Introduction
Évariste Régis Huc was a Roman Catholic missionary who wrote of his travels through China, Tartary and Tibet at a time when such travels were rare for Europeans. The following anecdote tells how his party was momentarily stumped by a Chinese boy’s ability to tell the time by examining a cat.
ONE day, when we went to pay a visit to some families of Chinese Christian peasants, we met, near a farm, a young lad, who was taking a buffalo to graze along our path. We asked him carelessly, as we passed, whether it was yet noon.* The child raised his head to look at the sun, but he could read no answer there. “The sky is so cloudy,” said he, “but wait a moment;” and with these words he ran toward the farm, and came back a few minutes afterward with a cat in his arms.
“Look here,” said he; “it is not noon yet;” and he showed us the cat’s eyes. We looked at the child with surprise, but he was evidently in earnest: and the cat, though astonished, behaved with most exemplary complaisance. “Very well,” said we, “thank you;” and he then let go the cat, who made her escape pretty quickly, and we continued our route.
Huc had spent eighteen months in Macau learning Chinese, and adopted Chinese dress. He acquired a great respect for Chinese culture, and found many points of contact between their religions and Christianity, but instead of following St John Damascene and magnanimously crediting this to ‘the God of lights’ from whom everything good comes down, the Vatican put Huc’s book on the ‘Index’, a list of prohibited reading.
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