CHAPTER III.

SINAIC BRANCH.

The nations belonging to the Sinaic branch (from the Latin _Sinae_, Chinese) have not the features of the Yellow Race so well defined as those belonging to the Mongolian branch. Their nose is less flattened, their figures are better, and they are taller. They early acquired rather a high degree of civilization, but they have since remained stationary, and their culture, formerly one of the most advanced in the world, is now very second rate compared to the progress made by the inhabitants of Europe and America. Chemical and mechanical arts were early practised and carried very far by nations belonging to the Sinaic branch. Living under a despotic government, and accustomed to abjectly cringe to those in authority, this race developed a peculiar taste for ceremony and etiquette. Their language is monosyllabic, their writing is hieroglyphic, and these facts perhaps account for the scant progress made by their civilization in modern times.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 113.--INDO-CHINESE OF STUNG TRENG.]

The Sinaic branch comprises the Chinese, the j.a.panese, and the Indo-Chinese families.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 114.--INDO-CHINESE OF LAOS.]

THE CHINESE FAMILY.

The Chinese, amongst whom, out of all the Yellow Race, civilization was the first to develop itself, have the following characteristic features.

Width and flatness in the subocular part of the face, prominent cheek bones, and obliquely set eyes. Their features as a whole partake of the type of the Mongol race: that is to say, they have a broad coa.r.s.e face, high cheek bones, heavy jaws, a flat bridge to their nose, wide nostrils, obliquely set eyes, straight and plentiful hair, of a brownish black colour with a red tint in it, thick eyebrows, scanty beards, and a yellowish red complexion.

They const.i.tute the princ.i.p.al population of the vast empire of China, and extend even further. Many have settled in Indo-China, in the islands of the Straits, and in the Philippine islands. China in four thousand years has been governed by twenty-eight dynasties. The emperor is merely an ornamental wheel in the mechanism of the Chinese government, the councillors possessing the real power. Centralization plays a powerful part in the administrative organization of the country. The emperor's authority is founded on a secular and patriarchal respect, boundless in its influence. Veneration for old age is a law of the state. Infirm old men, too poor to hire litters, are often seen in the streets of Pekin, seated in little hand carriages, dragged about by their grandchildren.

As they pa.s.s, the young people about receive them respectfully, and leave off for the moment their play or their work. The government encourages these feelings by giving yellow dresses to very old men. This is the highest mark of distinction a private individual can receive, for yellow is the colour reserved for the members of the imperial family.

Their respect for their ancestors is also carried very far by the Chinese. They practise a kind of family worship in their honour.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 115.--A YOUNG CHINESE.]

There are many different creeds in China. The Buddhist faith, so widely spread in Asia, is the most general; but the higher cla.s.ses follow the precepts of Confucius. But great religious toleration exists in the Celestial Empire. The men of the higher cla.s.ses affect a well founded contempt for the external forms of worship, and the ma.s.s of the people do not attach much importance to them. Many widely differing creeds are seen side by side throughout the whole empire.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 116.--CHINESE SHOPKEEPER.]

The Buddhist priests are called Bonzes.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 117.--CHINESE LADY.]

The position of women is in China a humble one. She is considered inferior to man, and her birth is often regarded as a misfortune. The young girl lives shut up in her father's house, she takes her meals alone, she fulfils the duties of a servant and is considered one. Her calling is merely to ply the needle and to prepare the food. A woman is her father's, her brother's, or her husband's property. A young girl is given in marriage without being consulted, without being made acquainted with her future husband, and often even in ignorance of his name.

The wealthy Chinese shut their wives up in the women's apartments. When their lords and masters allow them to pay one another visits, or to go and see their parents, they go out in hermetically closed litters. They live in a wing of the building, reserved for their use, where no one can see them.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 118.--CHINESE WOMAN.]

It is otherwise amongst the poorer cla.s.ses. The women go out of doors with their face uncovered; but they pay dearly for this privilege, for they are nothing but the beasts of burden of their husbands. They age very rapidly.

Polygamy exists in China, but only on sufferance. A man of rank may have several wives, but the first one only is the legitimate one. Widows are not allowed to remarry. Betrothals often take place before the future husband and wife have reached the age of p.u.b.erty. A betrothed girl who loses her betrothed can never marry another.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 119.--MANDARIN'S DAUGHTER.]

A marriage ceremony at Pekin takes place as follows. The bride goes in great state to the dwelling of the bridegroom, who receives her on the threshold. She is dressed in garments embroidered with gold and silver.

Her long black tresses are covered with precious stones and artificial flowers. Her face is painted, her lips are reddened, her eyebrows are blackened, and her clothes are drenched with musk. Many of the Chinese women have the complexion and the good looks of Creoles; a tiny well shaped hand, pretty teeth, splendid black hair, a slender supple figure, and obliquely set eyes with a piquancy of expression that lends them a peculiar charm. The drawback to their appearance is their lavish use of paint, and their small crippled feet.

