"The Musician's Song having ceased, the Ministers shall
recite with a loud voice the following Prayer:
'Great Heaven, that
extendest over all! Earth which art under the guidance of Heaven! We
invoke You and beseech You to heap blessings upon the Emperor and the
Empress! Grant that they may live ten thousand, a hundred thousand years!'
"Then the first Chamberlain shall respond: 'May it be as the prayer hath
said!' The Ministers shall then prostrate themselves, and when they rise
return to their places, and take a cup or two of wine."
The K'o-tow (Kheu-theu) which appears repeatedly in this ceremonial and
which in our text is indicated by the four prostrations, was, Pauthier
alleges, not properly a Chinese form, but only introduced by the Mongols.
Baber indeed speaks of it as the Kornish, a Moghul ceremony, in which
originally "the person who performed it kneeled nine times and touched the
earth with his brow each time." He describes it as performed very
elaborately (nine times twice) by his younger uncle in visiting the
elder. But in its essentials the ceremony must have been of old date at
the Chinese Court; for the Annals of the Thang Dynasty, in a passage cited
by M. Pauthier himself,[1] mention that ambassadors from the famous Harun
ar Rashid in 798 had to perform the "ceremony of kneeling and striking the
forehead against the ground." And M. Pauthier can scarcely be right in
saying that the practice was disused by the Ming Dynasty and only
reintroduced by the Manchus; for in the story of Shah Rukh's embassy the
performance of the K'o-tow occurs repeatedly.
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