“Then the first Chamberlain shall respond:  ’May it be as the prayer hath said!’ The Ministers shall then prostrate themselves, and when they rise return to their places, and take a cup or two of wine.”

The K’o-tow (Kheu-theu) which appears repeatedly in this ceremonial and which in our text is indicated by the four prostrations, was, Pauthier alleges, not properly a Chinese form, but only introduced by the Mongols.  Baber indeed speaks of it as the Kornish, a Moghul ceremony, in which originally “the person who performed it kneeled nine times and touched the earth with his brow each time.”  He describes it as performed very elaborately (nine times twice) by his younger uncle in visiting the elder.  But in its essentials the ceremony must have been of old date at the Chinese Court; for the Annals of the Thang Dynasty, in a passage cited by M. Pauthier himself,[1] mention that ambassadors from the famous Harun ar Rashid in 798 had to perform the “ceremony of kneeling and striking the forehead against the ground.”  And M. Pauthier can scarcely be right in saying that the practice was disused by the Ming Dynasty and only reintroduced by the Manchus; for in the story of Shah Rukh’s embassy the performance of the K’o-tow occurs repeatedly.

["It is interesting to note,” writes Mr. Rockhill (Rubruck, p. 22), “that in A.D. 981 the Chinese Envoy, Wang Yen-te, sent to the Uigur Prince of Kao-chang, refused to make genuflexions (pai) to him, as being contrary to the established usages as regards envoys.  The prince and his family, however, on receiving the envoy, all faced eastward (towards Peking) and made an obeisance (pai) on receiving the imperial presents (shou-tzu).” (Ma Twan-lin, Bk 336, 13.)—­H.  C.]

(Gaubil, 142; Van Braam, I. 20-21; Baber, 106; N. et E. XIV.  Pt.  I. 405, 407, 418.)

The enumeration of four prostrations in the text is, I fancy, quite correct.  There are several indications that this number was used instead of the three times three of later days.  Thus Carpini, when introduced to the Great Kaan, “bent the left knee four times.”  And in the Chinese bridal ceremony of “Worshipping the Tablets,” the genuflexion is made four times.  At the court of Shah Abbas an obeisance evidently identical was repeated four times. (Carp. 759; Doolittle, p. 60; P.  Della Valle, I. 646.)

[1] Gaubil, cited in Pauthier’s Hist. des Relations Politiques de la
    Chine, etc., p. 226.

CHAPTER XVI.

CONCERNING THE TWELVE THOUSAND BARONS WHO RECEIVE ROBES OF CLOTH OF GOLD FROM THE EMPEROR ON THE GREAT FESTIVALS, THIRTEEN CHANGES A-PIECE.