Evening Republican, Volume 15, Number 228, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 September 1911 — HOLD GRAVES SACRED [ARTICLE]

HOLD GRAVES SACRED

CHINESE ARE EXTRAORDINARILY CAREFUL OF THEIR DEAD. Rsrevence Carried to an Extreme in the Yellow Country—Case In Point Bhows How Obstinate They Can Be. /’ Better strike a Chinaman than step upon his ancestor’s grave. They are finding that out to the great detriment of industry and agriculture all over Cathay—for the Chinaman will simply not allow a railroad or a plow to pass through what he suspects Is the dust of one of his honorable forbears and there is no condemnation law in China to force him to sell the graves. The instance of the Russian railroad from Harbin to- Port Arthur, which made a 26-mile detour to avoid the ancient Manchu tombs at Mukden, has been often cited to show the expense and trouble that may arise from this cause. This was many years ago and there seems'to be a popular idea, even among old foreign residents of China, that the going for the “right of way” men and the builders of railways is much easier now than then. /As a matter of fact, since people are dying right along and the number of graves increasing as a consequence. it is very doubtful if conditions are not becoming worse rather than better. The Chinese nave accepted the railway as a conveniehce in transportation, not as a destroyer of their beloved graves. They have shown the greatest readiness to patronize it once it is built, but they never have ceased, and never will cease, putting obstacles in the way of a line that disturbs so much as a single isolated ancestral resting place.

Many of the foreign educational institutions of China have been years acquiring the land for their ground!— principally on account of graves—and the blue print maps of some of their holdings reminds one of the drawing of the original “gerrymander” congressional district In Massachusetts. The Canton Christian college, in (jtouth China, has a striking monument to the obduracy of a solitary grave-hold-er in the form of an upright cylinder of yellow clay in the middle of Its basketball field. Not the desecrating touch of the feet of the hated “foreign devils,” not the turmoil of the mad games that surge around it, not even the fact that its elevated crest is occasionally utilized by an irreverent student as a coign of vantage from which to toss a goal, hpn led the old woman that owns it to accept the generous offer made her by the college authorities for her little “six feet of soil.” Her husband used to sleep with all the babies crying, she says philosophically,, and it Is hardly likely that a little noise will trouble him now. He will let her know through the .priests when he is disturbed and until then she knows that be will rest better where he Ts. Of course, the obvious thing for the college authorities to do would be to pay a visit to the geomancers and arrange that the old lady should be Instructed that the “fengshul" decreed that her late husband would rest quieter in some other place; but as “subtlety” of this class is hardly In the line of a Christian institution, it is not unlikely that the strange looking cylinder of yellow clay may star the campus basketball field until the gam? old lady is herself numbered with her ancestors. ' }