CHAPTER XXI

CHINA

Sail for China - Hongkong - Comicality of sporting clerks - Canton prisons - Executions - Infanticide - Cantonese "unemployed" - Astrologers - A brave man and a tiger - Dead Chinaman shipped in San Francisco - Chinese medicine - Driving out devils - A Shamãn - Missionary and a booby-hatch.

WE were quite long enough in Saigon, and I personally left it with no regret. Hongkong was our next halt - my first acquaintance with China. The vastness of this country is overwhelming, its antiquity awe-inspiring, the cleverness of its inhabitants a revelation. A clever Chinaman is probably, with the exception of an Armenian, the cleverest man alive, with something subtle at the back of his brain which a Westerner never gets at, and could not understand if he did.

Of European society, neither in China nor subsequently in Japan, did I see much, though I had one or two very great friends in both countries. Hongkong was then almost in its infancy in comparison with the splendour of to-day, and nowhere on the face of the earth did the dollar mean more. The great houses - keeping steamers of their own in the China Seas to intercept the slower mail steamers and so forestall the

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markets with the price of opium - were conducted on a scale of lavishness which staggered one. Almost every clerk kept racing ponies, and was himself housed and fed extravagantly : as it was the policy of the heads of the houses to foster extravagant habits in order to prevent young men accumulating money and entering into competition with them. The Chinese "House-keeper" was a recognised institution ; in fact, indispensable in every bachelor's household, as she kept all his money, superintended his servants, and saved him from wholesale robbery. In return, she was almost universally faithful and honest, although her tenure of office was only the whim of her master.

No sight in civilised life was funnier than the Hongkong Races held in the Happy Valley - near Hongkong - when white-livered British clerks would contend on horseback with swag-bellied Germans or wizened Portuguese for prizes awarded by the merchants, themselves with as much knowledge of racing as a Houndsditch Jew. One feature of the great Chinese houses was the constant succession of new names, as partner after partner retired having made his fortune in a few years.

I made several trips to Canton not only on this occasion, but frequently in later years. Space forbids me to describe at any length the purely Chinese side of life which alone interested me, for even to touch the fringe of its wonderful conditions, peculiarities, and mysteries would fill volumes. I may, however, briefly mention what struck me most.

I went to see the terrible prisons, where forlorn and hopeless wretches were undergoing tortures of many kinds, men in narrow cages where they could neither sit, lie, or stand up straight ; others with the kango, a large wooden board like a collar round their neck,

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EXECUTION OF PIRATES

too wide to enable them to reach their face with their hands, so that flies, wasps, and mosquitoes swarmed over their heads and round their eyes undisturbed. I was taken one morning to a large open space within the city walls where hundreds of potters were at work, and crowds of women and children were employed in arranging the pots in rows in the sun. Into this place was marched a long string of some forty criminals - the most woebegone-looking creatures it is possible to imagine, many of them a deadly green colour, from terror - but others, apparently quite indifferent to their fate, looking about them as unconcernedly as an undertaker's man in Kensal Green. Their heads had, of course, not been shaved all the time of their incarceration, and the ragged, bristly hair added to their dreadful appearance. Their hands were tied behind their backs, and they were preceded by a giant of a man carrying a naked broadsword, and were guarded by a ragamuffin body of Chinese soldiers, armed with pikes and ancient muskets.

As the procession advanced the potters rose up hurriedly, the condemned men being made to kneel down facing the heap of clay and forming two long rows. Then an assistant executioner came round, pulled back their jackets, leaving their shoulders bare, and let down the scraggy stump of their pigtails. When all was ready, a man - the governor of the gaol, I believe - screeched out in a high, shrill voice what might have been their sentence, when instantly the assistant seized hold of the pigtail of the first man in the rear rank and jerked his head forward ; the executioner, with one swishing blow, severing it absolutely clean from the body - as easily as one knocks off the top of a thistle. Then, with not twenty seconds' interval, the next man, and so on down both rows

