Part 9
Most of the printing presses are from England and America. Those for finer work, including the immense wonder-working machines in the colour printing department, are of German manufacture. The Commercial Press was the first firm to introduce three-colour printing into China. One is tempted to linger long beside these marvellous presses. As the blue, yellow, red, each in its turn, is added so quickly and easily to the maps, charts, pictures, and kindergarten scrolls, the visitor is almost persuaded that he is viewing an exhibition of the cunning art of a magician, rather than the automatic movements of an insensate piece of machinery. Here is laid before the eyes a gay picture of the landing of Columbus for a history of America in Chinese, and yonder an equally charming one of the child Raleigh for a history of England. Much is made of illustrations in the school books published by the Commercial Press. Their ethical readers for little folks are fascinating productions. Each page is a coloured picture, which teaches its own lesson. Children are represented on their way to school, saluting the teacher, reciting their lessons, giving alms to the poor, caring for the aged, the young, sick, and blind, dusting and sweeping the rooms, washing, brushing, mending, and folding clothes, brushing their teeth, eating, playing. Houses are pictured as clean and sanitary, living as wholesome and pure. Especial emphasis is placed on proper manners and morals, teaching sadly needed to-day in China, when there is such an alarming tendency to abandon all that was really admirable under the old régime, and adopt in an exaggerated form all that is bad from the West. In the First Year Primary books practically no reading matter is introduced, only a few Chinese characters to explain the text. The little ones scan them attentively, absorbing knowledge without being conscious of the fact. How different is this from the old way, when children were shut all day long in dark, close rooms, shouting aloud unmeaning phrases from the Chinese classics, while the teacher dozed in his chair!
The newest addition to the plant is the installation of three “off-set” presses, the first in the Far East. An expert came out from America with them to set them up and instruct the Chinese workmen in their use. They are often kept busy through the twenty-four hours in turning out bonds and bank-notes by the millions for the Government.
Too much praise can not be given to the work of the editorial department. The entire second floor and part of the third of a quiet, three-story building is devoted to it. At long, unpainted wooden tables, littered with books and papers, sit the hundred and fifty scholars, bending over their work. Above four thousand original books have already gone out from their busy workshop, besides countless others that have been translated and edited. Eight monthly magazines are published by the editorial staff, a general one, an educational, a political, student’s, child’s, short story, a woman’s magazine, and one entitled “The English Student,” of which twenty thousand copies are issued monthly. The newest publication is a magazine called “The English Weekly.” The aim of the last two is to help Chinese students in the study of English. The Woman’s Magazine is one of the most popular. A bright girl who has studied in America was speaking about it one day to a group of foreign friends. “Just think,” she said, “the last number contains recipes for cooking eggs in twelve different ways.” “Is that so unusual?” asked an interested listener. “Why, they were not for making foreign dishes, but cooking Chinese food! I never before heard of a printed Chinese food recipe. If Chinese women begin to learn about food values it will mean everything in their lives.” The Woman’s Magazine started its life two years ago with a man as editor-in-chief. This fall a young woman will take over that position. She is a recent graduate of Wellesley College and married to a Harvard alumnus. Modest and lovable, she graciously answered the questions of her foreign callers. “Yes,” she admitted, with a little apologetic laugh, “I am going to try to edit the magazine.” “There will be assistant editors of course?” “Oh, yes.” “Women?” “No, I believe they are all men.” This young wife is a beautiful housekeeper, and it is safe to assume her home and family will not be neglected on account of the outside work she is about to take up. Indeed, it is worthy of comment that no one is more pleased about it than the young husband himself.
An interesting fact in connection with the editorial department of the Commercial Press is that most Western books are translated through the medium of the Japanese language, instead of directly from the English. This is because the present system of education in China is based on that of Japan, and scientific terms are more easily adapted from the Japanese. But Chinese students returning from abroad are strong in their feeling that this second-hand method of acquiring knowledge must soon give way to the more direct.
Glancing about the editorial room with its scores of hard-working men, pouring out the best that is in them for the uplift and enlightenment of their country, it is impossible not to feel a strange stirring of the heart, and one is also thrilled when looking through the warehouses where room after room is filled with books stacked to the ceiling or packed in boxes to be shipped away. Some of the largest orders come from the most distant provinces. The aim of the publishing house is not to issue many handsome, expensive books, but to flood the land with cheap editions that shall be within the reach of all.
