All this went on for a week or more, though with diminishing ardor; for some soon tire of so long a holiday, and many would starve if they celebrated it all, so that gradually men went back to work, though not a few stuck it out. We hardly noticed a lack of rickshaws even on the first day, and the calls of street-hawkers never completely died out. If our servants went out more than usual we missed none of their usual services, and certainly the cook must have found the markets open. The real New Year’s duty of every Chinese, of course, is to go home, though it be across ten provinces, to put paper “cash,” such as flutter along the route of every funeral, on the graves of his ancestors, and to prepare them special food, preferably duck or chicken, of which they can eat only the “flavor,” leaving three guesses as to what becomes of the rest. Many do go home, but in modern days it is surprising how many find this imperative journey quite impossible. At length the celebration petered out, though crowded carts of people in their best garments could be seen plodding toward the temples outside our East Wall up to the last, and Peking settled down to its industrious seven days a week again.
With the republic, China officially adopted the Western calendar, as Japan did long ago; but the masses cling to the old one, with its animal names for the twelve years that are constantly recurring. Like Christianity, the new calendar is considered something foreign, which is quite enough, even leaving the tenacity of old custom aside, to condemn it among many Chinese; and even in official circles the lunar New Year is celebrated more thoroughly than the other. The result is that no government employee has to come to office on the foreign New Year, and no one does on the old one, when even cabinet members go to their ancestral homes or on a spree to Tientsin or Shanghai. Nor is the cult of cyclical animals by any means dead among the Chinese. Almost over our head on the East Wall stand the famous astronomical instruments, some of them made by Verbiest himself, which the Germans carried off in 1900 and very recently returned in accordance with a clause in the Treaty of Versailles; and just beyond them is an old temple, the occupants of which include among their duties the annual task of compiling the popular almanac. One may see original or reprinted copies of this everywhere in China, for it is indispensable to the fortuneteller, the geomancer, and all their innumerable ilk, if not to the mass of the people themselves. Here are set forth the lucky and unlucky days for marriages or funerals, for washing the hair, for beginning a new building, for every act of importance in the Chinese daily life. Without it how could match-makers know whether or not the birth-years of possible brides and grooms conflict? Obviously if one was born in the year of the rabbit and the other in that of the dog, or in the years of the tiger and the sheep respectively, the result of an alliance would be a sorry household.