From Pekin to Calais by Land

by Harry De Windt

We had the Piacenza pretty well to ourselves. There were but twenty first-class passengers in all, among them two pretty girls fresh from Devonshire, with the good looks, and clear, fresh complexions that county alone seems able to produce. It seemed a sin so to take them to a clime notorious for stealing the roses from the youngest and fairest faces. In the second class were some ten or twelve Protestant female missionaries bound for North China, whose religious zeal was unparalleled. They were for ever hunting up lost sheep among the passengers, hot as it was. I do not fancy, however, that their efforts were very successful. Only one of them made converts. She was eighteen, and very good-looking.

The remainder of our voyage was uneventful and tedious enough. Hot, sleepy little Penang; Singapore a vision of green hills and red dust, a sickly odour of pepper, cocoa, nut-oil, and drains. Hong Kong, for all the world like some Spanish or Italian town with its white terraces, and coloured venetians, nestling in masses of dark green foliage at the foot of the bare rugged peak; all these were passed without incident worthy of mention excepting the meeting of the fifty-year-old bride with her fiancé at the latter port, which was affecting in the extreme. It was a relief to find that, at any rate, the bridegroom was something near her own age. Five days later, on the 21st of May, six weeks to a day since leaving Gravesend, we dropped our anchor in the broad, muddy waters of the Yangzekiang, whence a small tug conveyed us in six hours up the narrower and still muddier Woosung river to Shanghai.

Shanghai cannot be called a picturesque place. Vast alluvial plains of rice and cotton surround it on every side, while the view from the bund or esplanade fronting the river, is not unlike the Thames at Blackwall, with its flat banks, forests of masts, and grey stone wharves and warehouses. The town itself consists of three distinct settlements, English, French, and American, divided one from another by small tributaries of the Woosung river. These settlements, quite distinct from the native Chinese city, were formed by their respective governments in 1846, and occupy a space of ground rather more than a mile square. Shanghai, in 1883, contained a population of four hundred thousand, of whom two thousand were foreign residents, and an idea of its commercial importance may be gained by the fact that its trade in silk, tea, and opium now equals thirty to forty million sterling value of imports and exports.

Were I ever condemned to live in the far East (which Heaven forbid), I should certainly choose Shanghai for a residence, for besides its other advantages, there is a marked absence among its European inhabitants of the ill-nature and scandal that makes anything but a very short stay in other colonial settlements almost intolerable to those whose occupation does not compel them to reside there. Whether it is the effect of the climate on the liver, I know not, but for envy, hatred, and malice commend me to the European communities of China and the Straits Settlements.

There is a capital club (one of the best if not the very best in the East) at Shanghai, of which (thanks to the kindness of Mr. C————, to whom we had an introduction) we were made honorary members, no mean advantage, for the Shanghai hotels are by no means models of comfort or cleanliness. We intended making a stay of at least ten days before going on to Tientsin, the port of Pekin, for many things had to be thought of and procured for the long journey across the Desert of Gobi, which we now ascertained, for the first time, is nearly a thousand miles across.

There seems to be no lack of amusement at Shanghai, and the merchants and other Europeans located there appear to have what Americans would call a “real good time of it” all the year round——so far as regards gaiety and sport. For those who care for it there is any amount of shooting. In winter there is no lack of duck, teal, snipe, and other wild fowl. Indeed from here all the way up to Pekin the country teems with game, big and small, the former including wild boar and deer, while further north in Manchuria are found lion, tiger, and bear. Nor is shooting the only sport, for there is a capital race-course, polo and cricket ground. I attended a match on the latter, in which was playing, in Chinese dress and a pigtail (!) a lately celebrated English cricketer, well known at Lord’s and the Oval, who had adopted the native costume in accordance with the rules of the Mission of which he is now a member. The loose clumsy dress did not seem to interfere with his play much, for he was quite in his old form, and made over a hundred runs first innings.

But the Race week is the real Shanghai carnival. At this festive season offices and warehouses are closed, and everything given up for the business of the meeting. Nearly all the horses engaged are Mongolian ponies, and half the fun of the thing is getting a “hot one” down from its native plains and keeping it dark till the day of its engagement. The figures paid for these little animals are something fabulous. People at home have no idea of how our countrymen live in China. “Light come, light go,” seems to be the motto of the cheery, hospitable Shanghai merchants, who, although they make such enormous fortunes, never seem, to the casual visitor, to have anything to do but entertain the stranger who has the good luck to find himself within their gates. It will be long before I forget the kindness they showed us, although (before we met Mr. C.) we did not know a soul in the place.

It was curious sometimes to cross the iron bridge separating them and take a ramble from the English into the French town. It was like crossing the English Channel——indeed, I doubt if Dover and Calais present a more striking contrast than do the settlements of their respective nations at Shanghai. One left the broad regular roads, asphalte pavements and severe, business-like architecture that the mercantile Briton takes with him wherever he goes, to emerge the other side of the narrow stream on a boulevard, that first thought of every colonizing Frenchman——lined with cafés, gaily striped awnings, and little zinc tables, at which Auguste and Alphonse sat sipping their absinthe or “Mazagran,” waited upon by bustling, white-aproned garçons. The sleepy looking Douanier, with baggy trousers and képi, the grass-grown cobbled streets, the dark blue enamelled plates at the street-corners, with Rue de la Republique, Rue de Paris, &c., thereon in large white letters, the general air of stagnation and idleness among the population, seemed to carry one in a moment over leagues and leagues of land and sea to some quiet provincial town in far-away France. It needed not the tricolor floating from the mainmast of the ironclad anchored mid-stream, off the Consulate, to tell us that we were no longer on English ground.

The Shanghai bund and esplanade on a fine afternoon was amusing enough, and we whiled away many a pleasant half-hour watching the motley crowd that assemble there for a ride or drive in the cool of the evening. Here might be seen every grade of colonial society, from the solemn and portly merchant and his family rolling solemnly along in an English-built landau, to the San Francisco demi-mondaine, all powder and patches, dashing about in a Victoria drawn by a pair of pulling, tearing Mongolian ponies. Europeans in buggies and on horseback, Japanese in rikshaws, Chinese in wheelbarrows (the reader may smile, but this is a public conveyance in Shanghai), crowds of every conceivable nation and colour strolling under the trees by the water’s edge, the esplanade at Shanghai on a fine evening is a sight to see and remember.

At night electric lights every twenty yards or so convert the bund into a perfect fairyland. The inauguration of the Jablokoff system, however, was attended with a slight contretemps. Crowds of natives and Europeans turned out the first night to see the effect, but for a good hour none was apparent. The place was wrapped in total darkness, and the expectant crowd beginning to show signs of impatience, it was found that the engineer had fixed the lights above the trees, whence the dense foliage very naturally obscured it, instead of under. This trifling mistake was, however, soon rectified, and the brilliant illumination so took the fancy of the natives that all the principal Chinese thoroughfares are now lit by it.