The method of carrying water in India and China is conspicuously
different. In India the drawers go from the well with the jar of water
balanced on their heads. In China the water is put into two large
buckets, which are slung from the two ends of a bamboo, which is
balanced on the shoulder. Chinese markets in the villages and smaller
cities are managed on the fair system, as in Russia. You can not buy
barrow wheels at the bridge fair every day in the week, because the
wheelwright only comes to your village fair every second Friday,
his tour taking him through ten villages perhaps. You can not buy
feather dusters or shoes every day, as the pedler is off on a tour of
six villages, and only visits your fair, held at the temple, every
Saturday. But food and coins you can buy every morning at your two
village fairs, and the hucksters there will tell you just what days the
barber, the druggist, the potter, the copper hammerer, etc., will be
around again, unless thieves waylay them, or gamblers entice them, or
Taoist astrologers, looking for a bribe, deceive them into belief that
it is their unlucky day by their birth star on the almanac!
That the Chinese civilization in general had little communication with
Egypt or Babylonia, after once being separated, may be inferred partly
from the fact that the early Chinese forgot the secret of embalming the
body. The _Bamboo Books_, tenth century B. C. recite how the Emperor
Muh, whose concubine died while traveling with him in the Tartary
desert, had to bury her there at once, and other records recite that
when tombs were opened they stank so badly that dogs had first to be
sent in to ascertain when human beings could safely enter. It was not
until long centuries after this that the Chinese learned to use lime
to destroy the flesh.
Conjuring has been popular from the earliest times. The famous _Bamboo
Books_ recite that the Emperor Muh, on his travels into Tartary in the
tenth century B. C., was infatuated by an unusually clever conjurer
there. Lieh Tsz, a patriotic chronicler of the fifth century B. C.,
complains that the emperor of disintegrating China had more time to
study the tricks of a conjurer than for state affairs.
An interesting means of transportation over the mountains of the north
is the pony-litter, which is swung between two animals in tandem. The
trip is exciting enough, especially when one of the animals falls to
its knees. Chinese gang laborers do all their pulling, pushing and
lifting, accompanied by a chantey song. The famous trackers of the
Yangtze gorges and the Grand Canal; the gunny lifters of Hongkong; the
wood sawers and teak pilers; the coal passers of Hankau, all sing at
the top of their splendid voices as they work.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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