CHINESE IDEAS AS TO BURIAL.

Bush Advocate, Volume XIV, Issue 183, 31 October 1902, Page 2

CHINESE IDEAS AS TO BURIAL.

Like the Romans, the Greeks, aud other nations of antiquity, including the Jews, the Chinese regard the rites of sepulture as of the highest importance. The loss ot these rites, whiletheir forms vary in different parts of the country, is held by all Chinese to be a terrible calamity to the dead and to their living kinsfolk. The dead are supposed to be restrained by their animal nature to the tombs where their bodies lie, and to be drawn by their spiritual nature to their children and to the old scenes of their past life. If their bodies are unburied, or do not receive full rites of sepulture, their ghosts are thought to be unhappy, to wander from the places where they lie to their former haunts, and to bring misfortune to tbeir descendants and former companions. So great is the importance attached to funeral ceremonies that a native custom, dating back to tha beginning of the Christian era, provides for a fictitious funeral, in which an e&gy plays the part of a corpse, when the body of a deceased person bas been lost by drowning, or for some other reason canubt be found.

Tombs in foreign lands — or even in China if distant from the family home aud giaveyard — are usually regarded as but temporary resting-places, and the bodies have later to be exhumed and buried properly if the souls of the dead are to he satisfied, and to refrain from troubliug the living. The peculiar reverence the Chinese feel for the dead, and tbe religious obligation upon Chinese children to see that their ancestors' receive due rites of sepulture and customary worship at their tembs, will indicate the feelings of those who had sent away the remains of relatives by the ill-fated Ventnor — Post;