Chapter VII: Chinese Hankow (hankau)

It is a short step from the stately dulness of the bund to the crowds, colour, and noise of the native city—the “Million-peopled City,” the commercial centre of China, the greatest “distributing point” in the empire, the centre of the tea trade, which has fallen practically into Russian hands, and the greatest junk port in China.

The city wall is imposing, with a crenelated parapet, forts at the corners, and tunnelled under double-roofed gate-towers for heavily bossed gates, which are closed from sunset to sunrise. The unpaved roadways are usually foul quagmires owing to the perpetual passage of water carriers; where big dogs of the colour of dirty flannel, with pink patches of hairlessness, wrangle over offal. The streets are from ten to twelve feet wide. The houses are high. Matting or blue cotton is stretched across from opposite roofs in summer to moderate the sun’s heat and glare; so the traffic is carried on in a curiously tinted twilight, flecked now and then by a vivid ray gleaming on the red and gold of the long, hanging shopboards, lighting up their flare and glare, and giving them a singular picturesqueness.

The shape of the signboard and the different colours of the letters and face of the sign indicate different trades. The devising of a signboard is a very important matter; it may affect the luck of the shop. The name of the shopkeeper comes first, but in the case of a firm a word of good omen is substituted for the names, with a character signifying union. In both cases the top characters are followed by words of good omen, suggesting wealth, prosperity, and increase.

Gold platers of ornaments use salmon-coloured boards with green characters, druggists gilded boards frequently traced with many lines, and large standard tablets which remain in their sockets at night, and there are a few other combinations of colour used by different traders for the sake of easy distinction; and on some signboards the articles sold within are carefully pictured, but black and gold and carnation-red and gold largely predominate, the gold being used for the highly decorative characters, the writing of which is a lucrative trade. An old signboard is a valuable piece of property, and if the business is sold fetches a high price, like the goodwill of a long-established business at home. An old-established druggist’s sign has sold for as much as 3000 taels, about £450. In the winter, with the streets so decorated, with the overhead screens removed, the narrow strips of bright blue sky above, and the slant sunbeams touching gold and colour into marvellous brilliancy, Chinese cities, especially Canton and Foochow, have a nearly unrivalled picturesqueness.

Of the crowded and semi-impassable state of such streets no adequate idea can be given. Though on my first visit to the native city the British Consul was walking beside me with an attendant, and my bearers wore the red-plumed hats and well-known liveries of the Consulate, I was often brought to a halt, more or less ignominious, or was roughly shaken by the impact of the burden of some hurrying coolie, while the chairmen threaded their way with difficulty through thousands of busy, blue-clad Chinese, all shouting or yelling, my bearers adding to the din by the yelling in chorus which is supposed to clear a passage for a chair.

Among the meaner cotton-clad folk there were not wanting rich costumes of heavy brocaded silks and costly furs, worn probably by compradores and shopkeepers, who in the treaty ports are coming to vie with the highest officials in the splendid expensiveness of their dress. Occasionally yells louder than usual, and an attempt on the part of the crowd to pack itself to right and left, denoted the approach of a mandarin in a heavy, coloured and gilded official chair, with eight bearers, and many attendants in heavily plumed hats and red and black decorated dresses; the official himself sitting very erect within his chair, nearly always very pale and fat, with a thin moustache of long curved hairs, and that look of unutterable superciliousness and scorn which no Oriental of another race is equally successful in attaining.

The principal streets are flagged; the others are miry ways cut into deep ruts by wheelbarrows. “Ancient and fish-like smells” abound, and strong odours of garlic, putrid mustard, frizzling pork, and of the cooking of that most appetising dish, fish in a state of decomposition, drift out of the crowded eating-houses. If of the lower class, the culinary operations of restaurants are visible from the street, the utensils consisting of a row of pans set into brickwork, one or two iron pots, and a few earthenware dishes. Not a tipsy man or a man noisy with drink was to be seen. The Chinese have the virtue of using alcoholic liquor in great moderation, and almost altogether with their food.

Oil in earthenware jars, each large enough to contain a man, or freshly arrived in the paper-lined wicker baskets in which it is shipped from SZE CHUAN, denotes the oil shops; parcels of tea done up in oiled paper, built up to a great height with surprising regularity, slabs of brick tea, and sacks of sugar denote the grocers; while rolls of carefully packed silk, which one longs to investigate, proclaim the prince of retail shopkeepers, the dealer in silks.

There are bean cakes, melon seeds, dates, and drugs from the north and west, brought in by the great junks, with huge sweeps and Vandyke-brown sails, which crowd the Han. There are idol-makers with every sort and size of idol for home use and export, some of which find their way to Tibet and Turkestan, and receive perpetual worship in the homes and _gonpas_ of Ladak and Nubra; but none of them are treated with even scant respect until the ceremony takes place which invests them with the soul, represented by silver models of the “five viscera,” which are inserted at a door in the back. In the same quarter are dealers in the manifold paraphernalia of idol worship, in the tinsel, gold, and silver shoes burned in ancestor-worship, and in the very clever and in some cases life-size representations of elephants, tigers, horses, asses, cows, houses, carts, and many other things which are burned at funerals, adding to their great costliness, the sons of a merchant of average means often spending a thousand dollars on these mimicries.

