Night-piece in China

Dominion, Volume 31, Issue 142, 12 March 1938, Page 9 (Supplement)

Night-piece in China

TT is fun to go walking in the streets of a Chinese town at nightfall. All manner of odd booths spring up on the pavements after dusk and everyone seems to have come out shopping or to gaze at the sights. There is an amazing selection of goods for sale: silks and jades and curios; fish and nuts and charcoal; sticky sweetmeats of brilliant colourings; persimmons and lychees and oranges; prayer-rags and charms to ward off evil spirits. Then there are the various entertainments and the side-shows. For one cent you can see a living crab with the head of a woman. The simple Chinese folk are much impressed 'by this phenomenon, but in reality it is merely an optical illusion created by the skilful placing of several mirrors. On payment of 5 cents yon can have your future predicted. providing, of course, that you have a Chinese-speaking friend with you, as the fortune-teller is quite unlikely to be acquainted with the English language.

The soothsayer is usually a wrinkled old woman with a bird-cage on a little table beside her. You ask her a question (which is translated into Chinese) and she lifts up the door qf the cage. A bird hops out and picks with his beak at one of the tattered yellow papers she proffers on a shallow tray. Thus is your fortune chosen, and the tiny bird is rewarded with a: solitary grain of seed and returned to captivity > forthwith.,— E.V.S,