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| A painting of boats near Guandong, China. |
CHINA AND
ITS PEOPLE.
ODD
SUPERSTITIONS AND NOTIONS OF THE CELESTIALS.
Shanghai,
the Paris of Asia—Boat Life on the Great River Yang-tse-Kiang— Peculiar Belief
Concerning the Making of Medicine in America.
Shanghai is about midway on the Pacific coast
between the northern and southern boundaries of China. It is near the mouth of,
though not on, the great river, the Yang-tse-Kiang, which divides the empire
into two equal portions, and which forms the great central avenue of trade.
This is one of the greatest and one of the longest rivers of the world, and it vies with the Nile in the
rich deposits which it carries down from the mountains of Thibet [sic] and
spreads over the rich plains of China. Its waters where it enters the sea are
as yellow as clay, and their contents are, I am told, as rich as guano. They
form a fertilizer which the Chinese use by irrigation, so that it is spread
over much of the 548,000 square miles which forms its basin and makes this land
produce from two to three crops per year.
LIFE ON THE YANG-TSE-KIANG.
The Yang-tse Kiang has a fall nearly double
that of the Nile or the Amazon. It is so wide at its mouth that when we sailed
up it in coming to Shanghai we for a long way were hardly able to see the
banks, and this width extends up the river for hundreds of miles. It is
navigable for ocean steamers to Hankow [Wuhan], a city of the size of Chicago,
which is situated on its banks 600 miles above Shanghai, and river steamers can
go 1,300 miles up its winding course. Above this there are gorges and rapids which
the foreigners now think can be
passed, and there will then be an opening into the interior of China by this means
for more than 2,000 miles.
The Yang-tse-Kiang is so long that it would
reach from San Francisco to New York and push its way out into the Atlantic if
it could be stretched out upon a plane of the face of the United States. It is
longer than the distance from New York to Liverpool, and it is said to be the
best stream in the world as to the arrangement of its branches.
Its boat population is numbered by hundreds
of thousands, and it is a city hundreds of miles in length, made up of junks,
ships and barges. These Chinese junks are gorgeously painted and carved. They
have the same style of sails and masts that were used thousands of years ago,
and their sails are immense sheets of cotton patched together and stretched on rods
of bamboo which look like fishing poles. The sailors are pig-tailed men in fat clothes
of cotton who sing in a cracked gibberish as they work, and who understand how
to manage their rude sails so well that they can often pass ships of more
modern make. All of the Chinese boats have a pair of eyes painted on the sides
of their prows, and the Chinese sailor would no more think of navigating
without these than he would think of eating without chopsticks.
If asked the reason he replies: "No
have eyes, no can see. No can see, no can go."
Bishop Fowler, while sailing up the Pie Ho
to Peking, happened to sit with his legs hanging over the boat so that they
covered up one eye. He noticed that the sailors were uneasy, and they at last
came to him and asked him to move his legs, as the ship could not see to go.
CELESTIAL SUPERSTITIONS.
The Chinese are full of superstitions and
many of them firmly believe that the foreigners make medicines out of human
beings. The massacre at Tien-Tsin in 1870, in which twenty foreigners were
killed and among them a number of French nuns, was caused by the report that the
sisters were killing children to get their hearts and eyes for medical
purposes, and the trouble in Corea last spring was caused by the circulation of
the stories that the missionaries were grinding up children's bones to make medicine.
This report was started by the Chinese, and
the latest attempt of the kind I find today here at Shanghai. It appears in a
tri-monthly illustrated magazine which the Chinese publish and which sells for
five cents a copy. This contains a full description of how the foreigners make
their medicine, with ghastly illustrations of the severed trunks and the cut up
limbs of human beings. In one cut, men in American clothes are bending over
great furnaces in which the heads and legs of men are boiling, and beside which
great baskets and tubs of cut up humans lie. The men are stirring the steaming
mass, and the picture makes one think of the witches' cauldron in
"Macbeth."
The Chinese themselves do not believe in dissection
and there is no body snatching here. They believe that the heart is the seat of
thought, that the soul exists in the liver and that the gall bladder is the
seal of courage. For this reason the gall bladders of tigers are eaten by
soldiers to inspire them with courage.
The Chinese doctor ranks no higher than the ordinary
skilled workman. He gets from fifteen to twenty cents a visit, and he often takes
patients on condition that he will cure them within a certain time or no pay.
He never sees his female patients except behind a screen, and he does not pay a
second visit unless he is invited. His pay is called "golden thanks,"
and the orthodox way of sending it to him is wrapped in red paper.
The dentists look upon pulled teeth as trophies,
and they go about with necklaces of decayed teeth about their necks, or with
them strung upon strings and tied to sticks. Toothache is supposed to come from
a worm in the tooth, and there are a set of female doctors who make a business
of extracting these worms. When the nerve is exposed they take this out and
call it the worm, and when not they use a sleight-of-hand by which they make
their patients believe certain worms, which they show then, come from their
teeth. I have heard persons tell of Chinamen who claimed to have had ten worms
taken from their mouths in a single day, and I saw a woman actually at work
upon a patient in the street here.
China is as full of superstition as the West
India Islands, and the people like to be humbugged quite as well here as we do
in America.—Frank G. Carpenter.
Death of
a Prominent Ithacan.
ITHACA, N. Y., May 30.—Ward Gregory, postmaster
of this city, died here to- day after many months' illness, resulting from Bright’s
disease, complicated by heart difficulty. Deceased was 45 years old, and for 16
years has been editor and proprietor of the Ithaca Democrat. For many
years he was chairman of the Democratic county committee. He was three years in
the State insurance department at Albany. Deceased enjoyed the personal
friendship of Mr. Cleveland during the latter’s gubernatorial term, and was
made postmaster for conspicuously vigorous efforts in 1884. Widow and two
daughters survive him.
CC editor’s
note: Benton B. Jones, editor and proprietor of the Cortland Democrat, also had Bright’s disease. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bright's_disease
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