Part 12 (2/2)
The sight of a Chinese city is something that one never forgets, for there are so many features about it that are absolutely new, that our minds are so impressed by what we see that a photograph of them is engraven upon our memories that will never be erased. Our conceptions of a city are those that we have gathered from those that we have seen in England, and we picture to ourselves wide streets with pavements on each side, where the foot pa.s.sengers walk in comfort without having to jostle each other. We see, too, in imagination lofty houses, built with a certain degree of regularity and with taste about them. Cleanliness, too, is one of the things that we remember as being a.s.sociated with it, whilst policemen day and night patrol the streets and preserve order amongst the people that travel along them. Cabs, and trams, and omnibuses crowded with pa.s.sengers are the conspicuous objects that are to be met with in any moderate-sized towns in the homeland.
Now, all the above things are absent from any part of a Chinese city that one may happen to visit in any portion of the Empire. This statement is made with a good deal of confidence, for, unlike the cities of the West, which all vary more or less one from another, the Chinese towns are very much facsimiles of each other, and when you have seen one, you may confidently a.s.sert you have a very true conception of what all the rest are like.
The ideal city was drawn in the brain of the designers and builders of the first one in the remote and misty past of Chinese History, and the spectacle evidently has seemed so sublime and overpowering to the succeeding generations of Chinese that no original genius has appeared since then to dare to suggest anything better. And so every city is built upon the same model throughout the length and breadth of the land, and whilst some are larger and more imposing than others, the plan of the walls and the configuration of the streets, and the architecture of the houses are pretty much the same everywhere.
But here is a town close at hand, and so, without waiting to discuss the theory of a Chinese city, let us boldly enter in and see with our own eyes exactly what it is like.
The first street we travel along gives us a shock.
Instead of the broad and s.p.a.cious roadway along which the traffic is carried, we come into a narrow, dingy-looking artery which at its extreme breadth is not wider than twelve feet, and even that is not all available for the use of those that have to pa.s.s up and down it. The shopkeepers on both sides have put out their counters, on which they expose their goods, so that only five or six feet are left free for the use of the public.
This particular street which we are now in is not an exceptional one, in fact it is one of the princ.i.p.al ones in the town, and therefore is a very fair sample of what the business quarter is like. If we were to diverge down the side streets that run into it we should find them all much narrower, more forbidding, more dingy and very much dirtier.
We have not advanced far in our walk before we begin to be conscious of peculiar odours that seem to be the heritage of the East. The air is never fresh, but at corners of the street and indentations in the houses, and on the spots not actually in use, there are always acc.u.mulations of refuse and garbage that fester in the sun and send out the most abominable smells. But these are healthy and playful when compared with others that now and again seem to strike one as if with a sledge-hammer and paralyze one for the moment.
These are caused by the foulness of the drain that lies underneath the centre of the street. As the roads are so narrow and are occupied by houses on both sides, the only available place for the drainage of the city is right through the middle of the roadway.
There is no Public Board of Works to superintend the construction of these, and as the Chinese as a race have very hazy and elementary ideas as to the necessity for drains of any kind, it may easily be imagined how badly they make them. The result is that gases generate and evil smells collect for which there is no escape excepting through the cracks of the stone slabs that pave the streets. Never has there yet been a writer with the genius to describe these. It is simply enough to say that they have the concentrated essence of the ages in them. They trace back their ancestry to the times that are lost in myth and fairy tales, and they would look with disdain upon any of the modern smells, just as an aristocrat that holds his t.i.tle from the times of the Conqueror would gaze with scorn upon some upstart, whose father sold soap and was knighted for the wealth he had ama.s.sed.
It is astonis.h.i.+ng that the people that live in the houses near by are not carried off by typhoid or other deadly fevers, but they are not. They have, on the other hand, a lively, healthy look about them as though they lived in some country place, where the air comes fresh from the mountain near by and where they breathe a wholesome stock of ozone all the year round.
The fact of the matter is the Chinese have no belief in the word infection. There is nothing in this huge c.u.mbrous language to express the idea of germ, bacillus and such like, and so when some terrible odour from a drain that is seething and frothing in the sun, such as would knock off the head of a water buffalo, the Chinese puckers up his nose for an instant and then puts on that childlike smile with which he so often adorns his countenance, and attends to his business without any more fuss.
