China, as everybody knows, grows a great deal of tea, but few are aware how great a proportion of this indispensable article she produces, and how much of it she uses herself. Here are the figures I see printed: Total production of the world, 1,300,000 net tons; China's portion, 1,150,000 tons, being about nine times more than all the world beside. But what is more wonderful is that China uses 1,000,000 tons per annum, and exports only 150,000 tons. But every one in China, upon all occasions, partakes of the cup which cheers and does not inebriate. Neither sugar nor cream is used in it; a little tea is placed in the cup and boiling water poured over it and it is drunk immediately. The strength of the tea is drawn in a few moments after the water is poured upon it. The coloring matter leaves it later. It is therefore a great mistake to use a teapot and allow tea to remain in it, and equally to use either sugar or cream—at least such is the verdict of those here who should know best. We quite agreed with them, and recommend our readers to try the Chinese plan, always provided they are so fortunate as to have a good sound article of pleasant flavor. With most of the tea found in England, and especially so with that generally used in America, the sugar and cream are no doubt necessary to drown the "twang." A Chinaman would put this practice on a par with putting sugar in Chateau Lafitte. Tea is the wine of the Celestial. A mandarin will "talk" it to you as a gourmet talks wine with us; dilate upon its quality and flavor, for the grades are innumerable, and taste and sip and sip and taste as your winebibber does—and smack his lips too. We are told of teas so delicate in flavor that fifty miles of transportation spoils them.
It is popularly supposed that a small-footed woman must be one of rank, but this is an error. It is a matter of family ambition, even among the poor, to have in the family at least one such deformity. Gentlemen marry only small-footed women, and their child might make a good match. If large-footed, this would be impossible; but such hopes are sometimes doomed to disappointment, or after marriage reverses may ensue; and so it happens that many small feet stamp about in poverty and try to eke out a living under disadvantages from which their less genteel neighbors are free. The most remarkable feature in the streets is the total absence of women of any class except such as drudge alongside of men, and even these are not numerous, for man appears to monopolize most of the work, at least in the cities. Occasionally we pass a sedan chair, or one passes us, closely covered up, which no doubt contains a lady of position compelled to visit some temple or relative; but I do not recall seeing in China any woman in a costume above that of the working classes, so jealously do Chinamen sentence their ladies to seclusion. A curious illustration of this occurred on our passage out. On our ship was one of the leading Chinese merchants of San Francisco with his wife. Rather than have her seen, even among the few cabin passengers, he engaged a portion of the steerage, had it closely boarded up and confined her in it, and she was never seen by any of us during the entire voyage. He and she took their meals together in the box. It was said that now and then at night she was carried secretly on deck for a breath of air; of course with her small feet she could not walk.
The steerage had to be fumigated at intervals and every soul was ordered on deck before the process began. This necessity had evidently not been taken into account by the exclusives, and much difficulty did our good doctor encounter with them. The husband declared that rather than be exposed to the gaze of the crowd, his wife would run the risk of being fumigated to death. The operation was postponed until a small cabin could be provided and the veiled beauty taken secretly to it.
A Chinese woman in China would hold it disgraceful to expose her face to a strange man. Queen Victoria, sober, sage matron and pink of propriety as she is reputed, would not consider a lady properly dressed for her levee—where the more strange men to gaze the better—who did not expose her face and neck and shoulders to full view. Education, my boy, education! all things right and all things wrong within a very wide range of affairs. Chinese women pinch the feet, ours pinch the waist, and each pities the other for their woeful lack of knowledge and their wickedness in marring God's image—and for their bad taste, which is, I fear, equally heinous to the female mind.