Tiptoeing out of the editorial department, the visitor passes on to the English and Chinese composing rooms, which present a very different scene. There is a sort of mystery about Chinese type. That a “character” made up of a score or more of tiny individual strokes can be reproduced perfectly in a clean-cut piece of lead, seems nothing short of marvellous. Chinese type-setting is exceedingly complex. The cases are set on slanting frames, placed to form a triangle, within which stands the compositor. About six thousand characters are in ordinary use and a font of type weighs fifteen hundred pounds. An American woman is chief proof-reader for English text, assisted by a Portuguese and many Chinese. Behind the printing department is the foundry. Type-casting is a specialty and is done on a large scale. Indeed the market for a long time was so generally supplied from the Commercial Press that their sizes became the standard for all China. The matrices, kept in a fire-proof safe, are among the Company’s most valuable assets. A few modern automatic type-casters from Chicago are used, but they are far outnumbered by the old-style, hand-worked machines. The type cast from the old-style machines must be assorted, trimmed, and polished, all of which is done by women. “We are not always keen in making use of the latest machines,” explains the staff, “since labour is so cheap in China, and it is a blessing to the poor people to give work to as many as possible.”
Nearly all of the smaller machinery used in the Commercial Press Works is made in their own foundry and carpentry shop, besides physical, physiological, and chemical apparatus for schools, tools for industrial work, and small reed organs. The job-printing department is strictly up to date and large returns are realized from it. Recently one of the heads of the company made a trip around the world in order to study the best and latest processes of printing. The two hundred copies of the English edition of “China’s Young Men,” the organ of the Young Men’s Christian Association, are sent out monthly from this press.
No expense has been spared to make the equipment of the photo-engraving department as perfect as possible. It is provided with arc lamps and an acid-blasting etching machine, so that orders can be quickly filled irrespective of the weather. A fine photographic gallery is annexed whose chief furnishing is a new camera bought in London and making the fifth in use. The lens is able to produce pictures 32 × 43 inches, and with a single exception is the largest in the world. The camera rests upon a handcar, which runs back and forth over a small track. For some years, one-fourth of the company’s stock was held by Japanese, but at the beginning of 1914 this was bought back, so that now the concern is wholly Chinese. This consummation of a long-anticipated hope was celebrated with great rejoicing.
Several miles away from the works, on one of the busiest streets in a Chinese section of the International Settlement, stands the business house of the Commercial Press. The four-story building of reinforced concrete, ornamented with iron pillars, is quite new, having been built only six years ago at a cost of twenty thousand dollars. The fine show windows at once attract attention. Those on the right of the entrance are reserved for Chinese books and the ones on the left for English. Among the latter, besides standard works in literature, fiction, biography, and travel, are seen titles like the following: “Ready Made Speeches,” “Cooking,” “How the People Rule,” “Our Sick and How to Take Care of Them,” “Poultry and Profit,” “All about Railways,” “Railway Conquest of the World,” and a series under the general head, “Common Commodities of Commerce,” including tea, coffee, sugar, iron, oil, rubber. The sales rooms are on the ground floor. But many things are found there besides books and the usual appurtenances of a bookstore. In the apartments at the rear, in glass cases, are displayed samples of the many kinds of school apparatus manufactured at the works, also a large collection of stuffed birds from different countries, various forms of insect and animal life preserved in alcohol, besides what is of exceeding value to Chinese students, studies in rice, cotton, the silkworm, and other products, showing the progressive changes and best methods of their development and the uses to which they are and may be put. For the accommodation of customers who wish to look over the books at their leisure, numerous benches are scattered conveniently about, and the pleasant little reading room is always well patronized.
The second and third stories are mainly devoted to offices, while a good part of the fourth is reserved for the dining-hall. According to the usual custom in China, the two hundred employees have their board furnished them as a part of their pay, and all who receive under ten dollars a month are given lodging as well, though not in the same building. A roof garden, where the clerks may gather for the noon rest, or enjoy the cool evening breezes in hot weather, is one of the attractions of the place. Perhaps the two most useful adjuncts are the elevator, which carries both freight and passengers, and the electric cash register and delivery system, the only one in China. The Commercial Press has over forty branch offices in China, the large branch in Peking being employed chiefly with work for the government. It has besides more than a thousand selling agencies in other countries where the Chinese have settled, and is the largest publishing house in the Orient.
