File:Lion and dragon in northern China (1910) (14597403860).jpg

Identifier: liondragoninnort00john (find matches)
Title: Lion and dragon in northern China
Year: 1910 (1910s)
Authors: Johnston, Reginald Fleming, Sir, 1874-1938
Subjects: Weihaiwei
Publisher: New York, E. P. Dutton and company
Contributing Library: The Library of Congress
Digitizing Sponsor: The Library of Congress

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ory will perhaps gain in reasonableness if it isexplained that the uneducated Chinese of the north—including Weihaiwei—do actually believe to this dayin the possibility of transferring certain diseases froma human being to an inanimate object. They declarethat if a sick person rubs a piece of cloth over the partof his body in which he feels pain, and then throwsthe cloth away at a cross-road,1 he will feel the pain 1 Quite an interesting chapter might be written about various beliefsconnected with cross-roads. See, for example, the superstition referredto in Platos Laws, quoted by Dr. Frazer in The Golden Bough(2nd ed.), vol. iii. p. 20; and the Bohemian prescription for fever : Take an empty pot, go with it to a cross-road, throw it down, and runaway. The first person who kicks against the pot will catch your feverand you will be cured. (Op. tit., p. 22.) Again, of the Dyaks we aretold that they fasten rags of their clothes on trees at cross-roads, J* 1 ■A i) ■ a £ . o <u
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TREE-WORSHIP 377 no more. Wayfarers who see such cloths lying onthe road will on no account touch them, as they aresupposed to harbour the disease that has beenexpelled from the human patient.1 There are similarbeliefs in Korea2 and elsewhere in Asia, and also inseveral countries of Europe.3 To confine ourselves to Weihaiwei, it should bementioned that the sticks or poles in front of theTu Tis shrine to which the rags are fastened areinserted perpendicularly in the ground in front or atthe side of the shrine, and are often made to repre-sent, on a miniature scale, the well-known mast-likepoles that stand outside the gates of official yamensand the houses and family temples of the literaryaristocracy. But sometimes the shrine is shadedby the branches of a tree, and in such cases the ragsmay occasionally be seen hanging on the tree itself.It is possible that here we have something like ablending of three old beliefs or superstitions : the cultof the local tutelary god, faith in the magi

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