Like our Easter, the Chinese New Year varies; but it generally comes some time in February.
In a small Chinese town, where there was no buying to be done, one evening we had the gentleman in charge of the telegraph station to tea. He brought his operator with him, a most determined young man of fourteen, who to everything said, "Yes!" Between them they send two messages a day, morning and evening, "Yes" and "All right," and that is all they have to do. "And conceive," said the superior, "that I spent £12 learning English, and therewith bought five thousand words, and then am set down in a place like this, where there is not even anything to eat."
On many of the farmsteads round about Ichang may be seen a large hieroglyph painted in white, the character "Fang," with "Shang" on the top of it, in a circle. It is always very conspicuously placed, and signifies, "This household pays its yearly tribute to the robbers, and must not be molested." The village of Kolopei, just below the Tiger's Teeth Gorge, is said to consist wholly of the class of whom it may be said—as was said to me once of the inhabitants of a network of common lodging-houses not far off Spitalfields, wondering at seeing them dancing and making merry at two o'clock in the afternoon—"What do the people here do? Why, they none of them works for their living."
A day or two after a great fire at Ichang a strange sight was to be seen. A man, who had been accused of helping to steal away some poor woman's child during the confusion, with a white calico placard pasted on to his coat behind attesting his innocence, his pigtail hanging unplaited, and wearing a crown of coarse paper cash, with long streamers of paper cash hanging from it, was going round from shrine to shrine, at each protesting his innocence. A man went before him with a gong, shouting out the whole story. It is to be hoped he was not one of the eight beheaded next day. What would be thought of eight executions in one day in Stamford or Teignmouth? But not so long ago England was equally bloodthirsty. We must remember that.
Another year we saw a similar sight, only much more picturesque. As we were going up-river, we met a boat coming down, and in the bow of it there was a man kneeling quite upright, with hands held up as if imploring. In the great beauty of a still reach in the Gorges it was a very moving spectacle; but it was only a rough-and-ready way of punishing a man accused of having tried to steal from his fellows.
I see I have said nothing of medicines. You can buy rhubarb in bulk quite fresh in Szechuan. It grows chiefly on the Tibetan border. Even under the Sung Dynasty the Chinese had three hundred and sixty-five kinds of drugs and one hundred and thirteen kinds of formulæ. But they use rough decoctions, and make tisanes from their drugs; they never make extracts, nor use minute and accurate weights to dole them out.
The ancient Chinese used metal models to exhibit man's inner structure; and everything that is most rare and dear they think must be useful for a medicine,—snakes, scorpions, the velvet off a deer's horns, a dead caterpillar with grass growing out of its head, tigers' bones, beautiful orchids, of which last whole boatloads float down from Chungking to Ichang. A Chinaman loves medicine; nothing pleases him better than to take it; and the European is always being asked for remedies, not so much because he believes foreign remedies to be good, but because he has found out to his delight and amazement that they are to be had for nothing. One doctor, delighted at the great reputation he thought he was acquiring amongst Chinese, was disgusted to find that as soon as he ceased giving away bottles with his medicines patients ceased to apply for them. But the benefits of quinine are so striking, that a Chinaman is ready to ask for this, even when you put it into his mouth for him. They suffer very much from fever, poor people! and when one thinks how many years they have stood the violent changes of their climate without ever a respite, and how much we ourselves lose our energy when exposed to them, one begins to feel more tolerance for a Chinaman's apparent inertia. Besides, what has he to gain by exerting himself? If he become rich, is not the life of a rich Chinaman so dull that only opium makes it possible to endure it? Once let Chinamen get a taste of the enjoyment of life, and they will be a different people. Now they suffer from fever as we do; they dislike bad smells, too, it seems—for no nation more delights in sweet-smelling flowers; they get depressed, and hipped as we do; and they have no light literature, no sports, very little of a newspaper press, no picture-galleries, no concerts, no bands, no intercourse with women, except of the baser sort. No wonder they look dull. And how they love to be amused!
CHAPTER XIV.
SOLDIERS.
Tiger Soldiers.—Woosung Drill.—General's Gallantry.—Japanese War.—Admiral Ting.—Dominoes with a Sentry.—Viceroy's Review.
At Ichang, a thousand miles up the river Yangtse, there is a regiment of soldiers dressed as tigers; but I never could persuade any of the foreign officials to escort me to see them manœuvre, the European opinion being that not even the presence of an inspecting general would awe the Tiger soldiers sufficiently to make it safe to take a foreign lady to see them. I was told that the Tigers were not really soldiers at all, but that some officer drew pay for them as if they existed; and then when the General came to inspect, all the beggars and riff-raff of the city put on the Tiger uniform over their rags, and turned out in so disorderly a condition that even their officers were afraid of them. And so it turned out that, except from a passing steamer, I never saw Chinese soldiers drill till I did so at Woosung, the new Treaty Port, at the junction of the Whangpoo, on which Shanghai is situated, with the great river Yangtse.