To give a more exact idea of domestic Chinese life, we will give a few extracts from the interesting travels of M. de Bourboulon, a French consul in China, travels edited by M. Poussielgue, and published in the “Tour du Monde” in 1864.
“A Chinese palace,” says M. Poussielgue, “is thus laid out: more than half the site is taken up with alleys, courts, and gardens crowded with rock-work, rustic bridges, fishponds full of gold fish, aviaries stocked with peacocks, golden pheasants, and partridges from Pe-tche-li, and especially a quantity of painted and varnished porcelain and earthenware jars, containing miniature trees, vines, jessamines, creepers and flowers of all kinds. The principal room on the ground floor opens on to the garden; a piece of open trellis work separates it from the sleeping apartment. The ground floor also comprises the dining-room, the kitchen, and sometimes a bath-room. When there is a second story, called leou, it contains beds and lumber rooms. The entrance-hall is invariably sacred to the ancestors and to the guardian spirits of the family. In every room the kang, which serves as a bed, a sofa, or a chair; and thick mats, laid upon the floor, are to be met with. The actual furniture is scanty; a few chairs and stools made of hard wood, with cushions placed on them; a small table in red lacquer work; an incense burner; some gilt or enamelled bronze candlesticks; flower stands and baskets of flowers; some pictures drawn on rice paper; and finally the inevitable tablet inscribed with some moral apothegm, or a dedication to the ancestors of the master of the house. There are no regular windows; a few square openings, pierced in the side wall where the rooms open on a court or garden, or inserted beneath the double beams supporting the roof where the apartment might be overlooked from the street or from the neighbouring houses, allow a dim light to penetrate through the cross laths of their wooden lattices which serve as fixed blinds to them ([figs. 120] and [121]).
“The wealthy, abandoning themselves to a luxurious idleness, spend half their existence in these secluded chambers; it is almost impossible for a European to procure admittance to them, for communicative as the Chinese are in business, at festivals, or at receptions, they are extremely reserved on all points concerning their domestic life.
120.—CHINESE BOUDOIR.
“Physical idleness is carried to an enormous extent in China; it is considered ill bred to take walks, and to use the limbs. Nothing surprises the natives more than the perpetual craving for exercise that characterizes Europeans. Squatted on their hams, they light their pipe, toy with their fans, and jeer at the European passers-by, whose firm measured footsteps carry them up and down the street. It is necessary to make excuses for coming neither on horseback nor in a palanquin, when paying an official visit, for to do so on foot is a sign of but little respect for the person visited.
“The palanquin is in constant use. Large depôts of these, where one can always be hired at a moment’s notice, are established in Peking. A palanquin carried by six coolies costs about a piastre per day; with four coolies half a piastre; with only two, a hundred sapecas. The French Legation keeps twenty-four palanquin porters, dressed in blue tunics with tricolor collars and facings. Palanquins are usually open both in front and behind; they have a small window at the side, and a cross plank on which the passengers sit.
“The rage for gambling is one of the curses of China; a curse that has begotten a thousand others, in all ranks and at all ages. One meets in the streets of Peking a quantity of little itinerant gaming stalls; sometimes consisting of a set of dice in a brass cup on a stand, sometimes a lottery of little sticks marked with numbers, shaken up by the croupier in a tin tube. We saw crowds round these sharpers, and the passing workman, yielding to the irresistible temptation, loses in an hour his day’s hard earnings. The coolies attached to the French army used to thus lose their month’s pay the day after they got it; some of them having pledged their clothes to the croupiers, who do a little pawnbroking into the bargain, had to make their escape amid the jeers of the mob, and used to return to camp with nothing on but a pair of drawers.
“Cock and quail fighting are still practised as an excuse for gambling by the Chinese, who stake large sums on the result. The wealthy and the mercantile classes are just as inveterate gamesters as the common people; they collect in the tea-houses and spend day and night in playing at cards, at dice, at dominos, and at draughts. Their cards, about five inches long, are very narrow, and are a good deal like ours, with figures and pips of different colours marked on them. The game most in vogue seems to be a kind of cribbage. Their draughtsmen are square, and the divisions of the board are round. Their dominos are flat, with red and blue marks. They play at draughts also with dice, a sort of backgammon. Professional gamblers prefer dice to any other game, as it is the most gambling of all. When they have lost all their money, they stake their fields, their house, their children, their wives, and, as a last resort, themselves when they have nothing else left, and their antagonist agrees to let them make such a final stake. A shopkeeper of Tien-tsin, who was minus two fingers of his left hand, had lost them over the dice box. The women and children are fond of playing at shuttlecock; it is their favourite game, and they are very expert at it. The shuttlecock is made of a piece of leather rolled into a ball, with one or two metal rings round it to steady it; three long feathers are stuck into holes in these rings. The shuttlecock is kept up with the soles of their slippers, which they use instead of battledores; it is very seldom allowed to fall.