The Tartar and Chinese ladies composing the court of the Empress, as well as the wives of the officials residing in the capital, do nothing to distort their feet, except to wear the theatrical buskin, in which it is very difficult to walk. But a Chinese woman of good middle cla.s.s family would think herself disgraced, and would have a difficulty in getting a husband, unless she had crippled her feet. This is what is done to give them a pleasing appearance. The feet of little girls of six years of age are tightly compressed with oiled bandages; the big toe is bent under the other four, which are themselves folded down under the sole of the foot. These bandages are drawn tighter every month. When the girl has grown up, her foot presents the appearance of a closed fist.

Women with their feet mutilated in this manner walk with great difficulty. They move about with a kind of skip, stretching out their arms to keep their equilibrium.

Another of their conventional points of beauty is to wear their finger-nails very long. For fear of breaking them they cover them with little silver sheaths, which they also use as ear-picks.

A quant.i.ty of toilet accessories gives a peculiar appearance to the costume of the inhabitants of the Celestial Empire. Fans, parasols, pipes, snuff-boxes, tobacco-pouches, spectacle cases, and purses, are all hung at the girdle by silken strings. The use of the fan is common to both s.e.xes, of all cla.s.ses.

The _kang_, at once a bed, a sofa, and a chair; some mats stretched upon the floor; and a few chairs or stools with cushions on them, are to be found in every room of a Chinese house. The interior of these dwellings is a true citadel of sloth. The Chinaman squatted on his mat, dallying with his fan and smoking his pipe, is amused at the European who actually takes the trouble to use his legs.

To give a more exact idea of domestic Chinese life, we will give a few extracts from the interesting travels of M. de Bourboulon, a French consul in China, travels edited by M. Poussielgue, and published in the "Tour du Monde" in 1864.

"A Chinese palace," says M. Poussielgue, "is thus laid out: more than half the site is taken up with alleys, courts, and gardens crowded with rock-work, rustic bridges, fishponds full of gold fish, aviaries stocked with peac.o.c.ks, golden pheasants, and partridges from Pe-tche-li, and especially a quant.i.ty of painted and varnished porcelain and earthenware jars, containing miniature trees, vines, jessamines, creepers and flowers of all kinds. The princ.i.p.al room on the ground floor opens on to the garden; a piece of open trellis work separates it from the sleeping apartment. The ground floor also comprises the dining-room, the kitchen, and sometimes a bath-room. When there is a second story, called _leou_, it contains beds and lumber rooms. The entrance-hall is invariably sacred to the ancestors and to the guardian spirits of the family. In every room the _kang_, which serves as a bed, a sofa, or a chair; and thick mats, laid upon the floor, are to be met with. The actual furniture is scanty; a few chairs and stools made of hard wood, with cushions placed on them; a small table in red lacquer work; an incense burner; some gilt or enamelled bronze candlesticks; flower stands and baskets of flowers; some pictures drawn on rice paper; and finally the inevitable tablet inscribed with some moral apothegm, or a dedication to the ancestors of the master of the house. There are no regular windows; a few square openings, pierced in the side wall where the rooms open on a court or garden, or inserted beneath the double beams supporting the roof where the apartment might be overlooked from the street or from the neighbouring houses, allow a dim light to penetrate through the cross laths of their wooden lattices which serve as fixed blinds to them (figs. 120 and 121).

"The wealthy, abandoning themselves to a luxurious idleness, spend half their existence in these secluded chambers; it is almost impossible for a European to procure admittance to them, for communicative as the Chinese are in business, at festivals, or at receptions, they are extremely reserved on all points concerning their domestic life.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 120.--CHINESE BOUDOIR.]

"Physical idleness is carried to an enormous extent in China; it is considered ill bred to take walks, and to use the limbs. Nothing surprises the natives more than the perpetual craving for exercise that characterizes Europeans. Squatted on their hams, they light their pipe, toy with their fans, and jeer at the European pa.s.sers-by, whose firm measured footsteps carry them up and down the street. It is necessary to make excuses for coming neither on horseback nor in a palanquin, when paying an official visit, for to do so on foot is a sign of but little respect for the person visited.

"The palanquin is in constant use. Large depots of these, where one can always be hired at a moment's notice, are established in Peking. A palanquin carried by six coolies costs about a piastre per day; with four coolies half a piastre; with only two, a hundred sapecas. The French Legation keeps twenty-four palanquin porters, dressed in blue tunics with tricolor collars and facings. Palanquins are usually open both in front and behind; they have a small window at the side, and a cross plank on which the pa.s.sengers sit.

