Lion and Dragon in Northern China

by Sir Reginald Fleming Johnston

Photo by Ah Fong, Weihaiwei.
A PEDIGREE-SCROLL (CHIA P'U) (see p. [279]).

A Chinese who emigrates to a foreign land rarely fails to make an agreement, either with his employers or with his compatriots, that if he dies while abroad his body is to be taken back not only to China but to his native town or village, wherever that may be. This peculiarity on the part of the Chinese is so well recognised by every one concerned that most European shipping firms trading in the Eastern seas are obliged to make special arrangements for conveying cargoes of coffins at moderate rates up and down the coast of China and from the various countries bordering on the Pacific where there are Chinese merchants and labourers. Probably it is generally supposed that the Chinese—like the people of other countries, only more so—are so sentimentally attached to their old homes that they will not venture to go abroad unless they are sure of returning to it some day as dead men if not as living ones. This is true to a certain extent. The average Chinese dearly loves his old home, and considering that it has been the home of his ancestors for a length of time that would make the oldest ancestral estate in England ashamed of itself, it is no wonder that he should regard it with affection.

But there is another reason why it is considered important that every Chinese—at least every Chinese who has sons of his own and has maintained connection with the old stock from which he sprang—should lay his bones beside those of his fathers. The Chinese theory is that some mysterious sympathy exists, even after death, between the soul and the body, and that unless the body is brought to the place where the ancestral sacra are carried out it will be impossible to provide for the sacrificial rites that ought to be rendered to the soul. The family at home will thus lose one of its ancestral links, and the dead man's spirit will wander homeless and lordless in the world of shades: an ancestral ghost separated for ever from communion with its fellows.

It is partly because of this supposed connection between soul and body that the Chinese abhor the idea of descending to their graves in a mutilated condition. Thus in China decapitation is a more serious punishment than strangulation, because it is thought that the headless man may become a headless ghost. The danger of appearing in a mutilated condition in the next world is, however, lessened or averted if the severed members can be buried along with the body to which they belonged. A Chinese servant in Weihaiwei not long ago begged for an old biscuit-tin from his foreign master in order that he might give it to a friend who wished to use it as a coffin for his amputated foot.[223]

It is the hope of every Chinese, then, that when he dies he will be laid in his ancestral graveyard, and that he will be laid there in a state of organic completeness. But there are occasions, of course, when it has proved impossible to convey dead men's bones from one end of China to another, or home from a foreign land: sometimes the family cannot afford the expense, sometimes there are overwhelming difficulties with regard to transport. Chinese ingenuity long ago set itself to devise a means whereby even such bad cases as this might have a happy ending, and it succeeded. The body itself, it was argued, is of no real importance: for sentimental reasons it is satisfactory to be able to bury the bodies of the dead in their ancestral graveyards, but otherwise there is no urgency in the matter provided only the dead man's souls—in spite of the absence of the body with which they were associated—can be persuaded or induced to take up their respective abodes in the ancestral graveyard and in the spirit-tablet. The problem was solved by calling in the aid of religion, and the ceremony observed is in outline something like this.

The members of the deceased's family, clad of course in funereal garb, call in a priest who, in accordance with the data provided by them, prepares a scroll containing the dead man's name and age and the date and place of his death. They then make a very rough effigy of a man—a few twisted straws are quite good enough—and on the effigy they pin the scroll. The priest now performs the ceremony of "calling the soul back"—that is to say, he recites certain charms which are supposed to reach the wandering spirit, wherever it may be, and to draw it to the place where the ceremony is to take place. The utterance of a few more charms is supposed to be sufficient to attach the spirit to the effigy-or rather to the scroll—which is then placed in a miniature coffin and buried with the rites observed at ordinary funerals. The man himself, to all intents and purposes, now lies buried in the ancestral graveyard, and all that remains to be done is to evoke the spiritual presence that will in future inhabit the shên-chu or spirit-tablet. When this has been done (just in the same way as when a real corpse lies buried) the ceremony is at an end: the soul, or rather the combination of souls, has been saved from homelessness, and will in future assume its proper position as an ancestral ghost both in the family graveyard and in the ancestral temple.

This remarkable custom is obviously such a convenient means of avoiding the trouble and expense of conveying dead bodies from distant places, that its comparative rarity may well be a matter of some surprise. Certainly, if the practice were to come into common use it would indirectly give a great impulse to emigration: for which reason it may perhaps be hoped by some Western peoples that it will for ever remain unfashionable. The custom is, however, an exceedingly old one, and was practised even at the Imperial Court nearly nineteen centuries ago.[224] There seems to have always been a strong prejudice against it, partly because it was a foolish superstition and partly because it would tempt the people to cease troubling themselves about the burial of their parents or bringing home their bodies from a distance, and would thus tend to the degradation or weakening of the ideals of filial piety. Hence we find that the practice of burying souls without the bodies was in 318 A.D. condemned by Imperial Decree as heretical;[225] yet this condemnation by no means brought about its discontinuance, and the present legal position is that the "violation of a grave in which an evoked soul is interred shall be punished just as severely as the violation of a grave occupied by a corpse,"[226] that is to say the offender may be sentenced to death.

In his interesting section on this strange custom Dr. De Groot remarks that as it has been "of common prevalence for at least eighteen centuries" its occurrence even nowadays can hardly be doubted. It certainly exists at Weihaiwei, though it is not in very common use. One reason for practising it in this little corner of China is based on the very strong belief that husband and wife should always be buried in the same grave. If the husband dies while he is abroad and the body is lost or cannot be brought home, nothing is necessarily done until his widow (who has remained at home) dies also. When she is buried, her husband's soul is ceremonially summoned to take up its residence in a paper scroll bearing the pa ko tzŭ ("eight characters" naming the year, month, day and hour of birth), and this, with or without a straw effigy, is formally placed in the grave by the widow's side.