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would be discussion of price, a discussion that might often wax hot; but as soon as a bargain was struck all would be smiles again and the parties would separate, each convinced that he had had the better of it. Now the new shops had glass fronts and counters inside between which the customer could walk. The goods were exposed to view and not tucked away in the back, and many of the conservative shop-keepers admitted that the new ways had their advantages; and that even the uncompensated sacrifice of 20 feet depth of shop front, with all the expense it involved in rebuilding, had possibly been worth while, as the widened street attracted more custom.
I managed to borrow a lorry in Nanchang and, with some Chinese friends, took the road, which most of the way follows the Kan river, and headed south for Kukong in Kwangtung Province. The first night we stopped in a wayside temple. We were passing through country which had been devastated during the anti-communist campaigns of 1928 to 1933, before the communists made their famous long march to the North West. Many of the fields were still uncultivated and ruined farmsteads gave evidence of the depletion of the population.
Temples in China are of many kinds. The Chinese are not religious; that is where they differ so from the Indians. The commonest type of temple is the ancestral hall, where the wooden tablets of the village ancestors are housed. The hall, as often as not, is removed a little from the village. It will consist of a first hall, through which you pass to a courtyard, with galleries down either side; beyond lies the second, or main, hall, where the small wooden tablets, each bearing the name in Chinese characters of an ancestor, are set out in rows, generation by generation, one beneath the other, below the single tablet of the founder of the line. The side and back walls may be of hollow brick, cheaply built and usually dilapidated; the curved tiled roofs, moss-grown and even bearing tufts of grass and small bushes, are supported by wooden pillars, sometimes lacquered red, with heavy carved transoms. All around festoons of cobwebs, traceries of dust, and perhaps the rotting heads of last year's Indian corn, stripped of the grain, adorn the broken remains of discarded agricultural implements, except in one corner, where a blackboard and some desks and benches may await the pupils of the local school, if one is lucky. Several benches put together make a better bed, on which to spread a bedroll, than the stone floor.