The happy Leigh Hunt, who was half American by blood, in one of his incomparable Addisonian essays, Tea Drinking, wrote as follows of the daily life and surroundings of the Chinese: “The very word tea, so petty, so infantine, so winking-eyed, so expressive, somehow or other, of something inexpressibly minute and satisfied with a little (tee!) resembles the idea one has (perhaps a very mistaken one) of that extraordinary people of whom Europeans know little or nothing, except that they sell us this preparation, bow back again our ambassadors, have a language consisting of only a few hundred words, gave us chinaware and the strange pictures on our teacups, made a certain progress in civilization long before we did, mysteriously stopped at it and would go no further, and if numbers and the customs of venerable ancestors are to carry the day, are at once the most populous and the most respectable nation on the face of the earth. As a population they certainly are a most enormous and wonderful body, but as individuals, their ceremonies, their trifling edicts, their jealousy of foreigners, and their teacup representations of themselves impress us irresistibly with a fancy that they are a people all toddling, little-eyed, little-footed, little-bearded, little-minded, quaint, overweening, pig-tailed, bald-headed, cone-capped or pagoda-hatted, having childish houses and temples with bells at every corner and story, and shuffling about in blue landscapes, over nine-inch bridges, with little mysteries of bell-hung whips in their hands,—a boat or a house or a tree, made of a pattern, being over their heads or underneath them, and a bird as large as the boat, always having a circular white space to fly in! Such are the Chinese of the teacups and the grocers’ windows, and partly of their own novels, too, in which everything seems as little as their eyes, little odes, little wine parties and a series of little satisfactions. However, it must be owned that from these novels one gradually acquires a notion that there is a great deal more good sense and even good poetry among them than one had fancied from the accounts of embassies and the autobiographical paintings on the chinaware, and this is the most probable supposition. An ancient and great nation as civilized as they is not likely to be so much behind hand with us in the art of living as our self-complacency leads us to imagine. If their contempt of us amounts to the barbarous, perhaps there is a greater share of barbarism than we suspect in our scorn of them.”

In August the Chinese resort to the graveyards and burn paper money and tin- and gold-foil models at the graves of their ancestors. It is a pretty sight at night to see thousands of these little fires lighting up the vast fields of the dead like a plain of stars through which the living spirits move. The ceremonies sometimes include the Greek custom of pouring out a libation of wine, and as this is the custom especially in the western provinces, it may indicate a former communion with old Greece. Long before the Christian era Greece had possibly acquired veneration for graves from older China. Demosthenes cried out to the Athenians in B.C. 354 as a climax to his arguments: “Will ye sacrifice your sepulchres to the Persian?” A mortuary custom in the southwest provinces, also similar to the Greek, is to place a coin in the mouth, to pay for ferriage of the spirit. The round coin, made of jade, and sometimes banded with pure gold, is an exact copy of the copper cash, with a square hole in the center. These tomb jades acquire a stained appearance as compared with the delightful glisten of jades kept in the light.

Foreigners with cinematograph lanterns are now going into the interior of China with interpreters to manage part of their shows, and are doing well, as the Chinese delight in the moving pictures. It is necessary to apply to the provincial governor for a passport, and to register at the consulate at the nearest treaty port. Both French and American films are used.

The purpose of the long nails, dwarfed feet and heavy hairdressing is the snobbish one of showing that such a person does not need to work, but can afford to keep servants. These devotees of fashion, rapidly becoming fewer, suffer so much torture that their conceit can be forgiven them. “Don’t say a word, you Westerners; remember your suffocating waists and your high-heeled compressed shoes,” retort some of the Chinese! At Ningpo boys wear boots made of human hair. Over these they draw straw sandals. For waterproof material an oiled cotton is used. The very poor classes use a picturesque cape and kilt made of rush leaves, and one sees sights on the mountain roads of Hongkong that remind one of Robinson Crusoe and Friday. The Chinese are great bird fanciers. Crows, magpies, hawks, larks, ducks, finches, etc., are exposed for sale in the fairs. The singing birds are taught to sing in competition, and also to catch seeds thrown into the air. Fortune-tellers take up their location at the street corner in Hongkong, Canton, and other ports, with their trained Kwangtung sparrows. When you pay your coin, the owner places a package of cards in envelopes before the door of the cage. The bird selects one and is rewarded with a grain of rice. You identify the card by the picture that it bears. The owner puts the card, together with a tiny slip of sandalwood, back in the envelope, shuffles the envelopes and calls the bird out again. The bird will select the same envelope, which proves that Kwangtung sparrows at least have a fine sense of smell! On another corner stands a bird trainer with a grossbeak-weaver perched upon his finger. He throws coins into the air, toward which the bird darts, catching the coins in its bill and returning to the finger of the master.