But while there are dealers in everything which can minister to the luxury or necessities of the “Million-peopled City,” many of the shops give a piteous notion of the poverty of their customers. And everywhere in these crowded streets not a thing is sold, from a valuable diamond down to a straw shoe, without the deafening din of bargaining, no seller asking what he means to take, and no purchaser offering what he eventually means to give, the poorest buyers, to whom time is money, thinking an hour not misspent if they get a reduction of half a _cash_. As all the bargaining, except in the case of the great shops, is done at the shop fronts, and the bargainers are men, and Chinese men, specially of the lower orders, shout at the top of their voices, the Babel in a Chinese commercial street is inconceivable.

Enormous quantities of goods are everywhere waiting for transit, for Hankow is the greatest distributing centre in China, and the big steamers lying at the bund, or at anchor in the stream, and the thousand junks which crowd the waterways, seem barely sufficient for her gigantic commerce.

Among the ghastly curiosities of Hankow, as of all big Chinese cities, are the coffin shops, which usually herd together in special quarters and are apt to use portions of the streets for their timberyards. In them are seen the great cumbrous coffins, at times ten and even twelve feet in length, which Chinese custom demands, of all grades and prices, from highly polished lacquer with characters raised or incised in gold to the roughly put together shell in which the tired coolie takes his last sleep. Many of the more costly are ordered as filial gifts from children to parents, and from grandchildren to grandparents, and take their lugubrious place, set up on end, among the decorations of the lofty vestibule by which rich men’s houses are entered, and where they may rest for years. As a body may remain for months or years unburied, waiting for the decision of the geomancers as to an auspicious place and date for the interment, the coffins are very carefully constructed, and are either lacquered or treated with the celebrated Ningpo varnish, which is practically impermeable both to air and moisture.

The varnishers and lacquerers also herd together, and their trade, which is based on the _Rhus vernicifera_, is a very important one. The eating-houses—and from the number of them and the crowds which frequent them it might be supposed that nobody eats at home—the tobacconists, and the opium shops are scattered broadcast through the city, and each has its special _clientèle_.

Possibly there may have originally been a plan on which the Hankow streets were built, but it must have been outgrown for some centuries, and at present there is little suggestion of design; streets and alleys intersect each other in singular confusion, and only a practised hand can find any given point without irksome and delaying tergiversations. On the whole there is a tendency to arrive at the top of the river bank, where at low water (winter) a singular spectacle presents itself.

The Han, an opaque, yellow, rapid flood, 200 yards wide, lies from forty to sixty feet below. Its summer rises have carried away its banks on the Hankow side, and the dense mass of ill-looking houses which formerly stood, as is the wont of houses, on the ground, have been undermined, and are now propped up on what it would be flattery to call piles, for they are only slender and casual poles lashed together till the requisite length is gained, some leaning one way, some another, while the dwellings they upbear owe their continued existence to their involuntary mutual support, and to the pestilent habit which such ramshackle buildings have everywhere of hanging together. Thousands of the poorer class of coolies live in these precarious abodes, which, however, are less unsavoury than some, for they have fresh air below and innumerable holes in the floors for the easy disposal of refuse. In the summer of 1898 a great many of these dwellings were carried away with much loss of life.

Almost below these, on the mud slope above the river, are hundreds of mat huts, which have to be removed as the water rises. These are the miserable, peripatetic kennels of the very lowest dregs of the Chinese humanity of a large city. It is difficult to say how this large population lives. Doubtless the “odd jobs” which support it are mostly connected with junks, for below each house is moored some rotten leaky thing capable of floating, to which descent is made by iron spikes driven into the strongest of the piles. Here are the men who on these “odd jobs” perpetuate lives which are not worth living—the beggars, blind and seeing, with malformed and loathsome bodies; lepers with gaping sores and fingers and toes dropping off; the unsightly and unnatural who rely for their living on revolting the feelings of the passers-by; suffering women old and friendless, who prefer the free Bohemianism of beggary to the almshouse or refuge provided by Chinese charity; and hosts of others, the pariah _débris_ of Hankow. These wretched beings have one solace in life—the opium pipe—and they starve themselves to procure it.

Flights of stone stairs, one of them at least of magnificent width and appearance, always crowded with water carriers splashing the contents of their pails, with coolies carrying burdens, and with passengers hurrying to and from the ferries, lead from the bank to the water. Through every opening in the dilapidations the river traffic is seen.

At least three miles of junks[20] and other craft lie two, three, and four deep (to quote Lu Hew again), “like the teeth of a comb,” of all sizes, colours, and builds, having but two features in common: a prominent eye on each side of the bows and sterns considerably higher than the bows. Every maritime province of China is represented on that crowded waterway. One could never weary of the spectacle. It represents the extent, the enterprise, the industry, and the conservatism of China, and with an unrivalled variety and picturesqueness.

