Mrs. Archibald Little

Arriving in Shanghai.—My First Tea-season.—Inside a Chinese City.—Shanghai Gardens.—In the Romantic East at last!

I. Arriving in Shanghai.

It was in the merry month of May, 1887, that I first landed in China; but from the first there was nothing merry about China. It felt bitterly cold, after passing through the tropics; and in Shanghai one shivered in a warm wrap, as the wind blew direct from the North Pole straight at one's chest, till one day it suddenly turned quite hot, and all clothes felt too heavy. Every one almost knows what Shanghai is like. It has been admirably described over and over again, with its rows of fine European houses fronting the river, the beautiful public gardens and well-trodden grass-plats interposed between the two; with its electric lights and its carriages, and great European stores, at which you can buy everything you could possibly want only a very little dearer than in London. There used to be nothing romantic or Eastern about it. 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; whilst the wheelbarrows on which his womankind are conveyed rush in and out amongst the carriages, colliding here and there with a coolie-drawn ricksha, and always threatening the toes of the foot-passenger. Too often there are no foot-pavements, and the whole motley crowd at its very varying paces is forced on to the muddy street. Ever and anon even now a closed sedan-chair, with some wealthy Chinaman from the adjacent Chinese city, threads its way in and out among the vehicles, noiseless and stealthy, a reminder of China's past glories. There are also now wholly Chinese streets in the foreign settlement, where all the shop-fronts are gorgeous with gilding and fine decorative Chinese characters, where all the shops have signs which hang perpendicularly across the street-way, instead of horizontally over the shop-front as with us, and where Chinese shopkeepers sit inside, bare to the waist, in summer presenting a most unpleasing picture of too much flesh, and in winter masses of fur and satin.

SHANGHAI CREEK, WITH DRAWBRIDGE.

Shanghai has got a capital racecourse, and theatre, and cricket-ground—grounds for every kind of sport, indeed. It has a first rate club, and an ill-kept museum. Its sights are the bubbling well and the tea-garden in the China town, believed by globe-trotters, but erroneously, to be the original of the willow-pattern plate. Beside this, there is what is called the Stone Garden, full of picturesque bits. A great deal that is interesting is to be seen in the China town by those who can detach their minds from the dirt; in one part all the houses have drawbridges leading to them. But even the Soochow Road in the foreign settlement has never yet been treated pictorially as it deserves. It is the Palais Royal of Chinese Shanghai. At the hour when carriage traffic may only pass one way because of the crowd, it would reward an Alma-Tadema to depict the Chinese dandies filling all its many balconies, pale and silken clad, craning their necks to see, and by the haughtiness of their gaze recalling the decadent Romans of the last days of the empire. Their silken garments, their arched mouths, the coldness of their icy stare, has not yet been duly depicted. Chun Ti Kung, by the late Mr. Claude Rees, is so far the only attempt to describe their life. Yet they, too, have souls possibly worth the awakening. With their long nails, their musk-scented garments, their ivory opium-pipes, and delicate arrangements of colours, they cannot be without sensibilities. Do they feel that the Gaul is at the gates, and that the China of their childhood is passing away?

It is this China of their childhood, with here an anecdote and there a descriptive touch, which I hope to make the English reader see dimly as in a glass in the following pages, which are not stored with facts and columns of statistics. People who want more detailed information about China, I would refer to Sir John Davis's always pleasant pages; or to my husband's Through the Yangtse Gorges, containing the result of years of observation; or to dear old Marco Polo's account of his travels in the thirteenth century, revivified by the painstaking labours of Colonel Yule, and thereby made into one of the best books on China extant. For my part, I shall endeavour to make the reader see China and the Chinese as I have seen them in their homes and at their dinner parties, and living long, oh! such long summer days among them, and yet wearier dark days of winter. And to make the reader the more feel himself amongst the scenes and sights I describe, I mean to adopt various styles, sometimes giving him the very words in which I at the time dashed off my impressions, all palpitating with the strangeness and incongruity of Chinese life, at others giving him the result of subsequent serious reflections.

