The People

The one thing people know about southern barbarians is that they are coarse, ugly, and very black.

I know nothing at all about those living on islands in the sea or in remote villages, but this is certainly true of those in the ordinary localities.

When it comes to the women of the palace and women from the nanpeng—that is, the great houses- there are many who are as white as jade, but that is because they do not see the light of the sun.

Generally, men and women alike wrap a cloth around their waist, but apart from that they leave their smooth chests and breasts uncovered.

They wear their hair in a topknot and go barefoot. This is the case even with the wives of the king.

The king has 5 wives:

• 1 principal wife
• 1 for the 4 cardinal points

Below them, there are 4,000-5,000 concubines and other women of the palace.

They also divide themselves up by rank. They only go out of the palace on rare occasions.

Every time I went inside the palace to see the king, he always came out with his principal wife, and sat at the gold window in the main room.

The palace women lined up by rank in 2 galleries below the window.

They moved to and fro to steal looks at us, and I got a very full view of them. Any family with a female beauty is bound to have her summoned into the palace.

At the lower level there are also 1,000-2,000 so-called chenjialan, servant women who come and go providing services inside the palace.

They all have husbands and live mixed in among ordinary people.

They shave back the hair on the top of their head, which gives them the look of northerners with their “open canal” partings.

They paint the area with vermilion, which they also paint on to either side of their temples. In this way they mark themselves out as being chenjialan.

They are the only women who can go into the palace; no one else below them gets to go in. There is a continuous stream of them on the roads in front of and behind the inner palace.

Apart from wearing their hair in a topknot, ordinary women do not have ornaments in their hair like pins or combs.

They just wear gold bracelets on their arms and gold rings on their fingers.

The chenjialan and the women in the palace all wear them too.

Men and women usually perfume themselves with scents made up of a mixture of sandalwood, musk, and other fragrances.

Every family practices Buddhism.

There are a lot of effeminate men in the country who go round the markets every day in groups of a dozen or so.

They frequently solicit the attentions of Chinese in return for generous gifts. It is shameful and wicked.

The “banjie” are the learned men.

Those “zhugu” are Buddhist monks.

The “basiwei” are the followers of the Dao.

I do not know if there is an academy for banjie.

• It is hard to find out what books they study.

All I have seen is that they dress like other people, except that they hang a white thread around their neck.

This is all that distinguishes them as learned men.

Those among the banjie who take up official positions become men of high status. They keep the thread round their neck till the end of their life.

Zhugu shave their heads and dress in yellow.

They leave their right shoulder uncovered, and otherwise wrap themselves in a robe made of yellow cloth and go barefoot.

For their temples they too can use tiles for roofing.

In the middle of the temple there is just one icon, an exact likeness of the Sakyamuni Buddha, which they call bolai.

It is clothed in red, sculpted from clay, and painted in many colors.

Apart from that there are no other icons.

In the pagodas, the Buddhas are all different in appearance and all cast in bronze.

There are no bells, drums, clappers, or cymbals, and no hanging curtains, fine canopies, and the like.

The monks all eat fish and meat.

They just don’t drink wine. They also make offerings of fish and meat to the Buddha.

They take one meal a day, which they get from the home of an almsgiver, as there are no kitchens in the temples.

They chant many scriptures, which are all written on piles of palmyra leaves put together in an extremely orderly way.

They write on them with a black script.

• They do not use brush and ink to write, but something else, though I don’t know what.

The monks also have palanquins and parasols with gold and silver poles and handles.

If the king is dealing with important matters of government, he also seeks their advice. There are no nuns though.

The basiwei dress just like ordinary people, except that they wear a red or white cloth on their head.

It looks like the tall headdress of Tartar women, except it is somewhat shorter.

They have temples, too, though these are rather smaller than the Buddhist temples.

In general the Daoists are less prevalent than the Buddhists.

They don’t make offerings to an icon, only to a block of stone, like the altar stones for the gods of the earth in China.

Again, I do not know what the source of their beliefs is.

They do have women priests, though. Their temples can be roofed with tiles too.

Basiwei don’t eat other people’s food, and don’t let other people see them eat. They don’t drink wine.

I have never seen them chanting scriptures or engaging in devotional studies.

When young boys from lay families go to school, they all start by being trained by Buddhist monks.

Only when they have grown up do they return to lay life. I couldn’t look into this in detail.