Sui-fu has a population of roughly 150,000, and the overcrowding question is not the least important. It is situated to advantage on the right bank of the Yangtze, and does an immense trade in medicines, opium, silk, furs, silverwork, and white wax, which are the chief exports. Gunboats regularly come to Sui-fu during the heavy rains.
Just outside the city, a large area is taken up with grave mounds—common with nearly every Chinese city. Mr. McIntyre and Mr. Herbert, who was passing through Sui-fu en route for Ta-chien-lu, where he is now working, showed me around the city one afternoon, and one could see everything typical of the social life of two thousand years ago. The same narrow lanes succeed each other, and the conviction is gradually impressed upon the mind that such is the general trend of the character of the city and its people. There were the same busy mechanics, barbers, traders, wayside cooks, traveling fortune-tellers, and lusty coolies; the wag doctor, the bane of the gullible, was there to drive his iniquitous living; now and then the scene's monotony was disturbed by the presence of the chair and the retinue of a city mandarin. Yet with all the hurry and din, the hurrying and the scurrying in doing and driving for making money, seldom was there an accident or interruption of good nature. There was the same romance in the streets that one reads of at school—so much alike and yet so different from what one meets in the Chinese places at the coast or in Hong-Kong or Singapore. In Sui-fu, more than in any other town in Western China which I visited, had the native artist seemed to have lavished his ingenuity on the street signboards. Their caligraphy gave the most humorous intimation of the superiority of the wares on sale; many of them contained some fictitious emblem, adopted as the name of the shop, similar to the practice adopted in London two centuries ago, and so common now in the Straits Settlements, where bankrupts are allowed considerable more freedom than would be possible if fictitious registration were not allowed. I refer to the Registration of Partnerships.
FOOTNOTES:
I inspected the railway at Ichang in December, 1910, and found that a remarkable scheme was making very creditable progress. Around the main station centre there was an air of bustle and excitement, some 20,000 coolies were in employment there, all the buildings and equipment bore evidences of thoroughness, and the scheme seemed to be going on well. But in January of this year (1911) a meeting was held at Chen-tu, the proposed destination of the line, and the gentry then decided that as nothing was being done at that end the company should be requested to stop work at Ichang, and start laying the line from Chen-tu, at the other end. "All the money will be spent," they cried, "and we shall get nothing up this end!" If the money ran out and left the central portion of the line incomplete, it did not matter so long as each city had something for its money!—E.J.D.
This is not true to-day. There has been a great falling off in numbers.—E.J.D., February, 1911.