The Chinese city is quite distinct from the foreign one; it lies just beyond the French concession, or, rather, the French section extends up to the walls of the old city. The contrast between the two is very great. While the foreigners have taken plenty of space for the construction of their buildings and laying out their streets, the Chinese have crowded together as closely as possible, and seemed desirous of putting the greatest number into the smallest area. It is so all over China from north to south. Even where land is of no particular value, as in the extreme north, the result is the same; and there are probably no people in the world that will exist in so small an area as the Chinese. Ventilation is not a necessity with them, and it seems to make little difference whether the air they breathe be pure or the reverse. In almost any other country in the world a system of such close crowding would breed all sorts of pestilence, but in China nobody appears to die from its effect.
A COOLIE IN THE STREETS OF SHANGHAI.
At the first opportunity our friends paid a visit to the Chinese part of Shanghai. They found a man at the gate of the city who was ready to serve them as guide, and so they engaged him without delay. He led them through one of the principal streets, which would have been only a narrow lane or alley in America; and they had an opportunity of studying the peculiarities of the people as they had studied in the Japanese cities the people of Japan. Here is what Frank wrote down concerning his first promenade in a Chinese city:
"We found the streets narrow and dirty compared with Japan, or with any city I ever saw in America. The shops are small, and the shopkeepers are not so polite as those of Tokio or other places in Japan. In one shop, when I told the guide to ask the man to show his goods, they had a long talk in Chinese, and the guide said that the man refused to show anything unless we should agree to buy. Of course we would not agree to this, and we did nothing more than to ask the price of something we could see in a show-case. He wanted about ten times the value of the article; and then we saw why it was he wanted us to agree beforehand to buy what we looked at. Every time we stopped at a shop the people gathered around us, and they were not half so polite as the Japanese under the same circumstances. They made remarks about us, which of course we did not understand; but from the way they laughed when the remarks were made, we could see that they were the reverse of complimentary.
"We went along the street, stopping now and then to look at something, and in a little while we came to a tea-house which stood in the middle of a pond of water. The house was rather pretty, and the balconies around it were nice, but you should have seen the water. It was covered with a green scum, such as you may see on a stagnant pool anywhere in the world, and the odor from it was anything but sweet. Fred said it was the same water that was let into the pool when they first made it. The guide says the house is a hundred years old, and I should think the water was quite as old as the house; or perhaps it is some second-hand water that they bought cheap, and if so it may be very ancient. We went into the house and sat down to take some tea. They gave us some tea-leaves, on which they poured hot water, and then covered the cup over for a minute or two. Each of us had his portion of tea separate from all the others. The tea was steeped in the cup, and when we wanted more we poured hot water on again. Then they brought little cakes and melon-seeds, with salt to eat with the seeds. Our guide took some of the seeds, and we ate one or two each to see how they tasted. I can't recommend them, and don't think there is any danger they will ever be introduced into the United States as a regular article of diet.
A TEA-HOUSE IN THE COUNTRY.