When I was a boy, someone gave me a dollar from the Chinese Bank of Hell. Besides the obvious titillation of hiding from my parents a four-letter word boldly printed in black, there was the thrill of having a mysterious piece of paper, which, I later learned, could be burned to provide a dead relative with a bit of extra cash. I was shocked. Was I now to worry how much money my ancestors had to "live" on? What was it like to be dead and poor at the same time? Fortunately, such questions faded with the years. In time, they were replaced by more serious questions about traditional Chinese society and its preoccupation with burnt paper sacrifices to the ancestors. I found out that not only was paper money burned but also paper clothes and paper houses, in short, everything that a person might need in the after life. Thus, I was delighted, in my on-going research, to come across Roderick Cave's book Chinese Paper Offerings, in which he discusses the full range of what he calls mazhang. Mazhang is used to describe various types of ceremonial papers, ranging from the Hell banknotes of my youth to the printed images of gods hung on kitchen walls and taped to cash registers. Cave discusses each type in detail, providing excellent photographs of the modern with the old, the expensive with the ridiculously cheap. Thus, modern credit cards from Hell with a faux American Express motif vie with the ancient designs of cut paper coins. Fabulous paper houses and Rolls Royce cars costing a fortune exist side by side with cheaply printed pictures of paper clothing and household goods. Cave also goes into great detail about the manufacture of ceremonial papers. He begins with a lengthy discussion of papermaking before moving at last to the heart of the matter: the fabrication of ceremonial paper. He provides an excellent discussion of the techniques of making tin-coated paper money as well as of the ancient and modern techniques of making printed paper items. He also discusses the mass-produced, machine-made papers now coming out of Singapore and Hong Kong, which, he laments, are slowly causing the disappearance of handmade items. The making of these ceremonial papers is, of course, big business to papermakers, printers, and joss vendors. Cave mentions a few statistics to give readers an idea of the enormous amounts of raw materials consumed and vast quantities of money spent each year to honor the dead. Such big business shows how deeply rooted this practice is in Chinese society. For the last thousand years, successive Chinese regimes have repeatedly tried but failed to eradicate the consumption of ceremonial papers. In spite of their efforts, vast quantities of paper goods are still burned each year, not only in Mainland China but also in Chinese communities throughout the world. What are the origins of this practice? Unfortunately, Cave gives us little help here. Although he does mention the Buddhist origins of paper sacrifices, he does not note the obvious connection between the benign, present day ceremonies and the gruesome practices of pre-Han times when servants were sacrificed to the dead and vast quantities of silken objects were burned at funerals and the ancient tombs were filled with real money. But Cave's book is not about early history, nor is it a survey of Chinese thought on the subject of funerary practices. The reader must forgo hearing from Su Yijian, who wrote in the tenth century of the magical power of paper, and from Song Yingxing, who in the seventeenth century, decried the wastefulness of burning paper for the dead. Cave also gives us little help with the Chinese terminology used in the book, confusing Cantonese and its dialects with the national language, Mandarin. He also mixes up transliteration systems, giving us the standard pinyin system on pages 1 and 7, but a hybrid one on pages 4 and 21. Without the correct transliteration and certainly without providing the characters themselves, it is nigh impossible to understand many of the Chinese terms used in his book. But this is a small matter. The appeal of Cave's book comes from his passion for collecting ceremonial papers. This is what charms us. We are introduced to collectors of the past. We lament with Cave the loss of many of their collections, but are grateful for what has survived. We revel in the choice pieces Cave has managed to wrest from the flames for his own collection and, like Cave, we praise the workmanship of the past and are disdainful of the shoddy work of today. We are with Collector Cave as he makes his forays into the Chinatowns of the world, visiting quaint joss shops in hopes of a "find." We listen to his mishaps and adventures along the way, such as the time a kindly old lady showed Cave exactly how to shove the beautiful papers he had just bought into the flames. Lost to Cave, these papers undoubtedly were a boon to some distant ancestor of his.
