstones, the upper one having a hole in the centre. Into this the beans are poured along with water, and the thick white cream which results from the grinding is caught in a trough below. Plenty of gypsum and some salt are added, the cream is boiled, the froth is thrown away, and the residue, after undergoing considerable squeezing in a cloth, is poured into flat, deep trays to set; when cold it is cut up into bricks. Every traveller in China, Japan, and Korea makes acquaintance with this preparation. Beans are enormously used, fresh, and made into patties, and preserved in equal parts of brine and syrup, when they taste like hazel nuts.

Patties, or pies, are universal, and the itinerant pieman frequents all markets and places where men congregate. Vegetable patties of beans, chopped cucumbers, vegetable eggs, and sweet potato are much liked, and so are patties of pork, and salt fish, and frog, but the last are somewhat of a luxury. Then there are cakes of wheaten flour containing chopped and fried onion, or a spoonful of treacle, and cakes of ground millet, with sugar-candy or scorched millet on the top, and the same pieman often sells bags of popcorn, melon seeds, and pieces of sugarcane.

Water-melon seeds ought rather to be classed with amusements than with food. As in Persia, they are enormously used; it is difficult to write consumed. They descend to the poorest class, but chiefly on holidays. Their use implies leisure and sociability. I never saw a man eating them alone, except on a journey. They are a national custom. Where our men would enjoy themselves drinking wine or spirits, the Chinese play with melon seeds. Eating them seems a masculine amusement, and the higher a Chinese is in rank the more melon seeds he consumes. One dare not speculate on what the consumption of the Son of Heaven must be. Doubtless they serve the useful purpose of helping to supply the system with fatty matter.

In some parts of SZE CHUAN water-melons appear to be grown entirely for their seeds. I have seen the cooling, delicious pulp thrown on the road, while the seeds are carefully preserved, and, as in Tibet the proprietors of apricot orchards allowed me to eat as many apricots as I liked, provided that I returned them the stones, so I have been allowed to eat melons, if I returned the seeds. Huc writes that on the rivers “huge junks may be seen loaded entirely” with these “deplorable futilities.” I do not pretend to such a remarkable vision, but at good inns I have seen parties of six or eight well-dressed merchants, with carefully-tended, pointed finger-nails an inch long, spending three or four hours in cracking melon seeds, plate after plate rapidly disappearing. Piles of shells of melon seeds some inches high often greeted me in inn rooms. Every wayside restaurant sells them. Groups of children sit apathetically in village streets eating them. They are served before, with, and after every meal, with tea and wine, and at all social gatherings. Men crack and eat them while they are bargaining or discussing business, or are travelling in sedan chairs. And the dexterity and rapidity with which they extract the small kernel from the tough shell is worthy of squirrels and apes. This consumption of melon seeds is a feature of the whole empire, and I really believe is, as a pleasure, second only to “foreign smoke.”

Our ideas as to Chinese food are, on the whole, considerably astray. It is true that the rich spend much in pampering their appetites, that the foolish extravagance of providing meats, fruits, and vegetables, out of season at “dinner parties” prevails among them as among us, and that such delicacies as canine cutlets and hams, cat fricassees, bird’s-nest soup—a luxury so costly that it makes its appearance on foreign tables—stewed _holothuria_, and fricassee of snails, worms, or snakes are to be seen at ceremonious feasts. I have been myself in dog and cat restaurants in Canton, but they are only frequented by the extravagant.

I think in addition to the enormous variety in Chinese articles of diet, multiplied a hundredfold by culinary art, the food is wholesome and well cooked, and that the cooking is cleanly, steaming being a very favourite method. Cleanly cooking and wholesome and excellent meals are often produced in dark and unsavoury surroundings, and those foreigners who travel much in the interior learn to find Chinese food palatable. My chief objection to it is the amount of vegetable oil used, and the prevalent flavour of garlic. The bulb well applied is an excellent condiment, but it is startling to meet with it in unexpected places, and everywhere.

