PASSING OF RICKSHAS

Greymouth Evening Star, 5 December 1929, Page 9

PASSING OF RICKSHAS

THE MARCH OF PROGRESS There will come a day when one of the pleasures of the Far East —a ride in a ricksha —will be a tiling of the past. Trams and trains and motorcars have come to deprive the rickshamen of the remnants of a rapidly disappearing livelhood, says a writer in th© “Sun News-Pictorial.” In recent riots in Pekin—rthe culmination to a long-standing dispute be-

tween the rickshamen and the tramway authorities —more than 100 tramcars were wrecked in the main streets of the city, and traffic was stopped completely. Every rickshaman in Pekin was there to deal a blow in the death struggle of a profession as old as the hills of China. Generally a mild, happy, laughing lot of boys, these rickshamen are being changed into rebels by the march of progress. The ricksha boys are strong-limbed, sunburnt as brown as berries, hard as nails because their job is as strenuous as any in the world, and happy so long as they can earn enough for a bowl of' rice and an occasional gamble. Among those uulling rickshas are some old men. They are gaunt, gnarled, and pathetic, like old winded horses. They go on until in the heat of the sun they drop dead between the shafts of their'rickshas. A rickshaman is not honest. No one realy should expect hi mto be. He will fool a tourist by taking him a long way round when told to make for a certain landmark, and, if he can, will charge double the fare. But if ever a man earns the meagre rates of pay, which have been allotted to him, he assuredly does. At any time of the day or night he is available to run miles if necessary. He can be awakened —he sleeps lightly, with

never a complaint. A few pennies mean more to him than sleep.

Rickshamen never sleep in beds. They never sleep indoors. The pavement of a street or their own little go-cai’ts are their homes. If the rickshaman owned his ricksha he would possibly earn a decent livelihood. as standards of living go in China. Tho ricksha boy must first pay the hiring fee each day before

he can even have a bowl of rice. Most, of them generally contract consumption. They are happy so long as their strength lasts, but after a few years they are the' most pitiable objects of all China’s pitiable sj ecimens of humanity. Their antipathies were few until the coming of the modern vehicles into China. Motor cars and trams are to them demons of hate—more cruel than the monsters of the legendary Chinese Hades. The rioting in Pekin is only one of many futile gestures they have made in an attempt to safeguard their means of livelihood, And a rickshaman, even if he could afford it, would never deign to travel by car. ■ ■ The gods of old China have already been forsaken, and, in time, China will want to move faster than the pace of the rickshanian.