[56] Upon a wall at the entrance to every official residence is painted a huge fabulous animal, called Greed, in such a position that the resident mandarin must see it every time he goes out of his front gates. It is to warn him against greed and the crimes that are sure to flow from it.
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[57] Such, indeed, is the case at the present day in China, and elsewhere.
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[58] See No. VII., [note 54].
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[59] The great sorrow of decapitation as opposed to strangulation is that the body will appear in the realms below without a head. The family of any condemned man who may have sufficient means always bribe the executioner to sew it on again.
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[60] This story is an admirable exposé of Chinese official corruption, as rampant at the present day as ever in the long history of China.
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[61] See No. LXIV., [note 18].
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[62] Such has, doubtless, been the occasional result of torture in China; but the singular keenness of the mandarins, as a body, in recognising the innocent and detecting the guilty,—that is, when their own avaricious interests are not involved,—makes this contingency so rare as to be almost unknown. A good instance came under my own notice at Swatow in 1876. For years a Chinese servant had been employed at the foreign Custom House to carry a certain sum of money every week to the bank, and at length his honesty was above suspicion. On the occasion to which I allude he had been sent as usual with the bag of dollars, but after a short absence he rushed back with a frightful gash on his right arm, evidently inflicted by a heavy chopper, and laying the bone bare. The money was gone. He said he had been invited into a tea-house by a couple of soldiers whom he could point out; that they had tried to wrest the bag from him, and that at length one of them seized a chopper and inflicted so severe a wound on his arm, that in his agony he dropped the money, and the soldiers made off with it. The latter were promptly arrested and confronted with their accuser; but, with almost indecent haste, the police magistrate dismissed the case against them, and declared that he believed the man had made away with the money and inflicted the wound on himself. And so it turned out to be, under overwhelming evidence. This servant of proved fidelity had given way to a rash hope of making a little money at the gaming-table; had hurried into one of these hells and lost everything in three stakes; had wounded himself on the right arm (he was a left-handed man), and had concocted the story of the soldiers, all within the space of about twenty-five minutes. When he saw that he was detected, he confessed everything, without having received a single blow of the bamboo; but up to the moment of his confession the foreign feeling against that police-magistrate was undeniably strong.
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[63] See No. I., [note 39].
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[64] See No. LXVIII., [note 30]. The circumstances which led to this marriage would certainly be considered “exceptional.”
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[65] This being a long and tedious story, I have given only such part of it as is remarkable for its similarity to Washington Irving’s famous narrative.
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