Intimate China: The Chinese as I Have Seen Them

by Mrs. Archibald Little

IN A CHUNGKING GUILD-HOUSE.
By Mrs. Archibald Little

The glorious white falcon attributed to the Emperor Hui Tsung at the beginning of the twelfth century and the exquisite pictures of flowers and birds to be seen at the British Museum show whence the Japanese borrowed their art inspiration; but in China, its birthplace, it is wanting now, though probably in many rich official residences glorious specimens are still to be found such as I have myself been delighted by in Japan, where alone and at the British Museum I have seen Chinese masterpieces of painting. Before Giotto was born the Chinese were painting living human figures such as they cannot paint now. It is, however, true that in Chungking, the only Chinese city I know really well, there is to this day an artist who paints flowers as a connoisseur, the head of an English technical school, pronounced only one man in England could. And how does this poor artist sell his pictures? Of course, it will never be believed in England that he is an artist at all, when I tell the sad truth—he sells them by the square foot! And when you decide to buy a picture, he—measures it!

The popularly received opinion is that there is no architecture in China. Houses and temples alike are built with wooden pillars, raised off the ground upon stone bases. The roofs are placed upon the pillars, and only when the roofs are finished are the walls built up like screens. The proportions often strike me as very beautiful; and the cunningly contrived perspectives add much to their dignity. But, as in Japan, whilst moved to admiration by the approach, one often has a disappointed feeling of not arriving at anything in the end. At the same time, the conception of a Chinese house, like the design of Peking, strikes me as very lordly; the courtyards are extremely graceful and elegant, whilst the beautiful sweep of the roofs makes European roofs painfully mean by comparison. Indeed, a European house now usually gives me the same effect as a face would divested of eye-lashes. The Chinese roofs in the west of China and at Peking are, however, far more beautiful than those generally to be seen along the east coast.

To turn to Chinese industries. When tea was first discovered, all sorts of medicinal properties were attributed to it. It is to be hoped the virtue lay rather, as we are told now it does with whisky-and-water, in the hot water; for if not, what does the poor Tibetan get out of the £150,000 he is said to spend on tea at Tachienlu, the frontier city—for 65 per cent. of wild scrub leaves, scrub oak, etc., are said to be mixed up in the brick tea he receives? And the cost of the tea in the Tachienlu market is nearly doubled before the Tibetan receives it at Batang; at Lassa it has quadrupled its price. It is only for the last four centuries the Tibetans have had silver to exchange for tea; till then it was exchanged for horses, a good horse being valued at 240 lb. of tea. Even to this day the tea trade is much too limited for the four million of Tibetans; and the many thousand Tibetans who cannot afford tea use oak bark instead, astringency being the quality they desire to relieve them from headache and excessive meat-eating. The tea trade with Russia still thrives; but that with Europe has been killed by the much more carefully grown and prepared tea of Ceylon and India—though melancholy experience must ere long teach people that this tea has altogether other and more undesirable properties than the soothing, refreshing beverage of China.

PACKING TEA.

It is, however, no wonder that the China tea trade has languished. Home industries are universal in China, and each peasant who farms a bit of land grows his tea, picks it and dries it, according to his own ideas. To introduce any improvement it would be therefore necessary to educate the great mass of peasant cultivators. European tea-buyers' exhortations have so far proved fruitless; and it is distressing to see the utter want of care with which the tea-plant, with its glossy green leaves and delicate white blossom, is treated, compared with the untiring labour expended upon the poisonous poppy-plant. The latter is carefully weeded, planted in regular lines, with the earth mounded round its roots, and presents an appearance of the most perfect vigorous health, with its erect stalk over five feet high, its blue-green leaves, and beautiful blossoms. Sometimes it stands out brilliant crimson against a transcendently blue sky, making the eyes ache with the gorgeous colour contrast; at others it is white, delicately fringed and pink-tipped, or pink, or scarlet, or scarlet and black, or with the purple of the purple iris, or oftenest of all—and perhaps, after all, most beautiful—white of that frail fair whiteness that makes it impossible to think of crime or vice as connected with it—impossible even to believe in the existence of so foul a weed as vice being able to exist in a world that produces so frail and pure a flower, able to stand upright in the full heat of a China noonday sun and remain unwilted. The tea-shrubs, on the other hand, are old and gnarled, planted irregularly just anywhere, and never by any chance weeded. The same want of care is shown in the drying of the young leaves, picked just as they are opening out off their young shoots. At the same time, if Scotland would take to China tea, there would not be so many cases of tea-poisoning as there now are in Glasgow; but the beverage is a mild one, that must seem tasteless to whisky-drinkers. It has the further apparent disadvantage that an equal amount of leaf will not make anything like the same strength of decoction that Indian tea will.

China silk is also in a bad way; but, indeed, all over the world now it seems difficult to get healthy silkworm eggs. To turn, however, to an especially Chinese industry, and one which still seems to me even, after seeing it, to border on the marvellous—the white or vegetable wax of China. The processes essential to its use began about six centuries ago. The tree which produces the white wax insect grows in the Chienchang valley, on the far or western side of the unconquered Lolos, a valley about five thousand feet above the level of the sea. The Kew authorities pronounce that this tree is the Ligustrum lucidum, or large-leaved privet, an evergreen with very thick dark-green glossy foliage, bearing clusters of white flowers in May and June, succeeded afterwards by fruit of a dark-purple colour. In March brown excrescences become visible, attached to the branches; and if these be opened, a crowd of minute insects, looking like flour, will be discovered. Two or three months later these develop into a brown insect with six legs. And as the Chinese have discovered that these insects would not continue to flourish on the trees, their birthplace, they make them up into paper packets of about sixteen ounces each; and porters, each carrying sixty of these packets, hurry by night along the dangerous mountain paths to Kiating, a city about two hundred miles to north and east, and place them there on severely pollarded trees of the Fraxinus chinensis. It is this flight by night that has always fascinated my imagination, even before I traversed the successive high mountain passes, descending into the valleys over-grown by ferns and lit up every here and there by waxy clusters of the beautiful begonia flower that there flourishes as a wallflower. But it would be impossible to carry the insects through the noonday heat, as it would develop them too fast. Therefore, at the season of the carriage of the insect, all the city gates along the route have to be left open at night to facilitate the passage of the army of running porters. And to think of the rough, rocky ascents and descents those poor porters have to stumble along! The packages of insects are each wrapped in a leaf of the wood-oil tree; rice straw is used to suspend the packet under the branches of the ash-tree; rough holes are drilled in the leaf with a blunt needle, so that the insects may find their way out; and they creep rapidly up to the leaves of the ash-tree, where they nestle for about thirteen days. They then descend to the branches, and the females begin to develop scales on which to deposit their eggs, and the males to excrete what looks like snow as it coats the under side of the boughs and twigs, till at the end of three months it is a quarter of an inch thick. The branches are then lopped off, and the wax removed, chiefly by hand, and placed in an iron pot of boiling water, where it rises to the surface, is skimmed off, and deposited in a rough mould. This is then the extraordinary hard white wax of commerce, used to coat the ordinary tallow candles, and give the tallow greater consistence, thus enabling the Chinese to carry tallow candles about in the paper lanterns that supply still the place of lamps, gas, and electric lighting for the greater part of China. It is used also to size paper and cotton goods, as furniture polish, and to impart a gloss to silk.