Lion and Dragon in Northern China

by Sir Reginald Fleming Johnston

It will be observed that no penalty is assigned for the offence of damaging the actual graves, this being an offence which is almost unknown; though a man was once charged before me by the whole of his fellow-villagers with the offence of digging up and levelling an old grave (chüeh p'ing ku fên). It was admitted by the prosecutors that the grave in question was very ancient and that the branch of the family to which it belonged had long been extinct. The fact that the whole village made a point of denouncing their sacrilegious neighbour (who had hoped to extend the boundaries of his arable land by encroaching on a corner of the graveyard that no one seemed to want) shows how heinous a crime it is in China to disturb the resting-places even of the unknown dead. Sometimes the regulations are cut on a great stone slab which is set up within the graveyard itself. If no definite regulations have been agreed upon, the custom, when the sanctity of a graveyard has been violated, is for the elders of the clan to meet in council and decide the case according to circumstances. If the convicted man refuses to accept the punishment pronounced upon him, or if he belongs to another village or clan, the matter usually comes before the magistrate.

A case arising out of the theft of some graveyard trees was lately submitted to my decision owing to the truculent behaviour of the malefactor, who refused to submit to the headmen's judgment. After investigating the circumstances I sentenced him to pay a fine of ten dollars, which was to be applied to the upkeep of the ancestral temple; to plant three times the number of trees that he had cut down; and to erect a stone tablet within the graveyard at his own expense setting forth the offence of which he had been guilty and enlarging upon the severe punishments that would befall others who attempted in future to commit like misdeeds.

Another case was brought before me by a man who accused a stranger of cutting up a dead donkey within his family graveyard. The defendant's excuse was that while passing the graveyard his donkey had suddenly taken ill and died, and that he dragged it in among the trees in order to avoid incommoding the public by skinning and slicing the animal on the roadside. Donkeys, it may be mentioned, are not ordinary articles of diet, but few Chinese can bring themselves to throw away flesh that by any stretch of the imagination can be regarded as edible; hence it is quite usual to eat the remains of cattle and donkeys that die of old age or even of disease. The plaintiff's plea in this suit was not that the defendant was preparing for human consumption food that was unfit to eat, but that the defendant had selected his graveyard for use as a butcher's shop. He objected, reasonably enough, to having his ancestors' tombs bespattered with the blood of a dead donkey. The defendant was required to offer a public apology to the plaintiff and to pay him a moderate sum as compensation; and the plaintiff left the court a contented man.

The mode of punishment often chosen by the elders for offences connected with graveyards is to compel the accused to make an expiatory offering to the dead whose spirits he is supposed to have offended. A man who "cut branches from the family graveyard for his own use" was recently sentenced by his clan to present himself at the graveyard in an attitude of humility and to offer up a sacrifice of pork and vegetables. The custom in such cases is that after the dead have consumed their part of the sacrifice (that is to say, the spiritual or immaterial and invisible part) the remainder is divided up among the chief families concerned or eaten at a clan feast.

A curious custom analogous to this of serving up hog-flesh as an expiatory offering to the spirits to whom the graveyard and its trees are sacred is to be found in Roman literature. "Cato," as Dr. Tylor reminds us,[196] "instructs the woodman how to gain indemnity for thinning a holy grove; he must offer a hog in sacrifice with this prayer, 'Be thou god or goddess to whom this grove is sacred, permit me, by the expiation of this pig, and in order to restrain the overgrowth of this wood, etc., etc.'" The two customs are not true parallels, however, for the Chinese offers his sacrifice to the spirits of his ancestors as an atonement for the offence of cutting trees which he normally regards as the inviolable property of the dead or as associated with them in some mysterious way; whereas the Roman offered his sacrifice to a grove which was in itself sacred as being the abode of gods or dryads. We shall see later on[197] that tree-worship still finds a place in the Chinese religious system and is not extinct even in Weihaiwei, but it would be a mistake to regard the veneration shown for the trees of a family graveyard as evidence of such worship. Even if the custom of planting a graveyard with trees had in remote times a common origin with tree-worship (which is at least doubtful) there is no evidence whatever to support the view that graveyard trees are regarded as sacred in themselves at the present time. An obvious reason for planting trees in a graveyard would seem to be that it facilitated the protection of the graves from the encroachments of the plough; but the custom is more probably derived from the ancient superstition that certain trees communicate their preservative qualities to the human remains that lie below them or impart a kind of vitality or vigour to the spirits of the dead.

This matter has been ably and thoroughly discussed by Dr. De Groot,[198] who shows convincingly that "since very ancient times pines and cypresses have played a prominent part as producers of timber for coffins, and that this was the case because these trees, being believed to be imbued with great vitality, might counteract the putrefaction of the mortal remains." The same cause that made such timber valuable for coffins made it valuable for graveyards. The superstition is connected with the ancient Chinese philosophic doctrine of the Yang and the Yin—the complementary forces and qualities which pervade all nature, such as male and female, light and dark, warmth and cold, activity and passivity, positive and negative, life and death. It was supposed that all evergreens must have a greater store of the yang element (life, vitality) than other trees, because they retain their foliage through the winter; and of evergreen trees those prized most by the Chinese for their life-giving qualities were and are the fir and the cypress.[199] Therefore by planting these trees in their graveyards and in the courtyards of their ancestral temples the Chinese supposed they would endow their ancestors (apparently both their dead bodies and their living spirits) with a never-failing preservative against decay and dissolution. The result of this on themselves—the living descendants of the dead—must be, it was thought, a constant flow of happiness and good fortune.

It will be remembered that ancestor-worship is not merely regarded as a method of showing love and reverence for the dead but is believed to induce the ancestral spirits to protect and watch over the family and to bestow on its members long life, many children and general prosperity. The more abundant the vitality (if one may speak of the vitality of a ghost) that can be imparted to the ancestral spirits, the better able will they be (so goes the theory) to exert themselves on behalf of the fortunes of their posterity; and the best way to impart vitality (that is, the yang element) to the spirits is to surround their coffins and their ancestral tablets with as many yang-supplying agencies as possible. The original theory of the matter is probably extinct at Weihaiwei if not everywhere else; trees are planted and protected in the family temples and graveyards for no known reason except that it is the traditional custom to do so[200]: yet it is noteworthy that the cypress is still the favourite tree in the grounds of the ancestral temples, that the fir is still considered one of the best trees to plant in a graveyard, and that the pedigree-scrolls preserved among the archives of every family are often decorated with the painting of an evergreen tree.[201]