"Marriage Boats," Green And Gold,
With Much Wood Carving And Flags, And Auspicious Emblems Of All Kinds;
River Junks, With
Their large eyes and carved and castellated sterns
lying moored in treble rows; duck boats, with their noisy inmates;
florists'
Boats, with platforms of growing plants for sale; two-storied
boats or barges, with glass sides, floating hotels, in which evening
entertainments are given with much light and noise; restaurant boats,
much gilded, from which proceeds an incessant beating of gongs; washing
boats, market boats, floating shops, which supply the floating
population with all marketable commodities; country boats of fantastic
form coming down on every wind and tide; and, queerest of all, "slipper
boats," looking absurdly like big shoes, which are propelled in and out
among all the heavier craft by standing in the stern.
One of the most marvelous features of Canton is the city of house
boats, floating and stationary, in which about a quarter of a million
people live, and it may with truth be added are born and die. This
population is quite distinct in race from the land population of
Canton, which looks down upon it as a pariah and alien caste. These
house boats, some of which have a single bamboo circular roof, others
two roofs of different heights, and which include several thousand of
the marvelous "slipper boats," lie in tiers along the river sides, and
packed closely stem and stern along the canals, forming bustling and
picturesque water streets. Many of the boats moored on the canals are
floating shops, and do a brisk trade, one end of the boat being the
shop, the other the dwelling-house. As the "slipper boats" are only
from fifteen to twenty feet long, it may be imagined, as their breadth
is strictly proportionate, that the accommodation for a family is
rather circumscribed, yet such a boat is not only the home of a married
pair and their children, but of the eldest son with his wife and
children, and not unfrequently of grandparents also! The bamboo roofs
slide in a sort of telescope fashion, and the whole interior space can
be inclosed and divided. The bow of the boat, whether large or small,
is always the family joss house; and the water is starred at night with
the dull, melancholy glimmer, fainter, though redder than a glow-worm's
light, of thousands of burning joss-sticks, making the air heavy with
the odor of incense. Unlike the houses of the poor on shore, the house
boats are models of cleanliness, and space is utilized and economized
by adaptations more ingenious than those of a tiny yacht. These boats,
which form neat rooms with matted seats by day, turn into beds at
night, and the children have separate "rooms." The men go on shore
during the day and do laborer's work, but the women seldom land, are
devoted to "housewifely" duties, and besides are to be seen at all
hours of day and night flying over the water, plying for hire at the
landings, and ferrying goods and passengers, as strong as men, and
clean, comely, and pleasant-looking; one at the stern and one at the
bow, sending the floating home along with skilled and sturdy strokes.
They are splendid boat-women, and not vociferous. These women don't
bandage their feet.
Their dress is dark brown or blue cotton, and consists of wide trousers
and a short, loose, sleeved upper garment up to the throat. The feet
are big and bare, the hair is neat and drawn back from the face into a
stiff roll or chignon, and they all wear jade-stone earrings. You see a
woman cooking or sewing in most housewifely style in one of these
"slipper boats;" but if you hail it, she is plying the heavy oar in one
moment, and as likely as not with a wise-looking baby on her back,
supported by a square piece of scarlet cloth embroidered in gold and
blue silks. Not one of this river population has yet received
Christianity. Very little indeed is known about them and their
customs, but it is said that their morals are low, and that when
infanticide was less discouraged than it is now, the river was the
convenient grave of many of their newly-born female children. I spent
most of one afternoon alone in one of these boats, diving into all
canals and traversing water streets, hanging on to junks and "passage
boats," and enjoying the variety of river life to the full.
On another day I was carried eighteen miles through Canton on a chair
by four coolies, Mr. Smith and his brother walking the whole
distance - a great testimony to the invigorating influences of the
winter climate. As to locomotion, one must either walk or be carried. A
human being is not a heavy weight for the coolies, but it is
distressing to see that the shoulders of very many of them are
suffering from bony tumors, arising from the pressure of the poles. We
lunched in the open air upon a stone table under a banyan-tree at the
"Five-storied Pagoda" which forms the north-east corner of the great
wall of Canton, from which we looked down upon the singular vestiges of
the nearly forgotten Tartar conquest, the walled inner city of the
Tartar conquerors, containing the Tartar garrison, the Yamun (official
residence) of the Tartar governor, the houses of the foreign consuls,
and the unmixed Tartar population. The streets of this foreign kernel
of Canton are narrow and dirty, with mean, low houses with tiled roofs
nearly flat, and small courtyards, more like the houses of Western than
Eastern Asia. These Tartars do not differ much in physiognomy from the
Chinese. They are somewhat uglier, their stature is shorter, and the
women always wear three rings in their ears. I saw more women in a
single street in one day in the Tartar city than I have seen altogether
in the rest of Canton.
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