SALE OF A DAUGHTER

Evening Post, Volume CX, Issue 86, 8 October 1930, Page 15

SALE OF A DAUGHTER

FOR FIVE ROLLS OF SILK

Part of the great collection of Chinese manuscripts brought iffcoin China by Sir Aurel Stein was recently on exhibition in the King's Library, British Museum, states an English exchange. They were found at Tun Hauno, in tho extreme north-west of Kansu, where they had been walled up and forgotten for over. 900 years. The manuscripts, themselves cover a. period of 600 years, from about 400 to 1000 A.D.

Some of them aro business documents relating to contracts of loans. One of these, dated 25th August, 782, is the memorandum of an agreement between a novice. Ma Ling-Chuan, and. a monk, Chieu-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 be made against Ma's property. The signature of tho borrower, whose age is given as 20, to this document takes the form of his finger-prints. 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 piculs of millet, the exchange to be effected immediately. Of more serious import is the contract whereby Han-Yuan-Ting and his wife, Chi-Mians-Tzu, agreed to sell their daughter, Lang-Sheng, aged 28, to the Chu family, for three rolls of raw silk, payable immediately, and two rolls of spun silk to be delivered by the fifth moon of the following year. Two of the three witnesses to the names and finger-prints of the girl and her parents are Buddhist monks.

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 sous *vill become a general, or be created a duke or marquis in less than three years' time. A curious little jeu d'esprit uy the Licentiate Wang Fit is. in the. form'of a debate between tea and wine. Each boasts of its own qualities, until i» tho end water intervenes and shows that it is the all-important clement, on which they arc both dependent. A seventh-century phrase-book provides elegant and polished expressions on multitudes of subjects, andf or 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.