Our visit to the Celestial Empire is now at an end. We sail at noon by the French mail steamer Pie Ho for Singapore, fourteen hundred miles south. The more we see of China the greater it grows. A country much larger than the United States, with eight times the population, and not one mile of telegraph or railroad in it, in many districts not even one mile of public road broad enough for anything wider than a wheelbarrow—and yet a reading and writing people, a race of acknowledged mental power, with a form of settled government the oldest in the world—how inconsistent all this seems to us! But the reason for this paradoxical condition of affairs is, I think, that the unequalled resources of the country, which give to the people every necessary of life and almost every luxury, encouraged them in early days to eschew intercourse with the poorer lands around them, and then their superiority as a race to all their neighbors led them quite justifiably to conclude that all beyond were outside barbarians. They rested content with the advanced position attained, and as each successive generation copied the past, change became foreign to their whole nature, and in this path they have stubbornly persisted until the once inferior races of the West have far outstripped them. Among these outside barbarians must be ranked our noble selves, for it isn't one thousand years, let alone two, since our ancestors were running about dressed in skins and eating raw flesh—perhaps eating each other, as some allege—as ignorant of their A B C's as of the theory of evolution or the nebular hypothesis, when these Chinese were printing books and sailing ships by the compass. If my English readers will not be too greatly startled at the illustration, I will suggest that the conduct of China and its results suggest a danger for them which their statesmen should not be slow to perceive and remedy. England once stood as much in advance of other Western nations as China did in comparison with other lands, and she has apparently rested till now with equal complacency in the belief of her superiority. It is fast passing away. The English-speaking race throughout the world no longer looks to the parent land for political guidance, for instance, where Britain once reigned supreme. What English- speaking community would now study her antiquated political devices, her throne, her church and state, her primogeniture and entail, her hereditary chamber, unequal representation, or lack of representation rather, except that they might surely learn how to avoid them! Over the day when all English-speaking people turned instinctively to my native land for political example "Ichabod" must be written. They now look elsewhere, follow other ideals, and have adopted other ideas of government and the rights of man.
It is not too late yet, however, for England to regain her proper place in the race if she will only wake up, rub her dear old eyes, and see what the youngsters are about. "There is life in the old dog yet." The world is not done with the glorious little island, nor the island done with the world either. But no nation can indulge in a very long sleep in these days of progress the world over. England must remember,
"To have done, is to hang Quite out of fashion, like a rusty mail In monumental mockery."
Recent events have undoubtedly awakened the foremost minds of China to the fact that they have been asleep, not twenty years only like our Rip, but twenty generations. They have recently begun to build steamships, a line of telegraph is authorized, postage stamps are being printed, and, best of all, for our comfort, at the principal cities there is generally at least one dealer who adheres to fixed prices for his goods. A daily paper is now published in Chinese at Shanghai, and the English school there is well patronized. All these things convince me that at last Western civilization is making an impression. The inert mass begins to move, and China will march forward ere long. The most convincing proof of this is found, perhaps, in the fact that the government appropriated in 1872 nearly two millions of dollars to maintain a hundred and fifty students in the United States. These are to be educated in our colleges and afterward employed officially at home. No action could prove more conclusively that China is at last awakening from her long centuries of repose.
But without railroads the material resources of the country can never be thoroughly developed. I fear this will be among the last features of our civilization which China will adopt, although the most important for her progress, because, as before mentioned, a railway cannot be built without desecrating graves by the thousand, and this every true Chinaman would view with horror. Our guide, although a remarkably intelligent man, and favorable to improvements of all kinds, took his stand here, inflexibly opposing the introduction of railways. No matter what material advantages might accrue, nor how much money he might be offered, no earthly consideration would induce him to disturb his ancestors, who have lain in one place in uninterrupted succession for nearly seven hundred years. If my friends Messrs. Garrison, Field and Pullman, who have so skilfully managed to give us elevated railroads without disturbing proprietary rights below, wish to enhance their fame, let them ask a concession in the Celestial Empire for railroads "topside," guaranteed to dodge every grave, and I do not doubt their success. Such inborn superstition as is here depicted dies hard, but it must pass away with the spread of knowledge; it will, however, take time. Nevertheless, China has a great future before it, as it has had a great past, and instead of having passed her climacteric, I predict that she is destined to reach a position of paramount importance in the Eastern world.
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