hearts out thus for us mere strangers?” “Oh!” exclaimed all three in chorus, “the words you utter cover us with blushes! What! can we do anything in excess for brothers who have thus honoured us with their presence in our poor city!” “Poor Tartars!” said I in French to my colleague, “how thoroughly eaten up they must be when they fall into such hands as these!” These words, in an unknown tongue, excited considerable surprise in our worthy friends. “In which of the illustrious kingdoms of Tartary dwell your Excellencies?” asked one of them. “We are not Tartars at all,” was the reply. “Ah! we saw that at once; the Tartars have no such majesty of aspect as yours; their mien has no grandeur about it! May we ask what is the noble country whence you come?” “We are from the West; our native land is far hence.” “Quite so,” replied the eldest of the three knaves. “I knew it, and I said so to these young men, but they are ignorant; they know nothing about physiognomy. Ah! you are from the West. I know your country well; I have been there more than once.” “We are delighted to hear this: doubtless, then, you are acquainted with our language?” “Why, I cannot say I know it thoroughly; but there are some few words I understand. I can’t speak them, indeed; but that does not matter. You western people are so clever, you know everything, the Chinese language, the Tartarian, the western—you can speak them all. I have always been closely mixed up with your countrymen, and have invariably been selected to manage their affairs for them whenever they come to the Blue Town. It is always I who make their purchases for them.”
We had by this time finished our tea; our three friends rose, and with a simultaneous bow, invited us to accompany them. “My lords, the repast is by this time prepared, and our chief awaits you.” “Listen,” said we, gravely, “while we utter words full of reason. You have taken the trouble to guide us to an inn, which shows you to be men of warm hearts; you have here swept for us and prepared our room; again, in proof of your excellent dispositions, your master has sent us pastry, which manifests in him a benevolence incapable of exhaustion towards the wayfaring stranger. You now invite us to go and dine with you: we cannot possibly trespass so grossly upon your kindness. No, dear friends, you must excuse us; if we desire to make some purchases in your establishment, you may rely upon us. For the present we will not detain you. We are going to dine at the Turkish Eating House.” So saying, we rose and ushered our excellent friends to the door.
The commercial intercourse between the Tartars and the Chinese is revoltingly iniquitous on the part of the latter. So
soon as Mongols, simple, ingenuous men, if such there be at all in the world, arrive in a trading town, they are snapped up by some Chinese, who carry them off, as it were, by main force, to their houses, give them tea for themselves and forage for their animals, and cajole them in every conceivable way. The Mongols, themselves without guile and incapable of conceiving guile in others, take all they hear to be perfectly genuine, and congratulate themselves, conscious as they are of their inaptitude for business, upon their good fortune in thus meeting with brothers, Ahatou, as they say, in whom they can place full confidence, and who will undertake to manage their whole business for them. A good dinner provided gratis in the back shop, completes the illusion. “If these people wanted to rob me,” says the Tartar to himself, “they would not go to all this expense in giving me a dinner for nothing.” When once the Chinese has got hold of the Tartar, he employs over him all the resources of the skilful and utterly unprincipled knavery of the Chinese character. He keeps him in his house, eating, drinking, and smoking, one day after another, until his subordinates have sold all the poor man’s cattle, or whatever else he has to sell, and bought for him, in return, the commodities he requires, at prices double and triple the market value. But so plausible is the Chinese, and so simple is the Tartar, that the latter invariably departs with the most entire conviction of the immense philanthropy of the former, and with a promise to return, when he has other goods to sell, to the establishment where he has been treated so fraternally.
The next morning we went out to purchase some winter clothing, the want of which began to make itself sensibly felt. But first, in order to facilitate our dealings, we had to sell some ounces of silver. The money of the Chinese consists entirely of small round copper coins, of the size of our halfpenny, with a square hole in the centre, through which the people string them, so that they may be more conveniently carried. These coins the Chinese call, tsien; the Tartars, dehos; and the Europeans, sapeks. Gold and silver are not coined at all; they are melted into ingots of various sizes, and thus put into circulation. Gold-dust and gold leaf are also current in commerce, and they also possess bank notes. The ordinary value of the ounce of silver is 1,700 or 1,800 sapeks, according to the scarcity or abundance of silver in the country.
The money changers have two irregular modes of making a profit by their traffic: if they state the fair price of silver to the customer, they cheat him in the weight; if their scales and their method of weighing are accurate, they diminish the price of the silver accordingly. But when they have to do with Tartars, they employ neither
of these methods of fraud; on the contrary, they weigh the silver scrupulously, and sometimes allow a little overweight, and even they pay them above the market price; in fact, they appear to be quite losers by the transaction, and so they would be, if the weight and the price of the silver alone were considered; their advantage is derived, in these cases, from their manner of calculating the amount. When they come to reduce the silver into sapeks, they do indeed reduce it, making the most flagrant miscalculations, which the Tartars, who can count nothing beyond their beads, are quite incapable of detecting, and which they, accordingly, adopt implicitly, and even with satisfaction, always considering they have sold their bullion well, since they know the full weight has been allowed, and that the full market price has been given.
At the money changers in the Blue Town, to which we went to sell some silver, the Chinese dealers essayed, according to custom, to apply this fraud to us, but they were disconcerted. The weight shown by their scales was perfectly correct, and the price they offered us was rather above the ordinary course of exchange, and the bargain between us was so far concluded. The chief clerk took the souan-pan, the calculation table used by the Chinese, and after calculating with an appearance of intense nicety, announced the result of his operation. “This is an exchange-office,” said we; “you are the buyers, we the sellers; you have made your calculation, we will make ours: give us a pencil and a piece of paper.”—“Nothing can be more just; you have enunciated a fundamental law of commerce,” and so saying, they handed us a writing-case. We took the pencil, and a very short calculation exhibited a difference in our favour of a thousand sapeks. “Superintendent of the bank,” said we, “your souan-pan is in error by a thousand sapeks.”—“Impossible! Do you think that all of a sudden I’ve forgotten my souan-pan? Let me go over it again;” and he proceeded with an air of great anxiety to appear correct, to set his calculating machine once more in operation, the other customers by our side looking on with great amazement at all this. When he had done: “Yes,” said he, “I knew I was right; see, brother;” and he passed the machine to a colleague behind the counter, who went over his calculation; the result of their operations was exactly the same to a fraction. “You see,” said the principal, “there is no error. How is it that our calculation does not agree with that which you have written down there?”—“It is unimportant to inquire why your calculation does not agree with ours; this is certain, that your calculation is wrong and ours right. You see these little characters that we have traced on this paper; they are a very different thing from your souan-pan; it is impossible for them to be
wrong. Were all the calculators in the world to work the whole of their lives upon this operation, they could arrive at no other result than this; that your statement is wrong by a thousand sapeks.”
The money-changers were extremely embarrassed, and began to turn very red, when a bystander, who perceived that the affair was assuming an awkward aspect, presented himself as umpire. “I’ll reckon it up for you,” said he, and taking the souan-pan, his calculation agreed with ours. The superintendent of the bank hereupon made us a profound bow: “Sirs Lamas,” said he, “your mathematics are better than mine.” “Oh, not at all,” replied we, with a bow equally profound; “your souan-pan is excellent, but who ever heard of a calculator always exempt from error? People like you may very well be mistaken once and a way, whereas poor simple folks like us make blunders ten thousand times. Now, however, we have fortunately concurred in our reckoning, thanks to the pains you have taken.” These phrases were rigorously required under the circumstances, by Chinese politeness. Whenever any person in China is compromised by any awkward incident, those present always carefully refrain from any observation which may make him blush, or as the Chinese phrase it, take away his face.