ANCIENT CHINESE MSS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXI, Issue 229, 27 September 1930, Page 9 (Supplement)

ANCIENT CHINESE MSS.

WALLED UP FOR 900 YEARS. SIR AUREL STEIN'S COLLECTION. DEBATE BETWEEN TEA AND WINE, Part of the great collection of Chinese manuscripts brought from China by Sir Aurel Stein is now on exhibition in the King's Library, British Museum. They Were found at Tun Huano, in the extreme north-west of Kansu, where they had been walled up and forgotten for nine hundred years. Tho manuscripts themselves cover a period of six hundred years, from about 400 to 1000 A.D. Some of them are business documents relating to contracts of loans. One of these, dated August 25, 782, is the memorandum of an agreement between a novice, Ma Ling-Chuan, and a monk, Ch'ien-Ying. The novice had borrowed 1000 cash, and this principal, with 10| per cent interest, was to be repaid on demand to the monk, or, in default, distraint could bo made against Ma's property. The signature of the borrower, whose age is given as twenty, to this document, takes the form of his fingerprints, and the two witnesses, his mother, aged fifty, and his sister, aged twelve, attest in the same manner. Price of a Daughter. The nun Ming-Hsiang barters her three-year-old ox "on account of her lack of food and outstanding debts"; so it is unlikely that she was getting a good bargain from Chang in, 12 piculs of wheat and 10 pieuls of millet, the exchange to be effected immediately. Of more serious import is the contiac whereby Han-Yuan-Ting and his wife, Chi-Mianga-Tzu, agreed to sell their daughter, Lan-Sheng aged twenty-eight, to the Chu family, for three rolls of raw silk, payable iimnedintoly, and two roils of spun' siil< to lie delivered by ihe filth moon of tho following year, lvvo of the three witnesses to the names and finger-

prints of llic girl and lier parents are Buddliist monks. • In a circular issued in the ninth century by the Committee of a. Mutual Benefit Club, in the name of its president, Fan Tzu-Sheng, the members were requested to send in their contributions of wheat and millet by the twentieth of tho month under penalty of a fine. They were also requested not to delay the circular, which bore the names of the club officials at the end, and the word chi (noted) against each. * Of the same century is the roll, 34ft long, consisting of a phonetic dictionary of the Chinese language. The Future in Valours. A Taoist divination book of the seventh century shows how to foretell the future by means of the vapours rising from the ground. If a man sitting in his garden in the evening sees the mist rising in the form of a wolf or tiger, he may know that one of his sons will become. a general, or be created a duke or marquis in less than three years' time. A curious little jeu d'esprit by the Licentiate Wang Fu is in tho form of a debate between Tea and Wine. Each boasts of its own qualities, until in the end water intervenes and shows that it is the all-important element, on which they are both dependent. A seventh-century phrase-book provides elegant and polishpd expressions on multitudes of subjects, and for every occasion; and among the models in a "Polite Letter-Writer" is one for which many a Chinese bride .must have been grateful—the first letter written from the newly-married wife to her husband's parents.