The quaint Kiangsu junks are disappearing, and vast fleets of launches
and mere cargo junks have come into use. To see the picturesque old
life on the waters, one must now go farther inland. Shanghai is famous
for its peony, chrysanthemum and lily gardens. It is a florist’s
paradise, because it lies in the valley of the sun. Its dress show on
the bund and Bubbling Well Road, Hong Kew Park, Public Gardens and
Jockey Club grounds, almost rivals in silk the floral creations of
nature. Some of the costumes are amusing. A tall Sikh, “bearded like
the pard”, and wearing an immense red turban, comes along the road
with never a look to right nor left and never a smile on his eager
face. His gown looks like a loose white nightshirt, over which he has
forced a small tight vest of bright colors and flashy buttons. The
nightshirt is gathered in about his legs, which are bare below the
knee. On his feet he wears Punjab slippers, which curve up at the
points like a gondola. So he fareth forth into the perpetual comedy of
the Shanghai streets and maloos! The London “bobby” looks at him but
does not arrest him, because on official occasions this same Sikh is
the bobby’s partner on police duty, when, however, he buttons himself
within a decent blue tunic and dons long trousers, though the turban is
maintained to him for tradition’s sake.
All the foreign banks, the Hongkong bank, and the Chinese National and
Shansi banks, have branches here, and it is proposed to have branches
of large Chinese-American banks and steamship companies. Fault must be
found with the modern native as well as the European architecture of
Shanghai, that they are not perpetuating and adapting the extremely
beautiful Chinese style in roof, screen, portals, columns, terminal
ornaments, panels, pavilions and approaches. We of the Occident
are barbarians to intrude in any land and debauch its beautiful
architecture in the way we are universally doing. All praise to some
of the missionary societies, that as usual they are the first to do
right in a beautiful way by building in the Chinese manner in China. A
Grecian building like Boone University, at Wuchang; a top-heavy German
building like those at Kiaochou; a New York cave building like some
at Tientsin; a British barn like some on the praya at Hongkong, even
an Italian Renaissance like some on the Shanghai bund, are a trespass
unto architectural sacrilege in artistic China. Let us keep to the
galleries, the curved lines, the rich roof, the colored panels, the
enameled tiles of pagoda and temple as we raise stone on stone in
glorious old China, for she is the mother of the arts, and has sat
longest at the fountain of beauty, if not at the anvil of arms.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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