China -- Social life and customs; National characteristics, Chinese
When he died he had a grand funeral, and houses and wives and concubines,
and male and female slaves, fashioned at great expense in paper, were
burned at the grave, which by some mysterious and unexplained way were to
follow him into the Land of Shadows, where he could set up house on the
same princely scale that he had been accustomed to on earth. Nothing had
been neglected that money could purchase to make his life in the Dark
World as thorough a success as it was possible to ensure, for in addition
to a complete suite of furniture and kitchen utensils, and the providing
even of a dog to guard the house from robbers, immense quantities of
ingots of gold and silver, and piles of dollars and copper, all in paper,
were dispatched by a fiery way into the land of gloom to prevent him from
suffering any hardships that money could prevent.
It was felt in his late home that everything had been done that religion
or money could suggest, for not only had every convenience for living a
high-class life been lavishly provided, in paper, but Buddhist priests had
been engaged to perform the most elaborate services to deliver him from
the pains and sufferings of the infernal prisons, in case Yam-lo should
have decided to have him imprisoned in one of them. These last had cost
them thousands of dollars, which they had willingly spent, however, since
they had been solemnly assured by the priests that their relative had been
safely delivered from the horrors of the gaol in which he had been
confined.
The witch having arrived, the ancestral tablets of the deceased mandarin,
elaborately carved and chased with gold, were placed on a magnificent
black wood table. Incense sticks were then lighted, and the usual
questions identifying the spirit were asked and satisfactorily settled.
This preliminary is a very essential one, for it has often been discovered
that the inhabitants of the Land of Shadows retain many of the
peculiarities of character that they had in the land of the living, and
the witches are frequently taken in by vagrant spirits, who assume the
name of others in order to obtain the offerings that are being presented
to their friends in the other world.
The witch being satisfied that the spirit of the dead mandarin was really
in the tablet before her, asked him if he was happy in the dark land, when
it burst out into sorrowful complaints about the utter wretchedness of the
life he was leading. Yam-lo, because of his exactions and disregard of the
claims of justice when he was a ruler, had condemned him for his sins to
be a chair-bearer, and his days were now spent in the severest toil, and
at night he was tortured with cold, for he had not enough clothes to put
on to keep out the damp air that struck a chill into his very bones.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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