From Household Words.
OUR PHANTOM SHIP: CHINA.
Since a typhoon occurs not much oftener than once in about three years, it would be odd if we should sail immediately into one; but we are fairly in the China seas, which are the typhoon's own peculiar sporting ground, and it is desperately sultry, and those clouds are full of night and lightning, to say nothing of a fitful gale and angry sea. Look out! There is the coast of China. Now for a telescope to see the barren, dingy hills, with clay and granite peeping out, with a few miserable trees and stunted firs. That is our first sight of the flowery land, and we shall not get another yet, for the spray begins to blind us; it is quite as much as we can do to see each other. Now the wind howls and tears the water up, as if it would extract the great waves by their roots, like so many of old Ocean's teeth; but he kicks sadly at the operation. We are driven by the wild blast that snaps our voices short off at the lips and carries them away; no words are audible. We are among a mass of spars and men wild as the storm on drifting broken junks; a vessel founders in our sight, and we are cast, with dead and living, upon half a dozen wrecks entangled in a mass, upon the shore of Hong Kong;—ourselves safe, of course, for we have left at home whatever could be bruised upon the journey. How many houses have been blown away like hats, how many rivers have been driven back to swell canals and flood the fields, (whose harvest has been prematurely cropped on the first warning of the typhoon's intended visit,) we decline investigating. The evening sky is very wild, and we were all last night under the typhoon at sea; to-night we are in the new town of Victoria, and will be phantom bed-fellows to any Chinaman who has been eating pork for supper. The Chinese are very fond of pork, or any thing that causes oiliness in man. A lean man forfeits something in their estimation; for they say, "He must have foolishness; why has he wanted wisdom to eat more?"
Hong Kong was one of the upshots of our cannonading in the pure and holy Chinese war; and as for the new town of Victoria, we shall walk out of it at once, for we have not travelled all this way to look at Englishmen. The island itself is eight or ten miles long, and sometimes two or sometimes six miles broad. It is the model of a grand mountain region on a scale of two inches to the foot. There are crags, ravines, wild torrents, fern-covered hills; but the highest mountain does not rise two thousand feet.—We stand upon it now. Quite contrary to usual experience, we found, in coming up, the richest flowers at the greatest elevation. The heat and dryness of the air below, where the sun's rays are reflected from bare surfaces, is said to be oppressive, and perhaps the flowers down there want a pleasant shade. From our elevation we can see few patches of cultivation, but leaping down the rocks are many picturesque cascades. Hong Kong is christened from its own waters, its name signifying in Chinese "the Island of Fragrant Streams." There is a goat upon the nearest rock; but look beyond. On one side is the bay, with shipping, and behind us the broad expanse of the ocean; and before us is the sea, studded as far as our eyes can reach with mountainous islands, among which we must sail to reach Canton. Now we float onward in the Phantom, and among these islands our sharp eyes discover craft that have more hands on board than usually man an honest vessel. In the holes and corners of the islands pirates lurk to prey upon the traffic of Canton. We pass Macao on our way into the Canton river. Portugal was a nation of quality once, with a strong constitution, and in those days, once upon a time, wrecked Portuguese gained leave to dry a cargo on the Island of Macao. They erected sheds a little stronger than were necessary for that temporary purpose; in fact, they turned the accident to good account, and established here an infant settlement, which soon grew to maintain itself, and sent money home occasionally to assist its mother. Twice the Emperor of China offered to make Macao an emporium for European trade; the Portuguese preferred to be exclusive. So the settlement fell sick, and since the English made Hong Kong a place of active trade, very few people trouble themselves to inquire whether Macao be dead yet, or only dying. The Portuguese town has a mournful aspect, marked as it is by strong lines of character that indicate departed power.
