Page:Journal Of The Indian Archipelago And Eastern Asia Series.i, Vol.3 (IA in.ernet.dli.2015.107696).pdf/411



four months ago I received several numbers of your valuable Journal which you had kindly sent me, and for which I give you many thanks. This Journal, conducted in a good spirit. appears to me calculated to do good. I wish I could send you something of interest to insert in your pages, but the painful position in which the persecution places us, prevents me from exploring the country in which I am, and closely studying the manners of the people whom Divine Providence has called me to convert. I am obliged like all my brethren in Cochin-China, to keep myself shut up in a miserable cabin, and all that I do must always be done through intermediate means. However, I will give an account of an event which has made some little noise in the kingdom this year. It is the death and funeral of Thiên Tri, king of Cochin-China.

The king Thiên Tri, son of the cruel Minh Mang, had scarcely resolved to tread in the footsteps of his father, and renew the persecution of the Christian religion, and hardly had he published sanguinary edicts against the ministers of that religion, and against those who did not wish to abandon them by a base apostacy, when the hand of God was laid upon him. He fell ill, and his sickness, it is said, was caused by the fears which the Europeans inspired in him. In spite of all the doctors, in spite of all the sorcerers, the sooth-sayers, the mountebanks and other individuals of that kind, whom be caused to assemble from all quarters, for in no part are all these absurd superstitions more in vogue than in this kingdom, Thiên Tri died on the 26th of the 9th moon (3rd November) 1817. When the king was dead, it was necessary to consult other sorcerers, and mountebanks of another kind, in order to know the day and hour propitious for enshrouding and encoffining the body. The coffins here are made of a single large piece of wood hollowed out, and are covered with another piece of wood, also hollowed. They are then painted and varnished. The lid shuts up the coffin hermetically, so that it can be kept in the house many months and even years, without any bad smell exhaling from it. When the corpse of Thiên Tri was deposited in the coffin, there were also deposited in it many things for the use of the deceased in the other world, such as his crown, turbans, clothes of all descriptions, gold, silver and other precious articles, rice and other provisions. In all these lands the pagans act as if they believed