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299
examples from field work, I began to look in books on China for examples from other places. It then became obvious that the use of firecrackers in the settlement of disputes was widespread. Some examples from my reading may be of interest to readers, and I shall briefly refer to them here.
E. T. Williams mentioned their place in the settlement of disputes in his general work on China China Yesterday and Today (New York, Thomas Y. Crowell 1923), 128:
The village elders use their good offices to reconcile the disputants and earn for themselves the reward of the peace-makers. They hear the complaint and the defense, the rejoinder and the sur-rejoinder. They find a middle ground on which the parties to the quarrel may meet, The law-suit is avoided: the ill-feeling is removed, the principals and their relatives are reconciled, and the whole village participates in the feast with which the event is celebrated. Of the complainant is decorated with red hangings, and the neighbor against whom complaint was made brings great bunches of fire-crackers attached to a pole and sets them off in the gateway. Thus full atonement is made for the alleged injury or affront and everybody is happy.
The house
except, as I have said above, the losing party! And forty years before Williams' book was published, the prefect of Canton, intervening in a three-cornered dispute between merchants, scholars and his subordinate officials, playing the role of mediator, "soothed the anger of the scholars with fireworks, i.e. shooting firecrackers, a customary way of giving loud apology to a party whose sentiments or honor were wronged". This is taken from Kung-chuan Hsiao Compromise in Imperial China, Occasional Papers on China No. 6 (Seattle, School of International Studies, University of Washington, 1979), p. 45, citing the account given by Herbert A. Giles, China and the Chinese (New York, 1902).
Chang Fu-liang, a member of a rural reconstruction programme in Kiangsi province in the 1930s, found that the settlement of disputes was sometimes necessary before a start could be made to the work. He describes one situation as follows:-
NOTES AND QUERIES
299
examples from field work, I began to look in books on China for examples from other places. It then became obvious that the use of firecrackers in the settlement of disputes was widespread. Some examples from my reading may be of interest to readers, and I shall briefly refer to them here.
E. T. Williams mentioned their place in the settlement of disputes in his general work on China China Yesterday and Today (New York, Thomas Y. Crowell 1923), 128:
The village elders use their good offices to reconcile the disputants and earn for themselves the reward of the peace- makers. They hear the complaint and the defense, the rejoinder and the sur-rejoinder. They find a middle ground on which the parties to the quarrel may meet, The law-suit is avoided: the ill-feeling is removed, the principals and their relatives are reconciled, and the whole village participates in the feast with which the event is celebrated. of the complainant is decorated with red hangings, and the neighbor against whom complaint was made brings great bunches of fire-crackers attached to a pole and sets them off in the gateway. Thus full atonement is made for the alleged injury or affront and everybody is happy.
The house
except, as I have said above, the losing party! And forty years. before Williams' book was published, the prefect of Canton, intervening in a three-cornered dispute between merchants, scholars and his subordinate officials, playing the role of mediator, "soothed the anger of the scholars with fireworks, i.e. shooting firecrackers, a customary way of giving loud apology to a party whose sentiments or honor were wronged". This is taken from Kung-chuan Hsiao Compromise in Imperial China, Occasional Papers on China No. 6 (Seattle, School of International Studies, University of Washington, 1979), p. 45, citing the account given by Herbert A. Giles, China and the Chinese (New York, 1902).
Chang Fu-liang, a member of a rural reconstruction programme in Kiangsi province in the 1930s, found that the settlement of disputes was sometimes necessary before a start could be made to the work. He describes one situation as follows:-
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