Chians

“ But I think I am no longer far from the gods; aye, that is the dwelling of Zeus, I perceive. Hullo! Hi! where is the doorkeeper? Will no one open?
f (1) An allusion to the proverbial nickname applied to the Chians (in Greek) —'crapping Chian.' There is a further joke, of course, in connection with the hundred and one frivolous pretexts which the Athenians invented for exacting contributions from the maritime allies.
(THE SCENE CHANGES AND HEAVEN IS PRESENTED.)
HERMES Meseems I can sniff a man. (HE PERCEIVES TRYGAEUS ASTRIDE HIS BEETLE.) Why, what plague is this? ”

“ The domestic dog of China is uniformly one variety, about the size of a moderate spaniel, of a pale yellow, and occasionally a black colour, with coarse bristly hair on the back, sharp upright ears, and peaked head, not unlike a fox’s, with a tail curled over the rump.
In China, the dog is fattened for the table, and the flesh of dogs is as much liked by them as mutton is by us; being exposed for sale by their butchers, and in their cook-shops. ”

“ The Chinese avail themselves of the well-known obstinacy of these animals, and by that means succeed in getting the beast into the narrow conveyance; by placing the head of the animal close to the entrance of the basket, and pulling the creature by the tail, it enters immediately. ”

“ But to returne to their Horses, the Chinois know not how to manage and breake them but by gelding; so that their Horses. Horses for service are innumerable, but so unserviceable, that they will not indure the neighing of the Tartarian Horse without flight. They shooe them not with Iron, so that in rockie and hard wayes they faile. ”

“ The domesticated breeds of China and Siam have, among other characters, broader and stouter heads than those which are descended from the Wild Boar, and are best known to Englishmen under the form of the Chinese breed. ”

“ Among fowls we have the bat, crow, magpie, cock, hen, duck and goose. Of animals, the dog, cow, horse, mule, donkey, camel, and mouse, are the favorites. There are also rhymes on the snake and frog, and others without number on places, things and persons,—men, women and children.
Those who hold that the Chinese do not love their children have never consulted their nursery lore. There is no language in the world, I venture to believe, which contains children's songs expressive of more keen and tender affection than some of those sung to children in China. ”

“ There must be some subtle unnoticed quality in the Chinaman to breed such dogs; and the sweet little Szechuan ponies, miniature race-horses in form, and almost human in their intelligence, are fitting companions for the dogs, and doglike in their faithful, cheerful friendliness. ”

“ Tradescent Lay, the naturalist in Beechy's expedition, in his interesting work on China, thus amusingly speaks of the natives and their swine:—"There is a striking analogy between these two. A Chinese admires a round face and the smooth curvatures of a tun-belly, and where opportunity serves, cultivates these additions to personal beauty in himself. The Chinese pig is fashioned on the same model. ”

“ The Chinese language more than makes up for this deficiency; and it is certainly curious that, as in ancient Greece, the names of animals are not frequently used in this connection, with the sole exception of the dog. No Chinaman will stand being called a dog, although he really has a great regard for the animal, as a friend whose fidelity is proof even against poverty.
In the ivory shops in China will be found many specimens of the carver's craft which will [125] bear comparison, for the patience and skill required, with the greatest triumphs of Greek workmen. ”

“ Superficially, one might think that the English toy spaniels should never be supplanted by the Chinese, and as far as mere beauty is concerned one would assign the palm to the lovely Japanese, but the Chinaman has come and conquered. He must be endowed with some intrinsic merits which are not apparent to the casual observer, one of which undoubtedly is the soundness of his constitution, a capacity for withstanding diseases to which others succumb only too readily. ”

“ You are not, as with other dogs, limited to breed. In china, you can have a blue dog or a pink dog. For a little extra, you can have a double-headed dog.
On a certain fixed date in the autumn the German stakes his flowers and bushes to the earth, and covers them with Chinese matting; and on a certain fixed date in the spring he uncovers them, and stands them up again. If it happens to be an exceptionally fine autumn, or an exceptionally late spring, so much the worse for the unfortunate vegetable. ”

