China—Plate 27
Plate XXVII.
A TRAVELLING SMITH.
It is a peculiar feature in all the Oriental nations, that the most beautiful specimens of workmanship in the various arts are made with the most simple and at the same time most clumsy tools. The artificers moreover are rarely fixed, or settled in a workshop convenient for their purposes, but generally travel about the country carrying their shop and apparatus with them. The annexed figure represents an itinerant smith, who has more tools than almost any other artificer of China, and yet performs his work the worst. Their cast iron is light and good, but their manufactures of wrought iron are very indifferent: they can neither make a hinge, nor a lock, nor even a nail that can be called good. The bellows of the smith is a box with a valvular piston, which, when not in use, serves as a seat, and also to contain his tools. The barber also makes a seat of his basket; the joiner uses his rule as a walking-stick, and the same chest that holds his tools serves him as a bench to work upon: such are the expedients which thousands resort to, both in India and China.
China—Plate 28
Plate XXVIII.
VISIT TO THE GRAVE OF A RELATION.
Filial piety in China extends beyond the grave. Every year at certain periods dutiful children assemble at the tomb of their parents or ancestors, to make oblations of flowers, or fruit, or pieces of gilt paper, or whatever else they consider as likely to be acceptable to the manes of the departed. Their mourning dress consists of a garment of Nanquin cotton, or canvas, of the coarsest kind. Some of the monuments erected over the dead are by no means inelegant; like their bridges and triumphal arches, they are very much varied, and made apparently without any fixed design or proportion. The semicircular or the horse-shoe form, like that in the print before which the mourner is kneeling, appeared to be the most common.