Democratic Sentinel, Volume 19, Number 34, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 30 August 1895 — A VAST GRAVEYARD. [ARTICLE]

A VAST GRAVEYARD.

•II China Is Dottad With Grave* yards. • The face of all nature i 9 pimpled with graves. No farm is so small that it,cannot afford at least one; no hill is so high (I speak of the Garden provinces of China) that it is not dotted with them to the top. No city lacks them, within and without its walls; only the compactest parts of the compact cities are without them. They vary in shape and form, as everything else varies in China. The saying is that “in ten miles everything is different,” and it certainly is so with the graves- Near Shanghai this eruption on the face of nature took the form of shapeless mounds of earth, perhaps six feet long by three feet high. There the coffins had been put on the ground and covered over with dirt. Farther along, toward Foochow and the Grand Canal, the graves were brick affairs, round topped, and square at the ends. In the other direction, at and near Cha-pu, on the coast, there wero often vaults of earth faced with stone and surrounded by a horseshoe or broken circle of earthwork. Some of these had three doorways, and looked like triple bake ovens. But down Cha-pu way many of tho graves were perfect little houses of brick, with tile roofs, and even with roofs whose corners were bent up in grand style. There are graveyards In China, family or village graveyards, that look like mere disturbances of the earth, when acres have been turned up into mounds or covered with brick ovens, and there are graveyards that are solemnly planted with rows of trees. But, as a rule, the farmers bury their dead in their rice or cotton fields or among their mulberry trees, and the poor buy or lease a resting place for their departed upon the acres of some wealthier man. I don't know whether lb be true or not, but I was told that the graves are kept, or let aloue, until a change of dynasty occurs, when they are razed and China begins over again to preempt a great fraction of her surface for her dead. If so, it is time for a change of dynasty, because a vast proportion of tho soil is lost to the farmers, who otherwise cultivate almost every foot of it. And the graves are in all stages of rack and ruin and disorder. At one time you see scores of tombs whose ends have been worn down by the elements or have fallen opt so as to show tho coffin ends or an outbreak of skulls aud bones. There is nothing that is possible that you do not see, oven to disclosures of great earthen jars full of bones, where the original graves and coffins have worn away. There the bones have been reinterred in pots, and these in turn huve been exposed by the careless hand of time. You Bee bare coffins sot out in the rice fields because the mourners were too poor to brick them oveV, and you see tens of thousands of coffins merely covered over with thatched straw. You see the grand tcftnbs of mandarins taking up half a mile of the earth. First there are the granite steps leading to a splendid triple arch all beautifully carved. Then follows the stately approach to the tomb —a wide avenue bordered by trees, and set with lions and warriors, horses and sages, all hewn out of stone. Finally the tomb itself, on a hillside if possible, stares down the avenue at all tlieso costly ornaments. But it must be that most of these monuments are to men long doad—perhaps to men of distant ages. Therefore, most of them are falling to pieces. Some are merely beginning to crumble, some are waste places with broken suggestions of what they were, and some have been Invaded by farmers and by the populace, with the result that you see portions of the once grand arch set in a near-by bridge or used us steps to a waterside tea house.