Rice, wheat, Italian milled and maize are the grains chiefly eaten, but rice is the staff of life, and is regarded as absolutely indispensable. But it is not eaten by itself, even by the poorest, but mixed with fried cabbage, or with such dainty relishes as rotten beans, or putrid mustard, or soy, or Chili sauce. Among common expressions, to “take a meal” is “to eat rice,” and the salutation equivalent to “How do you do?” is literally “Have you eaten rice?”[44]

The Chinese list of culinary vegetables about quadruples ours, and with the exception of rice they are the great result of garden cultivation and heavy manuring, some of the root crops receiving individually at stated intervals a supply of liquid manure. Cucumbers, melons, and radishes weighing a pound each, are produced in enormous quantities. More than twenty sorts of peas and beans are cultivated—one monstrous bean being eaten with its soft squashy pod. Leaves are important articles of diet, beginning with the opium leaf. There are pig weed (_Chenopodium_), sow thistle (_Sonchus_), ginger, radishes, mustard, clover, shepherd’s purse, succory, sweet basil, lettuce, celery, dandelion, spinach, purslane, artemisia, amaranthus, tacca, and numberless others which have no English names. In addition to carrots, turnips, parsnips, Jerusalem artichokes, sweet potatoes, enormously used, and “Irish potatoes” increasingly grown, they have aquatic edible roots, among others the big root of the _Nelumbium_, water-caltrops, and water-chestnuts.

Onions, garlic, leeks, scallions, and chives are consumed both by rich and poor, and it is seldom possible to be out of their odour. Cabbage, broccoli, kale, colewort and cress are eaten enormously, both fresh and preserved, as well as musk and water-melons, pumpkins, squashes, gourds, tomatoes, and brinjals, besides many eccentric pods, of the names of which I have not a notion. One of the most delicious of all Chinese vegetables is the young shoot of the bamboo, which looks like huge asparagus, and is eaten boiled. The Chinese consume enormous quantities of pickled cabbage and onions, as well as candied roots and fruits, and others preserved in syrup. Even the common potato is dignified by this treatment.

In the absence of butter and oily foods, the use of much oil in cooking is a physical necessity, but the European palate would require a long education before it could enjoy the strong flavours of some of the vegetable oils, such as castor oil, sesamum, and ground nut. Lard and pork fat are used also.

Very little land in the Yangtze Valley is used for the rearing of animals for food. Pork is the principal meat used, and I suppose that every family possesses a pig. Beef is rarely obtainable, except where there are Mohammedans. I never saw mutton west of Ichang, or, indeed, sheep till I reached the mountains. Pork, fowls, geese, and ducks really represent animal food over much of SZE CHUAN. If young cats and dogs are bred for the table they are fed on rice. Locusts, grasshoppers, silkworms and grubs are eaten, being fried till they are crisp. In some cities human milk is sold for the diet of aged persons, great faith being placed in its nutritive qualities.

Undoubtedly much of the grain, especially millet, which is grown between Sin-tien-tze and Mien-chuh is used for the distillation of spirits. There are no vines in SZE CHUAN, so what we call wine is unknown. There are water-white spirits distilled from both millet and barley, and a sort of beer like the Japanese _sake_ made from rice, from which spirits can be distilled. I never saw a drunken man in fifteen months of Chinese travelling, or heard mirth of which strong drink was the inspiration. Men take spirits in very small quantities, and almost invariably with their food. They never drink anything cold, which safeguards them from the worst results of the abominably contaminated water. They drink plain hot water, the water in which rice has been boiled, tea, and decoctions of various leaves.

I have dwelt so long upon food, because for two hours of every day I had nothing to do but study it and inferior cooking as well, for several months, and saw infinite varieties of food in the different parts of the province at different seasons during my long journey. On the whole, except in times of scarcity, the Chinese is a fairly well-fed person.

The journey of March 23 was along the top of a ridge over rocky ground, and along limestone terraces incapable of cultivation. There were no villages, and few houses, but we passed through two market-places of large size. The country, as seen from the ridge, is all low, undulating ranges, sprouting up now and then into conical protuberances, till suddenly, from an altitude of 2300 feet, there is a view of a narrow valley and an extraordinary bend of the Chia-ling. Then comes an abrupt and difficult descent of 800 feet, on ledges of rock and steep flights of broken stairs, and at its foot the small town of Mao-erh-tiao, with a very fine temple lately restored. Boats of twenty tons, salt laden, were lying in the clear, blue-green water along the bank. It was a delightful day’s journey, the sky very blue, the air dry and as keen as a knife, and I reached a fairly good inn where the curiosity was not overpowering. The coolies were, if possible, cheerier and better than those from whom I had reluctantly parted, and as they were not opium smokers they were able to feed themselves well, and thought nothing of travelling thirty miles a day at a good pace.

