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.
The view from that corner of the wall (to my thinking) is beautiful,
the flaming red pagoda with its many roofs; the singularly picturesque
ancient gray wall, all ups and downs, watch-towers, and strongholds,
the Tartar city below, with the "flowery pagoda," the mosques, the
bright foliage of the banyan, and the feathery grace of the bamboo;
outside the wall the White-Cloud hills, and nearer ranges burrowed
everywhere for the dead, their red and pink and orange hues harmonized
by a thin blue veil, softening without obscuring, all lying in the
glory of the tropic winter noon-light without heat, color without
glare. Vanish all memories of grays and pale greens before this
vividness, this wealth of light and color! Color is at once music and
vitality, and after long deprivation I revel in it. This wall is a fine
old structure, about twenty feet wide and as many high, with a broad
pavement on which to walk, and a high platform on the outside, with a
battlement pierced for marksmen.
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