"The rage for gambling is one of the curses of China; a curse that has begotten a thousand others, in all ranks and at all ages. One meets in the streets of Peking a quant.i.ty of little itinerant gaming stalls; sometimes consisting of a set of dice in a bra.s.s cup on a stand, sometimes a lottery of little sticks marked with numbers, shaken up by the croupier in a tin tube. We saw crowds round these sharpers, and the pa.s.sing workman, yielding to the irresistible temptation, loses in an hour his day's hard earnings. The coolies attached to the French army used to thus lose their month's pay the day after they got it; some of them having pledged their clothes to the croupiers, who do a little p.a.w.nbroking into the bargain, had to make their escape amid the jeers of the mob, and used to return to camp with nothing on but a pair of drawers.

"c.o.c.k and quail fighting are still practised as an excuse for gambling by the Chinese, who stake large sums on the result. The wealthy and the mercantile cla.s.ses are just as inveterate gamesters as the common people; they collect in the tea-houses and spend day and night in playing at cards, at dice, at dominos, and at draughts. Their cards, about five inches long, are very narrow, and are a good deal like ours, with figures and pips of different colours marked on them. The game most in vogue seems to be a kind of cribbage. Their draughtsmen are square, and the divisions of the board are round. Their dominos are flat, with red and blue marks. They play at draughts also with dice, a sort of backgammon. Professional gamblers prefer dice to any other game, as it is the most gambling of all. When they have lost all their money, they stake their fields, their house, their children, their wives, and, as a last resort, themselves when they have nothing else left, and their antagonist agrees to let them make such a final stake. A shopkeeper of Tien-tsin, who was minus two fingers of his left hand, had lost them over the dice box. The women and children are fond of playing at shuttlec.o.c.k; it is their favourite game, and they are very expert at it.

The shuttlec.o.c.k is made of a piece of leather rolled into a ball, with one or two metal rings round it to steady it; three long feathers are stuck into holes in these rings. The shuttlec.o.c.k is kept up with the soles of their slippers, which they use instead of battledores; it is very seldom allowed to fall.

"Gambling, which paralyzes labour, is one of the permanent causes of their pauperism, but there is another, still more disastrous--dissipation. The thin varnish of decency and restraint with which Chinese society is covered, conceals a widespread corruption.

Public morality is only a mask worn above a deep depravity surpa.s.sing all that is told in ancient history, all that is known of the dissipated habits of the Persians and Hindoos of our own day.

"Drunkenness, as understood in Europe, is one of the least of their vices. The use of grape wine was forbidden, centuries ago, by some of their emperors, who tore up all the vine trees in China. This interdiction having been taken off under the Manchu dynasty, grapes are grown for the use of the table, but the only wine that is drunk is rice wine or _samchow_. A spirit as strong as our brandy is extracted from this as well as from coa.r.s.e millet seed. It induces a terrible form of intoxication. The abuse of it by our soldiers in the Chinese campaign caused a great deal of fatal dysentery in the army.

"The tea-houses also sell alcoholic liquor, but the eating-houses and the taverns drive the largest trade in it.

"We cannot speak of the process of the manufacture of tea, nor of the vast amount of labour it employs: the subject properly belongs to southern China; we will only say that the use of tea is as common in the north as in the south. The moment you enter a house, tea is offered to you--it is a sign of hospitality to do so. It is given to you in profusion; the moment your cup is empty, a silent attendant fills it, and your host will not permit you to mention the subject of your visit till you have drunk a certain quant.i.ty. The tea-houses are as numerous as cafes and taverns in France; the elegant manner in which they are furnished, and their high charges, distinguish some from others. The rich trader and the idle man of fashion, not caring to mix with the grimy handed workman or the coa.r.s.e peasant, only frequent those houses that have a fashionable reputation. Tea-houses can be recognized by the large range at the end of their rooms, fitted up with huge kettles and ma.s.sive tea pots, with ovens and stoves supplying with boiling water immense caldrons as big as a man. A singular kind of time-piece is placed above the range; it is made of a large moulded bar of incense divided off by equidistant marks, so that the lapse of hours can be measured by its combustion. The Chinese can thus literally use the expression, "consuming the time." Morning and evening the rooms are full of customers, who for two sapecas, the price of entrance, can sit there and discuss their business, play, smoke, listen to music, or amuse themselves by looking at the feats of tumblers, jugglers, and athletes.

For the two sapecas they have also the right to drink ten cups of tea (certainly extremely small ones), with which, on trays covered with cakes and dried fruits, a crowd of waiters keep running to and fro.

