A Chinese who emigrates to a foreign land rarely fails to make an agreement, either with his employers or with his compatriots, that if he dies while abroad his body is to be taken back not only to China but to his native town or village, wherever that may be. This peculiarity on the part of the Chinese is so well recognised by every one concerned that most European shipping firms trading in the Eastern seas are obliged to make special arrangements for conveying cargoes of coffins at moderate rates up and down the coast of China and from the various countries bordering on the Pacific where there are Chinese merchants and labourers. Probably it is generally supposed that the Chinese--like the people of other countries, only more so--are so sentimentally attached to their old homes that they will not venture to go abroad unless they are sure of returning to it some day as dead men if not as living ones. This is true to a certain extent. The average Chinese dearly loves his old home, and considering that it has been the home of his ancestors for a length of time that would make the oldest ancestral estate in England ashamed of itself, it is no wonder that he should regard it with affection. But there is another reason why it is considered important that every Chinese--at least every Chinese who has sons of his own and has maintained connection with the old stock from which he sprang--should lay his bones beside those of his fathers. The Chinese theory is that some mysterious sympathy exists, even after death, between the soul and the body, and that unless the body is brought to the place where the ancestral _sacra_ are carried out it will be impossible to provide for the sacrificial rites that ought to be rendered to the soul. The family at home will thus lose one of its ancestral links, and the dead man's spirit will wander homeless and lordless in the world of shades: an ancestral ghost separated for ever from communion with its fellows. [Illustration: _Photo by Ah Fong, Weihaiwei._ A PEDIGREE-SCROLL (CHIA P'U) (see p. 279).] It is partly because of this supposed connection between soul and body that the Chinese abhor the idea of descending to their graves in a mutilated condition. Thus in China decapitation is a more serious punishment than strangulation, because it is thought that the headless man may become a headless ghost. The danger of appearing in a mutilated condition in the next world is, however, lessened or averted if the severed members can be buried along with the body to which they belonged. A Chinese servant in Weihaiwei not long ago begged for an old biscuit-tin from his foreign master in order that he might give it to a friend who wished to use it as a coffin for his amputated foot.[223]