East of Suez Part 10

CANTON, UNIQUE CITY OF CHINA

It is a steamboat journey of but ninety miles up the estuary of the Pearl River from Hong Kong to wonderful Canton, and a traveler in Asia who fails to see the city that is the commercial capital of China misses something that he may think and talk of the remainder of his life.

Historians profess to trace the origin of Canton to a period antedating the Christian era, when, it is somewhere recorded, the thirty-fourth sovereign of the Chan dynasty, by name Nan Wong, who ruled for nearly sixty years, was on the Chinese throne. In those days the city bore the name of Nan-Woo-Ching, meaning "The Martial City of the South," and was encircled by a stockade formed of bamboos and river mud, tradition has it. Tradition additionally tells us that in the shadowy past Canton used to be known as the "City of the Rams," inasmuch as once upon a time five genii, each mounted on a ram carrying ears of grain in the mouth, rode into the market-place and said to the wondering people, "May famine and dearth never visit your city." This benevolent sentiment uttered, the genii are said to have instantly vanished, leaving their steeds in the market-place, and forthwith these were turned into stone. There is to-day a Temple of the Five Genii, where five clumsily sculptured rams are pointed out as the identical animals that once were flesh and blood.

Pa.s.sing over twenty centuries we find the metropolis of the present time, with its two million people, the most satisfying, fascinating, and puzzling city in the Orient, if not in the whole world. Canton with its agglomeration of a primitive existence, is surely distinct and different from any other city. Its dazzling color effect, its pile of ma.s.sive gilding in grotesque ornamentation, its wonderful sign-boards in bewildering hieroglyphics, and its host of odd-looking humanity--all is at variance with anything the traveler has before seen. To successfully view Canton requires some urbanity, a wealth of patience, and a stomach not readily overthrown by gruesome and unusual sights. And, further, the visitor must never forget that his vision is looking back from one to two thousand years, and that the hordes of human beings congesting the labyrinth of streets not seven feet wide, speak of a great nation as it was, which to-day is the oldest living nation on earth. You, of the fast-marching West, are viewing at its fountainhead a race for which the word "conservative" was most likely first called into use. It was the great Li Hung Chang who stingingly rebuked some patronizing Englishmen who were urging the astute old statesman to advocate certain social reforms in China, by saying: "Why, we Chinese look upon England merely as an interesting experiment in civilization, wondering where you'll be five hundred years hence."

The only impress that Europe and Christianity have visibly made upon Canton is the French cathedral of the twin spires that you see near the place where your steamer lands. In all Canton there is not a wheeled vehicle, street-car, hotel, or mouthful of food appealing to the convenience or appet.i.te of the visitor from the West; and apart from your own coterie of sight-seers, you may for days be about the streets of the vast city without seeing a person wearing the habiliments of Europe. That section of Canton known as Shameen, in reality an island suburb, is set apart under concessions to the United States and certain European powers, and the consuls, missionaries and foreign merchants there dwell surrounded by many of the comforts of home.

[Ill.u.s.tration: TEMPLE OF THE FIVE HUNDRED GENII, CANTON]

Few venture upon leaving Hong Kong for Canton until satisfying reports are received a.s.suring that no immediate outbreak is apprehended of the known Cantonese hatred for foreigners, nor until a vast amount of letter-writing and telegraphing for guide and chair-bearers has been gone through with, and the steamboat company has placed the craft of their line at your command, to be used as hotels, restaurants, and otherwise as bases of supplies. Confident that you would be met at the landing by the guide of whom you had rea.s.suring reports, and with whom you believed you had been in correspondence, a gorgeously-clad, good-looking fellow greets you at your state-room door on the boat before your ablutions have been completed, and tells you politely but firmly that he is to be your guide. His card says he is "Ah c.u.m John,"

which is not that of the guide you had expected to meet you, and you meekly remonstrate, until the potentate tells you through the half-opened door that you will see Canton under his auspices or not at all. "Why?" "Because I am proprietor of all the sedan-chairs worth riding in, and employ every good coolie; and, besides, Ah c.u.m, my father, showed Canton to Rudyard Kipling twenty-five years ago. I'm the third son of Ah c.u.m, and my family does all the guiding that is done in Canton--n.o.body else speaks any English."

