CHINESE MASONS.

Marlborough Express, Volume XLII, Issue 114, 15 May 1908, Page 3

CHINESE MASONS.

CURIOUS CEREMONIES.

HEADQUARTERS IN SYDNEY.

A quaint description is given in the Sydney Morning Herald of the opening of new headquarters for all the \ Chinese Freemasons in Australia. The ceremony started at four a.m., and lasted until mid-day. The hall, with the.furnishing.'and fitting, cost-£2OOO, which was subscribed by the Australian Chinese Freemasons. A number of , stately deputations and addresses were received, all with due pomp. A Chinese opera Company, brought together with much expense, performed for two day§ at the Gaiety Theatre, and a dinner was held.

Under the guidance of Mr James Chuey, of Junee, who was in Sydney to officiate at this function, one stepped over the threshold from Blackburn Street, Sydney, A.D. 1908, into the Chihli Road, Shanghai or Canton, B.C. 1000. The smell of joss sticks, lazily smouldering somewhere in the background, set one half-asleep to begin with. A droning song . filtered down from am upper floor. It was in monotone, with a quaint minor every now and then, as if something had caught in the singer's throat for a moment. On the floor in a corner were dishes of food. Whatever it was, it was chopped up very small, set out in the neatest of patterns, and gaudily coloured. If colour were any indication of taste, it was a most royal feast. -, .....•■ Wandering up the stairs in search of the singer, one did not find him, but marched into a hall of Oriental gorgeousness, in which the addresses from various Chirtese lodges and merchants in the Commonwealth had been presented. The pillars and walls were covered with red—blazing, staring red —from ceiling to floor. Thirty of forty long wooded tablets, each'written down with aVprpcession of half-a-dozen big golden Chinese letters, were hung round the sides. Curiously carved shrines, large and small, stood ■ at one end. In front of them'flicker- i ed a few rickety little candles, and wreaths of smoke twined in and out of their fretwork doors'. A portly , Chinaman, on a bare wooden settle > I was fanning himself with a delicate lady's fan, and smiling his blessing upon all the world. One had seen him before. It cannot have been anyone else than Buddah in a boxer hat arid a sac coat. . j

Still that droning chant came down

the stairs. It proceeded from some ceremony on the top floor. The room up there was crowded to the walls, except for a narrow lane leading up to a great, gaudy altar. Over the pot hats of a hundred (Wentieth-century Chinamen one could see a row of inverted yelow saucers with red cushion tassels hanging over them. They bobbed and bowed, and turned out to be the head-gear of some half-a-dozen solemn men, in rich silks and babies' sashes. One decorated in mauve and gold, like the lord chancellor in' "lolanthe," knelt and bowed his head'again and; again to the dust. In the intervals he sipped at a baby tea-cup .half-full of some weird spirit; and sniffed at-what appeared to be a slice of bacon, and set it down again. At particularly awe-inspiring moments a second Chinaman knelt beside him, and sipped tea and sniffed bacon. Then a wild-eyed .man, all complete, in a saucer and sash and pinafore, chanted some order in .the strain of a bugle-call. The expressions on an Eastern face are all one to a Western; and whether he was going to laugh of cry one could not for the life of one make out. Only he felt strongly about something. As he finished, an unauthorised person in the crowd hammered a tattoo on a wooden drum; and a stout Chinaman in a billy-cock hat from a back seat made strange noises 6n a tin trumpet. He was most portentously solemn over it. The wild-eyed man sang another stave. The lord chancellor bowed to the ground. Three or four ordinary mortals in the audience a,nswered the litany. Apparently it did not much matter whether ~ they sang or _not. They took a hand if they felt inclined. And so one left'thelh—.the chant and the tom-tom, and the tooting and sipping and sniffing. A hage cracker fizzed and banged and danced in the street below.' One thbugM of all those solemn elderly Chinamen in the top room amusing themselves in this way. "You find it rather new,* 1 said Mr Chuey, pleasantly. And so one did.