The Mysteries of Modern London

by George R. Sims

Here in the south-west of London is a little old-fashioned shop in which second-hand furniture and curios are sold.

There is nothing out of the common in the shop, yet it has its strange romance. If you look over the doorway you will see a Chinese name. If you enter the shop the young lady who comes forward, though she has Oriental features, addresses you in ordinary English, with perhaps a slightly Cockney twang.

The shop was founded by her father, a young Chinaman who suddenly appeared in London. No one knew where he came from. He wore Chinese dress and a pigtail, and started in business with a hired barrow, with which he went round to houses in the neighbourhood, buying the odds and ends that people wanted to get rid of.

Gradually he became less Chinese in appearance. The pigtail went, and he took to European clothes. He seemed to have prospered, for he took a little shop, and later on married an Englishwoman.

It was quite a humble little shop at first, but there passed in and out of it occasionally Chinamen who were evidently grandees. They came in elegant carriages, and, according to report, they were mandarins.

Once the carriage of the Chinese Ambassador stopped in the street, and the representative of the Brother of the Sun and First Cousin of the Moon passed into the shop and remained for a quarter of an hour in the little back parlour closeted with the Chinaman who had come here from nowhere, and had started business in England buying old bottles, old iron, and old rags.

Every one in the street knew the Chinaman, and gradually many became his tenants, for he bought a good deal of property round about. But no one ever penetrated the mystery of his connection with the great mandarins who from time to time visited him, and no one was ever able to form the faintest idea why the Chinese Ambassador came to interview him in the back parlour.

The Chinese name is over the door, the Chinaman's children are carrying on the business at the present moment. They are in everything but appearance English men and women. The Chinaman himself lies in a London cemetery, where the broken stones are on his grave. But the mystery of who he was, and what interest the high representatives of the great Chinese Emperor had in him, remains unfathomed.

While we are in Chinese company let us cross London to the east and enter the Chinese quarter, which is still round Lime-house Causeway, although many of the lodging-house proprietors and opium-den keepers have moved into High Street, Poplar.

Here is a little shop which looks innocent enough. The only suggestion that it is an opium den is in the odd-looking little pipes exhibited for sale in the window.