[193] The Cantonese believe the following to be the usual process:—“Young children are bought or stolen at a tender age and placed in a ch‘ing, or vase with a narrow neck, and having in this case a moveable bottom. In this receptacle the unfortunate little wretches are kept for years in a sitting posture, their heads outside, being all the while carefully tended and fed.... When the child has reached the age of twenty or over, he or she is taken away to some distant place and ‘discovered’ in the woods as a wild man or woman.”—China Mail, 15th May, 1878.
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[194] Meaning that it would become known to the Arbiter of life and death in the world below, who would punish him by shortening his appointed term of years. See [The Wei-ch‘i Devil], No. CXXXI.
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[195] One important preliminary consists in the exchange of the four pairs of characters which denote the year, month, day, and hour of the births of the contracting parties. It remains for a geomancer to determine whether these are in harmony or not; and a very simple expedient for backing out of a proposed alliance is to bribe him to declare that the nativities of the young couple could not be happily brought together.
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[196] The bridegroom invariably fetches the bride from her father’s house, conveying her to his home in a handsomely-gilt red sedan-chair, closed in on all sides, and accompanied by a band of music.
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[197] The Censorate is a body of fifty-six officials, whose duty it is to bring matters to the notice of the Emperor which might otherwise have escaped attention; to take exception to any acts, including those of His Majesty himself, calculated to interfere with the welfare of the people; and to impeach, as occasion may require, the high provincial authorities, whose position, but for this wholesome check, would be almost unassailable. Censors are popularly termed the “ears and eyes” of the monarch.
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[198] In the Book of Rites (I. Pt. i. v. 10), which dates, in its present form, only from the first century B.C., occurs this passage, “With the slayer of his father, a man may not live under the same heaven;” and in the Family Sayings (Bk. X. ab init.), a work which professes, though on quite insufficient authority, to record a number of the conversations and apophthegms of Confucius not given in the Lun-yü, or Confucian Gospels, we find the following course laid down for a man whose father has been murdered:—“He must sleep upon a grass mat, with his shield for his pillow; he must decline to take office; he must not live under the same heaven (with the murderer). When he meets him in the court or in the market-place, he must not return for a weapon, but engage him there and then;” being always careful, as the commentator observes, to carry a weapon about with him. Sir John Davis and Dr. Legge agree in stigmatizing this as “one of the objectionable principles of Confucius.” It must, however, be admitted that (1) a patched-up work which appeared as we have it now from two to three centuries after Confucius’s death, and (2) a confessedly apocryphal work such as the Family Sayings, are hardly sufficient grounds for affixing to the fair fame of China’s great Sage the positive inculcation of a dangerous principle of blood-vengeance like that I have just quoted.
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[199] The Chinese theory being that every official is responsible for the peace and well-being of the district committed to his charge, and even liable to punishment for occurrences over which he could not possibly have had any control.
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[200] See No. X., [note 75].
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[201] See No. X., [note 78].
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[202] No man being allowed to hold office within a radius of 500 li, or nearly 200 miles, from his native place.
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