Whatever your degree of objection to monopolies, a single reason enumerated by the autocrat seeking to enter your employ is sufficient to swing you into a feeble acquiescence, for, to tell the truth, you are not impressed favorably by the mob of jostling, shoving yellow humanity on sh.o.r.e, naked to the waist, who seem to be accentuating with menacing gestures their demands upon your patronage. You wonder how long a white man can be on sh.o.r.e without having his throat cut, and reason that if Ah c.u.m John can bully a sovereign-born American into accepting him as guide, when you had wanted somebody else, why is he not the very man to control the pa.s.sions of a fanatical Chinese mob? His administrative ability impresses by the manner in which he directs affairs from the instant his control is confessed by your party of seven native Americans, and after breakfast this born leader sets forth at the head of the timid pleiad longing to explore the great human warren of China--the thugs of the river bank are now your bearers and devoted subjects, four to a chair, and countless a.s.sistants and relatives trail at the end of the procession.

The cavalcade attracts good-natured attention from shopkeepers drawn to the fronts of their stalls by the yelping of forty l.u.s.ty Mongol throats, commanding all and sundry wayfarers to allow honorable visitors to pa.s.s.

So narrow are the filth-smeared streets that a sight-seer might help himself at will from shops on either side of the way. Hundreds of messes stewing over braziers in the thoroughfare have to be moved, and now and then the bearers of a native dignitary slide into a conveniently wide place that the procession of "foreign devils" may not be inconvenienced.

But a mandarin, in his palanquin and preceded by an orderly mounted on a short-legged pony, and guarded front and rear by forty wicked-looking soldiers armed with carbines, has precedence so instantly accorded him that the clients of Ah c.u.m's third son are almost precipitated sideways into a row of shops. The mighty official pa.s.ses without so much as casting a glance of compliment at the women of the party, thereby making it evident that Canton mandarins have a code of deportment peculiarly their own.

The products of every section of Asia are said Canton, Unique City of China to be heaped high in the warehouses of this great mart of Southern China; but the tourist sees naught of these. What he views from his sedan-chair is thousands of shops but little larger than catacomb cells, wherein everything from straw sandals for street coolies to jade bracelets for the richly endowed is offered for sale. Preserved from theft and fire in Canton's G.o.downs and p.a.w.nshops are stored enough fabrics of silk, art-embroideries, and carvings in ivory and teakwood, to cause a person of average taste to lose his mind, could they be paraded for his benefit; and a collector would find it difficult to preserve solvency, were the treasures of the shabby-looking warehouses proffered for sale. Unusually repugnant are the stalls where food is vended, for their wares are prepared in a manner making it easy for the visitor to forget that he ever possessed an appet.i.te. A hundred times as you are borne through Canton's streets your chair escapes by only a few feet or inches rows of cooked ducks and pigs that seem to have been finally varnished to make them appeal to the native epicure. Here and there you observe strange hunks of meat held together by a wisp of straw that your guide tells you with immobile countenance are rat hams, and in sundry shops your ready eye thereafter detects tiny dried carca.s.ses that can only be rats. Let it be said in fairness to the sights of Canton that the display of vegetables is attractive enough to turn your thoughts to the dietary benefits of vegetarianism.

You early perceive that Ah c.u.m John is many kinds of a "boss" by the way he takes command of the shops at which he deigns to halt his caravan.

All are charmed with the jewelry fabricated by the workers in kingfishers' feathers, and make liberal selections. But you are not permitted to pay the merchant with whom you have made a bargain, for John says, "You pay him nothing, you pay me to-night for everything"--and the purchases are carried away in his sumptuous palanquin. Pictures executed on rice-paper are next acquired on the same terms; then a cargo of daggers and swords with handles and scabbards covered with shark skin is secured after a brief d.i.c.ker. When you buy a carved ivory ball representing years of labor by a genius, or a dozen bolts of Chee-fu silk, the price of which may be several hundred Mexican dollars, John insists that you are ent.i.tled to a _c.u.msha_ of value. The merchant makes obeisance and proffers you a paper-cutter or a box of candied ginger. John resents this parsimony and says "Not good enough."

