[72] Watchmen in China, when on their nightly rounds, keep up an incessant beating on what, for want of a better term, we have called a wooden gong. The object is to let thieves know they are awake and on the look-out.
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[73] This is a characteristic touch. Only the most intimate of friends ever see each other’s wives.
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[74] Where the women of the family live, and into which no stranger ever penetrates. Among other names by which a Chinese husband speaks of his wife, a very common one is “the inner [wo]man.”
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[75] Until which he would be safe, by virtue of his degree, from the degrading penalty of the bamboo.
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[76] This is the instrument commonly used for flogging criminals in China, and consists of a strip of split bamboo planed down smooth. Strictly speaking there are two kinds, the heavy and the light; the former is now hardly if ever used. Until the reign of K‘ang Hsi all strokes were given across the back; but that humane Emperor removed the locus operandi lower down, “for fear of injuring the liver or the lungs.”
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[77] See No. VII., [note 54].
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[78] It is a principle of Chinese jurisprudence that no sentence can be passed until the prisoner has confessed his guilt—a principle, however, not unfrequently set aside in practice.
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[79] Wooden frames covered with a semi-transparent paper are used all over the northern provinces of China; in the south, oyster-shells, cut square and planed down thin, are inserted tile-fashion in the long narrow spaces of a wooden frame made to receive them, and used for the same purpose. But glass is gradually finding its way into the houses of the well-to-do, large quantities being made at Canton and exported to various parts of the empire.
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[80] Every Taoist priest has a magic sword, corresponding to our “magician’s wand.”
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[81] In China, a man has the right to slay his adulterous wife, but he must slay her paramour also; both or neither. Otherwise, he lays himself open to a prosecution for murder. The act completed, he is further bound to proceed at once to the magistrate of the district and report what he has done.
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