Page:Leaves from my Chinese Scrapbook - Balfour, 1887.djvu/36

 sensuality; in other respects she was simply an ignorant woman, characterised by the vulgar ambition to shine so often found among her class. Her part in the events we have detailed was a passive rather than an active one.

In the twenty-eighth year of his reign the Emperor made a grand progress through his dominions. He visited all the famous mountains and rivers in the kingdom, arriving at length on the shore of the Eastern Sea. There, with great pomp and ceremony, he offered solemn sacrifices to the Lords of Heaven and Earth, the canonised spirit of Ch'ih Yu, the Lords of the Yin and Yang, the Sun, the Moon, and the Four Seasons. After these religious exercises he turned south and ascended the mountain of Lan Ya, the prospect from the summit of which so delighted him that he stayed there three months, and built a terrace, on which he erected a monolith in commemoration of his visit. On this he inscribed a lengthy catalogue of his virtues and achievements, for doing which he incurred a severe remonstrance at the hands of the local worthies; but the Emperor, to his credit be it spoken, instead of boiling them alive for their impertinence, contented himself with recommending his disinterested advisers to confine themselves in future to their own concerns.

The event we are now about to relate is so mixed up with legend, and so differently described by different authors, that it is by no means easy to arrive at the actual truth. According to Ssŭ-ma Kuang, there was, at this time, a certain mystic in the state of Yen, who had acquired considerable fame by his ability to go through all the Taoist pranks and capers which conduce to the exorcism of demons and the sublimation of the body. Numbers of people in both Yen and Tsi, who had a taste