Sidelights on Chinese Life

by J. Macgowan

There is a class of men called geomancers, who get their living by giving their professional opinion as to the suitability or otherwise of plots of land that people have in view to use as graves. There are certain conditions that these must fulfil, or else they will be rejected. One of these is that they must be dry. This specially the case in the South of China, where a wet piece of land would attract the white ants, and in a very short space of time the coffin would be eaten up by them, and worms and noxious insects would then have free access to the body.

But, independent of this disastrous result, damp seems to be a potent factor that affects the happiness of the departed, which not only renders their life more miserable in the other world, but which also induces them in revenge for the want of care of the living to send all kinds of misfortunes upon the homes they have left.

CEMETERIES.

To face p. 216.

The mother at this stage asked the witch to describe what her daughter looks like. Taking a black cloth which is usually one of her paraphernalia, she puts it on her head, letting it droop down over the face, and getting into an assumed kind of trance, she begins in a slow and solemn chant to describe the scenes that she pretends she sees in the Land of Shadows. “The country that lies before me,” she says, “is a gloomy one, and there is no sun to be seen. Shadows lie everywhere, and an air of depression rests upon the hills and on the plains that stretch before my vision. I see men and women passing up and down the roads, but they all look like spectres, for there is no laughter on their faces, and no signs of joy about them. They seem to be oppressed with a sense of their desolate condition. But wait! here is the figure of a young girl standing by a bridge looking into the sullen stream that is flowing rapidly and with scarcely a sound underneath it. She is about eighteen years of age, and though her face is pale and has caught the colour of the land in which she lives, she does not seem to be in bad health. Her house, which is on the bank of the river, is a very pleasant one and has a courtyard, a guest-room, and a bedroom. She has a pleasant face, and one that could be very sunny did she not live in so gloomy a country. She has a spray of jessamine in her hair, and her dress is put on with exquisite taste.” “Ah! that is my daughter indeed,” exclaims the mother. “Jessamine was her favourite flower, and she was always so neat about her person, and had such fine taste about her dresses,” and here, overcome with the sad thoughts that filled her heart, her tears began to flow and she sobbed forth the bitterness of her heart in words of anguish and despair.

This was the end of the witch’s visions, and having received her fee of about twopence, she went off with a smiling face to explore the mysteries of the Land of Shadows for the benefit of other sorrowing ones whose sight could only reach to the scenes and people of this world.

Many of the scenes in which these second-sighted women engage are really most interesting, and supposing for the moment that the pictures described are inventions of their own—which, of course, they indignantly deny—they usually manage to import into them a fine sense of poetical justice that one would hardly expect from minds so illiterate and so untutored as they always possess.

On one occasion a wealthy man invited one of these women to his home to call up a vision of his father, who had died a few months before. It will make the story more plain by explaining that the old man had been a mandarin, who had been notorious everywhere wherever he had held office for his avaricious, grasping disposition. His ability to accept bribes was immense, and no case came before him but was finally decided not on its own merits, but by the amount that either the prosecutor or the defendant was able to give him.