Chapter VI. contains brief notices of other fruits. The banana and

persimmon are common, and several varieties are enumerated of each; the plantain is eaten raw and cooked, and forms a large item in the subsistence of the poor. The pomegranate, carambola or tree gooseberry, mango, custard-apple, pine-apple, rose-apple, bread-fruit, fig, guava, and olive, some of them as good and others inferior to what are found in other countries, increase the list. The _whampe_, _líchí_, _lungan_, or ‘dragon’s eyes,’ and _loquat_, are the native names of four indigenous fruits at Canton. The whampe (_Cookia_) resembles a grape in size and a gooseberry in taste; the loquat or _pebo_ (_Eriobotrya_) is a kind of medlar. The líchí looks like a strawberry in size and shape; the tough, rough red skin encloses a sweet watery pulp of a whitish color surrounding a hard seed. Grapes are plenty and cheap; in the northern cities they are preserved during the winter, and even till May, by constant care in regulating the temperature.

Chestnuts, walnuts, ground-nuts, filberts (_Torreya_), almonds, and the seeds of the salisburia and nelumbium, are the most common nuts. The Chinese date (_Rhamnus_) has a sweetish, acidulous flesh; the olive is salted or pickled; the names of both these fruits are given them because of a resemblance to the western sorts, for neither the proper date nor olive grows in China. A pleasant sweetmeat, like cranberry, is made from the seeds of the arbutus (_Myrica_), and another still more acid from a sort of haw, both of them put up for exportation.

Preserved fruits are common, and the list of sweetmeats and delicacies is increased by the addition of many roots, some of which are preserved in syrup and others as comfits. Ginger, nelumbium roots, bamboo shoots, the common potato, and other vegetables are thus prepared for export as well as domestic consumption. The natives consume enormous quantities of pickles of an inferior quality, especially cabbages and onions, but foreigners consider them detestable. The Chinese eat but few spices; black pepper is used medicinally as a tea, and cayenne pepper when the pod is green.

Oils and fats are in universal use for cooking; crude lard or pork fat, castor oil, sesamum oil, and that expressed from two species of Camellia and the ground-nut, are all employed for domestic and culinary purposes. The Chinese use little or no milk, butter, or cheese; the comparatively small number of cattle raised and the consequent dearness of these articles may have caused them to fall into disuse, for they are all common among the Manchus and Mongols. A Chinese table seems ill furnished to a foreigner when he sees neither bread, butter, nor milk upon it, and if he express his disrelish of the oily dishes or alliaceous stews before him, the Chinese thinks that he delivers a sufficient retort to his want of taste when he answers, “You eat cheese, and sometimes when it can almost walk.” Milk is used a little, and no one who has lived in Canton can forget the prolonged mournful cry of _ngao nai!_ of the men hawking it about the streets late at night. Women’s milk is sold for the sustenance of infants and superannuated people, the idea being prevalent that it is peculiarly nourishing to aged persons.[367]

Sugar is grown only in Formosa and the three southern provinces, which supply the others; neither molasses nor rum are manufactured from it. No sugar is expressed from sorghum stalks, nor do the Chinese know that it contains syrup. The tobacco is milder than the American plant; it is smoked and not chewed or made into cigars, though these are being imported from Manila in steadily increasing quantities, and find favor among many of the wealthier Chinese; snuff is largely used. The betel-nut is a common masticatory, made up of a slice of the nut and the fresh leaf of the betel-pepper with a little lime rubbed on it. The common beverages are tea and arrack, both of which are taken warm; cold water is not often drunk, cold liquids of any kind being considered unwholesome. The constant practice of boiling water before drinking, in preparing tea, doubtless tends to make it less noxious, when the people are not particular as to its sources. Coffee, chocolate, and cocoa are unknown, as are also beer, cider, porter, wine, and brandy.

~KINDS OF ANIMAL FOOD USED.~

The meats consumed by the Chinese comprise, perhaps, a greater variety than are used in other countries; while, at the same time, very little land is appropriated to rearing animals for food. Beef is not a common meat, chiefly from a Buddhistic prejudice against killing so useful an animal. Mutton in the southern provinces is poor and dear compared with its excellence and cheapness north of the Yangtsz’ River, where the greater numbers of Mohammedans cause a larger demand for it. The beef of the buffalo and the mutton of the goat are still less used; pork is consumed more than all other kinds, and no meat can be raised so economically. Hardly a family so poor that it cannot possess a pig; the animals are kept even on the boats and rafts, to consume and fatten upon what others leave. Fresh pork probably constitutes more than half of the meat eaten by the Chinese; hams are tolerably plenty, and a dish called “golden hams,” from the amber appearance of the joint, makes a conspicuous object in feasts. Horseflesh, venison, wild boar, and antelope are now and then seen, but in passing through the markets mutton, pork, fowls, and fish are the viands which everywhere meet the eye.

