CHAPTER III.

_LIFE IN A CHINESE CITY._

Arrangement of a Chinese House.--Crowd in Streets.--My First Walk in Chungking City.--Presents.--Cats, Rats, and Eggs.--Paying a Call.--Ladies Affectionate.--Shocked at European Indecency.--Cost of Freight.--Distance by Post.--Children's Pleasures.--Precautions during Drought.--Guild Gardens.--Pretty Environs.--Opium Flowers, and Smokers.--Babble of Schools.--Chinese Girlchild.

Chungking has been so fully described in my husband's volume _Through the Yangtse Gorges_, I will not here enter upon a description of it further than to say it is situated, like Quebec, at the junction of two rivers. It a little recalls Edinburgh; it is about the size of Lyons; has walls all round it; and its gates are shut at sunset, all but two, which remain open an hour or two longer, except when the country is in commotion. It is built upon a rock; and as the summer progresses all the rock warms up, till the heat is very great indeed. The streets are mostly covered over, both as a protection against the sun, and the rain, which is very frequent. There is thus no possibility of fresh air getting into its streets, short of a gale occurring; and there is only very rarely any wind, as is shown by the large shade-trees on the tops of the hills, and the awnings to keep the sun off the houses, which are supported on bamboos, and which in this windless region are taken up even over the roofs of the houses.

Now all the missions have built European houses; but a little while ago all foreigners lived in Chinese houses within the walls of the city. To describe one: You enter off a dirty alley by a large gateway, the only opening in the lofty fire-proof walls that surround the whole property; for fire is the great danger of a Chinese city, and a whole quarter of Chungking has been burnt down since we have lived there. You pass into a sort of courtyard; from that you proceed by a long passage to another gateway, thence into a courtyard ornamentally laid out with pots and flowers. The house door opens from this; and entering by it, you find yourself in the lofty entrance hall, used by Europeans as a dining-room. Passing through an ornamental screen with open doorways, over which hang portières, you find yourself in a sitting-room, of which one wall and two half-walls consist of paper windows, with occasional panes of glass. On either side of these two principal rooms are long narrow ones, only thirteen feet wide, which for convenience their English occupants had divided into two, the end wall being in both cases again paper windows with occasional glass. Paper ceilings had been put in to prevent the dust falling through from the tiled roof above; but the sun would shine through this as well as the tiles quite brilliantly at times. None of the partition doors had handles or latches, and the outer walls, as well as the inside partitions, were all alike of thin planks of wood, not overlapping, and which would shrink in dry weather so as to leave quite large openings between them. It will thus be realised that, whatever was the temperature outside the house, the same was the temperature inside, with the additional disadvantage of draughts on rainy, wintry days; and in winter it generally rains in Chungking. Europeans always took care to secure wooden floors for themselves; but these floors were not uncommonly rotting away under their feet. And picturesque though the houses are, with their lofty roofs, their solid wooden pillars, black rafters, and white plaster, their highly decorated exteriors, little pictures in black and white under the eaves, richly carved and heavily gilded ends to the beams, etc., it became increasingly evident each year that Europeans could not hope for health in them. Chinese in winter wear heavily wadded and fur-lined clothes, in which it is impossible to take exercise, and inside of which they loll about in a semi-comatose condition, much as if in bed.

