Page:Madras Journal of Literature and Science, series 1, volume 6 (1837).djvu/279

1837] by no means peculiar to the Chinese; the Romans, we are told by Juvenal, offered sacrifices to the manes of their ancestors. It was an ancient custom among them to bury their dead in their dwelling houses. About which their spirits were presumed to hover for the protection of the living. The following notes on the Chinese feast to the spirits of the dead, as celebrated by the colonists at Malacca, were taken on the spot. The ceremonial will probably be found not to differ materially from that observed in the Celestial Empire, as the Chinese settlers, though not at all overburthened by a sense of reverence for their national religion, are remarkably tenacious of the pageants and festivals connected with it, and are moreover excessively superstitious. The number of these settlers in Siam, Cochin China, Tonquin, the Malay Peninsula, and the Islands of the Indian Archipelago is supposed now to amount to upwards of 800,000 individuals, all males. Those in our settlements in the Straits, Penang, Malacca and Singapore, I find, from censuses in my possession, amounted in 1835-6 to not less than 28,854 individuals, who emigrate principally from the provinces of Canton and Fokien. Though contrary, I believe, to the laws of China, emigration is connived at by the government, as it rids the country of paupers, a few of whom return to spend their hardly earned savings in their native provinces, thus creating a double benefit to the state. The prohibitions touching the emigration of the females are still rigidly observed, and have partly the desired effect of bringing back to their native country many wealthy individuals. If these interdictions were abolished, there is little doubt that our colonies to the eastward would be permanently filled by this active and busy people. The Chinese, in spite of their gambling and dissipated habits, are decidedly our most valuable class of subjects in the Straits. I have witnessed their activity in almost every situation, as artizans and mechanics, as navigators, agriculturists, cultivators of spices, miners of gold and tin, as merchants and shopkeepers, and have invariably found them superior, both physically and intellectually, to the Malays, Javanese, Siamese, and natives from continental India, among whom they have to struggle for a livelihood. Without further digression on this interesting subject, I will now return to my notes on the Shaou-e.

Riding out on the evening of the 1st day of the 7th moon, I observed crowds of Chinese in the streets, busily engaged in burning long strips of yellow and white paper, which formed a series of blazing piles, extending nearly the whole length of the street. They set fire to them with small tapers of red wax. These form the first offerings