A few kittens and puppies are sold alive in cages, mewing and yelping as if in anticipation of their fate, or from pain caused by the pinching and handling they receive at the hands of dissatisfied customers. Those intended for the table are usually fed upon rice, so that if the nature of their food be considered, their flesh is far more cleanly than that of the omnivorous hog; few articles of food have, however, been so identified abroad with the tastes of the people as kittens, puppies, and rats have with the Chinese. American school geographies often contain pictures of a market-man carrying baskets holding these unfortunate victims of a perverse taste (as we think), or else a string of rats and mice hanging by their tails to a stick across his shoulders, which almost necessarily convey the idea that such things form the usual food of the people. Travellers hear beforehand that the Chinese devour everything, and when they arrive in the country straightway inquire if these animals are eaten, and hearing that such is the case, perpetuate the idea that they form the common articles of food. However commonly live kittens and puppies or dressed dogs may be exposed for sale, one may live in a city like Canton or Fuhchau for many years and never see rats offered for food, unless he hunts up the people who sell them for medicine or aphrodisiacs; in fact, they are not so easily caught as to be either common or cheap. A peculiar prejudice in favor of black dogs and cats exists among natives of the south; these animals invariably command a higher price than others, and are eaten at midsummer in the belief that the meat ensures health and strength during the ensuing year.

Rats and mice are, no doubt, eaten now and then, and so are many other undesirable things, by those whom want compels to take what they can get; but to put these and other strange eatables in the front of the list gives a distorted idea of the everyday food of the people. There are perhaps half a dozen restaurants in Canton city where dog’s-meat appears upon the _menu_; it is, however, by no means an inexpensive delicacy.[368] The flesh of rats is eaten by old women as a hair restorative.

The blood of ducks, pigs, and sheep is used as food, or prepared for medicine and as a paste; it forms an ingredient in priming and some kind of varnish. It is coagulated into cakes for sale, and in cooking is mixed with the meats and sauces. The blood of all animals is eaten without repugnance so far as concerns religious scruples, except in the case of Buddhist priests.

Frogs are caught in a curious manner by tying a young jumper lately emerged from tadpole life to a line and bobbing him up and down in the grass and grain of a rice field, where the old croakers are wont to harbor. As soon as one of them sees the young frog sprawling and squirming he makes a plunge at him and swallows him whole, whereupon he is immediately conveyed to the frog-fisher’s basket, losing his life, liberty, and lunch together, for the bait is rescued from his maw and used again as long as life lasts.

~HATCHING DUCKS’ EGGS.~

Poultry, including chickens, geese, and ducks, are everywhere raised; of the three the geese are the best flavored, but all of them are reared cheaply and supply a large portion of the poor with the principal meat they eat. The eggs of fowls and ducks are hatched artificially, and every visitor to Canton remembers the duck-boats in which those birds are hatched and reared and carried up and down the river seeking for pasture along its muddy banks. Sheds are erected for hatching, in which are a number of high baskets well lined to retain the heat. Each one is placed over a fireplace, so that the heat shall be conveyed to the eggs through the tile in its bottom and retained in the basket by a close cover. When the eggs are brought a layer is put into the bottom of each basket, and a fire kept in the room at a uniform heat of about 80° F. After four or five days they are examined in a strong light, to separate the addled ones; the others are put back in the baskets and the heat kept up for ten days longer, when they are all placed upon shelves in the centre of the shed and covered with cotton and felt for fourteen days. At the end of the twenty-eighth day the shells are broken to release the inmates, which are sold to those who rear them. Pigeons are raised to a great extent; their eggs form an ingredient in soups. Wild and water fowl are caught in nets or shot; the wild duck, teal, grebe, wild goose, plover, snipe, heron, egret, partridge, pheasant, and ortolan or rice bird are all procurable at Canton, and the list could be increased elsewhere.

