[317] This use of paper money in China is said to date from A.D. 1236; that is, during the reign of the Mongol Emperor, Ogdai Khan.
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[318] This contingency is much dreaded by the Chinese.
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[319] A yojana has been variously estimated at from five to nine English miles.
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[320] The patra and khakkharam of the bikshu or Buddhist mendicant.
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[321] It is not considered quite correct to take a concubine unless the wife is childless, in which case it is held that the proposition to do so, and thus secure the much-desired posterity, should emanate from the wife herself. On page 41 of Vol. XIII., of this author, we read, “and if at thirty years of age you have no children, then sell your hair-pins and other ornaments, and buy a concubine for your husband. For the childless state is a hard one to bear;” or, as Victor Hugo puts it in his Légende des Siècles, there is nothing so sad as “la maison sans enfants.”
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[322] This is the celebrated form of death, reserved for parricide and similar awful crimes, about which so much has been written. Strictly speaking, the malefactor should be literally chopped to pieces in order to prolong his agonies; but the sentence is now rarely, if ever, carried out in its extreme sense. A few gashes are made upon the wretched victim’s body, and he is soon put out of his misery by decapitation. As a matter of fact, this death is not enumerated among the Five Punishments authorized by the Penal Code of the present dynasty. See No. LV., [note 306].
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[323] Alluding to a well-known Buddhist miracle in which a bikshu was to be thrown into a cauldron of boiling water in a fiery pit, when suddenly a lotus-flower came forth, the fire was extinguished, and the water became cold.
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[324] The Chinese term—here translated “Cannibals”—is a meaningless imitation by two Chinese characters of the Sanscrit yakcha, or certain demons who feed upon human flesh.
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[325] Hué, the capital of Cochin-China.
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[326] The island of Hainan, inhabited as it was in earlier times by a race of savages, is the most likely source of the following marvellous adventures.
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