Page:Ling-Nam; or, Interior views of southern China, including explorations in the hitherto untraversed island of Hainan (IA cu31924023225307).pdf/46

 42 Ling-Nam.

Brightness,” we come to the great hall of examinations, where the candidates for literary honours once in three years compete for the degree of AM. They come to the number of twelve thousand or more, and are shut up in cells, six feet by three, for twenty-four hours at a stretch, while they write essays, odes, and historical disquisitions on subjects selected from the old classies. About one in each hundred succeeds in leaping the Dragon Gate, as the usual metaphor expresses it.

Proceeding thence, we pass the largest Confucian temple in the province attached to the Prefectural College, and the great temple of the God of War, and reach the street leading from the Great South Gate to the office of the Provincial Treasury. The cries of a courier to clear the street for the procession causes us to stand aside, and soon a small cavalcade on ponies with jingling bells appears, coolies carrying present boxes, others with banners and great gongs, while behind them, in a chair of state borne by eight coolies in uniform, sits a portly mandarin ; his satin robes, with embroidered breast- piece, hat with a red button and peacock’s feather, are noted as he passes. It is His Excellence the Viceroy on his way to pay official calls. The rear is brought up by a motley assortment of half-grown boys and men in red eoats, tall wire hats, bearing pikes, flags, and numerous red panels, with the honours bestowed on his excellency inscribed.

This temporary obstruction creates a dense crowd in the street, to escape which we enter a mission chapel, where an audience of perhaps two hundred people are listening to an American missionary, who, speaking with flueney