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001 76198
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010 _a43042941
040 _aUtSlPG
041 7 _aen
_2iso639-1
050 4 _aGR
100 1 _aDennys, N. B.
_q(Nicholas Belfield),
_d1840-1900
245 1 4 _aThe folk-lore of China
264 1 _aSalt Lake City, UT :
_bProject Gutenberg,
_c2025
300 _a1 online resource :
_bmultiple file formats
336 _atext
_btxt
_2rdacontent
337 _acomputer
_bc
_2rdamedia
338 _aonline resource
_bcr
_2rdacarrier
500 _a"A series of articles contributed to the China review, and now republished with a few additions and corrections."
500 _aRelease date is 2025-05-31
508 _aJeroen Hellingman and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net/ for Project Gutenberg (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
520 _a"The folk-lore of China : and its affinities with that of the Aryan and Semitic…." by N. B. Dennys is a scholarly comparative folklore study written in the late 19th century. It surveys Chinese popular beliefs, superstitions, rituals, and legends and sets them alongside Aryan and Semitic traditions to show striking parallels and probable common roots. Organized systematically from life-cycle rites to omens, charms, ghosts, dragons, nature lore, legends, fables, and proverbs, it argues that Chinese folk-belief is unusually pervasive across all classes and institutions. The work aims to be both a compendium of practices and a comparative argument about shared myth-making across cultures. The opening of the work explains that it compiles earlier articles, acknowledges limited access to sources, and thanks contributors, then makes the case that China is a vast, under-studied field for folklore, whose beliefs closely resemble Western ones in principle but dominate daily life from emperor to peasant. The introduction reviews European scholarship, urges a systematic plan (birth–marriage–death, days and seasons, omens, charms, the supernatural, legends, fables), notes the role of almanacs and cheap print in preserving lore, and advances the idea of a common origin with Aryan traditions, illustrated by courtly astrology and ubiquitous geomancy. Early chapters sample practices around birth (hour-of-birth charts and verses, fertility shoes or flowers from a child goddess, demon-frightening rites, taboos like not rocking an empty cradle, postnatal talismans), marriage (rings and betrothal tokens, sieving garments over fire, veils, symbolic altar objects, honeyed wine, candle omens, cakes, threshold rites, shoe symbolism, playful contests of dominance), and death (coffin customs, lights and “saining”-like rites, roof holes for the soul, white cock emblems, vigil beliefs, paper offerings, earth on the coffin, feng-shui graves, white mourning, and dread of disturbing burials). It then outlines lucky and unlucky days and seasons (a marked weekly “rest” day of Persian derivation, the moon festival, tabulated day-qualities, New Year “first-foot” and first-words omens, and a Chinese analogue to St. Swithin), before beginning a section on portents from daily mishaps and animals (oil spills, crows, magpies, dogs, cats, crowing hens, swallows, bats, owls). (This is an automatically generated summary.)
534 _pOriginally published:
_cLondon: Trübner and Co., 1876
653 _aFolklore -- China
653 _aChina -- Social life and customs
856 4 _uhttps://archive.org/details/folkloreofchinai00denn/page/n5/mode/2up
856 4 0 _uhttps://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/76198
999 _c116923
_d116923