He goes then behind the counter and pulls down a mandarin coat weighted with embroidery, or maybe an intricately carved puff-box, saying "The merchant gives you this with his compliments." Everything is dumped in the gorgeous palanquin, and your spoliation dash through commercial Canton is resumed.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CITY OF BOATS, CANTON, WHERE GENERATIONS ARE BORN AND DIE]

Between purchases, you are taken to see innumerable temples and other objects of interest, as they fall in your path. The Temple of the Five Hundred Genii is made amusing by the scion of the house of Ah c.u.m explaining that a figure sculptured with hat of European pattern is "Joss Pau Low." As a reader you are aware that it is the effigy of Marco Polo, the intrepid Italian traveler supposed to have been the first European to have penetrated ancient China. The water-clock, elsewhere, is found to be out of order and not running, and you a.s.sume that the water of the Pearl River is too muddy for delicate mechanisms. The execution ground is found to be merely a quadrilateral of vacant land, employed by native potters when not required by the State when a group of criminals is to be officially put to death.

The guide is regretful that your visit is a few days too late for you to see five men beheaded in as many minutes. Employing a chair-coolie as a lay figure, John manages to give a satisfactory description of the _modus operandi_ of a decapitation, and you let it go at that. A stalwart native is then introduced as the official headsman, and this functionary promptly tries to sell the heavy-bladed sword with which he says he struck off five heads earlier in the week. Probably three hundred malefactors are annually put to death on this spot, and it is said that the public executioner has been known to sell twice that number of swords in a year. Now and again a loaferish policeman is seen, nearly always leaning against a building or finding support from the angle of a deep-set door. Most of the police wear sandals and straw hats, and carry long batons and revolvers; but there is no sameness of apparel or armament among these guardians of the peace, attested by their wearing only a portion of their uniform at a time. The Cantonese believe their police are equipped and dressed in strict accord with the "finest" of a great city in America.

On the way to that section of the city where Cantonese of high and low degree are laid away after death, we encounter a returning funeral party that made a curious procession, and one stretching to inordinate length.

In front was a ragam.u.f.fin corps of drummers and men extracting ear-racking noises from metal instruments that looked like flageolets, but were not. Twenty or thirty bedraggled Buddhist priests in pairs trotted behind, proving by their individual gaits that in China there is no union of religion and music. Interspersed in the marching medley were a dozen or more gaudily painted platforms with pole handles, carried by coolies in the way that chairs are borne. Each platform displayed a layout of varnished pigs with immovably staring eyes, plates of uncooked strips of fish, and decorative objects suggesting place in a well-to-do Chinese home. Every fifty yards or so a mustached official of uncertain rank was mounted on a Tartary pony, and at the end of the column a coolie loped along bearing across his naked shoulders the deceased's Yankee-made bicycle. No student of foreign conditions could ask more striking evidence that China was at last "waking up," was heeding the influences of Western civilization, surely. The funeral party suggested perfunctory pomp and display, and gave not a suggestion of bereavement--and that it was, for every person in the cortege was hired for the occasion. Half the food had been left at the tomb for the departed in his spirit form; the remainder was to be devoured by the mercenary mourners when the procession broke up at the door of the home from which the corpse had been carried.

Ah c.u.m John's clients lunch in the renowned Five-Story PaG.o.da, rising from the city wall to an elevation that spreads Canton at its feet; but by the time one reaches the building he is satiated with views and wants nothing but food. The Chicago "air-tights" and bottled beers and table-waters fetched from the steamer are relished to the full by appet.i.tes not always satisfied by the culinary achievements of a Delmonico.

