ANCIENT CHINESE MSS.

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 1078, 16 September 1930, Page 14

ANCIENT CHINESE MSS.

DAUGHTER SOLD FOR ROLLS OF SILK DEBATE BETWEEN TEA AND WINE Part of the great collection of Chinese manuscripts brought from China by Sir Aurel Stein is now on exhibition in the King’s Library, British Museum. They were found at Tun Huano, in the extreme north-west of Kansu, where they had been walled up and forgotten for nine hundred years. The manuscripts themselves cover a period of six hundred years, from about 400 to 800 A.D. Some of them are business documents relating to contracts of loans. One of these, dated August 25, 752, is the memorandum of an agreement between a. novice, Ma Lign-Chuan, and a monk, Ch’ien-Ying. The novice had borrowed 1,000 cash, and this principal, with 104 per cen*. interest, was to be repaid on demand to the monk, or, in default, distraint could be made against Ma’s property. The signature of the borrower, whose age is given as twenty, to this document, takes -the form of his finger-prints, and the two witnesses, his mother, aged fifty, and his siser, aged twelve, attest in -the same manner. 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-Yuang-Ting and his wife, Chi-Miang-Tzu, agreed to sell their daughter, Lan-Sheng, aged twenty-eight, 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 fingerprints of the girl and her parents are Buddhist monks. In ft circular issued in the ninth century by the committee of a mutual benefit club, in the name of its president. Fan Tzu-Sheng, the members were requested to send in I heir contributions of wheat and millet by ■the twentieth of the month tinder penalty of a fine. They were also requested not to delay the circular, which bore tiie names of the club officials at the end. and the word chi (noted) against each. Of the same century is the roll, 34ft long, consisting of a phonetic dictionary of the Chinese language. A Taoist divination hook 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 sons will become a general, or be created a duke or marquis in less than three years’ time.

A curious little jeu d'esprit by the Licentiate Wang Fu is in -the form of a debate between Tea and Wine. Each boasts of its own qualities, until in the end Water intervenes and shows that it is tlie all-important element, on which they are both dependent. A seventh-century phrase-book provides elegant and polished expressions on multitudes of subjects, and for every occasion; and among the modfls in a “Polite Letter-Writer” is one for which many a Chinese bride must have been grateful—the first letter written from the newiy-married wife to her husband's parents.