That for which man offers up his blood or his property, must be more valuable than they. A good man does not fight with half the courage for his own life that he shows in the protection of another's. The mother, who will hazard nothing for herself, will hazard all in the defence of her child; in short, only for the nobility within us—only for virtue—will man open his veins and offer up his spirit; but this nobility—this virtue—presents different phases: with the Christian martyr, it is faith; with the savage, it is honor; with the republican, it is liberty.—Analect.
SHANGHAI: ITS STREETS, SHOPS, AND PEOPLE.
China has always been looked upon by Europeans and described in both ancient and modern works as 'the unchanging country,' and it is a common fallacy that the China of to-day is exactly what it was a thousand years ago; that foreign trade and intercourse have had and can have no effect upon the manners or ideas of the people, and that the descriptions we read of Chinese towns and their inhabitants, written twenty years ago, would answer for the same places to-day. In a measure this is true, but it is not true of the cities which have been opened to foreign trade, or in fact of any of the Chinese cities where foreigners have been settled since the war of 1857 and treaties of 1858.
Since that time the progress of Shanghai, Foo-Chow, Amoy, and Hong-Kong (which last, however, is purely a British colony) has been amazing, and men who visited China ten years ago would not recognize these places. Indeed, it is not unlikely, with the rapid extension of Chinese trade, and the removal of the prejudices of the people, that the history of Chinese cities, like those of the Western States and California, will have to be rewritten every ten years to be at all correct.
This is peculiarly the case in respect to Shanghai, which, from an insignificant place, almost unknown in the western world, has sprung up to an importance in trade surpassing that of any city on the China coast. It has, from its proximity to the tea district, and easy communication with the vast country watered by the Yang-tze river, taken almost without an effort the great trade that once centred in Canton, and every year shows a greater amount of tonnage in the Woosung river, and larger exports of tea, silk, and cotton.
Approaching the entrance to the Woosung river from the Pacific, the waters of the Yang-tze are plainly discernible at sixty to seventy miles from its mouth, and when near the point where the ship's head is turned from the broad current of the great river into that of the Woosung, a thick, yellow mud rolls out with the tide, and discolors the water as far as the eye can reach. It is like the waters of the Nile or the Mississippi, turbulent in the great tideways, and heavy with the coloring matter of the soil it has washed for thousands of miles. It is evident that we are approaching a great commercial city, although for miles we can see only a low coast, well cultivated, but without signs of a town. The number of ships and steamers passing in and out on a fine day would remind a New Yorker of the fleet that is always beating through the Narrows, or is to be seen from the heights of Neversink. In the three hours it took us to run from the light-ship to the anchorage at Woosung, no less than seven large steamers passed us, outward bound.
The tide in the Yang-tze and its branch, the Woosung, runs with tremendous force, having a rise and fall of eighteen feet at spring tides, and few ships are able to proceed beyond Woosung with a single tide, Shanghai lying twelve miles above. They anchor among a fleet of native junks from the trading places on the Yang-tze, bound to the same port, and awaiting a change of tide, which the Chinese sailors celebrate by a great hubbub on the poops of their unwieldy-looking vessels, with tom-toms and other instruments of the same nature. This fleet of junks and sampans is a curious sight to the stranger approaching the China coast for the first time, and, with a ramble through the filthy village of Woosung, occupies the time which the tides compel him to spend there.
The junks give proof that if there have been great changes in the trade of China and in the appearance of the cities where foreigners have established themselves, there certainly has been none in the mode of ship building, and in the thousand curious and uncouth ways of working, acting, and living which have been for generations handed down from father to son, and which are at the present time in no ways altered from what they were a thousand years ago. No people in the world are slower in admitting the ideas of foreign nations, or in taking advantage of the most obvious improvements daily before their eyes; and, although the improvements introduced by English and Americans in steamers and vessels adapted for the navigation of their rivers are so far acknowledged by them as to lead to the discontinuance of junk building to a marked extent, yet the vessels they now build are of the same uncouth, clumsy, and expensive shape as the first they ever put on the stocks.
Their anchors are still of wood, and occupy the greater part of the vessel before the foremast; and, instead of cables, they still have immense coils of rough rope like a hair lariat. The sails are still of bamboo mats, although occasionally a piece of good American or English duck is to be seen, stretched on bamboos in the style of the old-fashioned square sail, and once, on the river Min, we saw a native pilot-boat rigged with the regular fore-and-aft cut, her sails having evidently been fashioned by a foreign hand.