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until the whole place was one gaping shamble ; with men, women, and children looking on, apparently without any feeling. It was a sickening sight, and I myself could not bear to see it, hurrying away half sick after the second head had fallen. An hour or so later I accidentally came across a string of carts with the bodies of these unhappy men piled up in them arms, legs, and headless trunks sticking out on all sides scarce room for them to pass in the narrow streets. The ghastly procession was followed by a crowd of little boys and girls grinning and laughing as the jolting of the carts caused the limbs to waggle from side to side. I believe these men were all pirates, and had been captured by two British gunboats, commanded by Compton Domvile - the late Commander-in-Chief in the Mediterranean - and by Rodney Lloyd, also an Admiral of distinction - both a terror to these Chinese sea-robbers. À propos of both these naval men ; I do not think smarter, cleaner craft ever sailed than those under their pennants.

In China every scrap of paper that bears writing is burnt ceremoniously, and I went to see the immense kilns - outside the city - where the process is carried out. Hundreds of men, with baskets on their backs and spiked sticks in their hands for picking up paper in the streets, were coming and going, whilst others crammed the paper into the kilns.

The Chinese look with horror on the way we treat printed matter, for to them everything that is in any conceivable degree "literature" is sacred. For on it may be inscribed the name of God or some holy aphorism of Confucius. Thus men are continually perambulating the streets to collect old paper, not for its value, but for what may be written on it. In northern ports this paper is often sent out to sea in barges to be reverently committed to the deep.

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UNCOMFORTABLE SHAMPOOING

Well-to-do Chinamen are often seen with weeks or months of growth of hair on their heads, though accompanied by servants with perfectly clean-shaven heads. It is the sign of mourning, and in proportion to the nearness of relationship so is the growth obligatory ; for parents about fifteen months, for a wife six, for a mother-in-law ten days. Shaving of the head, and the pigtail was not originally a Chinese custom, but was forced on them by their Tartar conquerors. Chinese barbers are often shampooers : their shampooing process, extremely simple, consisting in punching the legs, arms, and chest with closed fist and banging the stomach with the hand flat. I never tried it myself, but I remember watching a Chinaman undergoing the operation, and was not surprised to see him get up suddenly, wrap a loin cloth about him and rush into the street, where he was violently sick.

Living in some half-ruined tower or in holes in the vast walls of Canton are hordes of the people we call the "unemployed," who obtain alms from the timid with threats and hideous howlings. But very often -unlike us effete English - the sturdy Chinese citizen takes the law into his own hand, and does not hesitate to crack their skulls with a thick stick, so that these idle ruffians, who are also cowards as are most of their kidney, do not multiply as rapidly as one might expect.

Walking round the walls of Canton early one morning I saw numbers of dead babies lying about, mostly little girls, left to die, poor little souls, because no one wanted them. Many thousands of infants are thus exposed every year in Canton alone, and the number taken throughout China must amount to millions. I went into opium dens and saw the usual sights, but carried away the impression, which, as a magistrate of very many years standing, I still retain, that I prefer the

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opium-smoker to the European drunkard ; that he is far less harmful to society generally, and certainly not the direct cause of so much crime. Nothing is more curious amongst the Chinese than their acceptance as of scientific truth, matters which Westerns of the lowest intelligence recognise as imposture, namely, occultism, which in China is as recognised a profession as that of the law or medicine. The keenest intellects amongst the Chinese believe in astrology, the casting of horoscopes, divination, and so through the whole gamut of these childish frauds. The fortune-teller is consulted on everything, and what is more strange, seems actually to believe in his own humbug. Nor are his clients merely the fatuous, the idle, the silly, and the neurotic, such, as in England, pour guineas into the laps of Bond Street swindlers and spiritualistic mediums. I went once with a friend of mine, in Swatow, to the house of a fortune-teller, a man brought up in a Chinese University and as much a recognised seer as was any ancient Israelite prophet. This man's specialisation in occultism was astrology, and his knowledge of astronomy was not only quite up to date but most extensive. But his chief guide-book was the Imperial Almanack - an official document published annually and having the imprimatur of authority - its pages showing the most fitting months for marriages, for building, for travelling, for the consecration of temples, in fact for all the business of life. A commoner and lower form of Chinese divination is by shuffling bits of cardboard in a box on which are inscribed sentences from the writings of Confucius or other great teachers, which, through the vast possibilities of commutation of the Chinese symbolic character, are capable of many different interpretations, to elucidate which and their application to the particular individual constituting the