Still sailing among islands, mountainous and barren, we soon reach the Bocca Tigris, or mouth of the Canton river, guarded now with very formidable forts. The Chinese, since their war with England, have been profiting by sore experience. If their gunnery be as completely mended as their fortifications, another war with them would not be quite so much like an attack of grown men upon children. The poor Chinese, in that war, were indefatigable in the endeavor to keep up appearances. Steam ships were scarcely worth attention—they had "plenty all the same inside:" and when the first encounter, near the spot on which we are now sailing, between junks and men-of-war, had exhibited the tragedy, in flesh and bone, of John Bull in a China-shop, the Chinese Symonds, at Ningpo, was ordered to build ships exactly like the British. He could not execute the order, and played, therefore, executioner upon himself. Cannon were next ordered, that should be large enough to destroy a ship at one burst. They were made, and the first monster tried, immediately burst and killed its three attendants; nobody could be induced to fire the others. One morning, a British fleet was very much surprised to see the shore look formidable with a line of cannon mouths. The telescope, which had formed no part of the Chinese calculations, discovered them to be a row of earthern pots. Forts, in the same way, often turned out to be dummies made of matting, with the portholes painted; and sometimes real cannon, mere three pounders, had their fronts turned to the sea, plugged with blocks of wood, cut and so painted as to resemble the mouths of thirty-two pounders shotted. However, we have passed real strong forts and veritable heavy cannon, to get through the Bocca Tigris. Nothing is barren now; the river widens, and looks like an inland sea; the flat land near the shores is richly cultivated; rice is there and upon the islands, all protected with embankments to admit or exclude the flood in its due season, or provided with wheels for raising water where the land is too high to be flooded in a simpler manner. The embankments, too, yield plantain crops. The water on each side is gay with water lilies, which are cultivated for their roots. Banyan and fig-trees, cypress, orange, water-pines, and weeping willows, grow beside the stream, with other trees; but China is not to be called a richly timbered country; most of its districts are deficient in large trees. There is the Whampoa Pagoda; there are more pagodas, towers, joss-houses; here are the European factories, and here are boats, boats, boats, literally, hundreds of thousands of boats—the sea-going junk, gorgeous with griffins, and with proverbs, and with painted eyes; the flower boat; boats of all shapes, and sizes, down to the barber's boat, which barely holds the barber and his razor. There is a city on the water, and the dwellers in these boats, who whether men or women, dive and swim so naturally that they may all be fishes, curiously claim their kindred with the earth. On every boat, a little soil and a few flowers, are as essential as the little joss-house and the little joss. Canals flow from the river through Canton; every where, over the mud, upon the water side are wooden houses built on piles. But here we will not go ashore; the suburbs of Canton are full of thieves, and little boys who shout fan-qui (foreign devil) after all barbarians, and we should not be welcome in the city; so we will not go where we shall not be welcome. After floating up and down the streets and lanes of water made between the boats upon the Canton river, pleased with the strange music, the gongs, and the incessant chattering of women, (Chinese women are pre-eminent as chatterers,) we sail away. We do not wait even till night to wonder at the scene by lantern light; but returning by the way we came, repass the rice fields, the water lilies, and the forts, the islands, and Macao, and Hong Kong, and have again before us the expanse of ocean. Canton lies within the tropic; sugar-cane grown in its vicinity yields brown sugar and candy; but our lump sugar is a luxury to which the Chinese have not yet attained. Canton lying within the tropic, we shall change our climate on the journey northward. An empire that engrosses nearly a tenth part of the globe, and includes the largest population gathered under any single government, will have many climates in its eighteen provinces. Now we are sailing swiftly northward by a barren rocky coast, with sometimes hills of sand, and sometimes cultivated patches, and, except for the pagodas on the highest elevations, we might fancy we were off the coast of Scotland.
