122 EXOGAMY IN CHINA 



strangely dashed and chequered with relics of the 

 lowest savagery. ' ' 



So it was in China: where from the first appear- 

 ance of the Race in the north-west to the present day, 

 there has been no real disturbance of Chinese life and 

 civilization. The race has for thousands of years 

 occupied the same valleys; dynasties have come and 

 gone, but no alien civilization has made its impress 

 upon them. 



The people lived on in the same way, tilling their 

 fields, in the times of the "Warring Kingdoms," just 

 as our own country people did in the Civil Wars of the 

 Roses, and in the times of the Stuarts. 



We have seen that the use of names of former 

 rulers, till then forbidden could be resumed upon the 

 death of the newly deceased ruler, and upon the 

 announcement that his name was to be thenceforth 

 avoided. 



The lifting of the taboo on the use of names of 

 "former Rulers" may have been due to the eminently 

 practical nature of the Chinese — a Concession to public 

 utility — or it may have been due to an idea that the 

 danger to be apprehended from the accidental calling of 

 their spirits, by the use of words comprising their 

 names, was the less as they receded further into that 

 ghostly state from which they could be summoned by 

 solemn service in the ancestral temple. 

 a.s. Catschet, In the "Golden Bough" instances are given of how 



ioiS^Bongh!" ^ e avoidance of names of the dead had interfered with 

 Pt. II, p. 363. historical tradition: "The Klamath people possess no 

 historic traditions going further back in time than a 

 century, for the simple reason that there was a strict 

 law prohibiting the mention of the person or acts of a 

 deceased individual by using his name. 



The ancestral worship of the Chinese with its 



careful preservation of the tablets of ancestors, their 



invocation of the great dead and their celebration in 



festal odes, would in any case have obviated such a 



result of the avoidance in ordinary life of the names 



of the dead. 



liki, Lepge. It is said in the Book of Rites: "In (reading) the 



??." m.'Voi. B 2 E 7 books of poetry and history, there need be no avoiding 



p-93- of names, nor in writing compositions. In the ancestral 



p. is. ' temple there is no such avoiding." And again "At all 



sacrifices, and in the ancestral temple, there was no 



avoiding of names. In school there was no avoiding of 



any character in the text. 