“ In their daily life the Chinese are extremely moderate eaters and mostly tea-drinkers, even the wealthy confining themselves to few and simple dishes of pork, fowl, or fish, with the ever-present accompaniment of rice. The puppy-dog, on which the people are popularly believed to live, as the French on frogs, is a stall-fed animal, and has always been, and still is, an article of food ”

“ Chinese dogs do not as a rule take kindly to the pursuit of wolves, and when a dog is seen running after a wolf it is not unlikely that the dog and the wolf will be moving, if not in opposite directions, at least at right angles to each other. ”

“ Fowls and ducks’ tongues are esteemed an exquisite Chinese dainty. The pettitoes of the sucking pig, or the mature feet and hocks of the elder hog, sheep’s trotters, calf’s feet, cow heel, bear’s paws, elephant’s feet, the feet of ducks and geese, and their giblets; ox tail, pig’s tail, sheep’s tail, kangaroo tail, beaver’s tail. And the entrails again are not despised, whether it be bullock’s heart or sheep’s heart, liver and lights, lamb’s fry or pig’s fry, tripe and chitterlings, goose liver and gizzard, the cleaned gut for our sausages, the fish maws, cod liver, and so on. ”

“ The dogs are so sensible that they know when the butcher is carrying away a dog that he is going to kill him, and the poor creatures come round him howling, as if begging for their brother's life.
The pig is the Chinaman's chief dish; for it can be fed on all the refuse food, and there is very little food to spare in China.
There are not many birds in China, because there is no room for trees. Only one bird sings, and she builds her nest on the ground; it is a bird often heard singing in England floating in the air,—I mean the lark. ”

“ The China Cat stretched her neck and looked at the Cloth Dog. Surely enough, in the gleam from the street light she saw that he had no tail.
"Oh, how dreadful!" mewed the Cat. [71] "How did it happen? It must pain you?"
"Not so much as at first," said the Dog. "I'm used to it now. One of the colored children pulled my tail off. I think it was the one they call Arabella. She's always grabbing things away from the others."
"Yes, she grabbed me," said the China Cat. "But I'm glad she didn't pull off my tail. ”

“ Chinese tradition ascribes the invention of writing to the dragon-faced, four-eyed sage Ts'ang Chien, who saw in the stars of heaven, the footprints of birds, and the marks on the back of the tortoise, the models on which he formed the written characters. At this invention "heaven caused showers of grain to descend from on high; the disembodied spirits wept in the darkness, and the dragons withdrew themselves from sight." On the altars raised to Ts'ang Chien throughout the Celestial Land, every scrap of fugitive paper which has writing on it is burned in his honour. ”

“ THERE IS NO VARIETY OF THIS USEFUL ANIMAL that presents such peculiar features as the species known to us as the Chinese pig; and as it is the general belief that to this animal and the Neapolitan hog we are indebted for that remarkable improvement which has taken place in the breeds of the English pig, it is necessary to be minute in the description of this, in all respects, singular animal. The Chinese, in the first place, consists of many varieties, and presents as many forms of body as differences of colour ”

“ It is a fact which cannot fail to force itself upon our notice at every turn, that the Chinese are not as a race gifted with that extreme fastidiousness in regard to food which is frequently developed in Western lands. All is fish that comes to their net, and there is very little which does not come there first or last. In the northern parts of China the horse, the mule, the ox, and the donkey are in universal use, and in large districts the camel is made to do full duty. ”

“ Some shop-keepers use the leaves, in which to wrap up things, instead of paper.
"Chinese people do very funny things. Because they think that their birds sometimes like change of air, they carry their cages out of doors with them for a walk. But I do so wish that they did not eat dogs! You see them being sold in the shops, and in one district of Canton a fair is held, where they are regularly sold for food. Many people like black dogs best. At the beginning of summer nearly everybody eats dog's flesh, when a ceremony takes place. ”

