The Boy Travellers in the Far East [Part First]: Adventures of Two Youths in a Journey to Japan and ChinaKnox, Thomas Wallace
General
The Boy Travellers in the Far East [Part First]: Adventures of Two Youths in a Journey to Japan and China
Knox, Thomas Wallace
China -- Description and travel -- Juvenile literature; Japan -- Description and travel -- Juvenile literature
The Chinese city is quite distinct from the foreign one; it lies just
beyond the French concession, or, rather, the French section extends up
to the walls of the old city. The contrast between the two is very
great. While the foreigners have taken plenty of space for the
construction of their buildings and laying out their streets, the
Chinese have crowded together as closely as possible, and seemed
desirous of putting the greatest number into the smallest area. It is so
all over China from north to south. Even where land is of no particular
value, as in the extreme north, the result is the same; and there are
probably no people in the world that will exist in so small an area as
the Chinese. Ventilation is not a necessity with them, and it seems to
make little difference whether the air they breathe be pure or the
reverse. In almost any other country in the world a system of such close
crowding would breed all sorts of pestilence, but in China nobody
appears to die from its effect.
[Illustration: A COOLIE IN THE STREETS OF SHANGHAI.]
At the first opportunity our friends paid a visit to the Chinese part of
Shanghai. They found a man at the gate of the city who was ready to
serve them as guide, and so they engaged him without delay. He led them
through one of the principal streets, which would have been only a
narrow lane or alley in America; and they had an opportunity of studying
the peculiarities of the people as they had studied in the Japanese
cities the people of Japan. Here is what Frank wrote down concerning his
first promenade in a Chinese city:
"We found the streets narrow and dirty compared with Japan, or with any
city I ever saw in America. The shops are small, and the shopkeepers are
not so polite as those of Tokio or other places in Japan. In one shop,
when I told the guide to ask the man to show his goods, they had a long
talk in Chinese, and the guide said that the man refused to show
anything unless we should agree to buy. Of course we would not agree to
this, and we did nothing more than to ask the price of something we
could see in a show-case. He wanted about ten times the value of the
article; and then we saw why it was he wanted us to agree beforehand to
buy what we looked at. Every time we stopped at a shop the people
gathered around us, and they were not half so polite as the Japanese
under the same circumstances. They made remarks about us, which of
course we did not understand; but from the way they laughed when the
remarks were made, we could see that they were the reverse of
complimentary.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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