Chinese mettle

by E. G. Kemp

He is Fear, O Little Hunter, he is Fear.”

In Yünnan they worship a stone placed at the foot of a Dragon tree, either in a wood behind the village or close to the houses. I did not see any in Kweichow, though I sketched just such a stone in Macao, where there were offerings of incense and scarlet paper. There is a sacrifice of a pig and a fowl made twice a year at the stone. The origin of this worship is not known, but it is now supposed to be addressed to a god in the sky, who protects the people. As regards the tree, it is a curious fact that it is not of any particular species, but that every village in the province of Yünnan, whether of the Chinese or of the aborigines, has one; they have the same belief about its being inhabited by a dragon, which protects the village.

The Ya-ch’io Miao offer in sacrifice an ox to Heaven and a pig to Earth, and once every thirteen years they sacrifice buffaloes to Heaven. Their sorcerers are men who wield great power, and it is a hereditary profession. The sorcerer must wear a special kind of hat when he is engaged in divination: without it he is powerless. He has special books (of which I am fortunate enough to possess one) with movable disks, superimposed one on another, for casting horoscopes. These books are handed down from generation to generation, and used to be copied out by hand; but nowadays they are printed. Such books were brought by an I-chia, who had become a Christian, in order to have them burnt; the missionary asked leave to keep them instead, explaining their historic value. The accompanying illustration is taken from one of these priceless old MSS. describing the Creation. It is written on a brittle kind of paper, extremely worn and fragile, and the leaves are fastened together with twisted strips of paper, acting as a string. This is a peculiarly Chinese way of binding, such as you may see students practising any day in class to fasten their notes. The colour of the paper is brown, the characters black, and the illustrations are painted in several shades of yellow and brown, forming a harmonious whole. The upper circle, containing a bird, is the moon; and the lower circle, containing a beast, is the earth.

Dr. Henry brought a large number of MSS. back from Yünnan, which are now in the British Museum, but they differ in certain respects from mine. In the first place, they contain no diagrams; secondly, they are all divided up metrically into groups of five characters, or seven; mine are not all divided into groups (as may be seen from the illustration, Ancient I-chia Script), and those that are in groups vary in number, four, or five, or six. He says that the subject-matter of all the MSS. which he studied is religious ritual, genealogies, legends and song, and all are written in verse. The script is quite unique: it is pictographic in origin, not ideographic like the Chinese. Many Chinese words are compound, one part denoting sound, the other part denoting meaning: Lolo words are never compounds.

The characters, as will be seen from the illustration, are decidedly simpler than Chinese. I had the good fortune to submit my MSS. when I was at Swatow (a couple of months later) to a learned Chinese scholar, who seemed greatly interested in them. He took them into his hands with devout reverence and care, as if they were of priceless value. He said that he had indeed seen such MSS. before, but that it was extremely rare: he at once said that it came from no Chinese source, but from aborigines in the north of Kweichow. When I asked if it were some hundreds of years old, he replied, “Oh! much older than that,” and stated that the numerals and certain other characters were the same as the Chinese script of three thousand years ago. One of the characters which he pointed out was that for the moon:

My MS. gives
Dr. Henry’s
Chinese

I have also compared my MS. with pages of Lolo writing published by Colborne Baber in the Geographical Society’s Supplementary Paper, 1882, and can find no exact correspondence between them. Surely it would be a most interesting study for some one to undertake, the more so that there is already a wealth of material lying ready to hand at the British Museum. The Lolo writing is also different from Chinese in that it is read in columns from left to right and the book begins at the same end as ours. It corresponds with the later Syriac mode of writing, and Dr. Henry suggests it may have had some connexion with the Nestorians, who were to be found in all parts of China from the seventh to the thirteenth centuries. S. R. Clarke mentions a spirit who controls the crops, and is called by the Lolos Je-so: the Christians suggested that this name be the one adopted for Jesus Christ, but it was not done.

The above-mentioned theory would account for some of the Lolo practices and beliefs, which are otherwise very difficult to account for, such as their keeping the Sabbath every sixth day, when no ploughing is allowed to be done, and the women are not even allowed to sew or wash clothes on that day. Of course this does not apply to all Lolos, but only to some in Yünnan. They have also the remarkable crosses (as seen in the soul-carriers), and they believe in patriarchs who lived to abnormal ages, such as six hundred and sixty or nine hundred and ninety years, as in the Old Testament records, not to mention the stories of the creation and the deluge. Their name for Adam has the two consonants d and m, it is Du-mu. The patriarchs are supposed to live in the sky: the chief of them is called Tse-gu-dzih, and this patriarch is also a deity who opened the box containing the seeds of death; he thus gave suffering humanity the boon of death. He also caused the deluge.

“The legend of the deluge,” says Dr. Henry, “runs that the people were wicked, and Tse-gu-dzih to try them sent a messenger to earth, asking for some blood and flesh from a mortal. All refused but Du-mu. Tse-gu-dzih then locked the rain gates, and the water mounted to the sky. Du-mu (? Adam) was saved with his four sons in a log hollowed out of the Pieris tree; and there were also saved otters, wild ducks and lampreys. From his sons are descended civilized people who can write, as the Chinese and Lolos. The ignorant races descend from men that were made by Du-mu out of pieces of wood. Du-mu is worshipped as the ancestor of the Lolos, and nearly all legends begin with some reference (like our ‘once upon a time’) to Du-mu or the Deluge. Du-mu and precedent men had their eyes placed vertically in their sockets; after him came the present race of men, who have their eyes placed horizontally. This quaint idea may have some reference to the encroachment of the oblique-eyed Mongolians, who have horizontal eyes, as it were, i.e. eyes narrow in height, whereas Europeans and other races have eyes that may be called vertical, i.e. wide from above downwards.

“The Lolos have a cosmogony. Their account of the Creation is that there were two Spirits, A-chi and A-li. A-chi made the sky, and made it evenly and well. A-li slept, and on awakening saw that the sky was completed. In his hurry to do his work, he dumped hurriedly earth here and there. This accounts for the inequalities of the earth’s surface. When the sky was first created the sun and moon were dull, and did not shine properly. They were washed by two sky-maidens, and have remained clean and bright ever since.”