“Why, is this King Street, Hongkong, or Malay Street, Singapore?”
The East never changes, no matter whether it is west or east. The restaurants, with their gaudily carved beams and their queer windows, with their upstairs rooms, containing priceless treasures of Oriental art, their iron money-chests, with half a dozen different locks on them, so that they could only be opened in the presence of all the partners in the concern; the paper lanterns outside, the weird hieroglyphical signs, the little joss tables in the inner compartments of the shops, with their images and odorous incense sticks—it was all the undiluted Orient, ages old, in the midst of the newest of the Occidental civilisations, one of those queer paradoxes which go to show the looseness of our most rigid principles and the shallowness of our deepest convictions.
After seeing sundry other things which would be difficult of description in printable English, I made a tour of a common lodging-house in Chinatown. I have slept in a common lodging-house in London, and I have seen humanity go to sleep under many and various conditions; but I never saw anything like this.
Only a few hundred yards away was the Palace Hotel, with its rooms at four dollars a night; here you could sleep for five cents,—twopence-halfpenny,—but what sleeping!
Little, dark, stifling cells—I have seen infinitely better ones in prisons—lit through a little window by a caged gas-jet on the flagged and iron-railed footway which ran round each floor inside the court within which these doss-houses are built. In the cell a narrow wooden bedstead, covered with unwashed rags and nothing else. Below in the court, horrors unnameable.
In the particular lodging-house which I visited I was shown a big, dark, hideous apartment, a perfect Black Hole, in which nine of the richest merchants of Chinatown—and some of them are very rich—were confined on ransom by the gang known as the High-Binders for four months until some died and the others paid. A remnant who stuck out were released by the police and a detachment of the United States Militia after a regular siege. It was Alsatia over again, and yet it happened less than a dozen years ago.
As I was feeling my way down the stairs a figure rose out of a corner on one of the landings, and I heard a thin voice say:
“Boss, gimme ten cents—I’m hungry!”