A CHINESE BURIAL

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 627, 2 April 1929, Page 9

A CHINESE BURIAL

DERBY HATS AND SLOGANS PROFESSIONAL PALL-BEARERS Black derby hats and nattily embroidered blue coats were part of the costume worn by the professional pallbearers, who carried Sun Yat Sen s coffin from its resting place in a beautiful Buddhist monastery, just outside Peking, to the railway station for transportation to Nanking, via Hankow. An elaborate ceremony to mark the occasion was planned hv a delegation sent to Peking by the Nanking Government to make the preliminary arrangements. When Sun Yat Sen died at Peking in 1925, the Nationalist Party, of which he was the recognised leader, was very much under Bolshevik influence, and his body was enclosed in a glass casket, like, the one in which Lenin lies in state in the Kremlin at Moscow-. Times have changed since then, however, and Russia has lost favour, so the body was transferred into a new brass coffin, which was secured from America at a cost of about £2.700. A special squad of professional pallbearers went Into training for the event. A “practice” coffin borrowed from one of the local undertaking establishments, and the bearers, who were carefully instructed in the rudiments of Dr. Sun’s somewhat incomprehensive political theories, were coached to shout appropriate slogans in unison as they strode along. A Chinese news agency says that the bearers were also taught to conduct themselves in “a very earnest and prudent manner.” It is necessary to have witnessed a Chinese funeral in Peking in order to be able to realise just how necessary instruction under this particular head is likely to be. Professional pall-bearers usually are recruited from among the city’s beggars, who, wearing a garb of dingy green over their rags and tatters, usually achieve about as much reverence as a gang of men shifting a grand piano. Peking’s sartorial experts, called into consultation with regard to a suitable costume, recommended blue coats, embroidered with white flowers, drab trousers, and red satin girdles. Black derby hats are reported to have been chosen as headgear possibly as a tribute to the dead revolutionist’s progressive Ideas. Pi Yun Ssu, poetically translated into English as “the monastery of the azure clouds,” where Sun Yat Sen’s body was originally placed, is some miles outside the walls of Peking, so the pall-bearers worked in three shifts of 64 each. The railway workshops for some time were busy refurnishing the late Empress Dowager’s state train, in which the body was carried to Hankow. A gun-boat took it down the Y’angtse from there to Nanking, the new capital of Nationalist China, where a magnificent mausoleum has been built at a cost of £300,000 on the slopes of Purple Mountain.