No junks interested me more than the great passage and salt boats, from seventy to one hundred tons burthen, with their lofty, many-windowed sterns like the galleys of Henry IV., their tall single masts and their big brown-umber sails of knitted cane or coarse canvas extended by an arrangement of bamboo, looking heavy enough to capsize a liner, and with hulls stained and oiled into the similitude of varnished pine, as coming from that Upper Yangtze for which I was bound. There were huge junks from the Fukien province, bringing to me recollections of Foochow and the Min river, piled high with bamboos and poles, and extended to a preposterous width by masses of the same lashed on both sides, the buoyancy of the cargo permitting as little as five inches of freeboard, gaily painted and decorated junks from Canton, with rows of carefully-tended plants on their high sterns, sombre craft from Tientsin and the north, junks from the Poyang and Tungting lakes, nondescript craft from inland streams and canals, alert tenders to the big junks, lorchas, some of them foreign-owned, doing homage to Chinese nautical experience by their Chinese rig, rafts, with their inhabitants, _sampans_ of all sizes, and huge junks heavily laden, crawling slowly down stream with their great sweeps, and the wild melancholy wail of the oarsmen—the Argonauts of Swatow or Ningpo.

People who think it witty to ridicule everything Chinese poke fun at these junks and their “pig-tailed,” long-coated crews, but the handling of them is masterly; in emergencies there is no confusion, every man obeys orders, and the ease with which these apparently ungainly craft tack, with their complicated arrangement of bamboos stiffening their vast sails, is absolutely beautiful.

The streets of Hankow, like those of most of the large trading cities, present a perpetual series of dramas. In them hundreds of people eat, sleep, bargain, gamble, cook, spin, and quarrel, while they are the sculleries, sinks, and sewers of a not inconsiderable portion of the population. They are the playgrounds of the children, if that can be called play which consists merely in rolling and tumbling over each other after the manner of puppies, the elder among them watching with greedy eyes the bargains of their seniors, eager cupidity and ofttimes precocious depravity written on faces which should be young.

Itinerant barbers pursue their essential calling, carrying their apparatus on their backs, and perambulating the streets with a curious cry. Their business is an enormous one in China, where hair is regarded as an enemy to be battled with. Once a week at least, the Chinese, however poor, must have the front and middle of his head smoothly shaven, or he looks like a convict, his face, I cannot say his beard, and his eyebrows, if he has any, trimmed, when he emerges from the barber’s hands a respectable member of the community. All these operations are conducted publicly under the eaves and gateways and at the street corners, with much shampooing, and dexterous manipulation of oddly shaped razors, which scrape rather than cut, the face of the client nevertheless wearing a look of serene contentment. The fees of the barber are an important item in the expenditure of a Chinese coolie.

Many other industries are carried on in the streets, and the Government is lenient to all encroachments, so long as a mandarin’s chair and retinue can pass unhindered. Government is represented in this _congeries_ of cities by _yamens_, with picturesque curved roofs, and gateways with a certain stateliness, and courtyards usually filled with petitioners and their agents, prisoners awaiting trial, _yamen_ runners, who, from three to six hundred or more in number, hang about official residences; while clerks and writers carrying papers and dressed in expensive brocaded silks move haughtily among the common herd. The inner court is concealed by a plastered brick screen, on which is emblazoned in brilliant colouring a bold representation of the dragon of the Dragon Empire.

Government in its military aspect is made apparent by a number of soldiers, usually in picturesque but stagey and unserviceable uniforms, in which blue and carnation-red predominate, who are encountered in the streets hanging round opium or tobacco shops, or gambling for _cash_, or attached slightly to some procession, or lounging at the city gates, or swaggering at the great entrance to the _yamen_, under the curse of abounding leisure. Their somewhat mediæval military equipments are supplemented with additions laughably grotesque, long fans attached to their girdles, and big paper umbrellas, occasionally gaudily decorated with mythical monsters, but oftener with proverbs or Confucian maxims.

Hurry, crowds, business, the absence of the feminine element, and noise, are common to all Chinese cities. Drums and gongs are beaten, cymbals are clashed, bells ring, muskets are fired, crackers are exploded everywhere, beggars wail, there are street cries innumerable, the din of bargaining tongues rises high, and the air is full of the discordant roar of a multitude.

In the centre of such surroundings, within hearing of the ceaseless din, and within smelling of the foul and ancient odour which pervades the city, the colony of English Wesleyan missionaries has placed itself in close contact with its medical missionary hospitals and dispensaries for men and women, its home and school for the blind, and its other missionary agencies, and not far off in a Chinese house, and living and dressing as a native, was one of the noblest and most sympathetic missionaries who ever sought the welfare of the Chinese, the Rev. David Hill, who died of typhus fever shortly after my first visit, genuinely mourned by those for whom he had sacrificed himself.