FILIAL piety in China extends beyond the grave. Every year at certain
periods dutiful children assemble at the tomb of their parents or
ancestors, to make oblations of flowers, or fruit, or pieces of gilt
paper, or whatever else they consider as likely to be acceptable to the
manes of the departed. Their mourning dress consists of a garment of
Nanquin cotton, or canvas, of the coarsest kind. Some of the monuments
erected over the dead are by no means inelegant; like their bridges and
triumphal arches, they are very much varied, and made apparently without
any fixed design or proportion. The semicircular or the horse-shoe form,
like that in the print before which the mourner is kneeling, appeared to
be the most common.
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[Illustration:
CHINA—PLATE 29
]
Plate XXIX.