A case arising out of the theft of some graveyard trees was lately submitted to my decision owing to the truculent behaviour of the malefactor, who refused to submit to the headmen's judgment. After investigating the circumstances I sentenced him to pay a fine of ten dollars, which was to be applied to the upkeep of the ancestral temple; to plant three times the number of trees that he had cut down; and to erect a stone tablet within the graveyard at his own expense setting forth the offence of which he had been guilty and enlarging upon the severe punishments that would befall others who attempted in future to commit like misdeeds.
Another case was brought before me by a man who accused a stranger of cutting up a dead donkey within his family graveyard. The defendant's excuse was that while passing the graveyard his donkey had suddenly taken ill and died, and that he dragged it in among the trees in order to avoid incommoding the public by skinning and slicing the animal on the roadside. Donkeys, it may be mentioned, are not ordinary articles of diet, but few Chinese can bring themselves to throw away flesh that by any stretch of the imagination can be regarded as edible; hence it is quite usual to eat the remains of cattle and donkeys that die of old age or even of disease. The plaintiff's plea in this suit was not that the defendant was preparing for human consumption food that was unfit to eat, but that the defendant had selected his graveyard for use as a butcher's shop. He objected, reasonably enough, to having his ancestors' tombs bespattered with the blood of a dead donkey. The defendant was required to offer a public apology to the plaintiff and to pay him a moderate sum as compensation; and the plaintiff left the court a contented man.
The mode of punishment often chosen by the elders for offences connected with graveyards is to compel the accused to make an expiatory offering to the dead whose spirits he is supposed to have offended. A man who "cut branches from the family graveyard for his own use" was recently sentenced by his clan to present himself at the graveyard in an attitude of humility and to offer up a sacrifice of pork and vegetables. The custom in such cases is that after the dead have consumed their part of the sacrifice (that is to say, the spiritual or immaterial and invisible part) the remainder is divided up among the chief families concerned or eaten at a clan feast.