the instruments of music are employed. Then orders are given throughout all the districts to sacrifice to the various princes, high ministers, and officers who benefited the people; praying that there may be a good harvest of grain[1].
9. The husbandmen present (the first-fruits of) their millet; and in this month the son of Heaven partakes of it along with pullets, and with cherries set forth beside them, first offering a portion in the apartment behind the ancestral temple.
10. The people are forbidden to cut down the indigo plant to use it in dyeing[2].
11. Or to burn wood for charcoal, or to bleach cloth in the sun.
12. The gates of cities and villages should not be shut[3], nor should vexatious inquiries be instituted at the barrier gates or in the markets.
- ↑ The first and last of the three sacrificial services in the paragraph were subsidiary to the second, the great praying for rain to God by the sovereign; the motive is not mentioned in the text, but only he could conduct a service to God. Callery renders:—"En méme temps l'empereur invoque le ciel avec grand apparat (afin d'obtenir de la pluie), et cette cérémonie est accompagnée de grande musique." All Chinese commentators admit that the performer was the sovereign, Kǎng Khang-khǎng says: "For this sacrifice to God, they made an altar (or altars) by the side of the (grand altar in the) southern suburb, and sacrificed to the five essential (or elemental) gods with the former rulers as their assessors." But the Khien-lung editors insist on the text's having "God," and not "five gods," and that the correct view is that the sacrifice was to the one God dwelling in the bright sky, or, as Williams renders the phrase, "the Shang Tî of the glorious heaven."
- ↑ The plant would not yet be fully fit for use.
- ↑ Every facility should be afforded for the circulation of air during the summer heats.
