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city of Victoria is situated on its northern side, and stands on a beautiful
land-locked harbour, formed by the island on the one hand and the peninsula of
Kowloon (also British) on the other a sheet of water which always presents a
gay and animated appearance, from the thousands of vessels and boats which
cover its surface like a mosaic.
It is not without some difficulty that we push our way through the thronging
craft, principally little boats termed [73]"sampans," to our moorings abreast
of the Dockyard. Curious craft withal, and serving a double purpose; for
besides their legitimate one, whole families live and move, are born, and die
in them; the necessary accommodation being furnished by an ingenious
arrangement of hatches, floors, and partitions, and, as it seems highly
fashionable that the Chinese mammas should be making constant additions to the
population, the squalling of the young celestials betrays a healthiness of
lung, and a knowledge of its capabilities, scarcely to be credited of such
small humanity.
The earlier fate of these infantile members of the boat population is sad.
They are exposed to a "rough-and-tumble" existence as soon as they are ushered
into the world, especially should the poor innocent have the misfortune to be
born a girl baby, for in that case she has simply to shift for herself, the
inhuman parents considering themselves fortunate if they lose a girl or two
overboard. The boys, or "bull" children, as they are termed, meet with rather
more care relatively speaking. As, from the nature of their occupation, but
little time can be devoted to nursing the mother being compelled to constant
labour at the oar the child is slung on to her back, and, as she moves to and
fro with the stroke of the oar, the babe's soft face bobs in unison against
its mother's back, a fact which will perhaps explain how it is that the lower
class Chinese wear their noses flattened out on their two cheeks rather than
in the prominent position usually selected by that organ.
It is amazing how wonderfully quick the Chinese pick up a colloquial foreign
tongue; the same tailor for [74]instance experiencing no difficulty in making
himself understood in English, French, Russian, or Spanish; English, though,
is the language par excellence along all the China seaboard. So universal is
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it that a foreigner must needs know something of our tongue to make himself
intelligible to the ordinary Chinaman; and, more remarkable still, there is
such a vast difference between the spoken dialects of north and south
China nay, even between any two provinces in the "Flowery Land" that I have
known some of our native domestics from the Canton district, when talking with
their countrymen of Chefoo, communicate their ideas and wants in English,
because their own medium failed them; the difference between the native
dialects being as broad as that between English and Dutch.
Though such a diversity exists orally, the written character is common, and
expresses exactly the same idea all over the empire, and beyond it in Japan,
Corea, and the Loo Choo islands.
The Chinese are splendid workmen, providing you can furnish them with a model
or copy, for there is very little genius, properly so-called, attached to John
Chinaman.
Their imitative faculty and powers of memory are really wonderful; as an
instance of the former perhaps the following may not be amiss:
"In the earlier days of the first occupation, the English residents of Hong
Kong were often placed in difficulties about their clothing, Chinamen not
having attained to that perfection in the tailors' art which they now have
acquired. On one occasion an old coat was supplied to a native tailor as a
guide to the construction of a new [75]one; it so happened the old garment had
a carefully mended rent in its sleeve a circumstance the man was prompt to
notice setting to at once, with infinite pains, to make a tear of a similar
size and shape in the new coat, and to re-sew it with the exact number of
stitches as in the original."
The old stories we have heard at home about a Chinaman's tail being designed
that by it he may be hoisted to heaven, and that if he lose it he may never
hope to reach that desirable altitude, have really no foundation in fact, nor
is it a fact, as sailors are apt to believe, that it is nurtured for their
special benefit as a convenient handle for playing off practical jokes on the
luckless possessors; the truth being that the "queue," now so universally
prized amongst them, is a symbol of conquest forced upon them by their hated
Tartar-masters. Previous to the seventeenth century the inhabitants of the
middle kingdom wore their hair much after the style of the people of Corea,
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