Note 44 — II.—BIRTH, MARRIAGE AND DEATH.
Reading edition
The student of Chinese folk-lore will search in vain for any expression of the old superstition regarding female apparitions as harbingers of decease.44 The Chinese theory of death is that it takes place in accordance with the reckoning of Heaven, exercised through the power of the God or Goddess controlling the special disease from which the patient suffers. To this latter, therefore, prayers and offerings are addressed, and if they prove unsuccessful the petitioners comfort themselves by remarking that it is the decree of fate. The absence of supernatural ghostly portents in this connection amongst a people so superstition-ridden as the inhabitants of the Middle Kingdom is quite as curious as the existence of its numerous beliefs.