The shopkeepers are charming, and there are numbers of salesmen--salesmen who do not mind taking any amount of trouble to please. It is delightful, if insidious, to go into those shops; and one can well believe that if a Chinese silk shop were opened in London, and silk sold at Chinese prices, the shop would have plenty of customers. The quality of Chinese silk far exceeds that of the silks of the West. A Chinese gentleman mentioned as an example of this superiority that one of his gowns was made of French silk, and that it was torn and spoilt after two or three years; but that he had had gowns of Chinese silk for twenty years or more which were quite as good as on the day he bought them, and that he had only put them on one side because the fashions in men's garments change in China as they do elsewhere for ladies. The same gentleman related many interesting things about the silk trade. The quality of the silk is determined by the silk guild. This is much more like the guilds in mediæval Europe than anything that we have nowadays, and that is why China is not exporting more silk than she is at present. These silk guilds to a certain extent prevent the Chinese catering for European customers, as they will not allow or at any rate encourage the production of silks that would take on the European market. The West has many faults as well as many virtues, and one of its faults is that it no longer cares for articles of sterling value, which last long and for which a high price must be paid, {97} but it delights in attractive articles of poor quality at a low price. It is to be feared that the West may spoil some of China's great products as she has spoilt the great arts and productions of India. But to return to Chinese streets. Next the silk shop will be the silver shop. Here again the work is admirable. At such a place as Kiukiang you can spend an hour or more bargaining, and watching the wonderful skill of the silversmiths as they turn out beautiful silver ornaments. It is pleasant to wander along and to look into the shops and see the strange things that are for sale--fish of many kinds in one shop, rice and grain in another, strange vegetables, little bits of pork, flattened ducks; or to glance at the clothes and the coats hung out, many of them of brilliant colours. The signs over the shops and the names of the merchants are a feature in themselves, illuminated as they are in vivid hues of red and gold, in those wonderful characters so full of mystery to the foreigner.