If the Chinese eat many things which are rejected by other peoples, they are perfectly omnivorous with respect to aquatic productions; here nothing comes amiss; all waters are vexed with their fisheries. Their nets and other contrivances for capturing fish display great ingenuity, and most of them are admirably adapted to the purpose. Rivers, creeks, and stagnant pools, the great ocean and the little tank, mountain lakes and garden ponds, tubs and rice fields, all furnish their quota to the sustenance of man, and tend to explain, in a great degree, the dense population. The right to fish in running streams and natural waters is open to all, while artificial reservoirs, as ponds, pools, tanks, tubs, etc., are brought into available use; near tide-water the rice grounds are turned into fish-ponds in winter if they will thereby afford a more profitable return. The inhabitants of the water are killed with the spear, caught with the hook, scraped up by the dredge, ensnared by traps, and captured by nets; they are decoyed to jump into boats by painted boards, and frightened into nets by noisy ones, taken out of the water by lifting nets and dived for by birds--for the cormorant seizes what his owner could not easily reach. In short, every possible way of catching or rearing fish is practised in one part of the country or another. Tanks are placed in the streets, with water running through them, where carp or perch are reared until they become so large they can hardly turn round in their pens; eels and water-snakes of every color and size are fed in tubs and jars until customers carry them off.

King-crabs, cuttle-fish, sharks, sting-rays, gobies, tortoises, turtles, crabs, prawns, crawfish, and shrimps add to the variety. The best fish in the Canton market are the garoupa or rock cod, pomfret, sole, mackerel, bynni carp or mango fish, and the polynemus, erroneously called salmon. Carp and tench of many kinds, herring, shad, perch, mullet, and bream, with others less common at the west, are found in great abundance. They are usually eaten fresh, or merely opened and dried in the sun, as stock-fish. Both salt and fresh-water shell-fish are abundant. The oysters are not so well flavored as those on the Atlantic coast of America; the crabs and prawns are excellent, but the clams, mussels, and other fresh-water species are less palatable. Insect food is confined to locusts and grasshoppers, grubs and silk-worms; the latter are fried to a crisp when cooked. These and water-snakes are decidedly the most repulsive things the Chinese eat.

Many articles of food are sought after by this sensual people for their supposed aphrodisiac qualities, and most of the singular productions brought from abroad for food are of this nature. The famous birdsnest soup is prepared from the nest of a swallow (_Collocalia esculenta_) found in caves and damp places in some islands of the Indian Archipelago; the bird macerates the material of the nest from seaweed (_Gelidium_ chiefly) in the crop, and constructs it by drawing the food out in fibres, which are attached to the damp stone with the bill. The nest has the same shape as those which chimney swallows build, and holds the young against the cliffs; they rarely exceed three or four inches in the longest diameter. The operation of cleaning is performed by picking away each morsel of dirt or feathers from the nest, and involves considerable labor. After they come forth perfectly free from impurities they are stewed with pigeons’ eggs, spicery, and other ingredients into a soup; when cooked they resemble isinglass, and the dish depends upon sauces and seasoning for most of its taste. The biche-de-mer, tripang, or sea-slug, is a marine substance procured from the Polynesian Islands; it is sought after under the same idea of its invigorating qualities, and being cheaper than the birdsnest is a more common dish; when cooked it resembles pork-rind in appearance and taste. Sharks’ fins and fish-maws are imported and boiled into gelatinous soups that are nourishing and palatable; and the sinews, tongues, palates, udders, and other parts of different animals are sought after as delicacies. A large proportion of the numerous made dishes seen at great feasts consists of such odd articles, most of which are supposed to possess some peculiar strengthening quality.

~COOKING AMONG THE CHINESE.~

The art of cooking has not reached any high degree of perfection. Like the French, it is very economical, and consists of stews and fried dishes more than of baked or roasted. Salt is proportionately dear from its preparation being a government monopoly, and this has led to a large use of onions for seasoning. The articles of kitchen furniture are few and simple; an iron boiler, shaped like the segment of a sphere, for stewing or frying, a portable earthen furnace, and two or three different shaped earthenware pots for boiling water or vegetables constitute the whole establishment of thousands of families. A few other utensils, as tongs, ladles, forks, sieves, mills, etc., are used to a greater or less extent, though the variety is quite commensurate with the simple cookery. Both meats and vegetables, previously hashed into mouthfuls, are stewed or fried in oil or fat; they are not cooked in large joints or steaks for the table of a household. Hogs are baked whole for sacrifices and for sale in cook-shops, but before being eaten are hashed and fried again. Cutting the food into small pieces secures its thorough cooking with less fuel than it would otherwise require, and is moreover indispensable for eating with chopsticks. Two or three vegetables are boiled together, but meat soups are seldom seen; and the immense variety of puddings, pastry, cakes, pies, custards, ragouts, creams, etc., made in western lands is almost unknown in China.[369]

FOOTNOTES:

[347] _Voyage à Péking_, Vol. II., p. 173.

