Superstition in China.

South Canterbury Times, Issue 6750, 3 February 1892, Page 2

Superstition in China.

(Prom the Times,) We are in the presence of an outburst of anti-fereign, not of anti-missionary, hatred. Unlike Mahometan peoples, the Chinese are no fanatics; to tbe vast mass of the people of all classes ona religion is much tbe same as another 5 they will pay their duties to all idols and at all shrines quite indifferently, and sometimes they will vi it every temple and shrine in their neighbourhood, one after the other, without the slightest regard to the deity to whom it is dedicated. It can do no harm, and— who knows?—it may do some good, they say. There is no religious hostility in them to those who worship etrarge gods ; on the contrary, they will cheerfully worship the same gods themselves, if they know how, in the hope that some personal good may come of it, and, at the worst, (hey have done what they can to oonoiliale a new set of powers that may, perchance, work them evil. The feeling upon which the anti-foreign agitators work is the dense superstition and ignorance of the Chinese, and the tendency to frenzied excesses of terror consequent on su- | perstition. To the ordinary Chinese, official as well as coolie, the earth on which he walks, tbe wafer, the air he breathes, are filled with spirits, whose quiescence may in a moment bo converted into tbe utmost malignance ; every corner of his bouse harbors a spirit ; tbe souls of his parents and relatives, or his friends, ■ and of bis enemies, may, by some unintentional act or omission of his,become tormenting demons, raging fiends, who would destroy him or his. In a land where a malicious man will drown himself in a neighbour’s well, or hang himself from his neighbour’s rafter, in the full hope that his spirit will ever afterwards haunt and torment that neighbour and thereby give the suicide sweet revenge on the latter—in such a land any belief is possible when it comes to a question of what spirits will do. The shadow of a telegraph wire or of a house which is built facing a particular way is considered sufficient to rouse to malignant activity the spirits of a whole ne'ghbourhood ; to bring on cholera, smallpox, apoplexy, and all the other ills to which flesh is heir ; and blcody and destructive riots have often broken out in China about a piece of wire or a house facing the wrong way. The feng sktti, or geomatio influences, of a place are matters of the first consideration to every Chinese living in it ; they are, to his terror-stricken apprehension easily deranged, and then follows death and destruction ; his family fall ill, his cattle die, his well runs dry, bis harvests are bad, the rain will not fall if it is wanted, and there will be an inundation if it is not, his debtors become bankrupt, his wares are burnt or otherwise destroyed, his father dies, his wife deserts him, and so on, all because the feng siui have been disturbed by the shadow of a new house or the digging of a>

new well (which, in addition to everything else, disturbs the earth dragon with additionally calamitous, though quite independent, results) or with some other equally trivial and everyday occurrence- With this inflammable material to work on, it cannot fail to be interesting to watch how the agitators have gone about their task, which was to inflame the ignorant populace to the pitch of attacking Europeans and their residences. The results we all know by this time ; the men murdered and mutilated by howling mobs of thousands of persons; ladies and children flying at night from their burning homes io native dress to escape observation, or striving to pass to some place of comparative safety through a merciless crowd assailing them with foul language and missiles, their faces torn and bleeding—all th;s and much more we find in dry official language in the Blue Book, or in the brief descriptions telegraphed home from time to lime. As to the specimens of the literature which has been one of the main causes of these cruelties, it should be said that, though it may be desirable to convey a completely accurate account of them, it is Quite impossible to print some of them. The allegations are so abominable that they cannot be printed, and this leads to some difficulty, inasmuch us these obscene' charges run through whole broadsheets, so that when they are excised very little remains.