“A terrible fire has occurred on the Canton river among the flower-boats which crowd the surface and form the permanent dwelling of a large number of the population. Hundreds of the flower-boats were destroyed, and fully one thousand natives must have perished.
“The boats were moored stem and stern in rows, and the flames spread with such rapidity that many of the craft were fully alight and their occupants overcome before they could cut the boats from their moorings and push them out into the open water.”
As if poor China were not in trouble enough just then, with a terrible plague still in rather full swing, and with war and with rumours of war, but must needs go and set herself on fire!
I don’t in the least doubt that there was a terrible fire on the Canton river, and that over a thousand human creatures perished in the flames. Such a catastrophe is by no means unprecedented in China, and most especially in Canton. But I do doubt that the fire broke out among the flower-boats. In the first place the flower-boats do not crowd the surface of the Canton river. In the second place they do not form the permanent dwelling of a large number of the population. I think that the sender of the dispatch, or one of the operators through whose hands it passed, must have confused flower-boats, sampans and Chinese cargo-boats.
The flower-boats are not in a crowded part of the river. They are moored quite by themselves at the wide mouth of the river and some little distance from the city. They are together, but not painfully near. No families dwell upon them. They are occupied solely by the flower-girls and their servants, and at night their decks and cabins swarm with rich and dissipated Chinamen. Then their windows are brilliant with light, their decks are bright with fanciful lanterns, and they are noisy with laughter and the tinkling of strange stringed instruments, and they smell of hot samshu. Not the sort of place in which one would expect flowers to thrive! Alas! the flowers on those boats are human flowers. They are painted with brilliant colours, but not by the hand of nature.
The girls who live there are not vendors of buds and blossoms. “Flower-girl” is the name by which the over chivalrous Chinamen designate a woman who is professionally unchaste.
On the opposite side of the river’s mouth, but still farther from the city, are moored the miserable boats of the lepers. The saddest of sins and the saddest of diseases are within sight of each other. Both are outside the pale of Chinese society. Both are excluded from Cantonese citizenship.
Because of their isolation, I doubt that the recent fire occurred among the flower-boats. But among the small cargo-boats, among the thickly huddled sampans! Yes; likely enough there.
Surely it is horrible enough to live all one’s life in a Chinese sampan or in a small junk, without being burnt to death into the bargain. Drowning, now, is a very common occurrence on a Chinese river. No one takes much notice of that in Canton. To be sure the mothers put crude, home-made life preservers on their babies, or tie a long rope about their little yellow waists, fastening the other end firmly to the boat. So if a Chinese baby falls overboard (as it usually does two or three times a day), it has a very fair chance of floating or being hauled back. But the adults must take their chances, and extraordinary numbers of them manage to tumble into a watery grave. Hundreds of Chinese are born in sampans, live in sampans, die in sampans. Yet almost none of them can swim.
For one thing the canals and rivers are too crowded. There is no room for them to swim in. For another thing they have no time to learn how to swim. It’s all work and no play to most of the sampan dwellers.