[348] It is said that when Ghengis in his invasion of China took a city, his soldiers immediately set about pulling down the four walls of the houses, leaving the overhanging roofs supported by the wooden columns--by which process they converted them into excellent tents for themselves and their horses.--_Encyclopædia Britannica_: Art. CHINA.

[349] James Fergusson, _History of Indian and Eastern Architecture_, p. 687; compare also _Mémoires Concernant les Chinois_, where Chinese architecture is treated of in almost every volume.

[350] The foreign literature upon this subject is as yet scant and unimportant. Compare the rare and costly _Designs of Chinese Buildings, Furniture, Dresses_, etc., _from Originals drawn in China by_ Mr. Chambers, London, 1757, folio; J. M. Callery, _De l’Architecture Chinoise_, in the _Revue d’Architecture_; Wm. Simpson, in _Transactions of the Royal Institute of British Architects_, 1873-74, p. 33; _Notes and Queries on China and Japan_.

[351] _Wanderings in China_, p. 98.

[352] Compare pp. 76 and 167.

[353] _Chinese Repository_, Vol. X., p. 473.

[354] _Travels in China_, p. 96.

[355] _Life in China_, p. 453.

[356] _Voyages à Peking_, Tome II., p. 79; Davis’ _Sketches_, Vol. I., p. 213; Fergusson, _Indian and Eastern Architecture_, 1876, p. 695; Milne’s _Life in China_, p. 429 seq.; _Chinese Repository_, Vol. XIX., pp. 535-540.

[357] Yule, _Cathay and the Way Thither_, Vol. I., p. 243.

[358] Compare an article by W. F. Mayers in _Notes and Queries on C. and J._, Vol. I., pp. 170-173 (with illustrations); Mrs. Gray, _Fourteen Months in Canton_, passim; Dr. Edkins in _Journal N. C. Br. R. A. Soc._, Vol. XI., p. 123; Doolittle, _Vocabulary_, Part III., No. LXVIII; Engineer J. W. King in _The United Service_, Vol. II., p. 382 (Phila., 1880).

[359] _Chinese Repository_, Vol. VI., p. 149.

[360] _Chinese Repository_, Vol. XII., p. 528; Medhurst’s _Hohkeën Dictionary_, Introduction pp. XXII, XXIII.

[361] Barrow’s _Travels_, p. 338.

[362] _Encyclopædia Americana_, Art. CANTON.

[363] It is recorded that Hau-Chu, of the Chin dynasty, in the year A.D. 583 ordered Lady Yao to bind her feet so as to make them look like the new moon; and that the evil fashion has since prevailed against all subsequent prohibitions.--_Notes and Queries on China and Japan_, Vol. II., pp. 27 and 43.

[364] Murray’s _China_, Vol. II., p. 266. Compare the _Chinese Repository_, Vol. III., p. 537; _Rec. de Mém. de Médecine milit._ (Paris), 1862-63-64 passim; _Chinese Recorder_, Vols. I., II., and III. passim (mostly a series of articles on this subject by Dr. Dudgeon); _The Far East_, February, 1877, p. 27.

[365] _The Jade Chaplet_, p. 121.

[366] On Chinese costume, see Wm. Alexander, _The Costume of China_, illustrated, London, 1805; _Mœurs et Coutumes des Chinois et leurs costumes en couleur_, par J. G. Grohmann, Leipzig; Breton, _China: Its Costume, Arts, etc._, 4 vols., translated from the French, London, 1812; another translation is from Auguste Borget, _Sketches of China and the Chinese_, London, 1842; _Illustrations of China and its People. A series of two hundred photographs, with letterpress descriptive of the places and people represented_, by J. Thompson, London, 1874, 4 vols. quarto.

[367] Dr. Hobson mentions a case at Shanghai where he was called upon to examine a child well-nigh dead with spurious hydrocephalus. Upon investigation he found that the nurse, “a young healthy-looking woman, with breasts full of milk to overflowing,” had “been in the habit of selling her milk in small cupfuls to old persons, under the idea of its highly nutritive properties, and was actually poisoning the child dependent on it.” The nurse being promptly changed, the infant recovered almost immediately.--_Journal N. C. Br. R. A. Soc._ New Series, Vol. I., p. 51.

[368] Archdeacon Gray, _China_, Vol. II., p. 76.

[369] _Mémoires conc. les Chinois_, Tome XI., pp. 78 ff. C. C. Coffin in the _Atlantic Monthly_, 1869, p. 747. Doolittle’s _Vocabulary_, Part III., No. XVIII. M. Henri Cordier in the _Journal des Débats_, Nov. 19, 1879. _Notes and Queries on C. and J._, Vol. II., pp. 11 and 26.