Leaving this quarter, and striking for the suburbs north of of the foreign settlements, we come upon a temple, perhaps the most interesting in Canton. This is the Temple of 500 Gods ; said, in Mr. Bowra's translation of the native history of the pro- vince, to have been founded by Bodhidharama, a Buddhist monk from India, about the year 520 A.D. It is Bodhidharama whom we frequently see pictured on Chinese tea-cups, as he ascends the Yangtsze river on his bamboo raft. The temple was rebuilt in 1755, under the auspices of the Emperor Kien-lung. It contains the Lo-hang-tang, or hall of saints, and with its temple buildings, its houses for priests, its lakes and its gardens, covers altogether a very large space. Colonel Yule, in his last edition of Marco Polo, says that one of the statues in this temple is an image of the Venetian traveller ; but careful inquiry proves this statement incorrect, for none of the images present the Euro- pean type of face, and all the records connected with them are of an antiquity which runs back beyond Marco Polo's age. The abbot, who is the centre figure in the illustration of a group of chess-players, received us with great cordiality, and showed us into his private apartments, where we enjoyed a repast of tea and cake, and spent some time in examining a collection of dwarf trees and flowering shrubs, which he had arranged in a court in front of his sitting-room. In the centre of this court stood a tank containing fish, and a group of sacred lotus flowers in full bloom. The old gentleman had spent many years of his life in seclusion and seemed to be devoted to his garden, ex- pressing his delight to find a foreigner who could share in his love of flowers. The apartments of this prelate impressed me with a sense of cold squareness and rigid uniformity. The flooring was marble, and the tables and chairs were either wholly of marble, or ebony, or ebony and marble combined. If the chairs sent too
