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Updated: May 12, 2025
In San Francisco there are some three hundred thousand people. Is it possible that a few Chinese can bring "our holy religion" into disgust and contempt? In that city there are fifty times as many churches as joss-houses. Scores of sermons are uttered every week; religious books and papers are plentiful as leaves in autumn, and somewhat dryer; thousands of bibles are with in the reach of all.
The Chinese theatres and joss-houses tumbled into ruins, rookery after rookery collapsed, and hundreds of their inhabitants were buried alive. Panic reigned supreme among the fugitives, who filled the streets in frightened multitudes, dragging from the wreck whatever they could save of their treasured possessions.
Chinese joss-houses, Hindu temples, and Mohammedan mosques almost jostle each other, and the indescribable clamor of the temples and the din of the joss-houses are faintly pierced by the shrill cry from the minarets calling the faithful to prayer, and proclaiming the divine unity and the mission of Mahomet in one breath.
This used to be a well-known fact; and daily still, in certain edifices, steeple-houses, joss-houses, temples sacred or other, everywhere spread over the world, we hear some dim mumblement of an assertion that such is still, what it was always and will forever be, the fact: but meseems it has terribly fallen out of memory nevertheless; and, from Dan to Beersheba, one in vain looks out for a man that really in his heart believes it.
The imperial palaces are of great extent, consisting of a series of courts, with galleries and halls of audience beautifully painted. The temples differ greatly in form and size. The ordinary temples or joss-houses, consist each of one chamber containing an idol.
We visited as much of the town as the mob would permit, but I shall reserve my description of a genuine Chinese town until our arrival to the northward. The joss-houses at Amoy are not remarkable, and one description of these buildings will suffice for all. We lay at Amoy for about a week, during which the Mandarins paid us a full dress visit.
They passed flaring joss-houses, gambling dens and brazenly naked haunts of vice, and after picking their steps through a particularly noisome gully odorous of napie and rotten vegetables they arrived at an innocent little door in a high blank wall.
I'm Secretary of a Nomological Society at home, which is interested in pagodas, topes, and joss-houses; and I've been travelling in Africa and in the South Sea Islands for a long time past, working at materials for a History of Taboo, from its earliest beginnings in the savage stage to its fully developed European complexity; so of course all you say comes home to me greatly.
All nations may be wrong in their religious beliefs, but certainly "pagan China" is outdone in religious extravaganza by America or any European state. Our joss-houses and our feasts are nothing to the splendors of American churches.
There is always a profusion of color in decoration, but there is never anything like symmetry or beauty. There are an immense number of joss-houses in Chinatown. Each company has one of its own. Others belong to the societies, tongs and to private parties. The appointments of these temples are gorgeous in their way.
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