In
Addition To All The Brilliant Things Which Are Sold For Native Wear,
They Keep Large Stocks Of English And
German prints, which they sell
for rather less than the price asked for them at home, and for less
than
Half what the same goods are sold for at the English shops.
I am writing as if the Klings were predominant, but they are so only in
good looks and bright colors. Here again the Chinese, who number
forty-five thousand souls, are becoming commercially the most important
of the immigrant races, as they have long been numerically and
industrially. In Georgetown, besides selling their own and all sorts of
foreign goods at reasonable rates in small shops, they have large
mercantile houses, and, as elsewhere, are gradually gaining a
considerable control over the trade of the place. They also occupy
positions of trust in foreign houses, and if there were a strike among
them all business, not excepting that of the Post Office, would come to
a standstill. I went into the Mercantile Bank and found only Chinese
clerks, in the Post Office and only saw the same, and when I went to
the "P. and O." office to take my berth for Ceylon, it was still a
Chinaman, imperturbable, taciturn, independent, and irreproachably
clean, with whom I had to deal in "pidjun English." They are everywhere
the same, keen, quick-witted for chances, markedly self-interested,
purpose-like, thrifty, frugal, on the whole regarding honesty as the
best policy, independent in manner as in character, and without a trace
of "Oriental servility."
Georgetown, February 11th.
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