Other halcyon days followed, of keen air, light without heat, and country which, if not actually pretty, led one continually to believe that it was about to become so. The plumed bamboo and orange and pommeloe groves had vanished, and on the high altitudes which the road pursues, which are very barren and rocky, there was almost no cultivation, and on one day’s journey of twenty-three miles we only met four people, and passed eight houses and a small market-place.

Whenever the elevation was lower, as at times where the road runs along the edges of limestone cliffs, there are deep valleys well wooded and cultivated, but the upland soil is very poor and bears scanty crops. What is called a road is only a narrow footpath, winding along the edges of wheat fields, through rocky clefts or ferny defiles, so narrow that the chair continually bumped both sides, or under cedars or other big trees, over the tops of which trailing red and white roses have grown, sending down streamers, then in the pink flush of their spring leafage, over the road. This beautiful climber, which grows with prodigious rapidity, also flourishes in Korea.

There were pretty little bits, sweet, restful, rural scenes, great breezy sweeps, and freedom; no calling of “Foreign devil” and “Foreign dog.” The people were quite disposed to be friendly. On arriving one afternoon at a specially lofty hamlet, having learnt much caution as to the use of my camera, I asked if I might “make a picture” of a mill worked by a blindfolded buffalo-cow, as we had not any such mills in my country, and they were quite willing, and stopped the cow at the exact place I indicated. They were friendly enough to take me to another mill, at which two women grind, turning the upper stone by means of poles working in holes. The Chinese use a great deal of wheat flour; it can be purchased at all markets and large villages, and I never used any other. It is not a good colour, and owing to some defect in the millstones one is apt to be surprised by grits. After seeing the mills I showed the people a number of my photographs taken _en route_, to show them that I was not doing anything evil or hurtful, but they said, though quite good-naturedly, that it was “foreign magic.”

At the same hamlet I got a room in a new inn which, though on the road-level on one side, was two storeys above a winding stream and some undulating agricultural country on the other. On that side it actually had a window and a view. The boards were new, and though the chinks were wide and the air which entered was keen, I congratulated myself heartily on such unusually pleasant surroundings. This was premature. When the bustle of unpacking was over, noises all too familiar made me look through the chinks of the floor, and I saw that I was over a pigsty the size of my room, inhabited by nine large, black sows.

It was the only night of my journey on which I had no sleep, and my servant, who had the next room to mine, said that he did not sleep after eleven, for the groaning, grunting, routing, and quarrelling were incessant. I had shared a room with pigs twice on the journey, but they were quiet by comparison. Looking through my floor at daylight, I saw that eighteen young pigs had been added to the family. This sleepless night was a bad preparation for an early start, and a long and very cold day’s journey.

The road leaves Tien-kia-miao, a remarkably clean and attractive village, by a level bridge on twelve stone piers, and soon rises again to barren altitudes, looking down on well-cultivated valleys wooded with cedars. Along every rocky path men were crowding with their wares to a neighbouring market, bamboo hats and baskets, sugarcane, fowls, and straw shoes being the principal wares. It was some time since I had seen any foreign cottons exposed for sale in these markets.

The soil of the region I had traversed for a fortnight, except in the basin of Paoning, is poor and unfitted for rice, and the people are chiefly hardworking peasant farmers and coolies. Without having any mission from associated or dissociated Chambers of Commerce, my interest in the subject led me to make continual inquiries into the local trade and the requirements of the people, and something as to the latter was to be learned in conversation with the women.

Apart from the general question of weight and make, the general verdict was that the widths of our cottons are wrong, and that widths above fifteen inches cut to waste in making Chinese clothing. Another complaint was that our goods, put up as they are in wrappers intended to impose on “semi-civilised” people, constantly make a display of colours which in China are “unlucky.” Another was that the printed cottons, besides offending in this respect, are coarse in pattern, colouring, and style, more fitted for outside barbarians than for the refined tastes of a civilised people! If these, which may appear minor matters, were attended to, there is probably an opening for both our white and printed cottons among the _middle and upper classes of Western China_. But I am not a convert to the roseate views which many people take of the enormous potentialities for our trade in SZE CHUAN if the means of communication are improved by steam on the Yangtze and other methods. It is not that our cottons are too dear, but that the great majority of the people don’t want them at any price. That is, that the strong, heavy, native cottons woven by hand, wear four times as long, and even when they are reduced to rags serve several useful purposes. A coolie will not buy a material which will only last a year, when, for the same price or less, he can get one which will last three, or even four years.