On the narrow streets, in constant danger of being jostled into, the letter-writer sits at a table, painting the beautiful characters for whomsoever wishes to buy a letter. His customers are many,—fruiterers, laborers, fishermen, cooks, gunny-lifters, hotel-runners, lantern sellers, rice bird hawkers, etc. The Buddhist or Taoist priest, too, is not averse to writing a letter for a wife buyer for an added fee after his customer has bought a written prayer to Buddha or his own dead father, which prayer the priest burns in presenting it to the spirit.

There are many Mohammedan Chinese in the western and southwestern provinces, and scattered throughout the empire are Mohammedan companies. They are generally butchers and bakers by occupation. Among these Mohammedans are doubtless the lost colonies of Chinese Jews.

It is found that the Miao aborigines of Szechuen and Yunnan are a more impulsive, vivacious, and by turns a more sulky race than the staid, trim, mannerly Chinese. Missionaries, therefore, report that when they Christianize the aborigines they find them delightfully frank and vivacious companions, who grow to be liked heartily, as the cultured Chinese is in comparison deeply respected. The Miaos (Now Su tribe) show Burmese influence, too, for they burn their dead, a custom which is abhorred by the Chinese masses, though some Buddhist priests do it. The Miaos often worship a hill, and far to the east, even at Hongkong, I have seen members of the aboriginal Hakka tribes worshiping a hill, or a rock, or the seashore. On the hillsides of Hongkong jars will be found on stones among the woods. These contain the bones of Hongkong Chinese who have died in America and whose bones lie out in the woods, waiting till the Taoist calendar reports that it is a lucky day for burial. If you make the fee large enough the priest can grant you absolution any day and you may bury with full assurance of good luck. It then becomes a struggle between the priest’s determination and the mourner’s stubbornness in the matter of securing possession of the coins of the dead one! The body lies in an American graveyard until the large bones only remain. These are manifested across the Pacific as “fish bones” and are received at Hongkong by the Tung Wah Hospital for the guild of which deceased was a member. The hospital turns the bones over to the chief mourner, who places them in a jar, as already related. While the Chinese abhor sickness, and will sometimes desert a fever patient after loading his blanket with stones so that he can not leave the bed, they have no abhorrence of coffins or bones. For long periods they keep the coffin in the best room of the house, or the jar of bones in the garden.

In selling goods by auction at the pawnshops, or inns, the auctioneer does not permit audible bidding. The goods are passed through an opening for inspection. Then the bidders walk to the window, and by whisper, card, or squeeze of the hand, indicate the bid. This encourages high instead of low bidding at the beginning, for it is known that the first bidder who offers a fair price secures the article.

The Chinese, on account of their localization, and lack of experience, while usually placid, can be worked up into uncontrollable excitement. This explains the murders of missionaries by mobs in the long years up to 1901. Many suicides among officials and widows and daughters of soldiers followed the excitement and distress of the October, 1911, revolution. The camaraderie of American clubs which has evolved the greeting, “old fellow,” equal to the “old chap” of British clubs, was copied from China, where you must call every one “old man” (lao jen). It is the highest term of respect, is in diplomatic use, and even bonzes and teachers are addressed in that way. A captain of a sanpan is called the “great old one” (lao ta). The mayor is called “old man of the village” (hsiang lao). The following incident will illustrate how the clan dominates Chinese life. San Wui is a city lying near Canton. The Kwan family is one of the largest and wealthiest clans living there. It maintained near the district burial ground a fine, large ancestral hall filled with family tablets and effigies. Against the votes of the clan, in the middle of August, 1911, Kwan Ta, one of the most powerful members, rented the building to the police, who used it as headquarters in collecting unpopular taxes and pressing the people to accept the nationalization of railways scheme. The people led by the Kwan clan, burned the ancestral temple. The members of the clan then rebuilt the hall and ordered the sculptors to make an image of the unpopular Kwan Ta, who had died in the meantime. The granite image represents the man with his hands behind his back in a kneeling posture. On his back is carved the history of his defection. As each member of the Kwan clan comes into the temple on the great days to worship the ancestral tablets which have been restored, it is obligatory that he shall give Kwan Ta’s image three strokes of the bamboo!

