These
Shops, Some Of Which Are Very Large, Are Nearly Dark.
They deal mainly
in Chinese goods and favorite Chinese articles of food, fireworks,
mining tools, and kerosene oil.
In one shop twenty "assistants," with
only their loose cotton trousers on, were sitting at round tables
having a meal - not their ordinary diet, I should think, for they had
seventeen different sorts of soups and stews, some of them abominations
to our thinking.
We visited the little joss-house, very gaudily decorated, the main
feature of the decorations being two enormous red silk umbrellas,
exquisitely embroidered in gold and silks. The crowds in this village
remind me of Canton, but the Chinese look anything but picturesque
here, for none of them - or at all events, only their "Capitans" - wear
the black satin skull cap; and their shaven heads, with the small patch
of hair which goes into the composition of the pigtail, look very ugly.
The pig-tail certainly begins with this lock of hair, but the greater
part of it is made up of silk or cotton thread plaited in with the
hair, and blue or red strands of silk in a pigtail indicate mourning or
rejoicing. None of the Chinese here wear the beautiful long robes used
by their compatriots in China and Japan. The rich wear a white,
shirt-like garment of embroidered silk crepe over their trousers and
petticoat, and the poorer only loose blue or brown cotton trousers, so
that one is always being reminded of the excessive leanness of their
forms.
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