Sidelights on Chinese Life

by J. Macgowan

Now, all the above things are absent from any part of a Chinese city that one may happen to visit in any portion of the Empire. This statement is made with a good deal of confidence, for, unlike the cities of the West, which all vary more or less one from another, the Chinese towns are very much facsimiles of each other, and when you have seen one, you may confidently assert you have a very true conception of what all the rest are like.

The ideal city was drawn in the brain of the designers and builders of the first one in the remote and misty past of Chinese History, and the spectacle evidently has seemed so sublime and overpowering to the succeeding generations of Chinese that no original genius has appeared since then to dare to suggest anything better. And so every city is built upon the same model throughout the length and breadth of the land, and whilst some are larger and more imposing than others, the plan of the walls and the configuration of the streets, and the architecture of the houses are pretty much the same everywhere.

But here is a town close at hand, and so, without waiting to discuss the theory of a Chinese city, let us boldly enter in and see with our own eyes exactly what it is like.

The first street we travel along gives us a shock.

Instead of the broad and spacious roadway along which the traffic is carried, we come into a narrow, dingy-looking artery which at its extreme breadth is not wider than twelve feet, and even that is not all available for the use of those that have to pass up and down it. The shopkeepers on both sides have put out their counters, on which they expose their goods, so that only five or six feet are left free for the use of the public.

This particular street which we are now in is not an exceptional one, in fact it is one of the principal ones in the town, and therefore is a very fair sample of what the business quarter is like. If we were to diverge down the side streets that run into it we should find them all much narrower, more forbidding, more dingy and very much dirtier.

We have not advanced far in our walk before we begin to be conscious of peculiar odours that seem to be the heritage of the East. The air is never fresh, but at corners of the street and indentations in the houses, and on the spots not actually in use, there are always accumulations of refuse and garbage that fester in the sun and send out the most abominable smells. But these are healthy and playful when compared with others that now and again seem to strike one as if with a sledge-hammer and paralyze one for the moment.

These are caused by the foulness of the drain that lies underneath the centre of the street. As the roads are so narrow and are occupied by houses on both sides, the only available place for the drainage of the city is right through the middle of the roadway.

There is no Public Board of Works to superintend the construction of these, and as the Chinese as a race have very hazy and elementary ideas as to the necessity for drains of any kind, it may easily be imagined how badly they make them. The result is that gases generate and evil smells collect for which there is no escape excepting through the cracks of the stone slabs that pave the streets. Never has there yet been a writer with the genius to describe these. It is simply enough to say that they have the concentrated essence of the ages in them. They trace back their ancestry to the times that are lost in myth and fairy tales, and they would look with disdain upon any of the modern smells, just as an aristocrat that holds his title from the times of the Conqueror would gaze with scorn upon some upstart, whose father sold soap and was knighted for the wealth he had amassed.

It is astonishing that the people that live in the houses near by are not carried off by typhoid or other deadly fevers, but they are not. They have, on the other hand, a lively, healthy look about them as though they lived in some country place, where the air comes fresh from the mountain near by and where they breathe a wholesome stock of ozone all the year round.