Page:Leaves from my Chinese Scrapbook - Balfour, 1887.djvu/171

 us content ourselves with recapitulating some of the more important natural events that have occurred in China during the past two thousand years. Many of these appear at first sight to partake of the apocryphal; but there is no doubt that much that appeared miraculous, and therefore portentous, in the days of Chou, Tsin, and Han was explicable enough, had there only been the requisite amount of natural philosophy at hand to bear upon it. For instance, we read of "red rain" having fallen in the neighbourhoods of Nanking and K'ai-fêng Fu in the years 300 and 1336 A.D., when the Western Tsin and Yuen dynasties held sway. The water which fell is said to have stained cloth with the colour of blood; and even in our own day, some seven or eight years ago, the same phenomenon was reported as having occurred in certain districts of Kiang-si. The explanation of this is probably as simple as that of the red snow mentioned by Aristotle, and observed in recent times in the polar and alpine regions. Black rain—as black as ink—fell, according to native chroniclers, during the reign of Hung Wu, the first Emperor of the Mings; and the river Yang-tzŭ is credited with having suddenly assumed a crimson hue on more than one occasion. These phenomena, it must be confessed, are not so easy of explanation. It is possible that they may have grown out of some metaphorical expression too deep to be understanded of the people; though there is no reason why critics who believe in a similar metamorphosis anciently recorded of the river Nile should hesitate to accept a story which attributes the same marvel to the Yang-tzŭ. The principal scourges to which China seems to have been subject,