Travelers insist that Canton is more essentially Chinese in an educational sense than any other city in China. Public speech in Hong Kong reflects the control of Britain, and in Shanghai popular opinion is held to be tainted with German or British opinion. At Pekin the game of diplomacy is played too consummately to allow an expressed utterance to have any national significance, for the capital is looked upon as a city eddying with cross currents and rival influences. Consequently, the pulse of the great Flowery Kingdom, with its more than four hundred million people, can best be taken at Canton, for the native press and native scholars there say frankly what they believe.

Cantonese opinion is potential because the capital city of the great Kw.a.n.g-tung province is recognized as the center of national learning, where scholars.h.i.+p is prized above riches. No Canton youth who aims at the first social order thinks of setting himself to make money; to enter the service of the government is his object, and to achieve this he studies literature. There is practically no barrier in China to becoming a "literate," and the cla.s.sification means all that the word "gentleman"

can in Europe. For this and other reasons thousands of men in Canton wear horn-rimmed spectacles, look wise, and discuss mundane affairs in a manner brooking no contention. The literary bureaucracy of Canton wields a mighty influence in the affairs of the nation, it is insisted. A member of this cla.s.s may not be able to do the simplest sum in arithmetic without the a.s.sistance of his counting-machine, but he may be able to write an essay on the meanings of ideographs, reproduce a trimetrical cla.s.sic, or quote the philosophic works of Confucius and the Book of Mencius until you grow faint from listening.

Once every three years Canton teems with men, young and old, who have gathered to compete for academic degrees. Any one save the son of a barber, an actor, or the keeper of a brothel, may enter the list, provided he possesses the certificate of a high school. A certain part of the city not demanded by business or residential purposes is designated as the Examination Hall, where 10,616 cells or compartments are built of brick and wood. These cubicles, six by eight feet square, are arranged in rows, like cattle-pens at an American agricultural fair. Placed side by side they would extend eight miles. These cells have no furnis.h.i.+ng whatever, save a plank to serve as desk and bed. The night before the examination is to begin the student is searched, and with writing materials and provisions sufficient for three days, is shut in his cell. This is repeated three times, making the examination extend to nine days. From sunrise to sunset no candidate is permitted to rise from his seat, and if one be taken ill and carried out, he cannot return for that contest. It is said that a few of the old men succ.u.mb to the strain at each examination.

The theses or essays of but eighty-three of the compet.i.tors can be accepted, and the fortunate ones are rewarded by the Bachelor of Arts degree. In time these compete near Pekin for a "Doctor" degree--and if abundantly rich, the successful scholar may bribe his way to official employment, say persons intimately knowing the customs of China. Those who pa.s.s the final degree become members of what is termed the Hon Lum College, and this furnishes China with her councilors, district rulers, and examiners of scholars.h.i.+ps in all the provinces--at least in theory.

The fortunate man standing at the head of the list in the great examination near Pekin receives the t.i.tle of Chong Yuen, and is termed "the greatest scholar in the world." The entire empire reveres him, and, taking into consideration the number of the examinations he has stood, he should be respected, if not for erudition, for his tenacity of purpose and the possession of a marvelous const.i.tution. But it is a.s.serted that this "greatest scholar" is invariably a millionaire and a Manchu.

[Ill.u.s.tration: EXAMINATION BOOTHS, CANTON]

Even the "literate" failing to secure appointment to public office has certain valued exemptions and prerogatives. When he fulminates against the Pekin government or against the acts of an overbearing viceroy, his words are attentively listened to and carry weight. Besides, the horn-rimmed spectacles give him a local standing envied by every man who toils or has to do with business. In Canton and other cities of China, standing before many of the larger and pretentious houses, are ornamental "literary poles," and these are always in pairs and generally show respectable decay. When newly erected they are painted in colors according to the rank of the family--white for a private citizen, red for a civil functionary, and blue for the army. A mast having a single row of brackets a few feet from the top means the degree of Ku Yan, equivalent to our M. A., and called in China the degree of Promoted Men; the degree of Entered Scholar, nearly equivalent to our LL.D., called Tsun Sze, is represented by two rows of brackets; and the highest degree attainable, Hon Lum, is announced by three rows of brackets, locally termed the "Forest of Pencils." The projecting brackets make admirable perches for pigeons and other domesticated birds. As the family and not the individual is the basis of the custom, the masts are always erected in front of the ancestral home, although the distinguished scholar may live miles away. The poles are never repaired or replaced unless some other member of the family acquires academic honors. China has no custom more poetic than the indicating of an abode from which a scholar has emerged.

