When We Were Strolling Players in the East

by Louise Jordan Miln

The marriage ceremony among Westernised, modernised Japanese would differ in many details from the wedding I have described. It would be less Japanesque, less elaborate, and, I had almost written, less picturesque; but nothing can lack in picturesqueness—nothing in which Japanese women play the principal parts.

HINDOO COOLIE WOMEN WITH LOADS OF BAMBOO. Page 249.

CHAPTER XXVIII

BAMBOO

The Orient is wreathed with bamboo. A considerable proportion of the houses in the East are built of bamboo. And at one season of the year many thousands of natives are fed on bamboo.

There is nothing else that I should find so impossible to wipe from my memoried picture of the East as bamboo. It is the one characteristic common to all the East. Indigo, rice, opium, tea, coffee, cochineal, gems, spices—they all mean the East, but no one of them means the entire East. Bamboo is symbolic of all the East. It lifts its graceful, feathery heads among the cocoanut trees and cinnamon groves of Ceylon. It touches with rare beauty every few yards of the Chinese landscape. It breaks up into lovely bits the fields of India. It grows at the base of the Himalayas. It softens again the soft, fair face of Japan. It thrives in Singapore, it runs riot in Penang. And wonderfully deft are the natives in their use of the bamboo. The Chinamen excel in its manipulation. I have come home, after a sojourn in the East of some years, with an idea that the Chinamen excel in almost everything mechanical in which they have an entirely fair chance. There are few things that a Chinaman cannot make out of bamboo; houses, boxes, and baskets, furniture, palanquins, ’rickshaws, hats, shields, carriages, scaffolding, fences, mats, portières,—those are a few of the simplest uses to which Chin-Yang puts bamboo.

There is nothing else in the vegetable kingdom at once so pliable and so strong as bamboo. The fingers of Chinese children weave it; the hands of Indian women pluck it. Yet from it is made scaffolding, upon which stand a multitude of Chinese workmen.

Once, in Hong-Kong, I saw the Chinese prepare for their Soul Festival. The Soul Festival is a unique expression of the artistic yearnings of this peculiar people. It occurs once in every four years. A temporary house is built of bamboo, it is lined with shelves of bamboo; on those shelves are placed pictures, vases, flowers—in brief, anything and everything that marks Chinese progress in the fine arts. The Soul Festival is the Chinese World’s Fair—but a World’s Fair from which all the world is rigorously excluded except China. There was a great deal about the Soul Festival I saw that was incomprehensible to me; and a Chinese mystery is apt to remain a Chinese mystery to the most inquiring European. One thing, however, was clear to me at the Soul Festival. That one thing was the preponderance of bamboo. Not only was bamboo an important ingredient in the building, and of half the semi-useful articles displayed, but it was in evidence on the majority of the pottery, and in many of the pictures. It was the saving grace of the most hideous carvings. It gave the utmost touch of beauty to the finest ivories.