Five ports are open to our trade upon the coast of China; one of these, Canton, we have merely looked at, and the next, Amoy, we pass unvisited in sailing up between the mainland and Formosa. Amoy produces the best Chinese sailors, and it is in this port that the native junks have most experience of foreign trade; it is a dirty, densely-peopled town, too distant from the tea and silk regions to be of prominent importance to the Europeans. As soon as we have passed through the Formosa channel, we direct our course towards the river Min, and steering safely among rocks and sand-banks, among which is a rock cleft into five pyramids, regarded with a sort of worship by the sailors, we float up the river to the third of the five cities, Foo-chow-foo. The river varies in width, sometimes a mile across, where it is flowing between plains, sometimes confined between the hills; a hilly country is about us, with some mountains nearly twice as high as those up which we clambered at Hong-Kong. We pass, after a few miles' sail, the little town and fort of Mingan; we sail among pagodas and temples, near which the priests plant dark spreading fig-trees, terraced hills, yielding earth-nuts and sweet potatoes; we see cultivation carried up some mountain sides beyond two thousand feet, and barren mountains, granite rocks, islands, and villages; here and there more wooded tracts than usually belong to a Chinese landscape, rills of water and cascades that tumble down into the Min. We have sailed up the river twenty miles, and here is Foo-chow-foo. We have met on our way a good many junks, having wood lashed to their sides; and here we see acres of wood (chiefly pine) afloat before the suburbs, for here wood is a main article of trade. We pass under the bridge Wanshow ("myriads of ages"), which connects the suburbs on each bank; it is a bridge of granite slabs, supported upon fifty pillars of strong masonry, the whole about two thousand feet in length. The suburbs happen just now to be flooded, and the large Tartar population here delights in mobbing a barbarian. This inhospitable character repels men, while the floods and rapids of the river and its tributaries, causes an uncertainty of transit, tend also to keep European traders out of Foo-chow-foo. True, the bohea tea hills are in the vicinity, but their bohea tea has not a first-rate character, and the great seat of the tea trade is yet farther north. The city walls are eight or nine miles in circumference; but we will not enter their gates for all Chinese cities have a close resemblance to each other; it is enough to visit one, and we can do better than visit this. We sail back to the sea again, and there resume our northward voyage. We have seen part of the mountainous or hilly half of China; farther north, between the two great rivers, and beyond them to the famous Wall, is a great plain studded in parts with lakes or swamps, and very fertile.
Far westward, we might journey to the high central table-land of Asia, where there are extensive levels; but the seaward provinces are the most fertile; and as for the Chinese themselves, they are in all places very much alike—in body as in character. But sailing in our ship, and talking of those plains, we may naturally recall to our minds those ancient days when the Chinese, civilised then as now, guided their chariots across a pathless level on the land by the same instrument that guides our ship across a pathless level on the water.
The coast by which we sail is studded with islands, and to reach Ningpo, the fourth of the five ports, we pass between the mainland and the island of Chusan. The water here is quite hemmed in with islands forming the Chusan Archipelago. Chusan is like a piece of the Scotch Highlands, twenty miles long, and ten or twelve broad, with rich vegetation added. Forty miles' sail from Chusan brings us to Ningpo. Amongst the numerous islands past which we have floated, we should have found, on many, characters not quite Chinese. One island, visited for water by one of our ships, was said to be an Eden for its innocence. Crime was unknown among the islanders: and at a grave look or a slight tap with a fan, the wrong-doer invariably desisted from his evil course. The simplicity of the natives here consisted in the fact, that they expected credit for the character they gave themselves. On another island, the natives entertained snug notions of a warm bed in the winter. Their bed was a stone trough; in winter they spread at the bottom of this trough hot embers, and over these a large stone, over that their bedding, and then tucked themselves comfortably in.
Ningpo, with its bridge of boats and Chinese shipping and pagodas, has a picturesque appearance from the river. It is large, populous, and wealthy; a place to which the merchant may retire to spend his gains, more than a port for active and hard working commerce. That is the reason why we will not land at Ningpo. Where, then, shall we land? If you have no objection, at Shangae, the fifth and most important, although not the largest, of these ports. But sea life is monotonous, and therefore we will take five minutes' diversion ashore, after we have sailed some twenty miles up this canal. Here we will land under an avenue of pines, and walk up to a Buddhist temple. We are in the centre of the green-tea district.
