hope that this little wilderness will prove to be of the kind that blossoms like a rose, yet at least I shall escape the charge of having staked out a valley and a hill and labelled it "China." Hitherto Weihaiwei has been left in placid enjoyment of its bucolic repose. The lords of commerce despise it, the traveller dismisses it in a line, the sinologue knows it not, the ethnologist ignores it, the historian omits to recognise its existence before the fateful year 1895, while the local British official, contenting himself with issuing tiny Blue-book reports which nobody reads, dexterously strives to convince himself and others that its administrative problems are sufficiently weighty to justify his existence and his salary. And yet a few years of residence in this unpampered little patch of territory--years spent to a great extent without European companionship, when one must either come to know something of the inhabitants and their ways or live like a mole--have convinced one observer, and would doubtless convince many others, that to the people of Weihaiwei life is as momentous and vivid, as full of joyous and tragic interest, as it is to the proud people of the West, and that mankind here is no less worthy the pains of study than mankind elsewhere. There is an interesting discovery to be made almost as soon as one has dipped below the surface of the daily life of the Weihaiwei villagers, and it affords perhaps ample compensation and consolation for the apparent narrowness of our field of inquiry. In spite of their position at one of the extremities of the empire, a position which would seemingly render them peculiarly receptive to alien ideas from foreign lands, the people of Weihaiwei remain on the whole steadfastly loyal to the views of life and conduct which are, or were till recently, recognised as typically Chinese. Indeed, not only do we find here most of the religious ideas, superstitious notions and social practices which are still a living force in more centrally-situated parts of the Empire, but we may also discover strange instances of the survival of immemorial rites and quasi-religious usages which are known to have flourished dim ages ago throughout China, but which in less conservative districts than Weihaiwei have been gradually eliminated and forgotten. One example of this is the queer practice of celebrating marriages between the dead. The reasons for this strange custom must be dealt with later;[1] here it is only desirable to mention the fact that in many other parts of China it appears to have been long extinct. The greatest authority on the religious systems of China, Dr. De Groot, whose erudite volumes should be in the hands of every serious student of Chinese rites and ceremonies, came across no case of "dead-marriage" during his residence in China, and he expressed uncertainty as to whether this custom was still practised.[2] Another religious rite