Coolies dispense with all clothing but cotton drawers in summer, and these must be strong to resist hard wear; and they say that our cottons are too cold for winter. This is obvious, for a yard of Chinese home-spun cotton cloth, fifteen inches wide, weighs over twice as much as a yard of British calico over thirty inches wide, and resists the wear and tear of hard manual labour and the ofttimes profuse perspiration of the labourer. More than two millions sterling worth of raw cotton and Sha-shih heavy home-spun cottons are supposed to be imported into SZE CHUAN annually, just because the wear requires, and must continue to require, the heavy make. Later, in Sin-tu Hsien, a prosperous town of 15,000 inhabitants, twelve miles north of Cheng-tu, I saw some Japanese cotton goods, fifteen inches wide, made on looms, which the alert cotton-spinners of Osaka had adapted for the Korean market, and which were of an equally heavy make with the Sha-shih goods, and scarcely to be distinguished from home-spun cloth. The shopkeeper highly approved of these goods, and said that if he could get them there would be a large demand for them. Possibly British “workhouse sheeting” of the same width might meet with similar approbation.

At the hamlet of Lu-fang, where I was stopped by an official with a card from the district mandarin, who kept me waiting an hour while he copied my passport on a stone and provided fresh runners, the by-road by which I had journeyed for some days joined the Ta-lu, the great Imperial road from Pekin to Cheng-tu. I travelled along this westwards to Mien-chow. A thousand years ago it must have been a noble work. It is nominally sixteen feet wide, the actual flagged roadway measuring eight feet. The bridges are built solidly of stone. The ascents and descents are made by stone stairs. More than a millennium ago an emperor planted cedars at measured distances on both sides, the beautiful red-stemmed, weeping cedar of the province. Many of these have attained great size, several which I measured being from fourteen to sixteen feet in circumference five feet from the ground, and they actually darken the road.

The first ascent from Lu-fang under this solemn shade is truly grand, nearly equalling the cryptomeria avenues which lead up to the shrines of Nik-ko, Japan. Each tree bears the Imperial seal, and the district magistrates count them annually. Many have fallen, many have hollow trunks, and there are great breaks without any at all. Still, where they do exist, the effect is magnificent. This road, like much else in China, is badly out of repair, many of its great flagstones having disappeared altogether. There was a great deal of traffic on it, and not a few saddle horses and mules were tripping easily up and down its stone staircases. It was quite cheerful to be once more on a travelled highway abounding in large villages and towns, with good inns and much prosperity.

These were days of delightful travelling without any drawbacks. The weather was beautiful, the air sharp, and the people well-behaved. There was no fatigue or annoyance, the accommodation was fair, and there was literally nothing to complain of; the travelling was fit for a Sybarite. The soil is rich, and enormous quantities of opium were grown; indeed, in some long valleys there was no other crop. Wu-lien, where I slept one night, is the cleanest and prettiest little Chinese town that I saw—prettily situated, with a widish main street, good inns, fair shops, and singular cleanliness, and the people were very mannerly. It has a level stone bridge, supported on twelve stone piers decorated with finely-carved dragons’ heads.

On the road from Wu-lien to the large town of Tze-tung Hsien there is some very pretty country, rich in agricultural wealth, and growing much opium, which unfortunately in good years pays better than any other crop, and is easy of transit. Wheat, which was only two or three inches above the ground on the high ridges, was bursting into ear in the valleys, and peas and beans were in their fragrant beauty. There was much pink and white mistiness of peach and plum, and yellow fluffiness of mimosa, and the people were astir and alert, performing spring pilgrimages to popular shrines, men and women in separate companies.

There are two very fine and ancient temples of brown cedar to the gods of Literature and War in a cedar wood on the road, with most picturesque hilly surroundings, a lovely spot, and the tides of pilgrimage set strongly towards them. The God of War there as elsewhere is very attractive to women, as may be seen any day in his great temple in the native city of Shanghai. Perpetual incense burns on these altars, and the priests claim the round-numbered antiquity of two thousand years for the temples.

There were very many companies of from ten to thirty well-dressed women on the road, some of whom had hobbled on their crippled-looking feet for fifteen miles, and were going back the same day; and many large bands of men, each led by a man with a gong, carrying a small table with incense sticks burning on it, the procession followed by another coolie loaded with red candles, large and small, with thick paper wicks, incense sticks, and red perforated paper for the God of War. His temple was crowded, and dense clouds of incense rolled from the open front into the atmosphere of heavenly blue. The God of Literature is chiefly worshipped by the _literati_, and there were only a few sedan chairs with their occupants and attendants at his splendid shrine.