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A BRAVE MAN

skill of the seer. Mystic meanings are discovered : a proposed marriage will be fortunate or the reverse : a house being built will be destroyed by fire : a contemplated journey will be prosperous or will terminate in shipwreck. Even amongst the highest Literates of China, the aristocracy of learning, few will be found with courage enough to disregard such omens. Of course there are still humbler professors in the art of divination, ignorant of everything, who wander about the country, their only qualification a power of invention ; but the higher-class professors are men educated ad hoc, and taking themselves and their divinations seriously : as much as did Epictetus for his when examining the entrails of birds.

I met an Englishman, who, in spite of being a confirmed opium-eater, was a man of great nerve. I cannot explain the paradox, but here is a fact about him. He was once shooting snipe in the paddy fields outside a remote Chinese village in the Southern Provinces, when, to his astonishment, he beheld men, women, and children, old and young, fleeing for their lives from their houses, in all directions. He was a perfect Chinese scholar, so he stopped a woman, still on the run, and asked what it was all about. A tiger had come into the village from the neighbouring jungle, had killed a woman, and had dragged her body into a house. Then my friend, drawing out his snipe-shot cartridges and replacing them by buck shot, walked into the village, where not a human being was left. In the middle of the street he came across a pool of blood and a mark where something had been trailed through the dust; and following this terrible spoor other indications showed him plainly that the woman's story was true. For the marks led to a small shop, where, looking in through the open door, he met the glaring eyes of a huge tiger, the brute's jaws

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smeared with the blood of a woman who lay between his paws. With a roar the animal sprang at him, but in one instant my friend fired both barrels down its throat, and the beast fell in a heap over the body of its victim.

On our way north to Japan, and indeed many times after, we visited most of the coast ports of China - Amoy, Foochow, Shanghai, and so on. In every one of these the social conditions of life were the same, the quest of the dollar the beginning and end of everything. In those days in China there was only one European nation of whom any one took account - our countrymen ; for China was practically British, and what foreigners there were, depended entirely on British protection, mostly people in a very small way and only there on sufferance. Gradually, though, our wiseacres at home allowed this predominance to be niched away, Germans and Frenchmen thrusting in their noses where our Treaty rights gave us an unquestioned position excluding theirs. However, that is another story, and need find neither apology nor explanation in modern British foreign politics.

I was one day rambling about some of the lower parts of Amoy when I fell in with a Chinaman who spoke something better than the usual "Pidgin English." He had been in England as a servant in the Chinese Embassy, and knew the seamy side of London better than I did. His experiences of San Francisco were also instructive; his opinion of Christian morality waggish, to say the least of it. His own business in that gay American city had been rather a lugubrious one, shipping his dead countrymen back to China for burial in their native land. It was a very profitable one, for - as with Persians and other Mahommedan Asiatics who send their dead to be buried at Mecca - the moral responsibility of the friends of the defunct ceases when the agent takes

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AMERICAN SMUGGLING METHODS

charge of the body. The result was that for every ten bodies this man contracted to bury in China only one perhaps ever got there. Some were never shipped at all, but were buried on the beach : others were thrown overboard the day after leaving port, whilst many coffins, through connivance with the American Customs, were used for smuggling, and came laden with American produce. In Yokohama, at different times, I have seen coffins being hoisted out into junks, which carried them to Chinese ports where smuggling was as recognised a business as it is in Leghorn or New York. By this time less and less of these coffins contained human remains, having been emptied at sea and filled up on board ship with various goods, and even in those in which the dead had been allowed to remain, the vacant spaces would be crammed up with such things as tinned salmon and preserved fruit, soap, tobacco, and what not.