But here let me record my first great disappointment, because it may be that of many another. Brown mud is the first thing one sees of China. Brown mud accompanies the traveller for miles along the Yangtse River, all along the Peiho, up to brown and muddy Tientsin, and on up to Peking itself. China generally is not at all like the willow-pattern plate. I do not know if I really had expected it to be blue and white; but it was a disappointment to find it so very brown and muddy.

II. My First Tea-season.

It was dull and leaden all the six hundred miles up the great river Yangtse; and at first it poured nearly all day and every day at Hankow, and we shivered over fires. Nevertheless, in spite of absolutely leaden skies and never a glimpse of sunshine, the coolies and the twenty-years-in-China-and-don't-speak-a-word-of-the-language men wore sun-hats, and pretended to get ill from the glare, when any one fresh from England would certainly say it was the damp. The floods were all the while advancing on what looked like a beleaguered city, when we went out on the plain outside, and gazed back at the city wall, with its dark water-line clearly marked all round close to the top.

The country round certainly did not tempt one to go out very often on to the rotten flag-stoned way by which one walked three or four miles in order to reach a one-mile distance as the crow flies, feeble-looking corn and marsh at either side, with an occasional tandem of buffaloes groaning not in unison with the discordant creaking of the cart they drew. Yet we plodded past the little homesteads, each planted on its own artificial hill, faced with stones on the side the floods come from. The very friendly people all used to come out of their cottages, and call out, "Do rest with us awhile," "Come in, do, and have some tea"; but till I spoke a little more Chinese, I did not care to repeat this often: though I rather enjoyed the first time going in and having tea, delicious tea, brought us at once—next a pipe, and then a bowl of water. Nothing could be friendlier than the people; and somehow or other I used to fancy from the first I held quite conversations with them. But what we either of us said to each other in words it is impossible to tell; there is so much one understands without knowing the words. So on and on we used to plod, resisting all kindly pressure to turn in, till gradually the reflection of the setting sun gave a red glow to the water in the ruts, and frogs hopped in numbers across the path, and bats whirled after mosquitoes. Then at last by an effort we summoned up will enough to turn, and plod just exactly the same way over the selfsame stones back to Hankow, the beleaguered city, with its avenues of over-arching willows, and beautiful Bund half a mile long—a mile walk up and down, therefore, as every one takes care to tell you the first day you arrive, as if afraid lest, stricken by a sort of midsummer madness, you should actually leave the English settlement, with its willows and its villas, and attempt to penetrate into the Chinese town.

TEA-GARDEN IN SHANGHAI CHINESE CITY.
Believed by globe-trotters to be the original of the willow-pattern plate.

The stories I heard about the Chinese town gave me quite a feeling of excitement the first time I went into it. People threatened me with horrible sights, and still more horrible smells. But I fancy those, who talk in this way, can know very little of the East End of London, and nothing of the South of France or Italian towns. Hankow certainly struck me as very fairly clean, considering how crowded its streets are, and the people at that time for the most part as wonderfully civil. I should not care to hear the shower of abuse, that would greet a foreigner in one of our English towns, who turned over and examined all the articles on a stall, then went away without buying anything, as English people do not hesitate to do there. The Kiangsi and Hunan Guild-houses are both well worth a visit, although the former has been in large measure burnt down, and thus stripped of those wonderful coloured tiles about which the few, who have seen them, are still enthusiastic. Most people have never seen them at all. As it is now, the temple to the god of literature at Hanyang has more charms for me, with its many curved roofs making such an harmonious, rich, dark medley. However, of course in Hankow no one in the month of May is thinking about architecture. "Thou art not science, but thou tea-chest art" is the riddle they were all engaged with, and they were very sad over it. For the tea was bad; and though the Chinamen had bound themselves under awful penalties to have no second crop, yet of course the second crop would be there soon. I looked sadly at the men from Hunan, sitting so truculently in their boats, with their pigtails twice coiled round their heads, counting over beforehand the gains they meant to take back home; for probably there would be none. We talked tea at breakfast and tiffin and dinner, and we took it at five and considered its quality. But that would not make the people at home give up Indian tea, with all its tannin and nerve-poisoning qualities. So in between-whiles we counted up how many suicides there were last tea-season. For Chinese have a fine sense of honesty, if not of honour; and merchants are apt to kill themselves, if they cannot meet their obligations. "There will be more suicides this year," said first one, then another.

