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The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither by Isabella L. (Isabella Lucy) Bird
page 67 of 382 (17%)
great untidy gardens, with ponds for sacred fish and sacred tortoises,
and houses for sacred pigs, whose sacredness is shown by their
monstrous obesity. In the garden of the Temple of Longevity, the scene
of the "Willow Pattern," dirty and degraded priests, in spite of a
liberal douceur to one of them, set upon us, clamoring _kum-sha_,
attempting at the same time to shut us in, and the two gentlemen were
obliged to use force for our extrication. In the court of the "Temple
of Horrors," which is surrounded by a number of grated cells containing
life-sized figures of painted wood, undergoing at the hands of other
figures such hell-torments as are decreed for certain offences, there
is perpetually a crowd of fortune-tellers, and numbers of gaming tables
always thronged with men and boys. Each temple has an accretion of
smaller temples or shrines round it, but most, on ordinary occasions,
are deserted, and all are neglected and dirty. Where we saw worshipers
they were always women, some of whom looked very earnest, as they were
worshiping for sick children, or to obtain boys, or to insure the
fidelity of their husbands. "Worship" consists in many prostrations, in
the offering of many joss-sticks, and in burning large squares of
gilded paper, this being supposed to be the only way in which gold can
reach either gods or ancestors. One or two of the smaller temples were
thronged by women of the poorest class, whose earnest faces were very
touching. Idolatry is always pathetic. It is not, however, idol worship
which sits like a nightmare on China, and crushes atheists, agnostics,
and heathens alike, but ancestral worship, and the tyranny of the
astrologers and geomancers.

I like the faces of the lower orders of Chinese women. They are both
strong and kind, and it is pleasant to see women not deformed in any
way, but clothed completely in a dress which allows perfect freedom of
action. The small-footed women are rarely seen out of doors; but the
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