While it is easy to admit the erudition of the Chinese in their own language, the tourist swung through Canton's streets perceives from his sedan-chair many signs displayed to catch the eye of the foreigner that prove the English schoolmaster to be absent. To read such announcements as "Chinese and j.a.panese Curious," "Blackwood Furnitures," "Meals at All Day and Night," and "Steam Laundry & Co." provoke a t.i.tter in a city where you believe yourself to be an unwelcome visitor. It is obvious that the scholars of China are not reduced to the straits of becoming sign-painters.

The greatest of all Canton sights is undeniably that of life on the boats along the river front, penetrating every creek, and extending along the paddy fields above and below the great city. There has never been a census of this "floating population," but it is estimated that more than three hundred thousand Cantonese have no other homes but the junks, sampans, "flower boats" and "snake boats," upon which they are literally born, reared, married, and die. Lining both sides of the river, extending into Shameen Creek, the sampans are everywhere. They ferry people across the stream or convey them wherever they wish to go in the neighborhood, carry light cargoes of fuel, food, or merchandise, deliver packages, and do a thousand and one services of the "odd-job"

order. A sampan nearly always houses an entire family, and is rowed by the father and mother. Beneath the round covering amids.h.i.+ps the woman conducts the domestic affairs of the family with a cleverness that is remarkable, and for cleanliness it may be said that the Canton sampan is equal to any abiding-place on sh.o.r.e. The cooking is done forwards over a "fire-box," flowering plants frequently are placed in the boat's stern, and within the cabin incense sticks may nearly always be seen burning before the family idol. A mother ties very young children to the deck by a long cord, while older children romp at large with a bamboo float fastened about their bodies, which serves at once for clothing and life-preserver. It is a common sight to see sampans propelled up and down stream by women, each rower having an infant strapped to her back.

The good behavior of the babies of the sampan flotilla is always appreciated by visiting mothers whose nurse-maids at home have difficulty in keeping their young from crying their lungs out.

The "flower boats," moored a mile or two below the business part of Canton's foresh.o.r.e, are the ant.i.thesis of the sampans, for they cater to a pleasure-loving cla.s.s, to men and women possessing wobbly morals, who love good dinners and suppers and a game of fan-tan without too much publicity, with singing and dancing as adjuncts. In build these craft are like the house-boats of the Thames, and the custom of tricking them out with flowering plants suggests the scene at Henley during regatta week. Practically all the vice that a traveler learns of during a visit to Canton is confined to the flower boats, and their floral appellation comes from the reputed attractiveness of the sirens dwelling upon them.

The boats are moored side by side in long rows, with planks leading from one to another. Prices on the boats are always high, and the native voluptuary pays extravagantly and the foreigner ruinously whenever he devotes an evening to the floral fleet. By night the boats are gorgeous with their mirrors and myriad lamps alight, and blackwood tables and stools inlaid with mother-of-pearl; but by the light of day they look tawdry to the point of shabbiness.

To a person interested in marine construction, especially one hailing from a land where steam has supplanted sail-power, and where gasolene and other inexpensive motors have made rowing almost obsolete, the Pearl River "hot-foot" boats, so called by Europeans, are intensely interesting. These craft connect Whampoa and other out-lying towns with Canton, run in and out of rivers, and carry pa.s.sengers, freight, and sometimes the mails. They are of fairly good lines, but are propelled by huge stern-wheels, and the motive power is contributed by from ten to twenty barebacked and perspiring coolies running up a treadmill that occupies as much room amids.h.i.+ps as boiler and engine might. When the taskmaster urges the coolies to do their best, one of these "hot-foot"

boats chugs along in calm water at a five-knot gait, but ordinarily three knots an hour is the normal speed.