"One day," says a letter of M. X., a French officer in the 101st Regiment of the Line, "we determined to dine _a la chinoise_ in a Chinese eating-house. Our coolies arranged beforehand that the price was to be two piastres a head, a large sum for this country, where provisions are so cheap. As a preparation for dinner, we had to thread our way through a labyrinth of lanes, crowded with dens in which crouched thousands of ragged beggars, poisoning the atmosphere with their exhalations. At the entrance to the open s.p.a.ce in front of the eating-house stood a quant.i.ty of heaps of refuse, composed of old vegetable stalks, rotten sausages, and dead cats and dogs, and in every hole and corner a ma.s.s of filth as disagreeable to the nose as to the eye. It required a strong stomach to retain an appet.i.te after running the gauntlet of such a horrible mess. A few tea drinkers and card players were seated at the door, and seemed to care very little for the pestilential character of the neighbourhood. We tried to be equally courageous, and after admiring two immense lanterns which adorned the entrance, and the sign inscribed in big letters, 'The three princ.i.p.al Virtues,' we ventured to hope that honesty would prove one of them, and that the tavern keeper would give us our money's worth.

"Our entry into the princ.i.p.al room created a little excitement, for, accustomed as the Chinese are to see us, we still, in the quarters of the town where Europeans seldom venture, cause a certain amount of curiosity, not unmixed with alarm. Two square tables surrounded by wooden benches, on which had been placed, as a particular favour, some stuffed cushions, had been prepared for us. The waiters thronged round us with red earthen tea-pots, and white metal cups; there were no spoons; boiling water was poured on a pinch of tea leaves, placed at the bottom of the cups, and we were obliged to drink the infusion through a small hole in the lid. When we had got through this ordeal like regular Chinamen, we called for the first course, which consisted of a quant.i.ty of wretched little lard cakes, sweetened with dried fruit; and for _hors-d'uvre_, a kind of caviare made of the intestines, the livers, and the roes of fish pickled in vinegar, and some land shrimps cooked in salt water; these were really nothing but large locusts. This dish, however, found in most warm countries, was not at all bad. We did not get along very well with the first course, which was immediately followed by the second. The waiters placed on the table some plates, or rather saucers, for they were no bigger, and some bowl-shaped dishes, full of rice dressed in different ways with small pieces of meat arranged in pyramids on top of it. Chop-sticks accompanied these savoury dishes. What were we to do? n.o.body but a regular Chinese can help himself with these two little bits of wood, one of which is usually held stationary between the thumb and the ring finger, while the other is shifted about between the fore and middle fingers. The natives lift the saucers to their lips, and swallow the rice by pushing it into their mouth with the chop-sticks, but we tried to accomplish this in vain, and all the more so, that our fits of laughter prevented us from making any really earnest attempt. It was, however, impossible for us to compromise the dignity of our civilization by eating with our fingers like savages, and happily one of our number, with more forethought than the rest, had brought with him a travelling case holding a spoon, and a knife and fork. We then each in turn dipped the spoon into the bowls before us, with an amount of suspicion, however, that prevented the proper appreciation of the highly flavoured messes they contained. At last some less mysterious dishes, in quant.i.ty enough to satisfy fifty people, made their appearance; chickens, ducks, mutton, pork, roast hare, fish and boiled vegetables. White grape wine and rice wine were at the same time handed to us in microscopic cups of painted porcelain. None of the beverages were sweet, not even the tea, but to make up for it they were all boiling hot. The meal was brought to a close by a bowl of soup, which was really an enormous piece of stewed meat swimming about in a sea of gravy.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 121.--CHINESE SITTING-ROOM.]

"Satiated rather than satisfied, we should have preferred some more Chinese dishes; some swallows' nests, or a stew of _ging-seng_ roots, but it appears that such delicacies as these must be ordered for days beforehand, and paid for by their weight in gold. We swallowed a gla.s.s of tafia, a liquor which is becoming quite fashionable in Chinese eating-houses, and lighting our cigars looked about us. The day was drawing to a close; the tavern rooms, which were at first nearly empty, were filling with customers, who after furtively scanning us, betook themselves to their usual occupations. The waiter kept calling out in a loud voice the names and the prices of the dishes that were ordered, and these were repeated by an attendant standing at the counter behind which sat the master of the place. Some shop-keepers were playing at pigeon fly; one held up as many of the fingers of both hands as he thought fit, his antagonist had to guess immediately how many, and to hold up simultaneously exactly the same number of his own. The loser paid for a cup of rice wine.

"The room was beginning to reek with a nauseous odour, in which we recognised the smell of opium smoke. It was the hour for that fatal infatuation. Smokers with sallow complexions and hollow eyes, began to disappear mysteriously into some closets at the end of the room. We could see them lying down on mat beddings, with hard horsehair pillows."

Fig. 122 shows one of these closets kept for the use of opium-smokers.

The utensils and paraphernalia necessary for the preparation and lighting of the opium pipe, lie on the table.