Chapter Six.
But it is time to bid Japan good-bye and sail for China. It is a three days’ voyage from Nagasaki to Shanghai. We left the ship at the broad mouth of the Yang-tse-Kiang and in a small river boat went up a tributary to Shanghai, a distance of twelve miles.
I was met at the dock by our Consul General, John Goodnow, and his wife, with their elegantly liveried coachman, and was taken to the consulate, and, after a fine tiffin (lunch), we started for the walled city. A shrinking horror seized me as if I were at the threshold of the infernal regions as we crossed the draw bridge over the moat and entered the narrow gate of the vast city of more than a million souls. Immediately we were greeted by the “wailers” and lepers,—this was my first sight of the loathsome leprosy. Our guide had supplied himself with a quantity of small change. Twenty-five cents of our money made about a quart of their small change. A moment later we met the funeral cortege of a rich merchant. First came wailers and then men beating on drums; then sons of the deceased dressed in white (white is their emblem of mourning); then the servants carrying the body on their shoulders. More wailers followed, then came the wives. It made a strange impression.
The streets are so very narrow that we had to press our bodies close against the wall to keep from being crushed as the procession passed us. We heard the tooting of a horn. Our guide said, “Here comes the Mandarin.” We began to press ourselves into a niche in the wall to watch him pass. First came the buglers, then the soldiers and last the gayly-bedecked Mandarin carried in a sedan chair on the shoulders of six coolies. He looked the very picture of the severe authority that he is invested with. They say that he has witnessed in one day the execution of five hundred criminals. He was obliged to put a mark on each one’s head with his own fingers, and, after the head was severed from the body, to remark it in proof of the exactness of his work. I was glad when I had seen the last of him, though it is only to go from bad to worse.
In the opium dens, hundreds of people, of both sexes, of various ages, kinds and colors, were reclining in most horrible attitudes. One glimpse was enough for me.
From this place we entered the temple. One of our guides said he was obliged to buy joss-sticks and kneel before the gods or it would make us trouble, because they are watchful of what foreigners do. They consider us white devils. We saw a war god nine feet high mounted on a war steed one foot high, a child’s woolly toy. There were placed before the gods about six or eight cups of tea and hundreds of fragrant burning tapers.
At one point our hearts failed us. We came to a dark bridge; it looked so forbidding with its various windings, so frail in structure, so thronged, that we were timid about stepping upon it. Being assured that it was safe we ventured across. While it shook under our weight, we did not fall into the filthy frog-pond beneath.
When we reached the center, there were a number of sleight-of-hand performers who were doing all sorts of curious things; bringing out of the stone pavement living animals, bottles of wine, bits of porcelain, and cakes, too filthy looking even to touch.
There were for sale numbers of beautiful birds in cages and wonderful bits of art of most intricate patterns and exquisite fineness. We saw beautiful pieces of brocaded silk and satin on little hand-looms, made by these patient, ever working people, who only have one week in the year for rest. There does not seem to be any provision made for night or rest, and each Chinaman looks forward to this one holiday week in which he does no work whatever, and in which he must have all the money ready to pay every debt he owes or be punished.
I did not learn how much the average Chinaman gets for a day’s wages, but I know that one of my friends sent a dozen linen dresses to be laundried, and that the charge was thirty-six cents. To be sure a satin dress that she sent to be cleaned was put in the tub with the rest. In the markets were impossible looking sausages, dried ducks, and curious frogs. In China, as in Japan, each individual has his own little table about two feet long, fourteen inches wide and six or eight inches high,—not unlike a tray.