[VOL IV] DICE-PLAYERS, NEAR AMOY

DICE-PLAYERS, NEAR AMOY

Cover Image: Dice-playing, near Amoy Xiamen’s Dice-playing（”Bo Bing”） / XiaMen FuJian China / Drawn by T. Allom Engraved by J.B.Allen – ALAMY Image ID:2X55NAD

*Xiamen’s Dice-playing（”Bo Bing”）is a traditional folk activity in Xiamen, Fujian Province, China, typically held during the Mid-Autumn Festival on the 15th day of the eighth month of the lunar calendar. This activity involves making and sharing a special kind of pastry called “Bo Bing” and participating in a dice game. Bo Bing is a small, round pastry decorated with auspicious patterns like toads, lotus flowers, fish, and rabbits. These patterns often symbolize good luck, wealth, and happiness. Xiamen’s Bo Bing is known for its exquisite and artistic designs. In the Bo Bing game, participants roll dice, and the points rolled correspond to the patterns on the pastries. Depending on the dice rolls, they have the opportunity to win different Bo Bing pastries, each with symbolic meanings such as longevity, happiness, and wealth. This traditional activity is a way to celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival and seek good fortune and family happiness. Xiamen’s Bo Bing activity typically attracts many local residents and tourists, making it an important cultural tradition during the Mid-Autumn Festival. It also promotes community and family reunions. / Sketched on the spot by Capt.Stoddart R.N..

He knows his fault, he feels, he views,
Detesting what he most pursues;
His judgment tells him, all his gains
For fleeting joys, are lasting pains.

The Gamester.

THE Abbe Grosier says, “the Chinese are entirely ignorant of all games of chance;” so far is this from being true, that there is no nation in the world, the humbler classes of which are so entirely the slaves of this besetting vice. To this hateful propensity is to be ascribed their indifference to manly exercises, and to all those nobler sports that impart health and vigour to the body, generosity to the mind. They practise fishing as such as a trade, employing in its pursuit an endless number of snares; such as the varnished plank facing the moon; the flat and the purse nets, duls and gins of various kinds, three-pronged spears, the bow and arrow, and the diving cormorant. Hunting is held in little estimation, the farmer being at liberty to save his crops by destroying all those animals that are deemed destructive to vegetation. While fishing, fowling, and hunting, are thus excluded from their national amusements, – theatres, kite-flying, cricket, and quail-fighting, lot-drawing, morra-playing, cards and dice, prevail universally.

The picturesque spot on which Mr. Allom has spread a bamboo mat, for the idle Hainesee to indulge their morbid taste, is in the solemn locality of the city of the dead,—the ancient tombs hewn in the solid rock, records which the very gamblers, who desecrate the scene, hold in the utmost veneration.

The encouragement of this demoralizing vice by the Chinese, creates a distinction peculiarly remarkable, between that nation and the ancient kingdoms of Europe. In the latter, so far back as we have historic information of the fact, gamblers and spendthrifts were not only held in utter detestation, but punished also by public marks of degradation and contempt. Seneca calls the fruits of gaming, “the baits, not the boons of fortune;” another wise man pronounces the catastrophe of such a life to be sorrow, shame, and poverty. By an edict of the emperor Adrian, gamblers were declared to be prodigal fools, deserving of public reprobation, and exclusion from all societies. The Boetians brought their ruined spendthrifts into the market-place, an empty purse being carried before them, and, placing them on a stone called the prodigal’s chair, left them exposed to the scoffs of the multitude. Near to the senate-house, in Padua, may yet be seen “the stone of turpitude,” devoted originally to a similar purpose; and, some early European civilians thought that guardians might be appointed to save the property, and observe the actions, of a gambler, in the same manner as well-ordered governments, in modern times, protect the persons and estates of all acknowledged lunatics.

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