Mention Is Made Also In The Altan
Tobchi Of A Cane Tent In Shangtu." (Palladius, P. 27.) - H. C.]
[Illustration: Pavilion at Yuen-ming-Yuen.]
Marco might well say of the bamboo that "it serves also a great variety of
other purposes." An intelligent native of Arakan who accompanied me in
wanderings on duty in the forests of the Burmese frontier in the beginning
of 1853, and who used to ask many questions about Europe, seemed able to
apprehend almost everything except the possibility of existence in a
country without bamboos! "When I speak of bamboo huts, I mean to say that
posts and walls, wall-plates and rafters, floor and thatch, and the withes
that bind them, are all of bamboo. In fact, it might almost be said that
among the Indo-Chinese nations the staff of life is a bamboo!
Scaffolding and ladders, landing-jetties, fishing apparatus, irrigation
wheels and scoops, oars, masts, and yards [and in China, sails, cables,
and caulking, asparagus, medicine, and works of fantastic art], spears and
arrows, hats and helmets, bow, bowstring and quiver, oil-cans,
water-stoups and cooking-pots, pipe-sticks [tinder and means of producing
fire], conduits, clothes-boxes, pawn-boxes, dinner-trays, pickles,
preserves, and melodious musical instruments, torches, footballs, cordage,
bellows, mats, paper; these are but a few of the articles that are made
from the bamboo;" and in China, to sum up the whole, as Barrow observes, it
maintains order throughout the Empire! (Ava Mission, p. 153; and see also
Wallace, Ind.
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