Outside this crowded city of Canton's living masses is the even larger and more crowded city of Canton's dead. From the highest point on the city wall my guide pointed out an unbroken cemetery extending for ten miles: the hills dotted {144} with mounds until they have the appearance of faces pitted by smallpox.
For the Chinaman, however unimportant in actual life, becomes a man of importance as soon as he dies, and his grave must be carefully looked after. The finest place I saw in Canton was the mortuary where the dead bodies of wealthy Chinamen are kept until burial. The handsome coffins I saw ranged in value from $1400 to $2700 Mexican, or half these amounts American money. The lacquered surfacing accounts for the high cost.
Nor are these departed Celestials kept here for a few days only. Sometimes it is a matter of several years, my guide told me, the geomancers or fortune-tellers being employed all this time in finding a suitable site for a grave. These miserable scoundrels pretend that the soul of the dead man will not rest unless he is buried in just the right spot and in just the right kind of soil. Perhaps no professional man in China earns as much as these fakirs. Sometimes it happens that after a man has been dead two or three years his family suffers a series of misfortunes. A frequent explanation in such cases is that the wrong site has been chosen for the dead man's burial place. Another geomancer is then hired and told to find a new grave where the soul will rest in peace. Of course, he charges a heavy fee.
In one $1400 coffin I saw was the body of a wealthy young Chinaman who died last spring. Three times a day a new cup of tea is placed on the table for his spirit, and on the walls of the room were scores of silk scrolls, fifteen feet long, expressing the sympathy of friends and relatives. Around the coffin, too, were almost life-size images of servants, and above it a heap of gilded paper to represent gold. When the geomancers finally find a suitable grave for the poor fellow he will be buried, and these paper servants and this paper gold will be burned, in the belief that they will be converted into real servants and real gold for his use in the spirit world.
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A friend of mine in Peking who saw the funeral of the late Emperor and Empress Dowager told me some interesting stories of the truly Oriental ceremonies then celebrated. Tons of clothes and furs were burned, and vast quantities of imitation money. A gorgeous imitation boat, natural size and complete in every detail from cabins to anchors, steamer chairs, and ample decks, was fitted up at a cost of $36,000 American money, and burned. Furthermore, as my friend was coming home one evening, he was surprised to see in an unexpected place, some distance ahead, a full regiment of soldiers, gorgeous in new uniforms, and hundreds of handsome cavalry horses. Getting closer, what was his amazement to find that these natural-size soldiers and steeds were only make-believe affairs to be burned for the dead monarchs! To maintain their rank in the Beyond they must have at least one full regiment at their command!
Since we are on such gruesome subjects we might as well finish with them now by considering the punishments in China. I went out to the execution grounds in Canton, but it happened to be an off-day when nobody was due to suffer the death sentence. I did see the cross, though, on which the worst criminals are stretched and strangled before they are beheaded. The bodies of these malefactors are not allowed ordinary burial, but quick-limed, I believe. There were human bones beside the old stone wall where I walked, and when a Chinese brat lifted for a moment a sort of jute-bagging cover from a barrel the topmost skull of the heap grinned ghastly in the sunlight.
The cruelty of Chinese punishments is a blot upon her civilization. When I was in Shanghai a friend of mine told me of having been to a little town where two men had just been executed for salt-smuggling. Salt is a government monopoly in China, or at least is subject to a special revenue duty, so that salt smuggling is about equivalent to blockading whiskey in America.
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Recognized forms of punishment are death by starvation and "death by the seventy-two cuts"--gradually chopping a man to pieces as if he were a piece of wood. This latter punishment is for treason. To let a bad criminal be hanged instead of beheaded is regarded as a favor, the explanation being that the man who has his head cut off is supposed to be without a head in the hereafter.