English: Drawing by William Alexander, draughtsman of the Macartney Embassy to China in 1793. A wooden temple on a stone foundation with a wooden gate at the beginning of its entrance staircase. The figures dressed in loose gowns are priests attending at the temple, and the background is a view of the city Tin-hai, November 21, 1793. Alexander noted that the Chinese were scrupulously observant of moral and religious duties and norms; and their country abounded with temples, of various forms, to which they resorted on every occasion, and offered their sacrifices. Besides the temples, in almost every house and even ship, a small tabernacle, or niche, containing Chinese household gods, was to be found. Some religious ceremonies of the Chinese resembled to Alexander those of the Catholic Church; and the Chinese symbolic figure Shin-moo, was in his view very similar to the representations of the Virgin and Child; both being figures of a female and an infant, with rays of glory issuing from their heads, and having lights burning before them, during the day as well as night. Alexander also noted that the greater part of the people were of the sect of Fo (the Fo Kuang Shan sect of Chinese Buddhists), whose followers believed in the metempsychosis, and in a future state of happiness, after a virtuous life; and supposed, that the souls of the irreligious live hereafter in a state of suffering, and subject to the hardships endured by inferior animals. Image taken from The Costume of China, illustrated in forty-eight coloured engravings, published in London in 1805.