Now, this is one of the best streets in the town, and contains goods to the value of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Some of the wealthiest merchants in the town have their places of business in it, and yet there is not one to be compared with any ordinary shop that one meets with in any of the ordinary streets that abound in our cities in the West.
They have all a comparatively mean-looking appearance. They are only one storey high and have no fronts in them. When the shutters are taken down in the morning, the whole of the interior is at once laid bare to the public gaze, and as only the poorer shops attempt to display the goods they have for sale, one can see nothing but rolls on the shelves, and drawers tightly closed, and a number of Chinamen lounging about in a free and easy way, who are really clerks, but who act with a freedom that would ensure them being packed off at a moment's notice by any vigilant shop-walker in a good business house in England.
But here is a silk shop that it will be interesting to visit. It is one of the best in the whole town, and it is said to contain specimens from all the famous silk-producing districts in the Empire. It does not seem to have anything in it, beyond what one sees lying on the shelves, carefully wrapped up in paper as though the great purpose was to conceal everything from the gaze of the public. We find our progress impeded by a large counter within which the clerks lounge about, and as purchasers are never supposed to sit down, we have to stand on the outside of this, as no chairs of any kind have been provided, not even for the women, when they come to buy. Ladies of course never by any chance come out shopping, so the great majority of the customers are men, and occasionally elderly women of the middle cla.s.s, who are not supposed to need to sit down.
[Ill.u.s.tration: A BARBER AND HIS CUSTOMER.
_To face p. 178._]
The appearance of a foreigner causes a commotion, and a responsible-looking man steps forward with a hesitating manner, evidently questioning with himself how he is to address you, since he knows nothing but his own mother-tongue. You inform him, however, in Chinese, that you have come to look at his silks, and at once his countenance clears, and a look of pleasure flashes into his eyes and across the wide and expansive area of his Mongolian features.
The clerks, too, without any apparent restraint from their master's presence, crowd around and make remarks about your personal appearance, and criticize your dress, and give their opinion about the way in which you p.r.o.nounce Chinese. In the meanwhile two or three have been dispatched to an inner room, where the precious silks are kept, and they soon appear with a dozen rolls or so carefully wrapped in paper, and tied with string to keep the dust and the sunlight from getting to them.
As each one is unrolled, you gaze with absolute delight upon the exquisite colours that flash upon your sight. Here you have one piece of a delicate creamy white, that seems too pure to be touched without being defiled.
Next to it is another of a beautiful rose pink, a colour that the designers must have caught from some rose that had just opened its petals to the sun, and so as the men deftly unwind the various rolls you have displayed before you the whole array of colours that the Chinese weavers have woven into their fabrics, and for the moment the unaesthetic-looking Chinaman becomes sublimed in your imagination, because of the marvellous power with which he has reproduced the various hues of nature in the rolls of silk that are deftly unfolded before you.
The silk you have been examining is of an inferior quality and will not cost more than sixpence a foot, the standard measure with the Chinese, as they know nothing of yards in any of their measurements. You ask to see some of their more expensive articles, and soon the clerks return with specimens from the looms of Canton, Hangchow, and Soochow, each with its own distinctive characteristics, and so exquisitely beautiful that you stand gazing upon them all with admiring looks, and with words that are quite inadequate to express your high sense of the workmans.h.i.+p displayed upon them. The amazing thing is to understand how the weavers, in their poor tumble-down cottages, and with looms so c.u.mbersome and antiquated that they might have come out of the Ark, could have produced such exquisite specimens of art as these rolls of silk undoubtedly are.
We pa.s.s along this narrow unsavoury street, when we turn into one of the smaller ones that run into it. The shops here are of a decidedly meaner character, being inhabited by a much poorer cla.s.s of people. In plan, however, they are very similar to the ones in the street we have already described. There are no fronts to them, and everything that goes on in them can be distinctly seen and heard by the pa.s.sers-by. There is this decided difference in them, that the back part of the shop is the home of the family that are carrying on the business, which is never the case with the better ones.
Fortunately the Chinese do not believe in the privacy of the home as we do. They do not mind having the whole details of their daily experiences seen by every one that cares to look. How they live, what they eat, and even the family jars that we try and hush up from the public are things that seem to be common property, and not to belong exclusively to this particular family who are most concerned.
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