A LAND OF THE DEAD.

Patea Mail, Volume IX, Issue 1118, 28 November 1883, Page 3

A LAND OF THE DEAD.

‘ China, almost Wherever you see if, is a land of the thousands of years; Chinamen have been assiduously employed in burying each other. It is the habit of the Celestial mourner to “plant” his relative in a grave-that shall last. In the north there are few graveyards ; that is to say, few places exclusively devoted fb defunct celebrities. ; The person who is dead is placed in the moat convenient and comfortable spot which offers itself, and that may chance to be in the centre of a field of rice or on th:c roadside. If his relatives be rich they at once raise a huge mound of earth over him ; if. they do not happen to have a great amount of disposable funds they put the coffin down in the field or on the roadside, (hatch it with a little straw, and leave it till, the money for a mpund can be got together, or tlie3 T erect overJt a little structure of loose bricks and tiles. The wind and rain do their work, and sq the traveller sees ajl over the 1 andscapo mou nci s of earth flanked by exposed coffins. These coffins are not flimsy structures a< in England, but substantial structures of wood made to last and cons qnently it is no unusual thing to count many scores of them at any one point of the landscape of the interior. This does not lower The spirits of the Chinese. It possibly gives them typhoid fever, but that is another question. Oh the stranger its effects arc novel and various. All the second day of my Journey I looked out upon graves and coffins. They clustered under the hills, they Jay on the water’s edge, they had been carefully placed under the lee of houses, they occupied the best part of every field. Deceased Chinamen surrounded me everywhere. How far the distribution of graves all over a country in whicfi the principal religion of the inhabitants is the worship of ancestors, may delay railway construction, even for strategical purposes, I leave others to decide. But I learn that coffins can be brought as they stand, for a consideration, I did not buy a coffin by way of experiment but I kt»3w a man who had done so, and he estimated the cost at 2dols per deceased ancestor. So that it is possible the difficulty which is said to surround the making of railroads in China may some day disappear.— Corr.. London Telegraph.