My casual friend, the dead body contractor, invited me to his house, a large, well-built place, a little out of the town, close to the sea, where ten or fifteen junks lay alongside a small jetty, all his own property. His establishment was a model of order, and his wife, who also spoke pidgin English, was a rosy-cheeked Manchou, quite a different type from the white-faced China woman of the South. They had two daughters - one present, the other absent - and one son. I inquired where the son was.

" Up top side with wifey," said the mother, " like makey look see?"

"Yes," I said, "if they can't come down."

"No can come down," answered the mother. "Wifey all the same dead."

" Dead ! " I exclaimed. " How can I see her then ?

" You all the same belong family friend." All right ! " I said. " I'll go up."

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In a large room, profusely decorated with flowers, with a number of lamps burning and the whole air laden with the smell of smoking joss-sticks, I saw the figure of a young girl of eighteen or twenty lying in a square-shaped coffin dressed in violet-coloured silk, her hair neatly done, her small, white hands folded on her breast, her diminutive feet peeping out below her broad, white silk trousers. She looked as if she were asleep. By her side, on a bed spread out on the floor, sat her husband, a nice-looking youth - apparently quite unconcerned at the death of his young wife - holding his opium pipe in his hand, and, by his side, a bottle of Martell's brandy. He had his shoes off, and as the father and mother crossed the threshold of the room they kicked off theirs. I followed their example out of respect for the dead. I asked afterwards why they went shoeless into the presence of the departed, and they told me it was for fear of awaking her soul, which slept near her as long as the body was unburied, and also that the husband had to remain on watch until she was actually under ground. This precaution threw a light on Chinese habits, and reminded me of a similar custom described by Herodotus - in the " Euterpe " - in connection with embalming of women in Thebes. I asked what the girl had died of, and her father told me she had been cursed by a begging friar for refusing him alms, but from his description it was clearly peritonitis, though terror of the curse may have helped. I asked, out of curiosity, what remedies had been given. Translated into our vernacular, he said--

" The best that the world can produce, and the most skilful doctor in the East. She had two hundred pills of gentian and hartshorn the first day; on the second she had a mixture weighing three-quarters of a pound of walnuts, treacle, sulphur, pigs' lard, camomile flowers,

A CHINESE WEDDING CHAIR

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MEDICAL MEN IN CHINA

and spider's web : an absolutely certain remedy in China."

I made a note of this in my note-book.

"And how did she get on with that?" I asked.

" Not too muchee well, but doctor man say, if live three day she all right ; give more medicine. But girly makee die and so give no more."

It struck me that Chinese doctors must be fond of giving physic. But their system of fees is in advance of ours, no cure no fee, or a bargain is made, to cure for so much. Any man in China can be, or may call himself, a doctor - much the same thing - and there is no qualification necessary. In consequence, the trades' union spirit of European medicine men is non-existent in China, for it is not compulsory to endorse the views of each and every imbecile in the trade, as is done in so-called "consultations" in the West.

But, strange to say, I had not done with death for that day ; for the same evening, passing a Chinese house in the crowded part of the town, I heard a deafening din, drums and tom-toms and the shrill scream of the Chinese flute - ear-piercing beyond belief - with a rumbling bass accompaniment of conches, sounding like bulls roaring with pain. Numbers of people blocked the street, every now and then crushing each other together as those nearest the house jammed back against the crowd behind, as squibs and crackers came firing out of the upper windows, accompanied by loud reports, like pistol shots, but made with huge wooden pop-guns. I forced my way through the mob and got inside the house. On a long table in the lower room were spread out all sorts of Chinese food, great bowls of rice, roasted rats, flattened-out ducks, joints of greasy pork, fish of many kinds - eels predominating - with plenty of liquor, chiefly European, such as gin, rum, brandy, and beer. Eating, as for