Meanwhile, the pretty painted boxes streamed past the house at the rate of eighty a minute sometimes—always noiselessly carried by coolies in huge sun-hats, and too often through the dripping rain. And the great gamble went on, and the men who dropped in to call looked wearier and wearier. But that was all in 1887, which might almost be called the last year of the great China tea trade of which Hankow had since 1861 been the centre. There was quite a fleet of ocean steamers there even that year to take the tea away; in 1898, barely one for London. English people will not drink China tea. It is so delicate that, though in itself inexpensive, it comes dear from more leaf having to be used to produce the same strength of liquor. But it is soothing, whilst Indian tea puts a fresh strain upon our already overtaxed digestions.

In old days the Hankow tea trade was a great business. Tea-tasters came out from England in crowds, arriving in May and going away in July. They would taste two hundred different teas, not swallowing the tea, but just savouring its flavour, and smelling it, and handling the leaf. Then the man who could not tell the same tea again when he went over the two hundred the second time was no tea-taster. They were pale men for the most part, of rather finely strung susceptibilities, or their palates would not have been so critical. And they did not care much for games of chance, they gambled so high in tea, a fortnight's business easily leading a man to win or lose £20,000.

Ah! the good old days of China tea and silk are gone. Are there better days yet to come in the new China that is to take the place of old China, which is passing away even as we talk about it?

III. Inside a Chinese City.

One of the most exciting moments of all my life in China was when I first found myself shut up within the walls and barred gates of Wuchang, the provincial capital of Hupeh, one of the rowdiest provinces of China. And of the three cities that meet together and almost join—Hankow and Wuchang being separated by the there three-quarter-mile wide Yangtse, and Hankow and Hanyang separated by the boat-covered Han—Wuchang has the reputation of being the most rowdy. It is there, of course, the Provincial Examinations are held; and when men assemble in their thousands away from their families and friends, they are in all countries apt to be unruly.

Probably, of all the hundreds of foreign tea-men who visited Hankow, barely one or two had been across the river to Wuchang. But a missionary, who was living alone there, and seemed to feel his loneliness, asked us to go over and spend the night with him; and with many doubts as to what kind of accommodation he could give us, and whether we should be inconveniencing him, we accepted. I have often been to Wuchang since then. But I remember still the thrill with which, when I went to bed that night, I stood at the window and listened to the strange, unfamiliar sounds from the street beyond the compound, or garden. There was the night-watchman crying the hours, and clacking his pieces of bamboo together to warn evil-doers to keep off. But he did it in a way I had not yet heard. Then there were such curious long drawn-out street cries, all unknown, and sounds of people calling to one another, and the buzz of a great city. And I suddenly realised, with a choking sense of emotion, that the gates were shut, and I was within there with a whole cityful of Chinese so hostile to foreigners, and especially to foreign women, that it had not been thought safe to let me walk through them to the missionary's house. Even the curtain of my sedan-chair had been drawn down, so that I might not be seen by any one.

Wuchang has always been specially interesting to me, because it was my first Chinese city. And it is so characteristic a one. Every Chinese city is supposed to be placed on hills representing a serpent and a tortoise, although the likeness has often to be helped out by a temple on the tortoise's head, or a pagoda to connect the serpent's coils. But at Wuchang the serpent and tortoise are very plainly visible. Then all Chinese cities are apt to be rude. But the people at Wuchang are so particularly rude. How often have not the gentlemen accompanying me, when in subsequent years I have dared to walk through its streets, had to separate themselves from me, and to walk backwards, exhorting the oncoming crowd of roughs to propriety of behaviour! Curiously enough, the roughest of Chinese roughs get red and uncomfortable, when you tell them you fear they have never learnt politeness, do not observe the rules of decorum, etc., etc. I learnt it as a patter simply from hearing it said in my own defence, and have often raised a blush since then by saying it myself. I doubt if the same results would be obtained by ever so eloquent a paraphrase of the fourth commandment down Whitechapel way. But Chinese, whether they follow them or not, seem all to have been taught to hold in respect the dicta of the ancients. To this day a quotation from Confucius will often settle a moot point in weighty affairs of State. Would that it were so among ourselves with a Christian text!

