The guide is regretful that your visit is a few days too late for you to see five men beheaded in as many minutes. Employing a chair-coolie as a lay figure, John manages to give a satisfactory description of the modus operandi of a decapitation, and you let it go at that. A stalwart native is then introduced as the official headsman, and this functionary promptly tries to sell the heavy-bladed sword with which he says he struck off five heads earlier in the week. Probably three hundred malefactors are annually put to death on this spot, and it is said that the public executioner has been known to sell twice that number of swords in a year. Now and again a loaferish policeman is seen, nearly always leaning against a building or finding support from the angle of a deep-set door. Most of the police wear sandals and straw hats, and carry long batons and revolvers; but there is no sameness of apparel or armament among these guardians of the peace, attested by their wearing only a portion of their uniform at a time. The Cantonese believe their police are equipped and dressed in strict accord with the "finest" of a great city in America.
On the way to that section of the city where Cantonese of high and low degree are laid away after death, we encounter a returning funeral party that made a curious procession, and one stretching to inordinate length. In front was a ragamuffin corps of drummers and men extracting ear-racking noises from metal instruments that looked like flageolets, but were not. Twenty or thirty bedraggled Buddhist priests in pairs trotted behind, proving by their individual gaits that in China there is no union of religion and music. Interspersed in the marching medley were a dozen or more gaudily painted platforms with pole handles, carried by coolies in the way that chairs are borne. Each platform displayed a layout of varnished pigs with immovably staring eyes, plates of uncooked strips of fish, and decorative objects suggesting place in a well-to-do Chinese home. Every fifty yards or so a mustached official of uncertain rank was mounted on a Tartary pony, and at the end of the column a coolie loped along bearing across his naked shoulders the deceased's Yankee-made bicycle. No student of foreign conditions could ask more striking evidence that China was at last "waking up," was heeding the influences of Western civilization, surely. The funeral party suggested perfunctory pomp and display, and gave not a suggestion of bereavement—and that it was, for every person in the cortege was hired for the occasion. Half the food had been left at the tomb for the departed in his spirit form; the remainder was to be devoured by the mercenary mourners when the procession broke up at the door of the home from which the corpse had been carried.
Ah Cum John's clients lunch in the renowned Five-Story Pagoda, rising from the city wall to an elevation that spreads Canton at its feet; but by the time one reaches the building he is satiated with views and wants nothing but food. The Chicago "air-tights" and bottled beers and table-waters fetched from the steamer are relished to the full by appetites not always satisfied by the culinary achievements of a Delmonico.
Travelers insist that Canton is more essentially Chinese in an educational sense than any other city in China. Public speech in Hong Kong reflects the control of Britain, and in Shanghai popular opinion is held to be tainted with German or British opinion. At Pekin the game of diplomacy is played too consummately to allow an expressed utterance to have any national significance, for the capital is looked upon as a city eddying with cross currents and rival influences. Consequently, the pulse of the great Flowery Kingdom, with its more than four hundred million people, can best be taken at Canton, for the native press and native scholars there say frankly what they believe.
Cantonese opinion is potential because the capital city of the great Kwang-tung province is recognized as the center of national learning, where scholarship is prized above riches. No Canton youth who aims at the first social order thinks of setting himself to make money; to enter the service of the government is his object, and to achieve this he studies literature. There is practically no barrier in China to becoming a "literate," and the classification means all that the word "gentleman" can in Europe. For this and other reasons thousands of men in Canton wear horn-rimmed spectacles, look wise, and discuss mundane affairs in a manner brooking no contention. The literary bureaucracy of Canton wields a mighty influence in the affairs of the nation, it is insisted. A member of this class may not be able to do the simplest sum in arithmetic without the assistance of his counting-machine, but he may be able to write an essay on the meanings of ideographs, reproduce a trimetrical classic, or quote the philosophic works of Confucius and the Book of Mencius until you grow faint from listening.
Once every three years Canton teems with men, young and old, who have gathered to compete for academic degrees. Any one save the son of a barber, an actor, or the keeper of a brothel, may enter the list, provided he possesses the certificate of a high school. A certain part of the city not demanded by business or residential purposes is designated as the Examination Hall, where 10,616 cells or compartments are built of brick and wood. These cubicles, six by eight feet square, are arranged in rows, like cattle-pens at an American agricultural fair. Placed side by side they would extend eight miles. These cells have no furnishing whatever, save a plank to serve as desk and bed. The night before the examination is to begin the student is searched, and with writing materials and provisions sufficient for three days, is shut in his cell. This is repeated three times, making the examination extend to nine days. From sunrise to sunset no candidate is permitted to rise from his seat, and if one be taken ill and carried out, he cannot return for that contest. It is said that a few of the old men succumb to the strain at each examination.
The theses or essays of but eighty-three of the competitors can be accepted, and the fortunate ones are rewarded by the Bachelor of Arts degree. In time these compete near Pekin for a "Doctor" degree—and if abundantly rich, the successful scholar may bribe his way to official employment, say persons intimately knowing the customs of China. Those who pass the final degree become members of what is termed the Hon Lum College, and this furnishes China with her councilors, district rulers, and examiners of scholarships in all the provinces—at least in theory. The fortunate man standing at the head of the list in the great examination near Pekin receives the title of Chong Yuen, and is termed "the greatest scholar in the world." The entire empire reveres him, and, taking into consideration the number of the examinations he has stood, he should be respected, if not for erudition, for his tenacity of purpose and the possession of a marvelous constitution. But it is asserted that this "greatest scholar" is invariably a millionaire and a Manchu.
EXAMINATION BOOTHS, CANTON