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The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither by Isabella L. (Isabella Lucy) Bird
page 147 of 382 (38%)

The festival lasts a fortnight, and is a succession of feasts and
theatrical entertainments, everybody's object being to cast care and
work to the winds. Even the official seals of the mandarins are
formally and with much rejoicing sealed up and laid aside for one
month. On the 20th day of the 12th month houses and temples are
thoroughly washed and cleaned, rich and poor decorate with
cloth-of-gold, silk embroideries, artificial and real flowers, banners,
scrolls, lucky characters, illuminated strips of paper, and bunches of
gilt-paper flowers, and even the poorest coolie contrives to greet the
festival with some natural blossom. There is no rest either by night
or day, joss-sticks burn incessantly, and lamps before the ancestral
tablets, gongs are beaten, gingalls fire incessantly, and great
crackers like cartridges fastened together in rows are let off at
intervals before every door to frighten away evil spirits; there are
family banquets of wearisome length, feasts to the household gods,
offerings in the temples, processions in the street by torch and
lantern light, presents are given to the living, and offerings to the
dead, the poor are feasted, and the general din is heightened by
messengers perambulating the streets with gongs, calling them to the
different banquets. When the fortnight of rejoicing is over its signs
are removed, and after the outbreak of extravagant expenditure the
Chinese return to their quiet, industrious habits and frugal ways.

Just as this brilliant display left the room, a figure in richer
coloring of skin appeared--Babu, the head servant, in his beautiful
Hadji dress. He wore white full trousers, drawn in tightly at the
ankles over black shoes, but very little of these trousers showed below
a long, fine, linen tunic of spotless white, with a girdle of orange
silk. Over this was a short jacket of rich green silk, embroidered in
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