China closet

“ The bridal chair is often itself a fit emblem of a Chinese wedding. Looked at from a distance, it appears to be of the most gorgeous description, but on a nearer view it is frequently perceived to be a most unattractive framework covered with a gaudy set of trappings sometimes much worn and evidently the worse for wear. In some cases there is a double framework, the outer of which can be lifted entirely off, being too clumsy to be got into a courtyard. The inner chair can be carried through the narrow doors of any Chinese yard, or, if required, into the house itself. ”

“ The shops are a succession of rooms, raised on a step from the earth passage and all open in front, where you can buy fancy articles and artificial flowers. There are the pretty jade pins, which form the centre for the shiny coil of hair worn by the Chinese women, long earrings and bracelets of the same, mandarin buttons in coloured stones, clocks, porcelain, shoes, and silk embroideries. It is the quaintest and prettiest of Eastern arcades, with the afternoon sun penetrating the bamboo blinds in shafts of light, lighting the picturesque groups of buyers and sellers squatted on the floors. ”

“ Before a Chinaman breathes his last his relatives lift him from his bed and carry him into the hall, where he is clothed in full mandarin costume. Every head of a family is entitled after death to lie in state for a certain number of days in the hall, where his friends may perform the last rites and pay their respects to the memory of the departed. Coverlets of silk or cloth are sent by his kinsmen and more intimate friends, and are laid upon the corpse, the colours white and red — the Chinese mourning and lucky colours, respectively — alternating. ”

“ A few points are of importance in the social etiquette of indoor life, and should not be lightly ignored by the foreigner, who, on the other hand, would be wise not to attempt to substitute altogether Chinese forms and ceremonies for his own. Thus, no Chinaman, and, it may be added, no European who knows how to behave, fails to rise from his chair on the entrance of a visitor; and it is further the duty of a host to see that his visitor is actually seated before he sits down himself. It is extremely impolite to precede a visitor, as in passing through a door ”

“ The Chinaman has a catholic taste. Horseflesh, dogs, cats, hawks, owls, sharks’ fins, and birds’ nests are freely sold in Canton for human consumption. Carpenters were busy making the substantial furniture to be found in almost every Chinese house. Blacksmiths and coppersmiths added the noises of their trades to the din that resounded through the narrow streets. Peddlers with their wares spread about them on the ground helped to choke the congested thoroughfares. Beggars shouted loudly for alms and drew the attention of the passers‐by to their disgusting sores and deformities. ”

“ From this story it will be rightly gathered that the Chinese mostly sleep on the ground floor. In Peking, houses of more than one storey are absolutely barred; the reason being that each house is built round a courtyard, which usually has trees in it, and in which the ladies of the establishment delight to sit and sew, and take the air and all the exercise they can manage to get.
Another blood-curdling story is that of four travellers who arrived by night at an inn, but could obtain no other accommodation than a room in which was lying the corpse of the landlord's daughter-in-law. ”

“ Now, darkened by the smoke of over thirty factories, it is flooded by an ever-increasing Chinese population, who jostle with Europeans in the thoroughfare, till it seems as if the struggle between the two races would be settled in the streets of Shanghai, and the European get driven to the wall. For the Chinaman always goes a steady pace, and in his many garments, one upon the top of the other, presents a solid, impenetrable front to the hurrying European ”

“ In descending, we return to the main thoroughfare of Queen's Road, and after some shopping, go to the City Hall, and the marble palace of the Shanghai and Hong Kong bank, where I wait outside to watch the ever-varying stream of passers-by. Chinamen in their cool cotton jackets and glazed pantaloons, coolies with their bamboo-slung burdens, sedan-chairs, jinrickshas, wheelbarrows, chairs, Sikh policemen with their scarlet turbans, Cinghalese, Parsees, mingling with our own officers and soldiers, under the shadow of the trees. ”

“ Of the personal comfort obtainable in a house, Chinamen are strangely ignorant. Their furniture is of the hardest and most uncompromising nature. Chairs made of a hard black wood, angular in shape, and equally unyielding divans, are the only seats known to them. Their beds are scarcely more comfortable, and their pillows are oblong cubes of bamboo or other hard material. ”

“ The interior wrappers of the ladies' feet are said to be seldom changed, remaining, sometimes, until they can no longer hold together; a custom that conveys no very favourable idea of Chinese cleanliness. This, indeed, forms no part of their character; on the contrary they are what Swift would call a frowzy people. The comfort of clean linen, or frequent change [77] of under-garments, is equally unknown to the Sovereign and to the peasant. A sort of thin coarse silk supplies the place of cotton or linen next the skin, among the upper ranks ”

“ A Chinese house turned out to be a very pleasant place to live in. There was pleasure even in having no stairs to climb, especially after being on the top floor of a hotel where the elevator too often bore the sign “No currency”; the delightful feeling of being at home as soon as the red doors closed behind us was more real than we had ever felt it in any of our Western abodes. Ours is a simple dwelling, to be sure, as befits mere rolling stones. ”

“ That house in the middle with glazed windows is a bank, and whenever we see a particularly bright exterior, we may be sure that it belongs to a pawnbroker, for he does a large business, the Chinese being ever ready to pawn their all [263] for a good gamble or perhaps a whiff of opium, as some unfortunates at home will do for a last drink. There is a man squatted on the ground, shaking some sticks in a bamboo-holder. He is largely patronized, men coming and going and choosing out a stick and putting it back with either a pleasing or dissatisfied look. ”