The streets, although wide for a Chinese city, are very narrow in comparison with English streets, being only eight feet at the widest, and extraordinarily crowded. Passing through them is a continual pushing through a crowd of foot-passengers; of sedan-chairs, carried by coolies, with sometimes one or two men running before to clear the way, and if it be necessary beat back the crowd; of mules, donkeys, or ponies, with loads; and of numbers of carrying-coolies, a bamboo across their shoulders, and from either end a basket hanging by strings. Everything that can be done in the streets is done in them: pedlars go by with great quantities of goods for sale; men are mending broken china with little rivets after a fashion in which the Chinese are great experts; here is a barber shaving a man's head, there are two women menders, on little stools very neatly dressed, pursuing their avocation; here is a man working at an embroidery-frame, there a cobbler mending shoes; here some pigs, there some chickens; here a baby in a hen-coop, there a pussy-cat tied to a shop-counter; and in the evenings street preachers, in the afternoons vast crowds pouring out from theatres. At night, in going out to dinner we used always to pass at least three street preachers. These men wear official caps, and are as a rule, I believe, reading or expounding the Sacred Edicts. There is always a little crowd listening, though often a very small one. In the better streets every attention is paid to decency; in the lesser streets none is apparent. At the street corners there are often large tanks full of water, as a precaution against fire. These are invariably grown over with weed. A vast army of coolies is every day going down the steep flights of steps to the river to bring water, which drips from the buckets as it is carried along. Another army is carrying out the sewage of the city to be used as manure. A very soft coal is used for fuel; and baskets of coal are constantly being carried in, two dangling from a pole across a coolie's shoulders. The coal-dust, and the smoke, and the drippings, and the bustling crowd, all make the streets rather an unpleasant place to walk in. Yet, although every one told me it was impossible for an English lady to walk in them, I felt it was impossible for me to live in Chungking unless I did; for in summer no one could walk out till sunset, and then the gates are closed; so after showing myself about as much as I could in a sedan-chair with the curtains up--unlike the other ladies, who all kept theirs down in those days--I determined to attempt a walk, with my sedan-chair, of course, following behind to show I had some claim to respectability.

In a few minutes two or three hundred men and boys were following me. As long as they kept behind and did not press upon me, it did not so much matter; but the boys have a knack of clattering past, and then turning round to stare into one's face in the most insulting and annoying manner. And I felt I could not go back home with all this rabble following, as of course they would all try to press into our house after me, and then there would probably be a row. So I turned into the official residence of the principal magistrate of the city, hoping that the guardians of his gate might stop both me and my following, as I supposed it would be their duty to do, and then I might somehow detach myself. Into the first courtyard every one has a right to go; but as we proceeded farther, soldiers came up and remonstrated with me. "Well, do your duty--shut us out," I said. "Do shut the people out, and then I won't go any farther." But they did not do their duty; and so, not seeing what else to do, I set up the camera and photographed the crowd and the soldiers, not doing their duty and turning them out. After that I got into my chair; and the people, curiously enough, satisfied that that was what I had come out for, dispersed, and I arrived at home unattended. But many a walk since then have I taken through these same streets; and the people have got so accustomed to the sight of me, that they now do not turn round to look.

One of the most fatiguing things about Chinese life is the presents. Whatever you do, you ought to take or send a present. Every lady who goes out to dinner takes a present to the hostess; and at a certain period of the dinner all sorts of things are done up in a heterogeneous mass for each guest to take home to her children, if she has any; whilst the hostess pays all her friends' chair-coolies, and the guest tips the hostess's servants, especially the cook, who has a great title of honour in China. If ladies care to call, they generally bring presents too, rolled up in a handsome, coloured handkerchief. The most curious present I have received at a dinner party was a white cat, that could hardly see out of its eyes. The general present seems to be sponge-cakes or fruit.

Cats are very much prized in a Chinese city, because of the fierce depredations of the rats; and in Chungking cats are always kept prisoners, and only occasionally let loose at night. It is sad to see the poor things tied up; and we have never been able to make up our minds to keep our cats thus chained. The consequence is they are always stolen, and have a miserable life of it, tied up, and probably far less well fed than they would have been with us. Fowls and pigs are both kept in Chinese cities, and the eggs get a most unpleasing flavour from the vile nature of the places where the poor hens have to lay them.

