PACIFIC MAIL STEAMER.
It was with a feeling of national pride that we repeatedly saw the Pacific Mail Company’s steamer “China,” Capt. Doane, thirty days from San Francisco, come into the harbor promptly on the day she was due. She is a noble ship of four thousand tons. Capt. Doane came on board our ship, and invited us to inspect his vessel. It is one of the principal events of the month with Americans to have the Pacific Mail Steamers appear. All other steamers seem diminutive by the side of them. It seemed strange to find on board these vessels five or six live oxen and the appurtenances of a slaughter-house, bestowed, however, out of sight.
We stayed in Hong Kong six months waiting for hemp to fall in Manila. While the ship lay at anchor we enjoyed the privilege, by the favor of Messrs. Augustine Heard & Co., of visiting several places in China and the East Indies.
IV.
CANTON, SHANGHAI, SINGAPORE, MACAO.
This is a traveller, sir; knows men and
Manners, and has ploughed up the sea so far
Till both the poles have knocked; has seen the sun
Take coach, and can distinguish the color
Of his horses and their kind.
Beaumont and Fletcher’s “Scornful Lady.”
The city of Canton is only eight hours by steamer from Hong Kong. Arriving in the Canton river you find yourself in a floating population in boats, close together, as though ground rents were as dear as in Broadway. When you enter a boat for a passage up the river you marvel that the boat can extricate itself from the snarl; but you are in a few moments on your way, meeting a seemingly endless throng of people, among whom you involuntarily close your eyes as if in anticipation of a crash. We were the guests of the Rev. Dr. Happer of the American Presbyterian Mission, who on our arrival at Hong Kong had kindly sent and invited us. We were also entertained by the other members of the Mission, Messrs. Noyes, Marcellus, and McChesney. We visited Dr. Ker’s Hospital. Over a hundred Chinese were sitting in a commodious room listening to a native evangelist, and going out by tens to receive medical treatment. This hospital was formerly sustained by the American Board of Foreign Missions, with Dr. Peter Parker for surgeon and physician.
Being introduced to Archdeacon Gray, he very kindly went with us two afternoons among the temples and many remarkable places. We saw the temple in which are five hundred bronzed images of gods or deified men, each in a posture or holding an emblem representing some action or attribute. We saw the water-clock made by tubs of water placed one above another, each dripping into the one below it, and the lowest holding a graduated stick which rose through a hole in the lid, and as each hour-mark on the stick appears through the hole, a man goes up to the roof with a painted sign announcing to the people the time of day. This seems to be an heirloom from past ages when the “Clepsydra” was in use, of which this is a specimen. Adherence to this useless thing is one illustration of the Chinese attachment to antiquity. As you go about the city, you see things which carry you back two thousand years, oxen treading clay, men sifting wheat in sieves fastened on the ends of planks laid on rolling stones, and a man standing on each and keeping up a motion on the planks like “tilting,” or “seesaw,” a laborious process of doing a simple thing. Then you see works of art surpassing modern western skill; as, for example, an elephant’s tusk undergoing three years of carving; price, one hundred and fifty dollars. Then you visit an eating-house, which Archdeacon Gray begs you to endure, to know that some things related of the Chinese are not fictions. He goes to a man who is eating, and courteously taking up his plate, says, “What is this?” The man laughs and says, “Rat.” He goes to another, and, taking his plate, says, “What is this?” The man cheerfully replies, “Black cat.” Another man says, “Dog.” Around the room, on hooks, are evident signs that the men were truthful. You make swift retreat, but are constrained by your guide to look into an opium shop, where the customer, as he comes in, mounts a table, lies at full length, with his head on a wicker pillow hollowed in the middle to fit the neck, then is furnished with a pipe and lamp and box of opium, which he smokes till he is stupefied. Emerging from such scenes of degradation into the narrow street, ten feet wide, you may see a woman at a door with a child three years old, with whom she is playing “pease porridge hot,” going through the motions as we learned them in childhood; and you wonder whether Mother Goose derived her knowledge from the disciples of Confucius, or whether she did actually live and die, as is now asserted, in Rowe Street, Boston. This Chinese woman and her child playing at “pease porridge hot,” is one of those touches of nature which make “all the world akin.” You next reach a place where intellectual competition throws some of our university feats into the shade.
OPIUM SMOKERS. [Page 200].