“ It has been aptly said that there are no real homes in China and it is not surprising that, ignored and despised for centuries, the Chinese woman shows no ability to improve the squalor of her surroundings. She passes her life in a dark, smoke-filled dwelling with broken furniture and a mud floor, together with pigs, chickens and babies enjoying a limited sphere of action under the tables and chairs, or in the tumble-down courtyard without. Her work is actually never done and a Chinese bride, bright and attractive at twenty, will be old and faded at thirty. ”

“ In time, the mud-plaster or, if the walls are of sun-dried brick, the wall itself begins to disintegrate. But it is let alone, as long as it does not make the house uninhabitable, while paint is unknown. So the general appearance of a Chinese town is squalid and tumbledown. Even the yamen of a district magistrate presents crumbling walls, unkempt courtyards, rickety buildings and paper-covered windows full of holes. The palaces of the rich are often expensive, but the Asiatic has little of our ideas of comfort and order. ”

“ A view of this quilt when the heads are protruding is suggestive of an apartment where dozens of dilapidated Chinese have been decapitated. All night long the lodgers keep up a frightful noise; the proprietor, like the individual in the same business in New York, will tell you, “I sells the place to sleep, but begar, I no sells the sleep with it.” The couch is a lively one, as the feathers are a convenient warren for a miscellaneous lot of living things not often mentioned in polite society. In the southern cities of China one sees fewer women in the street than in the north. ”

“ Jars of grain, agricultural implements, clumsy looms for weaving cotton, spinning wheels, baskets of all sizes and shapes, one or two benches, and possibly a chair, all seem to occupy such space as is to be had, while from the sooty roof depend all manner of articles, hung up so as to be out of the way—some of which when wanted must be hooked down with a pole. The maxim “a place for everything, and everything in its place” is inappropriate to a Chinese dwelling, where there is very little place for anything. ”

“ Doors are locked by passing the link of a chain over a staple in the door-frame above; but Chinese padlocks can generally be picked with a wire, a chop-stick, or even with a dry weed, and afford no real protection. Thieves are always provided with an assortment of keys, and often get in by lifting the doors off the pins which serve as hinges. Nothing is easier than to dig through adobe walls. In some of the rich villages of Shan-hsi house-walls are built quite six feet thick to discourage such penetration. ”

“ The domestic furniture—the couches, the stoves, the china vessels, the painted fans, and cabinets, and the beautiful materials for dress—bespeak a great deal of comfort, though they may display but little taste. Four points are said to be peculiarly characteristic of the Chinese, as compared with other Oriental nations—“they sit on chairs, eat off tables, burn wax candles, and cover the whole body with clothing.” But many others place them in a position enviable when compared with that of their neighbors. ”

“ 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 ”

“ They are bold and enterprising men, and work their business exclusively on modern principles. Their offices are fitted up in European fashion with telephones and type-writers; only here and there a rare plant, some precious object of art, or a singing bird in a cage, betrays the native instinct of love of nature and art. The national dress is still worn, and the wide silk trousers and traditional pigtail strike one at first as somewhat out of place in these modern surroundings.
At Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Tien-tsin, one has excellent opportunities of seeing the business man at home. ”

“ The modern Chinaman dresses in Western fashion; the loose flowing garment of China acts as a sort of barometer by which the extent of European pressure can be tested; up-country they are as loose as ever, but in Shanghai, wherever Chinese dress is still preserved, it has grown tight. A change typical of what may happen if the union between the civilisations takes place without any guidance may now be seen in the streets of Shanghai ”

“ And young men who go to church (young Shanghai does go to church a little; it is the men past their prime who only "have seats") ,—young Shanghai speaks sentimentally of some fair apparition who looked so lovely in loose-fitting white and blue, and begins to question whether Chinese dress is not, after all, the most becoming. Certainly, fair hair looks all the fairer and softer above the loose-fitting clothes more generally associated with coarsest black.
And all the while the missionaries come in increasing numbers. ”

“ All the foreign banks, the Hongkong bank, and the Chinese National and Shansi banks, have branches here, and it is proposed to have branches of large Chinese-American banks and steamship companies. Fault must be found with the modern native as well as the European architecture of Shanghai, that they are not perpetuating and adapting the extremely beautiful Chinese style in roof, screen, portals, columns, terminal ornaments, panels, pavilions and approaches. We of the Occident are barbarians to intrude in any land and debauch its beautiful architecture in the way we are universally doing. ”

“ Too great praise can not be given the British for their taste in occupying a Chinese palace as legation headquarters at Peking. Many missions, every foreign business house, nearly every foreign college, the government itself in its new buildings, even the kindred Japanese, and nearly every foreign legation, are all housed in an ugly adaptation of a Renaissance building with verandas. The fashion came from Singapore and Hongkong, but Hongkong gets some picturesqueness out of the style because that colonial city has a mountain to terrace it on. ”

“ These can only take place in a free government. A Chinese having finished his daily employment retires to his solitary apartment. There are, it is true, a sort of public houses where the lower orders of people sometimes resort for their cup of tea or of seau-tchoo (a kind of ardent spirit distilled from a mixture of rice and other grain) but such houses are seldom, if at all, frequented for the sake of company. They are no incitement, as those are of a similar kind in Europe, to jovial pleasures or to vulgar ebriety. From this odious vice the bulk of the people are entirely free. ”