564 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1911. 
The Ch’éen family, a young member of which is at this time a stu- 
dent in Berlin, has such an ancestral temple in the home at Canton. 
The temple consists of a series of courts and halls arranged on five 
parallel axes. The great guest room for family feasts is handsome 
and airy and most elaborately decorated. Each compartment con- 
tains the four tables and eight seats, repeating the well-known genii 
table arrangement of eight (pl. 9, fig. 1). 
The ancestral hall proper has room for 4,000 small ancestral tablets 
on five most elaborately carved altars. In front of each of these five 
altars there are five blue ritual vases. Everything is built of the 
richest materials and significant also from an architectural point of 
view. 
The mountains play an important part not only for the sites of 
temples, tombs, and ancestral temples but for the locations of the 
cities of the living. They prefer sites near a mountain, and when 
other advantageous conditions are available, such as the course of a 
river near the mountain, they consider the beauty of the location per- 
fect. The Chinese designate this as Féngshui, meaning that the citva 
relations to wind and water are perfect. 
The. large cities and almost all others are located in most clever 
concord with the natural conditions to combine most advantageously, 
the industrial interests with the most beautiful environment possible.: 
The manner in which the Chinese artistically build their structures 
to harmonize with the natural environment is astonishing. The 
Province of Szech’uan has the most beautifully located cities. Kia- 
tingfu on the Min River, a branch of the Yangtze, is a conspicuous 
example. European gunboats steam by this city in the very heart of 
the Empire, among others the German gunboat Vaterland (pl. 10, 
fig. 1!) ; ; 
The river flows along the south and eastern sides, and the city 
spreads out from the corner northwestward where there is a moun- 
tain that is conceived to have been the progenitor of it, and from 
which it derives its forces and soul. With this conception the temple 
was built on its summit for the protecting god of the city. This 
temple has a pantheon arranged with a central compartment for the 
main god, Yii-huang, the Jewel Emperor, who is preferably conceived 
as the incorporation of the spirit of the mountain. He appears in 
three images, three manifestations, that are disposed one behind the 
other, so that the image most advanced in front appears to have a 
more human resemblance than the others that are more in the dim 
shadow of the altar in the rear. This is a most impressive represen- 
tation of the triad. The great pantheon of the gods fills the other 
space within this temple. These gods are the embodiment of virtues 
and religious ideals that are specially revered in physical forms. 
The altars are placed in the axial lines. The two pillars on the sides 