On the left bank of the river and close to Canton is a large leper village, where all native craft approaching the city have to pay a "Leper toll." If this is done as soon as the vessel reaches the suburb the head leper gives a pa.s.s which franks the s.h.i.+p through; without this, any of the numerous lepers are able to demand a fee, which has to be paid, otherwise the junk would be surrounded by these people and all work brought to a standstill.

CHAPTER XIII

MACAO, THE MONTE CARLO OF THE FAR EAST

A prettier marine journey than from Canton to Macao, is not possible in the Orient, and it is of only eighty miles and accomplished by daylight with convenient hours of departure and arrival.

As on all pa.s.senger-carrying craft plying the great estuary having Hong Kong and Macao for its base and Canton its apex, you find the native pa.s.sengers on your boat confined below the deck whereon the state-rooms and dining saloon of European travelers are located, and you perceive racks of Mausers and cutla.s.ses at convenient points of this upper deck.

To American eyes it is novel to see every stairway closed by a grated iron door, and a man armed with a carbine on your side of each of these barriers. You perceive on the main deck three or four hundred Chinamen of the coolie cla.s.s, some playing card games, others Smoking metal pipes with diminutive bowls, but most of them slumbering in a variety of grotesque att.i.tudes. None of these Mongols who observe your curiosity seems to hold any feeling of resentment for the effective separation of the races, which places him, the native of the land, in a position that might be called equivocal.

The English skipper and his Scotch engineer, who take the seats of honor when tiffin is served, respond willingly to your appeal for an explanation of the doors of bar-iron and the display of weapons--every first-cla.s.s pa.s.senger always asks the question, and on every trip the British seafarers tell the story of Chinese piracy as practised up to comparatively recent times in the great estuary having a dozen or more names.

And an interesting tale it is, for it recounts deeds of the sea quite as audacious and high-handed as anything performed on land by Jesse James and his stage-coach bandits. Up to fifteen or eighteen years ago the estuary bristled with Chinese pirates, and wherever native fishermen and sailors foregathered, at Hong Kong, Canton or Macao, schemes for holding-up and sacking steamers carrying bullion and valuable merchandise were hatched with a frequency that gave a phase to local commerce that was anything but comforting, and more than one brave Yankee or British sailor went to his death fighting yellow thugs against overwhelming odds. The public decapitation of a handful of these murderers appeared to place no check on the outlawry.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PRINc.i.p.aL SECTION OF MACAO]

Once a Canton-bound steamer, carrying the mails and a considerable amount of specie, had her progress obstructed by two junks that wilfully forced her into shoal water. In the confusion that followed the grounding, a score of coolies, who up to that moment had been regarded as honest deck pa.s.sengers, rushed to the pilot-house and engine-room and murdered every white man on board. Practically everything of value was then transferred to the junks, now conveniently alongside, and the spoil was landed at such points in the estuary that made official detection well-nigh impossible. This is but a sample of the stories you may hear while yellow-faced Chinamen are serving your food, and it must be confessed that it affords a sense of confidence to know that the grates of the stairways are actually locked, and that the rifles of the guards are loaded with ball ammunition. As he sips his black coffee at the termination of luncheon, the captain a.s.sures you that until within a few years a skipper was suspicious alike of every native deck pa.s.senger and every fis.h.i.+ng junk indicating a disposition to claim more than its share of the channel; "but the old days in China," he concludes, "have disappeared forever, and piracy as an occupation has pa.s.sed with them."

Getting back to the forepart of the s.h.i.+p, the views on land and sea are engrossingly interesting. On the sh.o.r.es of the mainland and on an occasional island are ancient forts which revive memories of interesting experiences of the white man's invasion of the Celestial kingdom, and the foreground of rice-fields is backed by interminable groves of mulberry-trees explaining China's preeminence as a silk producer.

Numerous villages are pa.s.sed, and from them the traveler obtains a fair idea of the rustic life of China. Now and again a paG.o.da is visible, crowning an elevation, and recalling childhood's school-book ill.u.s.trations. You jump at the convenient conclusion that these structures of from six to ten stories had to do with the religion of the country, which surmise is erroneous, for the towers were reared to guard the geomantic properties of their respective neighborhoods, and in reality are relics of a bygone age of superst.i.tion.