IV. Shanghai Public Gardens.

To those who have just arrived off a long sea voyage, as to those who from time to time come down from some roadless, gasless, shopless, but smell-ful up-country sojourn, there is one bit of Shanghai that is exceptionally refreshing and delightsome; and that is the garden by the river. At night, when the lamps are lit and mirrored in the water in rows and garlands of light, when the sea-breeze blows in freshly, and friends gather in the gardens, I have even heard it asserted by its greatest detractors, "Shanghai is as good as any other place by night."

But it is in the mornings in winter, or in the before-dinner hours in summer, when the band plays, that you must go there, properly to know what the Shanghai Gardens are like. First and foremost, they are full of flowers—flowers with colours and scents. I do not know how many other people may be thus constituted, but there are occasions when I would as soon meet Keats' "Belle Dame Sans Merci" "alone and palely loitering" as wander through such unmitigated greenery as the Botanic Gardens at Singapore offer to the passing traveller, at least in the month of April. Kew Gardens are all too often depressing after the same fashion; though there one can always fall back upon the greenhouses to see

Hongkong Gardens are very fair to see, resembling those of Babylon in being hanging gardens, gardens of terraces. But the way in which the Shanghai Gardens are fitted in between the Bund and the Soochow Creek, with the much-traversed Garden Bridge giving something definite to look at, and the river girdling it all—the river with its ever-moving panorama of swift ocean steamers and perky little steam-launches, and yachts and junks of deeply dyed sails, and brilliant coloured sanpans, all within a stone's-throw,—this situation makes the Shanghai Gardens a place not easily to be matched for passing away the after-sunshine hours. But flowers are the Shanghai Gardens' forte. They should be seen when they are all abloom with roses; or when lordly tulips dazzle the eye with their scarlet and gold, till it is fain to seek relief among those blue and white fairies dancing in the sunshine—sweet-scented hyacinths; or when the chrysanthemums are in season. All these flowers are seen against a background of glossy-leaved magnolias, with their pale sweet-scented blossoms, and oleander-trees, and pomegranates and acacias, all in their different seasons glorious with rose and scarlet or feathery pink and white blossoms.

At one season there is a borderful, but full to overflowing, as those borders almost always are, of the Japanese Lilium auratum, a large, almost arrogant, white lily, with a broad band of gold down each petal. A little while before, people went to the far garden across the road to see the fly-devouring flower, and inhale its fetid breath as of dead men's—not bones, certainly—and all uncleanness. Next the water-lilies claimed their attention, and the poetic rosy lotus flowers, one of which grew so fast, and with such precision of rectitude, that its bud forced its way right through the overshadowing fleshy leaf, and there expanded into a beautiful blossom at its leisure.

The rarely visited fernery at the end of this garden well deserves more frequent visits. There you will find that quaint Asplenium bulbiferum, that drops off little plants, that happen to be growing about its leaves like little accidents, and eventually develop into big plants, that again do likewise. There are also fine specimens of the Australian Platycerium, which you do not wonder to find called grande, so solid and woolly-feeling are its great lumps of leaf. That brown irregular mark underneath one of the abruptly broken-off leaves is not decay, but spores of seed. This, with the name of Alicorne, something like an inverted porcupine, reaching out all round hands, some with three fingers, some with six, sometimes with the fingers tipped underneath with seed, sometimes not, is said to have arrived looking for all the world like a withered cabbage. Then it sprouted and burgeoned; and now it is a thing of joy for ever, not to be in the least dwarfed or put into the shade by Australian tree-ferns of really treelike proportions growing close alongside.

But the fernery has nothing of the charm for me possessed by the large conservatory. There, after so many years, I met once again the friends of my childhood.

