32 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 8o 



On Chin-min, or Tsin-ming, which comes on the third day of the 

 third moon, all who are able to do so go to the tombs, burn paper 

 money and incense, offer food, light candles, and repair the graves. 

 While all the seasonal festivals are occasions of family reunions 

 and ancestral ceremonies, this is the great Decoration Day of the 

 Chinese people. 



Two peculiar practices should be noted. One is that if a person dies 

 away from home he is not removed to his home for the funeral ser- 

 vices, for it would be unlucky to take him into the house after he 

 has died elsewhere. Grainger mentions this custom, which is ap- 

 parently general.^ In the summer of 1925 the writer saw a woman 

 hastening to a doctor with a sick child in her arms. A little later she 

 returned, still carrying the child, which had just died. On being cer- 

 tain that the infant was dead, she threw it into the Min River. The 

 explanation given was that it was unlucky to take the child into the 

 home after it had died elsewhere. 



We sometimes hear of the custom of making a hole through the 

 wall of a house, through which the dead person is taken for burial, 

 and later sealing up the hole, so that the spirit cannot find the way 

 back, which it could do if it were carried through a door. There is an 

 example of this among the Wasi aborigines at Kuan Tsai, near Uen 

 Chuan Shien, where a great hole was made through the wall of the 

 temple-yamen to bury an attendant who had died inside. Later the 

 hole was sealed up. 



IV. YINYANG AND FENGSHUI 



I. THE YINYANG CONCEPTION 



The conception of yinyang permeates and saturates the mental, 

 moral, and social life of the Chinese, affecting every phase of their 

 existence. Dr. Arthur H. Smith, in what is perhaps an overstatement, 

 describes this conception : 



This Chinese (and Oriental) habit is at once typical and suggestive. It 

 marks a wholly different conception of the family, and of the position of woman 

 therein, from that to which we are accustomed. It indicates the view that 

 while man is yang, the male, ruling, and chief element in the universe, woman 

 is yin. " dull, female, inferior." The conception of woman as man's companion 

 is in China almost totally lacking, for woman is not the companion of man, and 

 with society on its present terms she never can be." 



* Grainger, Adam, Studies In Chinese Life, 1921, p. 35. 



* Smith, A. H., Village Life in China, pp. 302-3. 