The pioneer European settlement of the Far East--Macao--is at last in sight, and it presents immediately a visual contrast to Canton, by reason of its picturesque situation. There is something about the promontory that takes you back to Southern Europe, to the summer sea and the sh.o.r.es of the Mediterranean, perhaps to a brightly situated fis.h.i.+ng port of the littoral of the Riviera. As the vessel rounds the cape and comes to anchor in the pretty crescent formed by the Praia Grande, flanked by terraced houses colored with minor tints of blue and yellow, you know instantly that this stranded Eastern rainbow is Monte Carlo--no, the Oriental equivalent of the beauty-spot of Latin Europe.

Macao is a little place large with history, in fact is an atom of Europe almost lost to public gaze by the vastness of Asia, and as much a part of the kingdom of Portugal as Lisbon itself. As the most enterprising maritime and trading nation of the sixteenth century, the Portuguese were the first to sail the Eastern seas, the first to open up commercial relations between Europe and the great empire of China, and holding the monopoly of all Oriental trade until the end of the eighteenth century. Owing to the prospect of increased gain, following on this European invasion, the waters of the Pearl River estuary soon became infested with pirates, which the Portuguese magnanimously a.s.sisted the Chinese government to subdue, and, in return, it is recorded, received in 1557 the cession of the rocky peninsula on which the Portuguese colony now stands. More than once Portugal had to maintain her rights by recourse to arms, but the colony has remained Portuguese without interruption for more than three hundred and fifty years, and is a h.o.a.ry patriarch beside infantile British Hong Kong and German Tsing-tau. The oldest lighthouse on the coast of China is that of Guia, standing sentinel on the highest point of the Portuguese colony.

The colony has a population of perhaps eighty thousand persons, and practically all these are Chinese. There are, of course, a few score of civil and judicial functionaries springing from the mother-country; and, as in all places where Europeans have long lived in friendly a.s.sociation with Orientals, the Eurasian cla.s.s is strikingly numerous. In no court on the Tagus are the laws of Portugal construed with more tenacity and precision than in Macao's chambers of justice; and the flag of Portugal floats over the homes of hundreds of loyal subjects who know only in a hazy manner where Portugal really is--they are rich Chinese and others evading the Chinese tax collector, or escaping burdensome laws, and for many years these crafty Mongols have made a sort of political Gretna Green of Macao. Certain influential Chinamen carrying on business in Canton or other southern communities live in almost regal splendor in Macao, and when the minions of the Chinese government attempt to hale them before a tribunal of law, or compel them to share the expense of carrying on the administration of a province, they exclaim in Chinese, "Oh, no; I'm a subject of the King of Portugal"--and prove it. The great sugar planter of the Hawaiian Islands, Ah Fong, whose Eurasian daughters were beautiful and accomplished enough to find splendid American and European husbands, was a subject of the Portuguese crown, strange to say. His domicile on the Praia Grande is one of Macao's proudest mansions.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FRONTIER GATE BETWEEN CHINA PROPER AND THE PORTUGUESE COLONY]

The colony of Macao is scarcely more important than one of Anthony Hope's imaginary kingdoms, but for the fact that it is on the map, for the area of Portugal's foothold is not more than two or three miles in length, and a half-mile to a mile in width; it is merely the rocky promontory of the tip end of the island of Heung Shan. A wall of masonry with artistic gateway separates the dominion of Portugal from the great Chinese empire--on one side of the portal the law of the Emperor of China is absolute, and on the other the rule of the monarch of Portugal is sacred. In various ways the place and its people remind strongly of a comic-opera setting--but the officer there serving his far-away sovereign discourses with serious countenance of Goa, and Delagoa Bay and Macao as important colonial possessions. Until Hong Kong under the British began to rise as a port and base of commercial distribution, Macao had a considerable trade; but with the decline of business the harbor has silted up until now an oversea s.h.i.+p could not find anchorage.