The bearers set me down at the gate of the Yamun among the festering
wretches dragging the heavy weights, the filthy and noisy beggars, the
gamblers, the fortune-tellers, the messengers of justice, and the
countless hangers-on of the prison and judgment-seat of the Naam-Hoi
magistrate, and passing through a part of the courtyard, and down a
short, narrow passage, enclosed by a door of rough wooden uprights,
above which is a tiger's head, with staring eyes and extended jaws, we
reached the inner entrance, close to which is a much blackened altar of
incense foul with the ashes of innumerable joss-sticks, and above it an
equally blackened and much worn figure of a tiger in granite. To this
beast, which is regarded by the Chinese as possessing virtue, and is
the tutelary guardian of Chinese prisons, the jailers offer incense and
worship night and day, with the object of securing its aid and
vigilance on their behalf.
Close to the altar were the jailers' rooms, dark, dirty, and
inconceivably forlorn. Two of the jailers were lying on their beds
smoking opium. There we met the head jailer, of all Chinamen that I
have seen the most repulsive in appearance, manner, and dress; for his
long costume of frayed and patched brown silk looked as if it had not
been taken off for a year; the lean, brown hands which clutched the
prison keys with an instinctive grip were dirty, and the nails long and
hooked like claws, and the face, worse, I thought, than that of any of
the criminal horde, and scored with lines of grip and greed, was
saturated with opium smoke.
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