In many countries there was once a barbarous custom whereby human beings were sacrificed at the building of the gates or towers of a city wall and buried below the foundations.[346] Human blood was believed to add strength and stability to the wall, and the sacrificed human being was supposed to become its spiritual guardian. Sacrifices of this kind are believed to have taken place as recently as 1857, at the foundation of the Burmese city of Mandalay. Not only city-walls but bridges, temples, river-dykes, and indeed all buildings of importance were supposed to be enormously strengthened by the blood and bones of specially-slain human victims. In some cases, apparently, the wretched victims were buried alive. There is some reason for believing that human sacrifices occurred at the construction of the Great Wall of China in the third century B.C.
In some parts of the Empire there is still a curiously-prevalent belief to the effect that Governments and officials are in the habit of taking a toll of human life when they have any great engineering work on hand, and bad characters or misguided patriots who wished to bring odium upon foreigners have been known to circulate stories that Chinese children were being kidnapped by Western barbarians for the purpose of burying them under a railway or a fort or a dock or some great public building. There was a scare of the kind among a section of the poorer classes of Hongkong about eight or nine years ago, and in the little village known to Europeans as Aberdeen, on the Hongkong island, there was, in consequence, a small panic. A white ship, said the people, had been seen coming by night into Aberdeen harbour, the object of those on board being to kidnap Chinese boys and girls for purposes of foundation-sacrifices. Yet the people of that village had been under direct British rule for about sixty years! It would be interesting to know whether the Ch'êng Huang or City-god was originally a sacrificed human-being, but the Chinese will not admit such to be the case and it is difficult to procure evidence.
The Chinese of to-day profess to think that no such barbarous custom can ever have taken place in their country, but they are unquestionably wrong in this belief: indeed there is some reason to believe that the custom is not yet extinct in China.[347] As for the barbarity of the practice, the Chinese admit that the custom of slaughtering men and women at funerals, and even burying them alive in the tombs of kings and high officials, became extinct only in modern times.[348] Whatever may be the truth with regard to the origin of the Ch'êng Huang, the popular belief is that he is a kind of ghostly magistrate, and in modern times he is generally regarded as the spirit of a former magistrate who on account of his blameless life or devotion to the interests of the people died "in the odour of sanctity."
Changes and promotions sometimes take place among the city-gods just as among the living members of the Chinese civil service. The world of the dead is supposed to be a reduplication of the world of men. One might almost imagine that some rather dull-witted Chinese philosopher had heard, and grievously failed to understand, the Platonic doctrine of Ideas, and had then applied his new learning to the solution, by Chinese methods, of the mystery of the land from which no traveller returns. Provinces, cities, villages, officials and yamên-runners, houses and fields and cattle, and indeed all material things were and are vaguely supposed to have their immaterial counterparts in the world of shades. It is necessary to emphasise the word "vaguely," for no well-educated and very few illiterate Chinese seem to hold this belief with dogmatic definiteness, and indeed they are usually ready to join Europeans in criticising or deriding it. But it is a theory that certainly colours the traditional Chinese views of death and the beyond.
The city-god takes rank according to the status of the living magistrate: a prefectural city is superior to that of a district-magistracy, hence the city-god of the former takes precedence of the city-god of the latter. The deity that presides over the destinies of Weihaiwei city is thus very humbly placed among the hundreds and thousands of deities of his class, for Weihaiwei is only the seat of a hsün-chien[349]—the mere deputy of a district-magistrate. It is probable, too, that just as the Weihaiwei hsün-chien has become an even less important person than formerly, since the establishment of British rule over the territory that was once under his supervision, so his ghostly counterpart has been obliged to assume a humbler position than before in the ranks of the minor deities. Yet if local legends are to be credited the Weihai city-god was once quite competent to assert his authority and defend his reputation. It is generally supposed that a deity of this class has control only over the people of his own city and its subject territory: beyond those limits his powers do not extend. But that the Weihai god insisted at one time on respectful treatment even from strangers is proved by the following incident. In the seventeenth century a certain man named Chao, a native of the P'êng-lai district in the prefecture of Têng-chou, had come to Weihaiwei to transact business. The weather being hot he went into the Ch'êng Huang miao (temple of the city-god) for an afternoon nap, and sat down with his back to the god's image. A bystander, who was a local man, hastened to point out that his attitude was disrespectful. "It is not proper," he said, "to sit with your back to the god. Wouldn't it be wiser to turn sideways?" Chao smiled scornfully. "I am a P'êng-lai man; your god has no power over me. I propose to stay where I am."
THE BUDDHA OF KU SHAN TEMPLE
(see p. [402]).