When I pay a call on a lady, my chair has to be carried over the thresholds of the various courtyards, and set down quite close to the guest-room, where the lady of the house receives, so that I may at once step out of the chair into the house. A woman-servant, almost certainly a slave, comes to offer her shoulder as a help to my tottering footsteps, and I am conducted into the guest-room, round the walls of which there are little tables, large carved wooden chairs with straight backs being placed one on either side of each table against the wall. The ladies bow after the Chinese lady's fashion, placing the right hand on the top of the left against the chest, and moving the right hand slowly up and down; the servants are ordered to bring tea; and then conversation commences. It is never very interesting. The floors are as often as not made of hard mud; the walls whitewashed, with long-shaped pictures, or _kakemonos_, hanging upon them, often with epigrammatic sentences in the decorative Chinese character. At one end of the room is the altarlike table, above which is the ancestral tablet, and on it stand generally candlesticks made of pewter, flower-vases, an incense-burner, and a small vase for incense-sticks. Embroideries are not hung over this table and on the backs of the chairs, unless it is the Chinese New Year time or a dinner party. When the tea is brought, little sugared cakes accompany it; and men say the etiquette is to go away directly you have sipped the tea. But I have never known ladies observe this etiquette. Indeed, the chief fault in Chinese visits is that they are interminable. As no one exerts herself to talk more than she feels inclined, there is, indeed, no reason why they should ever come to an end.

Chinese ladies appear very affectionate, and are very caressing. Whether they really do like me or not, they almost always succeed in making me think they do; and I think other European ladies would say the same. But as to whether the holding one's hand and occasionally stroking it means anything, I really do not know. They never have shown me anything, unless they wanted to sell it, except their children. At an artist's house pictures are brought out; but they are all carefully rolled up and put away again. And at other houses embroideries worked by various brides of the family have been shown me; but this was in order to see if I would buy them. It must be recollected that to the Chinese a foreign woman's tight-fitting dress showing her figure is very indecent. It also seems to them very shocking for a lady to go about unattended by a woman; and for a woman to stand up firmly on her feet and walk on them like a man seems far more indelicate than it does in England to wear so-called rationals. Thus there are great difficulties to be got over at first. They are, indeed, greatly concerned about our indecency; for they have heard no European woman wears trousers, and their first great anxiety is to examine under our petticoats, and see whether this is really true. Trousers are the one essential garment to a woman in China. Sometimes they ask, "Do you really eat with your waist girt in like that? How do you manage then?" But this they have only once had the opportunity of asking of me; for knowing it to be considered objectionable, I avoid wearing anything that shows the figure, in China, as far as I can. After all, tea-jackets admit of many pretty varieties. A European man's dress is, of course, a still greater scandal; and to Chinese, the only explanation of it is that the poor fellow had not enough cloth to cover himself properly. After spending any length of time amongst Orientals, I think every one must feel that our European dress is lacking in grace and elegance.

It takes longer to get a letter the fifteen hundred miles from Shanghai to Chungking than it does to get a letter the thirteen thousand from England to Shanghai. Freight of goods is a great deal higher; indeed, a ton of goods costs £6 from Shanghai to Chungking, and £36 to get it to Talifu in Yunnan. Once I wrote to England on Christmas Eve for stockings, saying I was in such need of them I should like to have them sent out by post; and yet I never received those stockings till the following spring year. In an ordinary way, with good luck, you ought to get an answer to a letter from England in four months; therefore, if you keep up a very animated correspondence with an English friend, always answering every letter directly you receive it, you write three letters a year. And curiously enough, whatever you may do at Chungking, the sense of its being so very far away deters other people from writing to you. Charles Lamb has written a beautiful Elia essay upon this. He explains it by the suggestion that the writer, thinking of the great distance the letter has to travel, fancies it growing tired. Anyhow, the result tends to heighten the sense of isolation, which is perhaps nowhere so much felt as among Chinese. Whether it is their expressionlessness, their want of sympathy, or the whole character of their civilisation being so different from ours, very few Europeans can spend more than a year amongst Chinese without suffering from it. Some go mad with it, and all are accused of growing odd. There is no doubt that most of us become somewhat self-centred and unduly impressed with the importance of our own affairs; but the depression that often overtakes people, women especially, is sadder to witness. In sending out missionaries, this is a point that ought to be specially considered: Have they enough strength of character to continue the work of an apostle without any outside spiritual or inspiriting influences whatsoever? It is not long since a man I had thought so ardent said to me: "I am going away; and I never mean to return. I cannot go on giving out, and having no spiritual help myself." Yet, just because they are trying to live for others, missionaries stand this trial best. I have known other men who from the moment they arrived in a Chinese town found no pleasure but in counting the days. "One more spent here!--one less to spend!" and this without even the least idea of when they would go away.

