The influence of these mottoes, and countless others like them which are constantly seen in the streets, shops, and dwellings throughout the land, is inestimable. Generally it is for good, and as a large proportion are in the form of petition or wish, they show the moral feeling of the people.
Boat-people in Kwangtung and Fuhkien provinces are peculiarly liberal of their paper prayers, pasting them on every board and oar in the boat, and suspending them from the stern in scores, making the vessel flutter with gaiety. Farmers stick theirs upon barns, trees, wattles, baskets, and implements, as if nothing was too insignificant to receive a blessing. The house is arranged in the most orderly and cleanly manner, and purified with religious ceremonies and lustrations, firing of crackers, etc., and as the necessary preparations occupy a considerable portion of the night, the streets are not quiet till dawn. In addition to the bustle arising from business and religious observances, which marks this passage of time, the constant explosion of fire-crackers, and the clamor of gongs, make it still more noisy. Strings of these crackling fireworks are burned at the doorposts, before the outgoing and incoming of the year, designed to expel and deter evil spirits from the house. The consumption is so great as to cover the streets with the fragments, and farmers come the week after into Canton city and sweep up hundreds of bushels for manure.
The first day of the year is also regarded as the birthday of the entire population, for the practice among the Hebrews of dating the age from the beginning of the year, prevails also in China; so that a child born only a week before new year, is considered as entering its second year on the first day of the first month. This does not, however, entirely supersede the observance of the real anniversary, and parents frequently make a solemnity of their son’s birthday. A missionary thus describes the celebration of a son’s sixth birthday at Ningpo. “The little fellow was dressed in his best clothes, and his father had brought gilt paper, printed prayers, and a large number of bowls of meats, rice, vegetables, spirits, nuts, etc., as an offering to be spread out before the idols. The ceremonies were performed in the apartment of the Tao Mu, or ‘Bushel Mother,’ who has special charge of infants before and after birth. The old abbot was dressed in a scarlet robe, with a gilt image of a serpent fastened in his hair; one of the monks wore a purple, another a gray robe. A multitude of prayers, seemingly a round of repetitions, were read by the abbot, occasionally chanting a little, when the attendants joined in the chorus, and a deafening clamor of bells, cymbals, and wooden blocks, added force to their cry; genuflexions and prostrations were repeatedly made. One part of the ceremony was to pass a live cock through a barrel, which the assistants performed many times, shouting some strange words at each repetition; this act symbolized the dangers through which the child was to pass in his future life, and the priests had prayed that he might as safely come out of them all, as the cock had passed through the barrel. In conclusion, some of the prayers were burned and a libation poured out, and a grand symphony of bell, gong, drum, and block, closed the scene.”[383]
A great diversity of local usages are observed at this period in different parts of the country. In Amoy, the custom of “surrounding the furnace” is generally practised. The members of the family sit down to a substantial supper on new year’s eve, with a pan of charcoal under the table, as a supposed preservative against fires. After the supper is ended, the wooden lamp-stands are brought out and spread upon the pavement with a heap of gold and silver paper, and set on fire after all demons have been warned off by a volley of fire-crackers. The embers are then divided into twelve heaps, and their manner of going out carefully watched as a prognostic of the kind of weather to be expected the ensuing year. Many persons wash their bodies in warm water, made aromatic by the infusion of leaves, as a security against disease; this ceremony, and ornamenting the ancestral shrine, and garnishing the whole house with inscriptions, pictures, flowers, and fruit, in the gayest manner the means of the family will allow, occupy most of the night.
CALLS AND COMPLIMENTS AT NEW YEAR’S.
