An Australian in China

by George Ernest Morrison

The Rev. A. H. Smith ("Chinese Characteristics," p. 207) speaks "of the enormous infanticide which is known to exist in China." The Rev. Justus Doolittle ("Social Life of the Chinese," ii. p. 203) asserts that "there are most indubitable reasons for believing that infanticide is tolerated by the Government, and that the subject is treated with indifference and with shocking levity by the mass." ... But Bishop Moule "has good reason to conclude that the prevalence of the crime has been largely exaggerated." (Journal, China Branch R.A.S., ut supra.)

One of the best known Consuls in China, who lately retired from the Service, told the writer that in all his thirty years' experience of China he had only had personal knowledge of one authentic case of infanticide.

"Exaggerated estimates respecting the frequency of infanticide," says the Rev. Dr. D. J. MacGowan, "are formed owing to the withholding interment from children who die in infancy." And he adds that "opinions of careful observers will be found to vary with fields of observation." (China Review, xiv., 206.)

Whatever the relative frequency of infanticide in China and Europe may be, it cannot, I think, admit of question that the crime of infanticide is less common among the barbarian Chinese than is the crime of f[oe]ticide among the highly civilised races of Europe and America.

There are several temples in Tongchuan, and two beyond the walls which are of more than ordinary interest. There is a Temple to the Goddess of Mercy, where deep reverence is shown to the images of the Trinity of Sisters. They are seated close into the wall, the nimbus of glory which plays round their impassive features being represented by a golden aureola painted on the wall. The Goddess of Mercy is called by the Chinese "Sheng-mu," or Holy Mother, and it is this name which has been adopted by the Roman Catholic Church as the Chinese name of the Virgin Mary.

There is a fine City Temple which controls the spirits of the dead of the city as the yamens of the magistrates control the living of the city. The Prefect and the City Magistrate are here shown in their celestial abodes administering justice—or its Chinese equivalent—to the spirits who, when living, were under their jurisdiction on earth. They hold the same position in Heaven and have the same authority as they had on earth; and may, as spirits, be bribed to deal gently with the spirits of departed friends just as, when living, they were open to offers to deal leniently with any living prisoner in whose welfare the friends were prepared to express practical sympathy.

In the Buddhist Temple are to be seen, in the long side pavilions, the chambers of horrors with their realistic representations of the torments of a soul in its passage through the eight Buddhist hells. I looked on these scenes with the calmness of an unbeliever; not so a poor woman to whom the horrors were very vivid truths. She was on her knees before the grating, sobbing piteously at a ghastly scene where a man, while still alive, was being cast by monsters from a hill-top on to red-hot spikes, there to be torn in pieces by serpents. This was the torture her dead husband was now enduring; it was this stage he had reached in his onward passage through hell—the priest had told her so, and only money paid to the priests could lighten his torment.

Beyond the south gate, amid groves of lofty pine trees, are the temple and grounds, the pond and senior wrangler bridge, of the Confucian Temple—the most beautifully-finished temple I have seen in China. We have accustomed ourselves to speak in ecstacies of the wood-carving in the temples of Japan, but not even in the Shōgun chapels of the Shiba temples in Tokyo have I seen wood-carving superior to the exquisite delicacy of workmanship displayed in the carving of the Imperial dragons that frame with their fantastic coils the large Confucian tablet of this temple. Money has been lavished on this building. The inclined marble slabs that divide the terrace steps are covered with fanciful tracery; the parapets of the bridge are chiselled in marble; sculptured images of elephants with howdahs crown the pillars of the marble balustrades; the lattice work under the wide eaves is everywhere beautifully carved. Lofty pillars of wood support the temple roofs. They are preserved by a coating of hemp and protected against fire by an outer coating of plaster stained the colour of the original wood. Gilding is used as freely in the decoration of the grand altar and tablets of this temple, as it is in a temple in Burma.

On a hill overlooking the city and valley is the Temple to the God of Literature. The missionary and I climbed to the temple and saw its pretty court, its ancient bronze censer, and its many beautiful flowers, and then sat on the terrace in the sun and watched the picturesque valley spread out before us.

As we descended the hill again, a lad, who had attached himself to us, offered to show us the two common pits in which are cast the dead bodies of paupers and criminals. The pits are at the foot of the hill, open-mouthed in the uncut grass. With famine in the city, with people dying at that very hour of starvation, there was no lack of dead, and both pits were filled to within a few feet of the surface. Bodies are thrown in here without any covering, and hawks and crows strip them of their flesh, a mode of treating the dead grateful to the Parsee, but inexpressibly hateful to the Chinese, whose poverty must be overwhelming when he can be found to permit it. Pigtails were lying carelessly about and skulls separated from the trunk. Human bones gnawed by dogs were to be picked up in numbers in the long grass all round the hill; they were the bones of the dead who had been loosely buried close to the surface, through which dogs—the domestic dogs one met afterwards in the street—had scraped their way. Many, too, were the bones of dead children; for poor children are not buried, but are thrown outside the wall, sometimes before they are dead, to be eaten perhaps by the very dog that was their playmate since birth.