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dear life, were five or six Taoist priests in long dressing gowns, some yellow and others black, with tall black hats on their heads who were having a spell off from the incantation going on upstairs. I went upstairs and into a large room where a fat, puffy old Chinaman seated in a chair with yellow satin draped round it was clearly at the point of death, his face cadaverous, his eyeballs green, his lips white. In front of him several Taoist priests were mumbling some hocus-pocus, engaged in exorcising the fiend which was causing the illness of the patient. I could not wait long, curious as I was to witness the end which I thought must be at hand for the heat and stench were overpowering. But these I would have endured had I thought there was any chance of seeing the evil spirit come out of the man : which would have been interesting. So whether it did, or did not, or went with him to the next world, I cannot say. Anyhow, on passing the house later in the day I learnt that the man was dead, which did not surprise me, and I asked a Chinese servant, who was standing near, what his end had been.

" Too muchy debble inside. Him catchy three piecy debble. One piecy man no can do three piecy debble."

" How did they know there were three? " I asked.

" Priest man, he countee debbles, when man makee die, see 'em all the same rats."

" Where did they go ? " I inquired.

" Go nother piecy man's house : by and by priest maky catchy."

"Why not get a cat?"

" Cat no can do, maky cat sick."

* * * * *

At a village some ten miles outside Foochow I saw a conjuror a Mongolian, from the extreme west cf China, near the Altai Eange perform what to me appeared miracles. He was an extraordinary man, with something

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A SHAMĀN

weird and hypnotic about him, and it is to hypnotic suggestion that I attribute some of his tricks, for, though I stood close to him and watched him narrowly, I could not detect the fraud, if fraud there were.

This Mongolian looked like a man a hundred and fifty years old, a shrivelled skin with hundreds of wrinkles, his oblique eyes - shining with a light which seemed to come from within - had a horrible and fascinating stare, so that when he caught one's own he seemed to hold them. He was dressed in an old yellow tunic, embroidered with some cabalistic pattern worked in red, inside this a silk garment of the same shape, which had once been scarlet. On his head was a high Astrakan hat, from under which long snake-like locks depended. He had a retinue of ten to fifteen ragged-looking ruffians - of Mongolian type - carrying various instruments of music, drums, and large conches. A small boy, of five or six, was also of the party - a bright, merry little lad - quite out of harmony with his strange companions. The conjuror's paraphernalia consisted of a small arăba - native cart - drawn by a wiry Turkoman pony - carrying an open wicker-work basket cage, divided into two compartments, in one of which was a small tiger. A few pots and pans, all exposed to view, some faggots of wood, and his own drinking bowl and rice saucer completed the outfit. He stood, with his cart, on a hard-beaten patch of ground used by potters, with no more underground contrivances than you would find under the asphalte of Trafalgar Square. Before beginning his tricks he stripped, all save his cummerbund, when one saw that he was a living skeleton, a mere bag of bones. He began by putting a pot to boil on a wood fire, filling it with water out of a gourd. Whilst it was boiling, by way of diversion, he seized the small boy and crammed him into the compartment of the cage next to the tiger which growled furiously, and tried to grab the

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boy through the wicker-work. Then the conjuror, or Shamān, to give him his Eastern title, suddenly drew up the dividing partition, the boy and beast seeming to face each other, whilst, at the same moment, he threw a large canvas cover over the cage. In an instant there were terrible screams in an unmistakable child's voice, and a most distinct sound of a conflict inside, followed by a sickening noise like the crunching of bones. The crowd grew terrified, it was so intensely realistic : women screamed and some would have rushed to the cage, but they were held back by the men, who all seemed terrorised by the old man's eyes. Some people assert that in this exhibition they have seen blood stream down under the cart, but I saw none. All this time a hideous din was being kept up by the half-naked ruffians who formed the Shamān's following, blowing large horns five and six feet long, and banging on drums, and, with this noise still going on, the Shamān jumped into the cart and pulled off the cover. The boy had vanished, but the tiger - evidently wildly excited - lay swishing his tail. Where or how the boy went, I have no idea, but in a minute or two afterwards he came pushing his way from outside the dense ring of people and went and sat down unconcernedly alongside the cart. This trick over, the Shamān now turned his attention to the pot. He picked up five or six stones from the ground and dropped them into the boiling water, stirring it round and round with a piece of bamboo. I saw the stones bobbing about at the bottom. He stirred it again and again, and finally threw in a powder, probably potassium, for instantly there was a bright violet flame. In a minute or so he took the pot off the fire, tilted it up, when out flopped three Chinese ducks - of that flattened breed one sees herded by millions on the banks of Chinese rivers - and as the birds attempted to waddle away, the Shamān caught them, threw them back into the pot, put on the