To Chinese children I always think life in a Chinese city must be very pleasant. There are the great festivals: the Chinese New Year, with all its countless crackers; the Dragon Boat Festival, when each district of the city mans a boat shaped like a dragon, and all paddle like mad, naked to the waist, and with a strange shout that must be very dear to children. Then there are the visits to the graves, when all the family goes out into the country together; and the long processions, when the officials are carried through the city in open chairs and long fur gowns, hundreds of umbrellas of gay colours going before them, and their retainers also riding in pairs and in fur coats of inferior quality. All the beggar-children of the city have a high day then. With fancy dress of various sorts over their rags, they walk or ride or are carried round the city, sometimes as living pictures, sometimes representing conquered aborigines, sometimes even Englishmen in short square coats and tight trousers. In the spring-time a procession goes out to meet the spring, and sacrifice an ox in the river-bed in its honour; and, strangely enough, the day in February on which this is done is always the most genial springlike day, though after it is over winter sets in with renewed severity. At other times it is the image of the fire-god that is carried round, to show him the buildings he is honoured to protect. Then, again, one evening there will be about four miles of little lanterns sent floating down the great river in honour of the dead. Or there will be the baking of the glutinous rice-cakes, accompanied by many curious ceremonials. And in it all the child takes his part; and his elders are very kind to him, and never bother him with cleaning up or putting on clothes to go out. He strips to the waist or beyond it in summer; then, as the winter comes on, puts on ever another and another garment, till he becomes as broad as he is long. At night-time, perhaps, he takes off some clothes; but they are all the same shape, all quite loose and easy. Then he never need be afraid of breaking anything or spoiling anything; for most things are put away, and Chinese things are not like European: the shining black polished table, for instance, can have a hot kettle stood upon it, and be none the worse. No one ever tells the Chinese child to hold himself up, or not to talk so loud, or to keep still; so he shouts and wriggles to his heart's content. And European children grow like him in this respect; and when readmitted to European houses, their feet are for ever rubbing about, and their hands fidgeting with something, which spoils, as European things will spoil.

Although there is so much rain in the west of China, and when it does not rain the air is generally damp to saturation-point, yet sometimes there is a long continuance of summer heat. One year, although according to the Chinese calendar the ending of the great heat had come--and, indeed, also the beginning of autumn, when, if it does not rain, according to the saying, no rain will fall for forty days--yet no rain fell, no thunder cooled the air. The ground was growing harder and harder, and the hills acquiring the yellow baked look so familiar down-river, but so unusual in Chungking.

The south gate was not closed. The idea is, that heat comes in from the south; therefore, when it is too hot, the south gate is always closed. There was, however, too much traffic through it. But no meat, fowls, nor eggs were allowed to go in thereat, and the various cooks and coolies sent in on foraging excursions from the hills returned disconsolate. If any one sold anything, it was with the air of a thief, one man reported. Europeans were beginning to consider what they would have to eat, if this prohibition were strictly enforced. Already for two days the killing of pigs had been forbidden. Outside most houses in the city stood a tub of water ready to be dashed over the too dry woodwork. Already report had been busy destroying the thriving and populous city of Luchou higher up the river by fire; but on a telegram being sent to inquire, the report was found to have arisen in people's own heated imaginations. The danger of fire is ever with us in China, with our wooden houses all dry as tinder and our closely packed opium-smoking population. As to the amount of dirt then concentrated in Chungking, it was shocking to think of; for the place had not been washed out for six weeks.

