VIII.]

AN ADULTERESS AND HER PARAMOUR.

227

remains in the family in the position of a domestic servant. If the adulterer be a poor man, the husband deprives him of his tail, and orders him to be severely flogged through the principal streets of the town or village in or near which the criminal act was committed. The offender is then banished from his native place, without even the permission to return at stated periods of the year to worship in the ancestral hall of his family, or at the tombs of his ancestors. The adulteress is sold to a “gobetween," who eventually disposes of her by sale either to a slave-dealer, or a keeper of prostitutes, or, it may be, to a poor labourer who is in search of a wife. Should the husband not put her away, the adulterer cannot be compelled to leave his home and his friends. In 1870, I saw a young man, apparently not more than twenty-one years of age, and his paramour flogged through the streets of one of the suburbs of Canton in a most unmerciful manner. His arins were bound behind his back, and the upper part of his body was naked. Immediately behind him came the woman, apparently about thirty years of age. Her arms were also bound behind her back, and she was receiving quite as severe a castigation. They had been seized by the woman's husband-a playactor-and two of his friends, and handed over to the elders of the district. At a meeting of this body which took place at noon on the following day, some were of opinion that the guilty pair ought to be bound hand and foot and cast into the Canton river. But the majority resolved that they should be flogged through the principal streets of the suburb. When the flogging was over the youth, whose name was Laong-a-Ying, was permitted to return to the house of his widowed mother. The adulteress was sold by her husband for the sum of one hundred dollars to the proprietor of a public brothel. I visited the youth on the day following that on which he was flogged, and I was shocked when I saw how fearfully lacerated his back and shoulders.

were.

It may be remarked here that the punishment of an adulterer by beating him severely with rods, which has always been practised by the Chinese, was, it would appear from Diod. Sic. I. 89, 90, also usual with Egyptians; while, in

Rome under Justinian, adulteresses, as in some instances in the present day in China, were scourged.

Before passing from the subject of this chapter, which I do with a sense of relief, I must not omit to add that the crime of adultery is regarded by the Chinese as more heinous when it is committed between persons who bear the same surname.

CHAPTER IX.

PARENTS AND CHILDREN.

THE birth of a child, like every other important social event in China, sets a long train of observances in motion. So soon as the midwife's care begins-for the Chinese consider that the obstetric art ought only to be practised by females1-some of the members of the family engage in the worship of Kum-Fa. In cases of severe labour, a Taouist priest is called in, who repeats certain prayers, and traces a mystic character with a new pen upon a piece of yellow paper. The scroll is burned, and the ashes of it are given to the patient in a cup of water. So soon as the child is born, the exact hour is noted, to enable the fortune-teller to cast its horoscope. The midwife puts the umbilical cord into an urn containing charcoal ashes, which is carefully sealed and kept. At the end of ten years, it is usually thrown away; but in some cases it is kept during the lifetime, and interred with the remains. Parents believe that if they were to commit any portion of the body to the ground, the interment of the child would soon follow. Should the child die shortly after birth, it is customary to expose the urn on a neighbouring hill, or in a cemetery. I have occasionally stumbled upon such urns in my walks near Canton.

There are a few accoucheurs in China, men who have resorted to this means of livelihood in their old age; but, as a rule, midwives are employed.

Sometimes the umbilical cord is baked, and given in the form of a powder to the infant as an antidote against small-pox. Several years ago a physician in Szechuen wrote a treatise recommending its use in this way.