The Ta-lu failed to keep up its reputation. Its great flags were tilted up or down, in mud-holes, or had disappeared; its noble avenue was spasmodic and often non-existent for miles, leading to the prophecy that it would disappear altogether, as it did. But the vanished grandeur was made up for by the extraordinary traffic—baggage coolies, chair-bearers, sedan chairs, passengers on foot and on horseback, varied at times by marriage and funeral processions, or batches of criminals tied together by their queues, being led to justice. Of the numbers of weight-carrying coolies, divested of the upper garment, on the road, there were very few free from hard tumours or callosities on both shoulders, and many of them have deep, cracked wounds in their heels. A man carries a load five miles before he earns a bowl of rice.

At intervals there were small huts, each sporting a military flag, and with halberds or lances with silk pennons leaning up against them. Sometimes these were in a village, but occasionally the flag, which is very showy, having a pennon end, and seen afar off, was only supported by a heap of stones on the roadside. There were no soldiers in uniform, but possibly the two or three peasants lying by every flag were men in mufti. Sometimes boys were carrying firearms of an ancient type, bows and arrows, or heavy swords. The people said that the flags were to frighten the rebels, and that the men were watching for them, but the region seemed in a state of profound peace.

The peasants’ coffins on the road were those of the poorest class, and were carried at a run, merely wrapped up in blue cotton. A mandarin’s coffin on its way to Mien-chow was draped with blue kilted silk, tasselled at the four corners, and was carried by twenty men in red-tasselled hats, slung on a heavy beam, with a boldly carved dragon, an emblem of official position, at both ends. The coffin was surmounted (as were those of the peasants) by a tethered live cock. A cheap coffin costs from five to ten dollars, and from that up to two thousand. There is much trade done on the Chia-ling in coffin wood and coffins. I saw many junks loaded with both.

At one place in China, where there was no inn, I slept in a room with a coffin which had been unburied for five years, because the geomancers had not decided on a lucky site or date for the interment, and for the whole time incense had been burned before it morning and evening. Of course if there is a family burial-place the services of the geomancer are seldom required except for the date of burial.

The coffin of the mandarin on the Ta-lu was not on its way to interment, therefore the usual procession was dispensed with, but nearer Tze-tung Hsien we met a large funeral for which we had to leave the road.[45] On this occasion the corpse of a well-to-do merchant, unburied for a year, was being borne to the grave.

In order to prevent any disagreeable consequences from interment being delayed for months or years, the coffin-boards are three or four inches thick, the body is covered with quicklime or is laid on a bed of lime or cotton, and afterwards the edges of the lid are closed with cement, and if the body is to remain in a dwelling-house, the whole is made air-tight by being covered with Ning-po varnish. A coffin is sometimes retained in a house by a defaulting tenant to prevent an ejectment for rent, and it is occasionally attached by creditors, in order to compel the relations to raise money to release it. So strong is the feeling in China regarding suitable burial, that a son if he has no other means will sell himself into slavery to provide the expenses, and burial clubs and charitable societies for providing the destitute with seemly funerals are numerous.

On this occasion a band of music came first, then the monstrous coffin on a bier carried by at least forty men in red coats and scarves, covered by a canopy embroidered in gold thread, on which was tethered a living fowl. Behind came the ancestral tablet in a sedan chair, the sacrifice, and some red tablets, on which were inscribed in gold the offices held by the deceased, followed by the male mourners dressed in white. The eldest son, apparently sinking with grief, though it was a year old, was supported by two men. Women and children followed, wailing at intervals. A man preceded the whole, strewing paper money on the ground to buy the goodwill of such malignant or predatory spirits as might be loafing around.

One man was loaded with crackers, another carried the libations which were to be poured out, and the rear of the procession, which was ten minutes in passing, was brought up by a great concourse of friends and neighbours, and a great number of bamboo and paper models, admirably executed, and many of them life-size, of horses with handsome saddles and trappings, mules carrying burdens, sedan chairs, houses, rich clothing, beds, tables, chairs, and all that the spirit can be supposed to want in the shadowy world to which it has gone. These, with a quantity of tinsel money, are burned at the grave, the tablet and sacrifice are carried back, the former to be placed in the ancestral hall, the latter to be feasted on or given to the poor. The ceremonies of the interment, as my readers are aware, only initiate the long years of ceremonial with which the dead are honoured in China.