[173] G. Chatterton Hill, _Heredity and Selection in Sociology_, p. 187.
[174] See Campbell Oman's _Cults, Customs and Superstitions of India_ (Fisher Unwin: 1908), p. 108.
[175] Cases in modern times where Chinese widows have actually been compelled to commit suicide on their husbands' death are referred to in Smith's _Chinese Characteristics_ (5th ed.), p. 215.
[179] The technical term almost invariably used for this action is _hsün_, which is the word used for the old practice of _burying alive with the dead_. In modern times, as in all these stories, the word signifies the death of a widow who commits suicide to prove her wifely fidelity.
[180] Obviously because they wished to arrange a new betrothal for her.
[181] The Underworld of disembodied souls.
[182] In Peking and many other places the bridegroom does not _ying ch'in_ or "go to meet the bride." He stays at home and awaits her arrival.
[183] This is a temporary tablet in which the soul of the deceased is supposed to reside till after the burial, when it is formally summoned to take up its abode in the wooden tablet intended to remain permanently in the possession of the family. In the present case the temporary tablet would be ceremonially destroyed by fire after it had served its purpose.
[184] See the _Chou Li_. In Peking and many other places the women still accompany the funeral party to the graveside.
[185] In China the belief that inspires this practice is that the greater the number of mourners who throw handfuls of earth on the coffin, the greater will be the prosperity of the family in future and the more numerous its descendants. The custom is not, of course, confined to China. It is mentioned by Sir Thomas Browne as a practice of the Christians, "who thought it too little, if they threw not the earth thrice upon the interred body" (_Urn-Burial_, ch. iv.).
[186] See Grant Allen's _The Evolution of the Idea of God_, pp. 52 and 69.
[188] According to the Fijian Islanders the souls of the unmarried are soon extinguished in the Underworld. See Tylor's _Primitive Culture_ (4th ed.), vol. ii. p. 23.
[189] Tylor, _op. cit._, vol. ii. p. 117.
Not the most unobservant visitor to China can fail to notice the ubiquity of graveyards. In Western countries one is usually obliged to ask the way to a cemetery; in China one finds the way by merely walking in any direction one pleases. Nowhere so vividly as in China does one realise that not only the path of glory but every other kind of path leads but to a grave. The sight is sometimes a melancholy one; as dreary as some of the city churchyards in England are the vast cemeteries for the poor that cover the bare hillsides in the neighbourhood of many great Chinese cities. The omega-shaped tombs of south China are apt, moreover, to appal one by their vastness and too often by the barren cheerlessness of their surroundings. But there is nothing dismal in the family graveyards that dot the valleys of the country districts in the north. Indeed, in a region like the north-eastern extremity of Shantung, where there is of course no tropical vegetation and where timber is scarce, the wooded graveyards form one of the pleasantest features in every landscape. If while walking across the fields of the Weihaiwei Territory one comes across a thick plantation of trees--such as the fir and the Chinese oak, which is never leafless--one is sure to find that it marks the last resting-place of a family or a clan that inhabits or once inhabited some village not far away. The plantation is surrounded by no wall or fence of any kind; such would be a useless precaution, for no one--except an occasional rascal who "fears neither God nor man"--will knowingly injure a funereal tree or otherwise violate the sanctity of the home of the dead. At the first glance the tombs may not be visible, for the tree branches are almost interlaced, and in summer-time nearly every grave has its own canopy of foliage; moreover, instead of the omega or horse-shoe tombs of the south we find only little hillocks and unpretentious gravestones.