Chinese at which a fish called Lee-yu is the principal dainty, and cockles are served up as a lucky dish.

During the first week of the year it is customary to send presents of cakes made in the form of balls, and fried in oil. Oranges, wine, and cocoa fried in oil, are also sent as gifts to friends. The gifts are borne by women; who for the nonce are called either tea-carrying women, or bearers of New Year's tea. In the course of a walk from Whampoa to Canton, I met once, several hundreds of these women carrying presents. From the fourth to the seventh day all spinsters and married women worship Apo, the presiding goddess of the marriage-bed. Sour ginger, and eggs dyed red, are offered to the goddess; and in the case of wealthy persons, roast pork, boiled fowls, and a water vegetable called by the Chinese Tsze-Koo.1 The seventh day is especially a ladies' holiday, and on it they resort in large numbers to public gardens. In the country, it is usual to meet with troops of them on their way to such places of resort. Some toddle along on their little feet, supported by female attendants; others are carried on the backs of their servants. With the Cantonese, the public gardens at Fa-tee are very popular at these times, and as the approach is by water, the creeks and streams that surround them are gay with flower-boats filled with richly dressed ladies, who have, as usual, been unsparing in their use of cosmetics. Great anxiety is manifested by all classes respecting the state of the weather during the first ten days of the year. Should it be propitious, men, horses, cows, dogs, pigs, goats, fowls, cereal crops, fruits, and vegetables will flourish and abound. I need scarcely add that soothsayers and fortunetellers reap a rich harvest during the first month of the year.

In Canton, and the province of which it is the capital, lantern markets are held from the first to the fifteenth day of the month. The public squares are chosen for the purpose, and the lanterns, which seem actually to crowd them, are of all kinds of fantastic shapes, resembling beasts, fishes, flowers, and fruits. Amongst the lantern buyers are men to whom children have been born during the year, and who suspend their purchases as votive offerings in temples near their homes. Men desirous of

1 This is supposed to be efficacious when married women desire female children.

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LANTERN USAGES AND CLAN DINNERS.

255

offspring affix their names and addresses to these lanterns, which are forwarded to them at the end of the month, having been first lighted at the ever-burning lamps before the altars. The messenger who conveys such a lantern is accompanied by minstrels, and presents with it a lettuce in the centre of which is placed a burning candle with two onions at the base. A dinner is given on the occasion of this ceremony, and the lantern is suspended in front of the ancestral altar. At the lantern markets, wax figures of men, which are called Sam-Sing, are also sold. These are clothed in silk, and are known respectively as Fok, or happiness; Lok, or rank; and Sow, or Longevity. The Sam-Sing are generally placed by those who purchase them, above the ancestral altar, or above that which has been erected to the god of wealth.

On the evening of the fifteenth day it is customary in some parts of the empire for members of a clan to dine together. On this occasion a large lantern which has been placed, on New Year's Day, in front of the clan's ancestral altar, is sold by auction, sometimes at a high price, to the highest bidder. These lanterns are procured in shops, and paid for out of lands or houses with which ancestral altars are endowed. In some parts of Kwang-tung, a tree with many branches-expressive of the hope that the clan may never lack representatives-is placed in front of the altar in the common ancestral hall. Clan dinners are given in these halls, from the first to the fifteenth day, by those who have been successful in business during the past year, or those to whom children have been born. Either on the seventh or on the fifteenth day of the month, dinners are given in each district to the poor by such of their neighbours as have had male children born to them, or have just come to reside in the district for the first time. Such banquets consist of rice, fish pork, fowls, vegetables, and wine, and are held in the hall of the principal temple of the district. A short time before the hour fixed for the feast, messengers are sent through the streets to summon the guests, either by beating gongs, or by going quickly from from door to door. This method of invitation seems to be of venerable antiquity, for we read in St. Luke, "that a certain man made a great supper, and bade many: and sent his servant

at supper time to say to them that were bidden, Come, for all things are now ready." Morier, in his account of his second journey into Persia, describes a similar custom. Speaking of a feast to be given by the second vizier, he says, that "on the day appointed, as is usual in Persia, a messenger came about five o'clock in the evening to bid us to the feast."

Throughout the first month, large processions, representing scenes of ancient history, traverse the streets by night. The processionists, who are in dramatic costumes, are preceded by the representation of a large dragon, which, like the monsters of a pantomime, is carried by men, the upper part of whose bodies are concealed in it. Boys follow, bearing lanterns of various shapes on long poles. Statute hirings are another feature of the season. These are held during the first half of the month, in the large squares in front of the principal temples of cities and towns. I have already alluded to these fairs, but I may here describe a peculiar mode of gambling practised at them, which I omitted to notice. A large fish, all alive-in some. instances a large piece of pork—is placed on the top of a pole, and hungry-looking fellows may be seen staking a week's earnings on the guess they have made as to its weight. When each speculator has declared his opinion, and handed in his stake, the fish, or pork, is taken down and weighed, and the winner declared,

One other custom by which the first month of the year is signalized in the southern provinces remains to be noted. The peasants of neighbouring villages meet in the open plains, form sides, and attack each other with stones. These encounters are sometimes very serious affairs. In one which I saw on the island of Honam, so many peasants were injured that the elders requested the police to prevent its renewal next day. Next morning the police accordingly seized one of the ringleaders, and bound him to a tree. The peasants, however, drove them back, loosed the prisoner, and renewed the rough scenes of the day before. At Yim-poo, in 1865, I saw about seven hundred men, whose ages varied from eighteen to forty, engaged in a contest of this sort. The high ground overlooking the plain where they fought was crowded with