“ He would have whisked off squirrel-quickest at the farthest sight of a dog; but he had been born fearless of human creatures, as fearless as he was of the patient, friendly buffaloes on whose humped backs he often rode, for Chinese are never cruel to such soft, small, woodland things, and never kill them but at need. Rats, and even puppy dogs, if of valueless breeds, have quick despatch in China often; but wild little things of softer, longer fur and swifter speed are rarely molested and never teased, and so are scarcely wild at all. ”

“ The China pony plays so important a part in the life of foreigners in the East that a short account of the antecedents of this famous animal in past ages may not be without its interest to our readers. In spite of the general inferiority it presents to its confrères of Arabia and the West, its culture has always been an object of considerable attention and solicitude among the Chinese ”

“ The Chinooks, like all other Indians, believe in existence after death; but their views of the conditions of that existence, I could not learn. The conjurors teach them, that they themselves shall be able to visit their tribe after the body shall have decayed; and when approaching the end of their days, inform the people in what shape they will manifest themselves. Some choose a horse, others a deer, others an elk, &c., and when they die, the image of their transmigrated state is erected over their remains. ”

“ Let no one lightly enter on a Chinese dog as companion; they make themselves too much beloved, become too completely members of the family. Even Nigger, the black Chow dog that my husband kept before our marriage, and whose greeting he looked forward to all the long voyage out to China—even Nigger seems like a living personality to me, and I can hardly believe I never saw him. Beloved dogs, companions of a life too solitary, because amongst an uncompanionable race, Requiescant in pace! Good-bye, Shing-erh! ”

“ The Chinese, my uncle told me, train the common cormorant to fish for them, the birds being taught to return with their prey to the boat in which their master sits, when they receive a small fish as their reward. As, however, the bird might help itself, and refuse to work for an employer, the cunning Chinese fastens a band round its throat sufficiently tight to prevent it from swallowing the fish, but not to impede its free action in other respects. ”

“ But his port and his attitudes were those of a lion, or, when engaged in worrying a piece of cord dangled invitingly before him, for all the world just like those of a Chinese monster, only in miniature. In some ways he was like a kitten rather than a puppy, so graceful and gentle in his movements, with long claws, too, at the tips of his little feathery feet, and a way of purring when he was pleased. He made many little plaintive sounds, as if he were talking to himself ”

“ Some animals take much longer to adapt themselves than others, just as the Chinese have stuck to their own ways for thousands of years, while, in a quarter of a century, the Japanese have made themselves more European than the dwellers in Europe. Now, the badger, the elephant, and many more, are the Chinese of the kingdom of animals. ”

“ We owe to the East the ox, horse, donkey, sheep, goat, pig, dog, cat, hen. Civilization, in fact, had its cradle in the lands of central Asia, where already there were flourishing peoples versed in sheep-raising and agriculture when in our western countries man, still plunged in wretched barbarism, lived only by the chase and hunted the bear and urus with his stone weapons.”
“Then those ancient peoples of the East came and [264] settled here and brought the first domestic animals with them?” asked Jules. ”

“ A very large number of beautiful birds, mostly songless, are found in various parts of China, and a great variety of fishes in the rivers and on the coast. Wild animals are represented by the tiger (in both north and south) , the panther and the bear, and even the elephant and the rhinoceros may be found in the extreme south-west. The wolf and the fox, the latter dreaded as an uncanny beast, are very widely distributed. ”

“ You can just imagine how the China Cat felt. Always so clean and white, always washing herself if she found the least speck of dirt on her, always keeping as much as possible away from dust and grime—and now to be spattered with water, blackened by the smoke of the fire, and finally thrust inside the soiled blouse of a not very clean boy! ”

“ It is traversed by a great river—the Waters of Life—which runs through the heart of China for a distance of six months' journey. It is bordered with villages, cultivated plains, orchards, and markets, just like the Nile in Egypt."
Ibn gives an amusing account of the Chinese poultry. "The cocks and hens are bigger than our geese. I one day bought a hen," he says, "which I wanted to boil, but one pot would not hold it and I was obliged to take two. As for the cocks in China, they are as big as ostriches." ”