The method of carrying water in India and China is conspicuously different. In India the drawers go from the well with the jar of water balanced on their heads. In China the water is put into two large buckets, which are slung from the two ends of a bamboo, which is balanced on the shoulder. Chinese markets in the villages and smaller cities are managed on the fair system, as in Russia. You can not buy barrow wheels at the bridge fair every day in the week, because the wheelwright only comes to your village fair every second Friday, his tour taking him through ten villages perhaps. You can not buy feather dusters or shoes every day, as the pedler is off on a tour of six villages, and only visits your fair, held at the temple, every Saturday. But food and coins you can buy every morning at your two village fairs, and the hucksters there will tell you just what days the barber, the druggist, the potter, the copper hammerer, etc., will be around again, unless thieves waylay them, or gamblers entice them, or Taoist astrologers, looking for a bribe, deceive them into belief that it is their unlucky day by their birth star on the almanac!

That the Chinese civilization in general had little communication with Egypt or Babylonia, after once being separated, may be inferred partly from the fact that the early Chinese forgot the secret of embalming the body. The Bamboo Books, tenth century B.C. recite how the Emperor Muh, whose concubine died while traveling with him in the Tartary desert, had to bury her there at once, and other records recite that when tombs were opened they stank so badly that dogs had first to be sent in to ascertain when human beings could safely enter. It was not until long centuries after this that the Chinese learned to use lime to destroy the flesh.

Conjuring has been popular from the earliest times. The famous Bamboo Books recite that the Emperor Muh, on his travels into Tartary in the tenth century B.C., was infatuated by an unusually clever conjurer there. Lieh Tsz, a patriotic chronicler of the fifth century B.C., complains that the emperor of disintegrating China had more time to study the tricks of a conjurer than for state affairs.

An interesting means of transportation over the mountains of the north is the pony-litter, which is swung between two animals in tandem. The trip is exciting enough, especially when one of the animals falls to its knees. Chinese gang laborers do all their pulling, pushing and lifting, accompanied by a chantey song. The famous trackers of the Yangtze gorges and the Grand Canal; the gunny lifters of Hongkong; the wood sawers and teak pilers; the coal passers of Hankau, all sing at the top of their splendid voices as they work.

When a native moves he is supposed to carry fire from his old kitchen to the new one, so as not to rekindle the misfortunes of the last lessee. He desires to burn up his old predecessor’s past, which may have been all bad (or he would not have moved), and to continue his own fortune, which is all good, or ought to be! When moving into a new house, the tenant replaces a threshold, lintel or rafter so that he may not inherit the bad fortune of the former tenant. He starts all things anew, as the new piece of lumber or stone typifies. The old-fashioned Chinese hotel buildings in the northern provinces are not unlike those in Palestine, low buildings with few windows in the walls being built around a court. In the court are troughs for the donkeys, mules, Mongolian ponies and especially camels of the pack trains. The roofs of the buildings, with their up-curling eaves and pagoda pinnacles, are the most beautiful in the world. It seems uncanny to see a crowd passing your house on a holiday without a sound, because the Chinese shoe is all felt. In contrast with this, compare the noisy shuffling of the wooden shoes of Japan, where one man makes more noise than a thousand Chinese, or a dozen Occidentals.

