In the present day[38] at important sacrifices to ancestors (and presumably at the funeral itself), it is customary to burn counterfeits of all kinds of furniture and objects which might be useful in the spirit-world. In general these counterfeits take the form of small square sheets of cheap paper adorned with pictures, stamped with a rudely carved wooden die, and representing houses, chairs, implements for cooking, writing and the toilette, carts and horses, sedan chairs, attendants and servants, slaves (male and female), cattle, etc. It is not clear when this custom first came into being, but it evidently replaced an earlier practice of burning real furniture, clothing, etc., at the tomb; and de Groot implies, at any rate, that the two practices existed side by side in the eleventh century. "Bonfires of genuine articles," he says,[39] "and valuables continued for a long time to hold a place side by side with bonfires of counterfeits. We read e.g. that at the demise of the Emperor Shêng Tsung of the Liao dynasty (1030 A.D.) the departure of the cortège of death from the palace was marked by a sacrifice, at which they took clothes, bows and arrows, saddles, bridles, pictures of horses, of camels, lifeguards, and similar things, which were all committed to the flames." Marco Polo,[40] in describing the city of Kinsai, relates that the inhabitants burnt their dead, and "threw into the flames many pieces of cotton paper upon which were painted representations of male and female servants, horses, camels, silk wrought with gold, as well as gold and silver money." FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 13: See Hirth, _China and the Roman Orient_.] [Footnote 14: Berthold Laufer, _Jade_, Field Museum of Natural History, Publication 154, Anthropological Series, vol. x., Chicago, 1912, pp. 232 and 233.] [Footnote 15: Occasionally of potters.] [Footnote 16: _La Sculpture sur pierre en Chine au temps des deux dynasties Han_, Paris, 1893. A few of these are figured by Bushell in _Chinese Art_, vol. i. See also Chavannes, _Mission archéologique dans la Chine septentrionale_, Paris, 1909.]