I have several times entered a village and found the houses surrounded with white thread, to which were attached Buddhist texts or leaves of the sacred eugenia, also employed in the Buddhist ceremony of initiation in the monkhood. This was with the idea of preventing the cholera demon from entering during an epidemic. More practical was a custom which I witnessed in Akyab in 1891 of segregating a whole quarter of the town by means of a rope over which townsmen stood as guards, no one being allowed to pass in or out. I was told then that many years before a European Inspector of Police roughly insisted on passing the cordon, and was cut down and killed.
Death and burial.—The subject of death and burial has been so fully treated in the last chapter of The Burman,[1] to which my notes in Man for February 1916 may be regarded as a supplement, that it is unnecessary to deal with it here.
- ↑ The Burman, by Shway Yoe (Sir George Scott), 1882.
