“Victoria is charming, sympathetic, and imposing: English and yet tropical—a mixture of cottages and palaces. Nowhere can be found a happier combination between the poetry of nature and the prose of commercial life; between English comfort and the intoxicating exuberance of the south. The streets, which are well macadamised, well kept, and beautifully clean, run in a serpentine fashion along the rock, sometimes between houses, of which the rather pretentious façades are coquettishly veiled by the verandahs, sometimes between gardens, bamboo hedges, or stone balustrades. It is like Ventnor or Shanklin seen through a magnifying-glass and under a jet of electric light. Everywhere there are fine trees—banians, bamboos, [pg 44]and pines. One may go on foot from one end of Hong Kong to the other, and yet always be in the shade. No one dreams of walking. Nothing is to be seen but chairs or palanquins. The coolies, their heads sheltered by enormous straw hats, carry you at a rattling pace. Nothing can be more delicious than a night promenade in an open sedan-chair. In the lower part of the town the scene is most animated and busy; officers and soldiers in red uniforms and with swarthy complexions (Sepoys), Parsees, Hindoos, Chinese, Malays, European ladies in elegant toilets, and men and women with yellowish skins, dressed like Europeans (half-caste Portuguese). The higher you climb the quieter you find it. Insensibly the town turns into country. Scramble up still a little higher, and you are in the middle of rocks, bare of trees, but covered with odoriferous shrubs, and traversed by a fine macadamised road, with glimpses of views here and there of marvellous beauty.”[19]
THE CUSTOM HOUSE, SHANGHAI.
Shanghai, as another leading port, would naturally be visited by the tourist of leisure, and it affords a wonderful example of English enterprise. It is by nature the port of Suchow, ninety miles up the great Yang-tse-Kiang river. Near the city its flat, green, cultivated [pg 45]banks recall the Humber in Yorkshire. The port is crowded with foreign shipping: great American steamships, the boats of the English P. and O. Company, those of the French “Messageries,” merchant steamers straight from London, Liverpool, and Glasgow, and sailing vessels in numbers. In a picturesque point of view the place has little to recommend it, but commercially it is a lively place, nine-tenths of the capital employed being English, and the white population counting at least six Englishmen to all the rest of the foreigners put together. There are three “concessions,” i.e., tracts ceded by the Chinese to the English, French, and Americans, for commercial purposes. Stone being scarce, these concessions are fringed by enormous wooden wharves, slips, and piers, outside the warehouses, depôts, and stores. There are streets of well-filled shops, where everything is to be obtained that could be bought in the Strand or Oxford Street. In this point of view, Hübner tells us, neither Yokohama nor any other European town in Asia, saving Calcutta and Bombay, can bear a comparison with Shanghai. The Chinese do not adopt numerals for their shops and warehouses, but use mottoes and descriptive titles, and the great English houses have adopted the custom of the country. Messrs. Dent & Co. have for their nom de maison, “Precious and Obliging,” while Messrs. Jardine & Co. are known, not as number 45, or what-not, but as “Honest and Harmonious.”
VIEW OF HONOLULU, SANDWICH ISLANDS.
CHAPTER IV.
The Pacific Ferry.—Another Route.
The Hawaiian Islands—King and Parliament—Pleasant Honolulu—A Government Hotel—Honeysuckle-covered Theatre—Productions of the Islands—Grand Volcanoes—Ravages of Lava Streams and Earthquakes—Off to Fiji—A Rapidly Christianised People—A Native Hut—Dinner—Kandavu—The Bush—Fruit-laden Canoes—Strange Ideas of Value—New Zealand—Its Features—Intense English Feeling—The New Zealand Company and its Iniquities—The Maories—Trollope’s Testimony—Facts about Cannibalism—A Chief on Bagpipes—Australia—Beauty of Sydney Harbour—Its Fortifications—Volunteers—Its War-fleet of One—Handsome Melbourne—Absence of Squalor—No Workhouses Required—The Benevolent Asylums—Splendid Place for Working Men—Cheapness of Meat, &c.—Wages in Town and Country—Life in the Bush—“Knocking Down One’s Cheque”—Gold, Coal, and Iron.