IX
THE CHINESE CITY
Many visitors to this busy port hurry on to richer fields of conquest with never a glimpse of the Chinese City, and some doubtless do not even know there is such a place. Yet not the International Settlement, nor the French Concession, but the Chinese City is the real Shanghai. The city is the nucleus north and south of whose storm-beaten walls the foreign settlements sprang up and without which they would not have been. The coming of the foreigner is of recent date, for few men from the West saw the spot, and certainly not one resided there till after Shanghai was opened as a treaty port in 1842. The city itself, though in the heyday of youth, compared with many other cities in China, still counts its age by centuries that creep close on to a millennium. The walls were not built until 1555, a year after the city had been sacked, burned to the ground, and left a howling wilderness by Japanese raiders. Gone now are the old walls, since the revolution, and the creaking gates that swung back and forth night and morning so many years on their rusty hinges, or if a vestige is left it is fast disappearing under the blows of pick-ax and hammer. But no, that is a mistake, for a halt has just been called in the work of demolition. The Chinese Town Council it is reported, is a house divided against itself, and some of its members strongly advocate the rebuilding of the walls for the sake of protection. A compromise has been effected by voting to allow the walls to remain down but letting the gates stand, or what is left of them, to serve as triumphal arches.
Of course it is better that the old walls should go, more sanitary and more modern. The ill-smelling moat has been covered on the north and west by a splendid boulevard ninety feet wide. Trolley lines will by and by encircle the whole city, as they now run along two sides. Many of the streets in the outer circumference of the city are being widened, while those in the heart of it are receiving some attention, though improvement is difficult on account of property interests. Ramshackle rat-infested hovels, here, there, and yonder, have vanished from sight, and new tea-houses, and shops, glistening with fresh paint, are taking their places. Public nuisances are being attacked. A well-to-do family reports that since the pestilential creek back of their house has been filled in, their property has advanced in value hundreds of dollars. Street refuse is swept up and carried away each day. Meat is inspected. Pipes have been laid and running water introduced, so that one no longer hears the monotonous cry of the water carriers trotting along with a pole across their shoulders from which were suspended the overflowing buckets spilling water at every step. Electric lights have largely superseded little smoky kerosene lamps, or still more primitive pottery or tin lamps with a tiny wick swimming in vegetable oil.
All this is just as it should be. The improvements are highly commended by every one, and yet, inconsistent beings that we are, why is it that with our rejoicing over the changes, our hearts likewise experience a pang of regret? What is there about things old and quaint, albeit noisome and repulsive, that things brand new somehow do not possess for us? So with the passing of the old walls and a modicum of the old dirt, a certain indefinable charm has slipped away too, never to return. Nevertheless the Chinese City continues to exist, although since the walls are down its boundaries are not so clearly defined, and enough of the ancient landmarks remain in the way of foul-smelling alleys, streets of gay shops, beggars and crowds, to satisfy most lovers of the haunting allurements of the Orient.
The city is approximately three miles in circumference. There is no map of it beyond the merest outline, and neither a Murray nor a Baedeker to facilitate a tramp through its labyrinthian byways. But the stranger crossing its boundaries is not left coldly to his own devices, for the instant he appears in sight he is met by a chattering company of self-constituted guides. If perchance their services are declined, they still manage unobtrusively to shadow the Innocent Abroad and entice him to shops that are almost certain to loosen his purse-strings and where they propose to secure a fat commission on the purchases made.
The shops in the Chinese City are the originals of the replicas in the Settlement, only that being the originals they are more bizarre and delightful. Like birds of a feather, shops doing the same kind of work, or selling the same kind of articles, are apt to flock together. For example, most of the furniture shops handling the beautiful red and black wood from the southern province of Kwangtung are found near the north gate, also the shops selling exquisitely carved ivory. Elsewhere are grouped the silversmiths, the jewelers with tempting displays of jade, amber, pearls, and precious stones, cloth and silk merchants, shoe and cap makers, dealers whose specialty is all kinds of fans; brass, pewter, and china shops, makers of coffins from the costly red and teak woods to the less expensive pine and ash--but the amazing variety of the shops is fairly bewildering and defies enumeration!
There are no department stores in the city. Each tradesman confines himself strictly to his own line of goods. Not for his life would he dare encroach on the rights and privileges of another, for every trade has its guild which sees to it that the interests of its members are protected. Many of the guilds are wealthy and powerful, politically as well as commercially, like the silk merchants’ and silversmiths’ guilds. They have their guild houses, all more or less elaborately fitted up with rooms for conferences and feasts, and attached to them are rows of long low buildings divided into small chambers, where, upon the payment of a rental, the coffins of deceased members may be deposited until a convenient time for burial.
