The Prefect and the City Magistrate are here shown in their celestial abodes administering justice--or its Chinese equivalent--to the spirits who, when living, were under their jurisdiction on earth.
They hold the same position in Heaven and have the same authority as they had on earth; and may, as spirits, be bribed to deal gently with the spirits of departed friends just as, when living, they were open to offers to deal leniently with any living prisoner in whose welfare the friends were prepared to express practical sympathy.
In the Buddhist Temple are to be seen, in the long side pavilions, the chambers of horrors with their realistic representations of the torments of a soul in its passage through the eight Buddhist hells.

I looked on these scenes with the calmness of an unbeliever; not so a poor woman to whom the horrors were very vivid truths.

She was on her knees before the grating, sobbing piteously at a ghastly scene where a man, while still alive, was being cast by monsters from a hill-top on to red-hot spikes, there to be torn in pieces by serpents.

This was the torture her dead husband was now enduring; it was this stage he had reached in his onward passage through hell--the priest had told her so, and only money paid to the priests could lighten his torment.
Beyond the south gate, amid groves of lofty pine trees, are the temple and grounds, the pond and senior wrangler bridge, of the Confucian Temple--the most beautifully-finished temple I have seen in China.

We have accustomed ourselves to speak in ecstacies of the wood-carving in the temples of Japan, but not even in the Sh[=o]gun chapels of the Shiba temples in Tokyo have I seen wood-carving superior to the exquisite delicacy of workmanship displayed in the carving of the Imperial dragons that frame with their fantastic coils the large Confucian tablet of this temple.