And there, when first I saw it, were all the many varieties of fancy geraniums, so seldom seen in England now, together with heliotropes, and begonias, and rosellias, and cinerarias, all growing in loveliest confusion, though not as I remember them, weighing each other down with their prodigal luxuriance in a garden border, in far-away Madeira, but intermixed with Chinese rockwork and ferns, and generally massed so as to show themselves off to the greatest advantage. In August that house is full of velvety gloxinias of richest hues, and again mixed with waxen begonias. Outside the conservatory are two of those very quaint Singapore cup-sponges, serving as flower-pots of Nature's making. And near by, apparently the pride of the gardener, to judge by its lavish supply of netting, is an apple-tree, with many apples peeping from underneath the netting, as yet quite green! But for all their greenness, one has been carried off by the birds already. Hence the netting.

But it is in the garden beside the river where the pleasantest sitting and sauntering is done. No one puts on best clothes to go there in the morning; only people who like to go are to be met there—none from a sense of duty. There the nurses love to congregate whilst their children play together, and add much life and animation to the scene. The nurses introduce a Chinese element; for otherwise Chinese, were it even Li Hung-chang himself, are excluded from the gardens, as now from Australia, solely because they are Chinese. This never can seem quite right. The Japanese nurses add an additional element of picturesqueness, with their dark-coloured, clinging kimonos, and curious gait, as do also Parsee merchants with their high, hard hats.

Yet sometimes I have regretted we do not have more of the flowers of China in Shanghai. What lovely bursts of blossom one sees at times in the interior of China! One February I wrote from Chungking:

"Camellias of infinite variety are to be seen already. It is surprising to notice how many different kinds there are. Perhaps the loveliest is more like a blush-rose than a camellia—delicate coral pink, shading off into white round the edges of the somewhat crumpled petals. Since the Chinese seem now to devote no care to them, nor at all to know how many varieties there are, it is puzzling to think how they arose."

Whilst on March 21st of another year, I wrote at the time:

"The thermometer is now in the sixties. Our plum-trees done flowering; orchids coming on victoriously; tree-tulips and magnolias like big bouquets; and camellias only slowly waning. Probably nowhere could camellias be seen in greater luxuriance than here, where there are endless varieties; and a blossom of a peony-camellia, loose-petalled and very double, on being measured the other day, revealed a circumference of fifteen and a quarter inches. Great branches of judas-tree and pink peach blossom adorn our rooms, together with a bright-yellow flower that grows in great profusion, and that used to be called New Zealand flax. From all this you can fancy how hothouselike our atmosphere feels just now."

Later in the summer the peonies are the great pride of the Chinese; whilst the scarlet dragon-boat flower is, perhaps, the most remarkable of all the Chinese flowers from being all scarlet together. But it is useless to try to enumerate; for the highest authority in Kew Gardens told me once that in no part of the world was there a more abundant and varied flora than in the Ichang Gorges, which are also the land of the butterfly. It is, however, a mistake, I believe, to think China is called the flowery land from the number of its flowers, the Chinese word translated "flowery" meaning also "varicoloured."

