Plate XI.
A BONZE.
The priests of Fo in China are the same as the priests of Boudh are in India, from whence their religion passed into China in the first century of the Christian æra. The temples and the monasteries of China swarm with them; and they practice, ostensibly at least, all the austerities and mortifications of the several orders of monks in Europe, and inflict on themselves the same painful, laborious, and disgusting punishments which the faquirs of India undergo, either for the love of God, as they would have it supposed, or to impose on the multitude, as is most probably the real motive. In China, however, they are generally esteemed as men of correct morals: and there is reason to believe, that the calumnies heaped upon them by the Catholic missionaries are for the most part unfounded, and were occasioned by the mortification they experienced in finding their ceremonies, their altars, their images, their dress, to resemble so very nearly their own.
It is scarcely necessary to observe that our umbrellas are borrowed from the Chinese. The poorest person has one of these machines to keep off the rain; but in China they are made of paper, and the wood part is entirely of bamboo. The hats of the common people are in fact a kind of umbrella; they are generally made of rice straw plaited, and so large that they equally defend the face from the rays of the sun and cover the shoulders from the rain. That which the priest carries under his arm is small in proportion of some of those worn by the peasantry. In moderate weather a Chinese, though close shaved, except as to the little lock of hair growing from the crown, generally goes bareheaded.
China—Plate 12