English: John Thomson: THIS priest is attached to the Kwan-yin Temple ; his duty is to beg for the benefit of the establishment, and to perform unimportant offices for the visitors to the shrine, lighting incense-sticks, and teaching short forms of prayer. I paid him half-a-dollar to stand for his portrait. He was very wroth, declaring the sum quite inadequate, as the picture had bereft him of a portion of his good luck, which he would require to work up again with offerings. He further informed me that a good run of praying visitors would have paid him much better for his time. He was undoubtedly of an avaricious disposition, and well up in his profession of begging. I would judge, however, from his starved miserable appearance that he was a faithful disciple of Buddha, and that a very small portion of his gains was devoted to his dress or sustenance. He is a type of thousands of the miserable, half-starved hangers-on of monastic establishments in China. Equally indispensable are tribes of loathsome beggars infesting the gates of the temples, and herds of hungry, howling dogs, that live, or die rather, on temple garbage and beggars' refuse.