V. In the Romantic East at Last!

Mr. Tee San's garden is one of the most fascinating spots in China, with the bright autumn sunshine glinting through the pretty bits of trellis-work on to its fantastic rocks, and zigzag bridges, and pretty pavilions, and lighting up the truly exquisite specimens of chrysanthemums sometimes on show there. There is the spiky little chrysanthemum, the tiger's moustache, and huge maroon blossoms fading off into delicate cream in the centre, and many other uncommon varieties, each in its appropriate pot, spacious, four-square, and creamy, apparently just made to be painted, and each placed at exactly the right elevation by means of its light wooden stand, sometimes raising the pot an inch or two, sometimes about eight feet, and always so slanted, that the flowers are tilted down towards the spectator, thus showing themselves off in their entirety. But it is not so much worth while to go to this garden in order to see the chrysanthemum, as to admire the infinite variety of Chinese decoration crowded into what is really a very confined space, but which is made to appear a garden large enough to lose oneself in. Rows of bamboo stems of soft blue-green china relieve the monotony of the walls, with their open air-spaces in between, as do also various graceful interlacings of tiles. There are doors of all sorts and sizes, like a horseshoe, like a pentagon, like a leaf cut somewhat irregularly down the middle by the leaf stem, and with outer edge fluted like a leaf. There are, of course, artificial mounds made out of rockwork, and grottoes, and quaint lumps of stone, looking as if they had been masses of molten metal suddenly hardened in their grotesqueness; also, as a matter of course, inside the pavilions there are various specimens of that landscape stone—dear to the heart of the Chinaman, and said to come from Yunnan—framed and hanging on the walls. There used to be also a magnificent peacock; a mandarin duck, with its quaint, bright, decisive colouring; golden pheasants; a scarlet-faced monkey, and a pale-faced; a little company of white geese, and another of white rabbits. But to enumerate the treasures of the garden gives no idea of the artistic skill with which it has been laid out; so that every one who sits down in it even in the most commonplace manner, and even those most unpicturesque of human beings, Chinese men and women, immediately becomes an integral part of a picture.

There sit two Chinamen, with dark-purple silk outer jackets and long, glowing blue undergowns. They sit on each side of a little square black table, with their long pipes; behind them the sun slants across the latticed paper window, a branch of Virginia creeper, already yellow, pushing in through it. It needs not the addition of the cream-coloured pot with its chrysanthemums planted well to the front of it, as they all are, and on the usual slant. Without that bit of autumn colouring behind them, there is already an autumn picture,—men past their prime soothing the evening of their day in life with the pipe, all nature attuned with its vivid fast-fleeting sunshine and its orange-yellow leaves. In another pavilion sits one of those gorgeous creatures who always recall the braveries of Sir Walter Scott's descriptions, but who are hardly now to be seen out of China: his big loose jacket, of brocaded golden satin, stiff and shimmering: his long gown, only less brilliant, of violet satin. A gnarled and knotted root served there as stand for a flower-pot, artificial streamlets meandering round the pavilion. In the pavement was a stork in white, all formed of little broken bits of tile. The lights and shades were so entrancing, it was difficult to think of ever doing anything in these picturesque retreats, which immediately suggest the Chinaman's ideal—elegant leisure—and furnish most pleasant places to sit and meditate, as one might say, but in reality probably idly to watch the sunlight glorify this tint and soften that.

Without the sunshine it is a different affair. The patterns in the walls, in the fine pebble pavement, are still as complex, the triangles in the latter still as cunningly arranged, the doorways as surprising. There are still the same China drums of soft blue-green and green-blue for garden-seats, and great egg-green vessels for rain-water, as they say "very clear." But it all looks like a theatrical stage by daylight. Even the row of changeable roses by the water, which is really not so clear as it might be, looks uncomfortably pink beneath a grey rain-sky. Only the hoarfrost-resisting flower, as the Chinese call the chrysanthemum, is undimmed, the Chinamen's coats as gay. Whilst Chinese ladies totter as gracefully—or ungracefully—as before, with highly painted cheeks, gay garments, long elaborate earrings, beringed and bebraceleted with soft pure gold unalloyed.

When we were last there, a dainty-looking Chinese dinner was laid out in one of the pavilions; and before the guests sat down, girls arrived to make merry with music. For studying Chinese manners and customs, there could hardly be a more convenient place. Every one seemed very smart and very friendlily disposed towards the foreigner. Those who care for local colour can find it in this garden quite as well as in the China town; and, after all, when one can find local colour without local odours, it is a thing to make note of in China. It is true to get there one must not only drive down the Fukien Road, with its quaint dyers' drying-sheds high up against the sky, their blue draperies streaming from them picturesquely, then across that very fascinating bridge choked underneath with highly polished boats, piled with all manner of merchandise, but also, alas! through a local Covent Garden, full of colour enough, like its prototype in London, but, like that, not smell-less. Once arrived, however, a bewildering sense comes over one of having left prosaic Shanghai very far away, and of having at last arrived at a bit of the romantic East!