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MARVELS OF CONJURING

lid, and looked round on the crowd with a fierce stare. Once more the pot seemed to boil ; again he took the lid off, and this time capsized the water entirely out of it. He then carried the pot round for the people to examine, and in the bottom of it I saw two snakes wriggling about, which the Shamān ejected from the pot by shaking it from side to side, catching them again immediately and putting them into a bag, which he threw on the top of the tiger's cage. I must remind the reader that all this time the man was practically naked. His next trick was that often seen in India, and needs no description : a boy tied up in a sack, the sack pierced in every direction by a sword, the usual screams, and, finally, the sack cut in two. The boy reappears unhurt, often up a tree, a hundred yards away. This trick, too, I do not understand.

I hoped to have seen the great semi-religious trick of a Shamān burning his own body on a pyre, a performance of special sanctity. This man, however, did not do it : but I have met men who have seen it, and have been told that it is utterly inexplicable. The Shamān lays himself naked on the top of a pyre of highly inflammable wood, and begins a drawling, sing-song chant, beating the while a small, sacred drum. Outsiders then set fire to the wood, a dense smoke rises from the midst of which the chant and drum are still heard. The fire takes, perhaps, half an hour to burn out, but no one sees the Shamān rise up or go away, though a crowd of people make a complete ring round him. At the end of this time he seems suddenly to appear squatting on his hams not far from the fire, still chanting, still beating his drum.

Near the Pagoda Anchorage, a pleasant spot below Foochow, when passing a Protestant Mission-house one day, the rhythmic cadence of girl's voices - repeating in unison what might have been the Apostles' Creed - caught

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my ear, and I ventured to look in through the open door. It was a pleasing sight, some ten or fifteen girls and women, in the dress of the working-class Chinawoman - short blue tunic with white tags and loops, flapping trousers which come half way below the knee - their well-turned ankles and neat feet bare, seated in a row on a bench, in a wide, cool room, the air laden with the scent of stephanotis, or tuberose, their favourite flowers. On the floor sprawled a selection of native babies - the queerest little people - playing with an English fox-terrier, who seemed to enjoy rolling them over and over. In the centre of the group stood the missionary, a good-looking young Englishman of thirty, dressed in correct clerical toggery, but wearing white duck trousers. At one end of the room I noticed a kind of booby-hatch, and wondered what it was for, but as I looked the face of the missionary's wife peered out through it, a pinched-up person with blue spectacles, and nearer fifty than twenty. Then I understood what it was for.

The missionary was very agreeable and explained to me that his converts were mostly recruited from washerwomen, the festive flower-boat class, though he sometimes landed a coolie, or some old men past work. His pay was �200 a year, and house rent free, and again I thought the missionary business must be fairly agreeable : barring the booby-hatch.

He took me to see an especially venerated Taoist temple dating, he said, from about the year 70 A.D. Round the courtyard were scores of huge Chinese vases, some ornamented, some of plain red clay. They were supposed to contain the spirits of the dead, and he told me as an excellent joke how, once visiting this place with a brother missionary, they had entered into a violent discussion with the Taoist priests as to the truth of this belief, when his friend to demonstrate that the Taoist belief was all

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lies kicked over one of these vases to let the spirits out, if there were any. There was such a commotion made by the priests, that he and his friend had to flee for their lives.

Personally, I thought it a pity they had not left them there.

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