Certain shops sell nothing but funeral trappings, but instead of presenting a sombre appearance they are among the gayest in the city. Hung aloft to show off to the best advantage are elaborately embroidered crimson satin coverings for the coffin, and around on the shelves or under glass cases is apparel for the dead, very richly embroidered robes, slippers, and headgear, this latter in the shape of mitres and helmets, of remarkable design and ornamentation. There are also priests’ robes and white cotton raiment and sackcloth for the mourners. Other shops carry only the paper furnishings that are an essential part of a funeral ceremony. When the spirit of the deceased leaves the body and passes to the spirit world, according to Chinese superstition he requires for his comfort the same conveniences to which he was accustomed in life. Hence the dutiful elder son, in proportion to his financial ability, and often far beyond it, for Chinese funerals are fearfully costly, sees that his honoured parent is provided with them. The articles are made of coloured paper, the larger ones over a light framework of bamboo, and include every conceivable object, from a sedan chair to a teacup. These images are borne in the funeral procession through the streets and burned at the grave, the smoke being supposed to waft them through ether to the waiting spirit. They are such exact facsimiles of the real thing, especially in the case of small articles like vases, jewelry boxes, braziers, lamps, clocks, basins, that it is hard to believe they are false. One of the best imitations ever produced in a Shanghai city shop was that of a fur-lined Mandarin coat, so perfect in every detail as almost to deceive the Chinese themselves.
A shopkeeper who always attracts custom is the portrait painter. He is an important personage and does business behind closed doors--that is, his shop is not open to the street as most are; but has a front partition with a door and show window. On the window is pasted a collection of small pictures of human heads cut from newspapers and magazines. Inside the shop quantities more are stored away. When a widow, it may be, wishes a likeness of her consort who left no pictured memorial behind him, or a youth perhaps craves a reminder of the grand-uncle he never saw, they find their way to one of these portrait shops. The shopkeeper spreads out before them an array of pictures, and after careful study a selection is made of a particular portrait which either bears some imaginary resemblance to the dear departed, or is what the sorrowing relatives would choose to have him look like. The shopkeeper then paints the head in life size and adds a body clothed in whatever style of garments may be mutually decided on. The finished portrait is finally hung on the wall of the family dwelling and pointed to with pride and affection as the face of the deceased ancestor.
Drug shops are many and are invested with an air of quiet exclusiveness and semi-professionalism, which suffers but a slight declension when in hot weather the clerks, after the manner of most shopkeepers, divest themselves of their non-essential upper garments and pass the day stripped to the waist. Upon the shelves of the shop stand rows and rows of large pewter cannisters and blue and white china jars, innocent enough to look at and yet designed to arouse the curiosity of the beholder as to the nature and character of their contents. Below are quantities of drawers containing dried roots, herbs, bones, seaweed, chalk, things indescribable and inscrutable, drawn from the air above, the earth beneath, and the waters under the earth. In addition to drugs the shop frequently keeps on exhibition some special attractions, such as glass jars with snakes preserved in alcohol, dried alligator skins, corals and geological specimens. In filling prescriptions china bottles, coloured pasteboard boxes and squares of white paper are used. Sometimes a score or more of the paper squares are placed on the counter at once, and from the different drawers an interesting assortment of medicines is laid on them. Here is dried orange peel, said to be an unfailing remedy for loss of appetite, a yellow berry that removes phlegm, a dried beetle that in a solution of water makes the best kind of eyewash. The silkworm taken from the cocoon when eaten with rice greatly assists digestion, and so does a flat bug that from its appearance might be great-grandfather to the bedbug. The ladybug, or what resembles one, is a sure cure for liver complaint, and another insect if rubbed on wounds quickly heals them. Also in certain troubles it has been found that a little of the alcohol in which a serpent is preserved, if taken internally, proves particularly efficacious. On the wall at the back of the shop is painted a picture of the god of medicine, at whose shrine tapers are kept burning. Chinese shops carrying foreign drugs, some of them excellent shops, too, are not uncommon in the Settlement but are seldom to be seen in the Chinese City.
The dentist, like his confreres in other countries, is ever in demand. Occasionally an aspiring, prosperous fellow is discovered doing business in a shop where the patient may balance himself on a stool, though still in full view of the curious street crowd, and tilting his head back, have the offending molar extracted without further ado. But ordinarily the professional outfit is limited to a small wooden table and what it will hold, set out in the street. Back of the weather-worn stand lounges the dentist, soiled and uncouth, keeping guard over his stock in trade, bottles of ointments, salves, a pair of forceps and other nondescript instruments, a few sets of teeth under a dust-covered glass case, and last but not least, piles of decayed teeth successfully extracted from tortured victims and kept as decoys to attract patronage. There are travelling dentists whose shop is a wheelbarrow which carries the dental equipment, with the inevitable pile of teeth conspicuous in the centre. They move from point to point, in inclement weather under cover of a mammoth coloured umbrella, and sound a gong to draw the ever-ready crowd.