There is an old saying that drought never wrought England harm. One has the same feeling in Szechuan; and when day by day the beautiful red-golden glow spreads along the range beyond range of mountain-tops, and the sun arises upon a cloudy sky, we cannot help thinking these clouds must gradually get lower, and rain come to cool the air and refresh the country. At night, as we see the lightning flash on the clouds south and west of us, and feel the cool breath of distant rain, we again think it must be on its way. Only during the long hot day there seems no prospect of it; the clouds reveal themselves as summer clouds; the sun shines; and we think how hot it must be in that southern region from which the hot wind comes to us, and wonder whether it is in Tongking, or where, there has been a tremendous rainfall. Has there been somewhere some great convulsion of nature? or is it again all a case of sun-spots? When it is so very hot, what can one think of but the weather?

I never saw the thermometer mark higher than 120° Fahr. in our sitting-room; but then, when it got to that, I always went down into the cellar, and did not come out again till evening. The Chinese have cool, dark places dug out of the rock into which they retire to _schwa_, i.e. enjoy themselves. All the guild gardens round Chungking are provided with such places. The worst of them is, there is no air in them. But, then, every one has a fan. Even the man heavily laden like a beast of burden has his fan stuck into his waist-belt; the soldier has his fan. It is not a luxury, but a necessary of life, in a Chinese city in summer.

In the spring-time what can be prettier than the environs of a Chinese city? The rape-fields are all fragrant with their bright-yellow flowers; whilst the still sweeter scent of the bean blossom makes it a real pleasure to walk along the narrow paths by the river-side. Every one is walking about with a bunch of roseate peach blossom, and the tangles of trees in the gardens are all flowering and all scented. Then a little later the poppy-fields become gorgeous almost up to the city gates, only shortly afterwards to give out a poisonous exhalation most irritating to the mucous membrane. After that everything trembles and glitters with the scorching sunshine, all the leaves droop, gigantic sun-flowers are running to seed, and the large pink-and-white lily flowers of the lotus float upon the waterside. Every woman has a white gardenia flower stuck on the left side of her glossy black hair. And all outside the city is inspiriting, when the sun shines and the blue rivers laugh back at the blue sky. But inside the city it is still all dark and dank, and all is pervaded by a sickly sweet odour, the emanation from the opium-pipe; while the lean ribs and yellow faces of the opium-smokers controvert without the need of words all the scientific assertions about the non-volatilisation of the opium poison. With opium-dens all over the place, with exquisite opium-pipes and all the coquetries of opium-trays and other accessories in the houses of the rich, how is it that we all give warning to a servant when we hear that he has taken to opium? How is it that the treasure on a journey is never confided to a coolie who smokes? How is it that every man shrinks with horror from the idea of an opium-smoking wife? And this in a land in which all important business dealings are concluded over the opium-couch, where, indeed, alone, with heads close together, is privacy to be obtained, and in which all important military posts are confided to opium-smokers, not to speak of most of the important civil offices!

There is, it is true, an immense difference between the man who smokes and him who has the _yin_, or craving, that must at all costs be satisfied; just as there is at home between the moderate drinker and the dipsomaniac. But in China people refuse to employ the moderate smoker to sweep out their rooms for them. Yet they will confide an army to him! These, however, are secrets of State, not to be got to the bottom of simply by life in a Chinese city.

There is one other matter, however, I must touch upon--the all-pervading babble, row I had almost called it, of the boys in the schools, here, there, and everywhere, so that it is almost impossible to get out of earshot of them, all at the top of their boy voices shouting out the classics, as they painstakingly day after day and year after year commit them to memory. With the sickly sweet smell of the opium, and to the sound of the vast ear-drum-splitting army of China's schoolboys, all must for ever associate life in a Chinese city. And through it all, and up and down its flights of stairs, painfully hobbles the Chinese girl-child, the most ungraceful figure of all girl-children,--poor little mutilated one, with her long stick and dreadful dark lines under her sad young eyes! Whatever the men may be, certainly the little girls of China are brought up as Spartans even never were, and those who survive show it by their powers of endurance.