Kipling, Archibald Little, Price Collier and others have written
that some men sometimes drink hard east of Suez. The writer himself
in a former book related the bravery of a famous 11 A. M. Cocktail
Brotherhood in the blazing stifling Orient, and two world-known knights
of the pen took him to tournament to break a lance because of it.
One witty evening an old hand on the club veranda admitted the soft
impeachment, and gave himself and some others medals for the dangers he
had passed in these words of Cicero in the immortal “Murena” oration:
“If Asia does carry with it a suspicion of luxury, surely it is a
praise-worthy thing, not never to have seen Asia, but to have lived
temperately in Asia.” Ah! we who had weathered many a storm, sighed,
and in bravery ordered one more, drinking not to the habit, but to the
wit. As Archibald Little, veteran of the East, said, the tea-tasting
season was over, and a mile-stone should be set to mark it!
A droll Chinese boy brought his fast running watch to Gaupp’s jewelry
store on Queen’s Road, Hongkong. On being asked to explain as best he
could what seemed to be the trouble, the Celestial rolled up those
expressive eyes of his, which must move the gods, as they always do
men, to laughter: “Oh, he too muchee to-mollow (to-morrow); you jerk
back to to-day.”
“We have come here to stay,” boasted a corps of the enemy, which took
up an advanced position. “Yes, they stayed,” replied doughty General Li
Yuen after the battle, and his grim smile explained that they stayed as
dead bodies.
Yen Tsz, an eminent premier of the Tsi principality, and a contemporary
wit with Confucius, referring to the increase of crime which called for
the punishment of the amputation of feet, used this ironical phrase:
“False feet are cheaper than shoes these days in our market-place.”
The humor of war is grim. Shortly before Confucius’ day the prince of
Tsu State had overcome the army of Tsin State. The dead lay in heaps.
The Tsu prince was asked if he would not order a tablet raised over
the brave enemy. “Not much,” said he, “I will have a tablet to my own
ancestors raised over them, giving thanks that we do the crowing
instead of them this time.”
A fireman on the new Canton-Hankau railway made out his report of a
regrettable fatality in a collision as follows: “The engineer was died
without senses.”
A consolidation of three formerly independent samshu liquor dealers of
Canton advertised as follows: “This three rice bier dealers, before
separate, is now amalgamated for quite economic, and glad with much
public order for oblige soled more cheap to foreign friends.”
On a landing in a curio store, popular with foreigners, was the
following sign: “Peoples alighted here go down stairs if curious
wishing.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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