Page 77.
Later on my brother attended real Chinese feasts, where the procedure was quite different from that I have just described. He would drive into the outer courtyard of the yamen, where musicians would be discoursing weird music from a latticed gallery, and the great doors of the inner courtyard would be flung wide to the deafening sound of crackers. The etiquette was to leave the carriage and proceed across a stage with an altar on one side, Jafar Bai walking ahead waving his master’s red visiting-card, and calling out his name and title, while the Amban met his guest half-way and escorted him to the repast. My brother’s name, as rendered in Chinese, was Si-Ki-Su, and we were told that it is considered chic to have a name of two or three syllables, whereas a name running into four is not good and a five-syllable name would expose its bearer to derision, as the slip of paper on which it was written would be so long. The custom of visiting-cards is supposed to have originated in the Celestial Empire centuries before the coming of Christ.
As is the habit in Persia, the Chinese spend about half-an-hour before the meal in discussing fruit, nuts, tea, wine and native spirit, this last being served hot and poured from a kettle. The host takes the lowest seat at table, helps his guests to tea, putting in the sugar with his fingers. Later on he serves them the various dishes and is full of attentions towards them. The dinner proper is placed on the table in bowls, from which every one supplies himself by means of chopsticks, fishing out what he fancies and transferring it to the small saucer placed before him.
Sharks’ fins, turtle fat, a plat prepared from the stomach of a fish, fried fowls’ livers, year old eggs, edible seaweed and preserved duck were some of the numerous dishes. My brother always carefully avoided this last, as the Consulate interpreter had had an illness which resulted in deafness from partaking on one occasion too freely of the delicacy, and perhaps it was this comestible that caused Captain Deasy to write so feelingly of the ill-effects that he experienced from Chinese banquets. Swallows’-nest soup is almost unprocurable nowadays and prohibitive in price; bread is seldom served, and if it appears it is rather like dough.
When the meat courses are concluded the servants bring in a basin of water in which they wash all the chopsticks and spoons, and then the sweets appear, beans in syrup and a kind of plum-pudding being among them. The last course is a bowl of rice, the national dish; when it makes its appearance it is a sign that the feast has reached its close, and after partaking of it the guests depart.
Sir George Macartney told me that the Chinese are very fond of playing games with their fingers at their dinner-parties. One game is for a man to put forward a certain number of his fingers, his opponent doing the same, and he who first guesses the total correctly is the winner, the whole being done at lightning speed. The guests do not call out five, six or seven as the case may be, but there are elegant titles for each number, such as Mandarin of the First Empire, and so on. Another curious game is as follows: The hand, when clenched, is supposed to represent a stone, two fingers protruded stand for scissors and two hanging down for a sack. The point of the game is that a stone cannot be cut by scissors but can be put into a sack, but on the other hand, a sack can be cut by scissors. If, therefore, a player responds with scissors to his adversary who has clenched his hand for stone he loses; but if he replies with sack he wins. It sounds a childish amusement, but the Chinese will play the game for hours at a time with tremendous zest.
I have omitted to mention that there is usually a length of wall placed in front of the gateway leading to any yamen, temple, rest-house, or graveyard, its purpose being to prevent evil spirits from entering. Most fortunately these can only go straight forward and cannot turn corners, so the wall brings them to a full stop and foils them in any malignant design.
The “name day” of the Tsaritsa fell early in May—Russians keep the baptismal day, and not the birthday, as we do—and the Cossacks attached to the Russian Consulate gave in her honour a display of horsemanship known as jigitofka. It was held on their sandy parade-ground close to the river, where the Russian colony assembled in full force. The men went through quite a military tournament programme, springing off and leaping on to galloping steeds, riding at breakneck pace facing the tails of their mounts, and leaping across kneeling camels. The “ships of the desert” strongly objected to this particular feat, and with loud roarings struggled to rise, until the men who held them bound cloths over their eyes. There were the usual V.C. races, and we had a glimpse of the war in watching the exciting rescue of a Cossack attired as a woman from the hands of a troop masquerading as Huns. The most sensational item was when the soldiers galloped their horses through a big barrier of flaming bundles of reeds, firing off blank cartridges, the sight of the flames and the noise of the rifles driving the animals almost mad.
The Princess gave away the prizes, chiefly money, daggers, and huge silver watches, and the simple-looking, fresh-faced youths rode past in a body when all was over, singing beautifully. They had a natural gift for song, taking parts as if by instinct, and on quiet evenings I used to listen for their hymn.
The Kashgaris had assembled in hundreds to see the spectacle, and opposite to where we sat the high loess cliffs were crowded with brilliantly clad spectators, who climbed with the agility of monkeys to apparently inaccessible points of vantage. Horsemanship naturally appeals strongly to a nation of riders; but the Kashgaris, though as it were born in the saddle, never appeared to use their horses otherwise than as a means for getting about, in contrast to the young Persian or Arab, who is for ever racing his steed. Later on we saw much of the “goat game” as practised by the Kirghiz, but the only horses which were galloped in Kashgar were ridden by Cossacks, who occasionally ran riot in the narrow public roads, to the imminent danger of passers-by.