GUNBOAT SOLDIERS.
By Mr. Cecil Hanbury.
Of course, the story is well known of Admiral Lang going off to a Chinese man-of-war to see if discipline were well maintained, and finding no sentry outside the Chinese Admiral's cabin. Going in to protest, he found the Admiral and another playing dominoes. "Really, Admiral," he began, "I thought you had promised me to maintain discipline. How is it, then, I find no sentry outside your door?" "Oh, well, I am very sorry," replied the Chinese Admiral. "But I really was so dull, I just asked him in to play dominoes with me."
The days of old-time Chinese reviews must be numbered, and so I will conclude this chapter with an account of the one great one I have seen. The Viceroy arrived the day before. Great was the show of flags, and the whole city was in a white heat of excitement. We foreigners were all going about, each guarded by two soldiers in front of us, intelligent-seeming, very civil men, in beautiful new clothes, their bright-red waistcoats giving them a very festive appearance. There were besides numbers of men in orange coats, who seemed to have some duty as regarded keeping order; whilst tsaijen (messengers), with pale, anxious-looking faces, sprang forward in dozens to protect me, when I went to examine the parade-ground. All the houses had been removed from it, and a mock city wall with five gates built across it by means of dark-blue cotton, with white chalk lines to simulate the joins of the blocks of stone. All the world (without his wife) had been out drinking tea at tables there, and the scene was what Chungking people call reh-lau, or "really jolly."
The next day we were all to get up at five o'clock, we understood, and dressed in Chinese clothes; for places had been arranged for the foreigners to see the sight, but we were requested if possible not to shock the populace by our queer foreign dress. The city was full of strangers, many of them with very flushed faces—a great contrast in their insouciance to the stream of extremely grave, anxious-looking mandarins in chairs coming back in full dress from waiting upon the great man. The review was beautifully set upon the stage; the Viceroy's entrance could hardly be improved upon:
"Behind him march the halberdiers,
Before him sound the drums!"
In the band there were men with long trumpets, such as those before which the walls of Jericho fell down. They blew, and men advanced through the gates of the city wall, built up of blue cotton, with white chalk marks; other men carried boards with titles; others came following after, and then stopped and stood in front of them, and so on, and so on; executioners with conical scarlet caps, boys with long Reeves' pheasant feathers in their caps, and all the curious insignia so well known in China, till at last there was a long line of them on either side all the way from the mock city wall to the tribune where the Viceroy was to sit, on one side of which was the Chinese bandstand, beside it again the box very politely set apart for foreigners, all hung with green reed-blinds to shield us from the people's stare.