The stillness of the streets and the gay inscriptions on the closed shops on new year’s morning present a wonderful contrast to the usual bustle and crowd, resembling the Christian Sabbath. The red papers of the doors are here and there interspersed with the blue ones, announcing that during the past year death has come among the inmates of the house; a silent but expressive intimation to passers that some who saw the last new year have passed away. In certain places, white, yellow, and carnation colored papers are employed, as well as blue, to distinguish the degree of the deceased kindred. Etiquette requires that those who mourn remain at home at this period. By noontide the streets begin to be filled with well-dressed persons, hastening in sedans or afoot to make their calls; those who cannot afford to buy a new suit hire one for this purpose, so that a man hardly knows his own domestics in their finery and robes. The meeting of friends in the streets, both bound on the same errand, is attended with particular demonstrations of respect, each politely struggling who shall be most affectedly humble. On this day parents receive the prostrations of their children, teachers expect the salutations of their pupils, magistrates look for the calls of their inferiors, and ancestors of every generation, and gods of various powers are presented with the offerings of devotees in the family hall or public temple. Much of the visiting is done by cards, on which is stamped an emblematic device representing the three happy wishes—of children, rank, and longevity; a common card suffices for distant acquaintances and customers. It might be a subject of speculation whether the custom of visiting and renewing one’s acquaintances on new year’s day, so generally practised among the Dutch and in America, was not originally imitated from the Chinese; but as in many other things, so in this, the westerns have improved upon the easterns, in calling upon the ladies. Persons, as they meet, salute each other with Kung-hí! Kung-hí! ‘I respectfully wish you joy!’—or Sin-hí! Sin-hí! ‘May the new joy be yours,’ either of which, from its use at this season, is quite like the Happy New Year! of Englishmen.
Toward evening, the merry sounds proceeding from the closed doors announce that the sacrifice provided for presentation before the shrines of departed parents is cheering the worshippers; while the great numbers who resort to gambling-shops show full well that the routine of ceremony soon becomes tiresome, and a more exciting stimulus is needed. The extent to which play is now carried is almost indescribable. Jugglers, mountebanks, and actors also endeavor to collect a few coppers by amusing the crowds. Generally speaking, however, the three days devoted to this festival pass by without turmoil, and business and work then gradually resume their usual course for another twelvemonth.
DRAGON-BOAT FESTIVAL AND FEAST OF LANTERNS.
The festival of the dragon-boats, on the fifth day of the fifth month, presents a very different scene wherever there is a serviceable stream for its celebration. At Canton, long, narrow boats, holding sixty or more rowers, race up and down the river in pairs with huge clamor, as if searching for some one who had been drowned. This festival was instituted in memory of the statesman Küh Yuen, about 450 B.C., who drowned himself in the river Mih-lo, an affluent of Tungting Lake, after having been falsely accused by one of the petty princes of the state. The people, who loved the unfortunate courtier for his fidelity and virtues, sent out boats in search of the body, but to no purpose. They then made a peculiar sort of rice-cake called tsung, and setting out across the river in boats with flags and gongs, each strove to be first on the spot of the tragedy and sacrifice to the spirit of Küh Yuen. This mode of commemorating the event has been since continued as an annual holiday. The bow of the boat is ornamented or carved into the head of a dragon, and men beating gongs and drums, and waving flags, inspirit the rowers to renewed exertions. The exhilarating exercise of racing leads the people to prolong the festival two or three days, and generally with commendable good humor, but their eagerness to beat often breaks the boats, or leads them into so much danger that the magistrates sometimes forbid the races in order to save the people from drowning.[384]
The first full moon of the year is the feast of lanterns, a childish and dull festival compared with the two preceding. Its origin is not certainly known, but it was observed as early as A.D. 700. Its celebration consists in suspending lanterns of different forms and materials before each door, and illuminating those in the hall, but their united brilliancy is dimness itself compared with the light of the moon. At Peking, an exhibition of transparencies and pictures in the Board of War on this evening attracts great crowds of both sexes if the weather be good. Magaillans describes a firework he saw, which was an arbor covered with a vine, the woodwork of which seemed to burn, while the trunk, leaves, and clusters of the plant gradually consumed, yet so that the redness of the grapes, the greenness of the leaves, and natural brown of the stem were all maintained until the whole was burned. The feast of lanterns coming so soon after new year, and being somewhat expensive, is not so enthusiastically observed in the southern cities. At the capital this leisure time, when public offices are closed, is availed of by the jewellers, bric-a-brac dealers, and others to hold a fair in the courts of a temple in the Wai Ching, where they exhibit as beautiful a collection of carvings in stone and gems, bronzes, toys, etc., as is to be seen anywhere in Asia. The respect with which the crowds of women and children are treated on these occasions reflects much credit on the people.