But I must not linger too long by the wayside of my pleasant subject. Yet I must touch—if only with a sentence—upon four or five of the many other ways in which the Chinese recuperate their overburdened bodies and their jaded minds.
They take great joy in Nature. Picnics are a most Chinese institution. They are invariably planned to be at some spot where there is an exceptional view. And the picnic party will sit for hours, and watch the hills, or masses of fruit trees in bloom, or the sunset—sit silently too; for the Chinese, though the noisiest nation on earth, are apt to be hushed in the presence of nature, however much they chatter in the presence of their gods.
The Chinese are intensely fond of gardening. Every Chinaman that can afford it has a flower garden, and in nothing, save the graves of his ancestors, does he take more pride. In the garden’s centre there will be a lake—a very round, funny lake—and on its rippleless bosom great drowsy lien-hoas will sleep away their perfumed lives.
The lien-hoa is the Chinese water-lily. There are many varieties. They are single and double. They are red, they are rose, they are white. And some are of an indescribably lovely pale red, delicately streaked with white.
In almost every Chinese garden you will find a summer-house, its roof heavy with festoons of the wisteria. And there will be a pansy bed, a bosque of bamboo, a grove of camellias, a field of chrysanthemums, a world of peonies, trees of peaches, of plums, and of apricots, parallelograms planted with hydrangeas, and clumps of azaleas.
There are two other Chinese pleasures that I must at least mention—opium-smoking and gambling. Both are ineradicable characteristics of the Chinese.
The poppy gives the Chinese masses inestimable alleviation, and does them, I believe, the veriest minimum of harm.
Gambling, I fear, has a more baneful effect upon them. But it is their most positive and commonest diversion, and it will, I fancy, always be their national habit.
I have spoken of Chinese amusements, and now my trouble begins. I am at an entire loss to know how to speak of Korean amusements without repeating myself almost word for word. I can think of but two Chinese amusements which are not as general in Chosön as in Cathay—card-playing and theatre-going. In Korea it is not good form to play cards, and they are not played openly, except by the soldiers, and the lowest grades of society. Soldiers are allowed to play cards as much as they like, and for a very quaint reason. A soldier is often called upon for night duty. Now after eating, the thing dearest to the average Korean is sleeping, and the Korean government, which is not, from the Far Asiatic point of view, so merciless after all, has decreed that, as the playing of games of chance is more likely than any other thing to keep a man from being sleepy, the Korean soldiers may indulge in any and every game of chance, including those that are played with cards.
Korea is not without theatrical performances, no Eastern land is; but the theatrical performances of Korea are very different from the theatrical performances of China and of Japan. Indeed, in no branch of amusements do the three countries so differ as they do in the branch dramatic. With the possible exception of the Hindoo and the Mohammedan, the Japanese dramatic school approaches our own more than that of any other Oriental country. I have seen performances in Yeddo that seemed to me to quite merit classification with London productions at the Lyceum, and at the Savoy. Chinese dramatic art is a thing apart, and a law unto itself. It makes little or no appeal to European intelligence, or to European imagination. It is for the Chinese, and takes as little concern as the Chinese themselves voluntarily do of other peoples.