Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society. Vol. 13, no. 3.

Date:
1869
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society. Vol. 13, no. 3. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    the yard of the temple, and every man ■who passed this way vented ordure upon them; so that, for fear the stones should he worn away, and the advantage of the example lost to future generations, a stone palisade was put round them ■ yet still up to this day, after the lapse of so many centuries, through the palisade do visitors to the spot show their hatred and contempt for the effigies of the calumniators, in a manner expressive, curious, and unrefined; and so respected is the memory of the faithful minister, that even those universal destroyers, the rebels, left his temple unharmed. Another curiosity on the West Lake is the Thunder Peak Pagoda, the origin of which is connected with the following legend. A barber-boy, while walking about the shores of the West Lake, is invited by a demon, in the form of a beautiful damsel, into a palace; he naturally becomes enamoured of her and marries her. She per- suades him to turn doctor, and by her skill he works most won- drous cures; he is accused of witchcraft—a crime punishable by death in China; to bribe the mandarin judges, the demon bride supplies him with large sums of money. These sums of money she has robbed, in her real demon form, of a flying dragon of the Hang- chow treasury while her husband slept. This gets the hero into still further trouble, and his friends inform him that he has espoused a fiend, and persuade him, at all events, to test the fact. This he does by making her drink, without her knowledge, a conse- crated wine on a high festival day, the result of which experiment is terrible. She suffers the most excruciating agonies, and resumes her hideous shape, vomiting torrents of blood over the floor. Her husband returning to the room, and finding the hideous demon where he had expected to see his lovely bride, faints away with fright. As she has no difficulty in persuading him afterwards that he has been the victim of a horrible nightmare, he restores to her bis love. Till at last the Queen of Heaven interferes, and the demon bride, purified by her affection for a human being, consents to sacrifice all —even his love—for his sake, and dies, having first given birth to a son, who turns out the greatest scholar of his age. She is buried on the spot where her fairy palace stood, and, to keep her quiet in her grave, the Thunder Peak Pagoda was built over her. This, in the absence of reliable history, is the legend given by the Chinese of the Thunder Peak Pagoda which proudly lifts itself in the form of a red brick fluted pillar to the skies. Another curiosity of the West Lake consists of a perforated mountain, which seemed to my inexpert eyes to be composed of pumice-stone. This hill, by the Chinese, is supposed to have flown to the spot whore it is, in a single night and of its own volition. Time fails me to speak further of the WestLako