The happiness of a Chinese home is measured by the degree in which one’s neighbors leave one alone, not by the degree one is bothered with the repeated visits of neighbors, as is the fashion in the more intrusive Occident. The Chinese illustrate this characteristic by building a high wall around the clustered buildings of the home-compound. As a rule, the Chinese rent not; they move not. They build a time-bronzed, indestructible home, even if it be as simple as one rough rock laid across two age-silvered boulders. Generations, down the ages, flow and follow there, as wave follows wave down the steps of the waterfall. What is the result? A personal fame, heroism of faith, a love, a depth, a beauty, in none of which our Western life can offer an equal joy or strength. The Oriental, never having dropped the extinguished lamp of memory from his hand, is able to follow the path of history with intensity, satisfaction and certainty, while we of the West, having no similar assurance, wander the fields of the earth, unsatisfied still, where our individual name may be carved with permanence. What hate pursues us? What fate awaits us? It is the saddest sign in our psychological organization. If we intend to remain great, we must end this renting of scooped holes in cave apartments, scatter our big cities into smaller ones, spread out on the land and give every man a home of his own, and a strong enough one to leave through the ages to his great-grandson. This is the Chinese way; it is the only true way, as witness their six thousand years of certain history, while they take care to-day of four times our population. The custom of sheltering the families of sons and grandsons within one patriarchal compound is truly Asian. It is described by Homer in the sixth book of The Iliad as obtaining in the home of Priam, King of Troy, B.C. 2500. At New-year time, in Fukien province, all the family join hands around a brazier which is smoking on a table, to signify the unity of the family around a common hearth.

The Chinese make a stew of chicken, ginger, lettuce and cucumbers, or vegetable marrow, and it is very good. Beans are soaked in water and allowed to sprout before being pickled, or boiled in sugar. Salutes at feasts are sometimes made in the German fashion by raising the wine (samshu) cup to the eyes before drinking. The Chinese mix rice, nuts, flour, fruit and seed in their candies, and their cakes are highly colored and made very sweet. Where the Germans use vinegar and salt as a preservative, the Chinese use sugar, and the results, while surprising, are often delightful. Partly as revealing the sumptuous table which it is now possible to set at Hongkong or Shanghai, or Tientsin, and partly to show to what gastronomic heights the treaty port Chinese rise, I quote the menu of the Wah On Kwong Association, or Guild, served at one of the Hongkong hotels by Chinese stewards:

Queen olivesCaviare on toast
Bird’s Nest soupChicken soupFungus soup
Garoupa, shrimp sauceBoiled shark steak
Fillet of beef (Champignon sauce)
Chicken compoteStewed sharks’ fins
Pigeon gelatinePÂtÉ de foie gras en Aspic
Beche de MerFried frogs’ legs
Roast saddle of Queensland mutton with jelly
Roast ribs of sirloin of Queensland beef
Roast Kwangtung turkeyBoiled fowl
Singapore pine appleHankau hamPotatoes
PeasVegetable marrowSalad
Asparagus, olive oil sauce
Victoria puddingChartreuse jelly
CakesMango ice cream
Preserved gingerSmall orangesChinese nuts
CoffeeEuropean wines
Lucien RozetCliquotHeidsieckChateau Larose
MedocManzanillaMarsala

The iron pans that come from Shansi province are made as thin as possible so as to economize fuel; indeed, as light fuel as grass and stalks is used. The kitchen god is Chang Kung, and he was given this office because “nine generations peacefully inhabited the same compound when he lived on earth.” As pigs, ducks and geese are driven long distances to market, little straw sandals are woven for their feet. This one sometimes sees in Southern France when the frugal peasant is competing with local railway rates!

An official asked a mannerly subordinate which way he was walking home, and the latter replied: “Your way, sir.” The same official, discussing a subject said to the subordinate: “Say what you think.” The subordinate, who was a good party politician even in China, replied: “I think what you say.” Some of their proverbs on daily life are:

“Wine will not drown sorrow.”

“The flattering tongue wants to fill its pocket.”

“The pot is as strong as its thinnest spot; the chain is as strong as its weakest ring.”

“Don’t ask your thirsty visitor if he will have tea, because if he is mannerly he will say, ‘Don’t trouble yourself’; just draw the tea for him.”

“It’s always the good climber that falls from the top of the tree.”

“Those best find to-day who plan each to-morrow.”

“To-morrow’s always harder before you get to it.”

“A word is fleeter than a gale.”

“The widest field has some one listening at the edge.”

“A grape well chewed is better than a sweet potato swallowed whole.”

“Room in the heart makes room in the house.”

“Because you feel merry, there’s no need to dance when you are on a horse’s back or in a small boat.”

“Sacrifice one sheep to capture the tiger and save the other sheep.”

“Even honey is not sweet at the end of the meal.”

“A fat cat never got all his food at home.”

“Tightening your drumhead is as good as enlarging your stick.”

“A blind fox catches only a dead fowl.”