The priests, belonging, for a wonder, to a simple-minded class, receive us, of course hospitably. The stranger is at all times welcome to a lodging, and to his portion of the Buddhist vegetable dinner. These priests are like some of our monks in mendicancy charity, and superstition. In the pagodas they always have a meal prepared for the arrival of a hungry traveller. But hungry we are not; and we came hither to see the tea-plantations; these we now seek out. They are small farms upon the lower slopes of hills; the soil is rich; it must be rich, or the tea-plant would not long endure the frequent stripping of its leaves, which usage does of course sooner or later kill it. Each plant is at a distance of about four feet from its neighbors, and the plantations look like little shrubberies. The small proprietors inhabit wretched-looking cabins, in which each of them has fixed a flue and coppers for the drying of his tea. In the appearance of the people there is nothing wretched; old men sit at their doors like patriarchs, expecting and receiving reverence; young men, balancing bales across their shoulders, travel out, and some return with strings of copper money; the chief tea-harvest is over, and the merchants have come down now to the little inns about the district, that each husbandman may offer them his produce. There are three tea-making seasons. The first is in the middle of April, just before the rains, when the first leaves of spring are plucked; these make the choicest tea, but their removal tries the vigor of the plant. Then come the rains; the tea-plant pushes out new leaves, and already in May the plantation is again dark with foliage; that is the season of the second, the great gathering. A later gathering of coarse leaves yields an inferior tea, scarcely worth exporting. It should be understood that although black and green tea are both made from the same kind of leaf, there really are two tea-plants. The plant cultivated at Canton for black tea, and known in our gardens as Thea Bohea, differs from the Thea viridis, which yields the harvest here. The Canton plant, however, is not cultivated in the North; on the Bohea hills themselves, speaking botanically, there grows no Bohea tea; the plant there, also, is the Thea viridis. The difference between our green and black tea is produced entirely in the making. Green tea is more quickly and lightly dried, so that it contains more of the virtues of the leaf. Black tea is dried more slowly; exposed, while moist, on mats, when it ferments a little, and then subjected in drying to a greater heat, which makes it blacker in its color. The bright bloom on our green tea is added with a dye, to suit the gross taste of barbarians. The black tea will keep better, being better dried. There is a kind of tea called Hyson Pekoe made from the first young buds which keeps ill, being very little fired, but when good it is extremely costly. As for our names of teas,—of the first delicate harvest, the black tea is called Pekoe, and the green, Young Hyson; Hyson being the corruption of Chinese words, that mean "flourishing spring." The produce of the main or second harvest yields, in green tea, Hyson; out of which are picked the leaves that prove to be best rolled for Gunpowder, or as the Chinese call it, pearl-tea. Souchong ("small or scarce sort") is the best black tea of the second crop, followed by Congou (koong-foo, "assiduity"). Twankay is imported largely, a green tea from older leaves, which European retailers employ for mixing with the finer kinds. Bohea, named from the hills we talked of, is the lowest quality of black tea, though good Bohea is better than a middling quality of Congou. The botanical Thea Bohea comes into our pots, with refuse Congou, as Canton Bohea. At Canton, however, Young Hyson and Gunpowder are manufactured out of these leaves, chopped and painted; and this branch of the fine arts is carried on extensively in Chinese manufactories established there. As the tea-merchants go out to collect their produce of the little farmers; so the mercers in the Nankeen districts leave their cities for the purchase, in the same way, of home-woven cloth. It is the same in the silk districts. If we look now into a larger Chinese farm on our way back to the Phantom, we shall find the tenants on a larger scale supplying their own wants, and making profit of the surplus. On such a farm we shall find also familiar friends, fowls, ducks, geese, pigs, goats, and dogs, bullocks, and buffaloes; indoors there will be a best parlor in the shape of a Hall of Ancestors, containing household gods and an ancestral picture, before which is a table or altar with its offerings. There is the head of the family, who built a room for each son as he married, and left each son to add other rooms as they were necessary, till a colony arose under the common roof about the common hall, in which rules, as a high priest and patriarch, the living ancestor. Respect for the past is the whole essence of Chinese religion and morality. The oldest emperors were fountain-heads of wisdom, and he who imitates the oldest doctrine is the wisest man. The tombs of ancestors are visited with pious care; respect and worship is their due. This had at all times been the Chinese principle, to which Confucius added the influence of a good man's support. No nation has been trained into this feeling so completely as the Chinese, and as long as they saw nothing beyond themselves, and were taught to look down upon barbarians out of the heights of their own ignorance concerning them, they were contented to stand still. But the Chinese are a people sharply stimulated by the love of gain; they despised what they had not seen, yet it is evident that they have not been slow to profit by experience of European arts. An emigrant Chinese became acquainted with a Prussian blue manufactory, secretly observed the process of the manufacture, took his secret home, and China now makes at home all the Prussian blue which was before imported. The Chinese emigrant is active, shrewd. In Batavia he ko-toos to the Dutch, and lets his tail down dutifully. In Singapore he readily assumes a freer spirit, keeps his tail curled, and walks upright among the Englishmen.