Extracts.

Lyttelton Times, Volume VIII, Issue 536, 23 December 1857, Page 3

Extracts.

LIFE IN HONG KONG,

(From a letter of the • Times' Special Carres.) Let me chronicle some of my first im ■ pressions of British Ghina before the surprise has worn away. The first great astonishment to a man who recollects Sir Francis Mainland's report, that there was anchorage for ships and room on the island for one house, is to find many merchant princes living in many gorgeous palaces, a city two miles long, every article of home luxury except a bracing breeze, and fleets whica could feed a principality and conquer an empire. When he has realized this fact, his next idea is what an utterly helpless creature he is in the midst of all this newly created greatness. However kind and self-denying the friend to whom you are committed may be, you soon find out that he knows no more the means oi obtaining creature comforts than you do. Every resident, be he married or single, has his "major domo," his "comprador, a long-tailed sleek Chinaman, who is his general agent, keeps his money, pays Ins bills, does all his marketing, hires his ser-

vants and stands security for their honesty, and oi course cheats him unmercifully! Ihe advantage is that he does not allow L One else t0 cheat; nim--The comprador is the link between the barbarian Englishman and the civilized world of China. The Englishman knows very little of China beyond what the comprador chooses to tell him, and the comprador chooses to tell him nothing worth knowing. Of course your comprador is a ? ¥V* Worth from s>ooo5 >000 dollars to 40,000 dollars. There are two here who are reputed to be worth 100,000 dollars. One of these was "squeezed" Vaaaa S? term used) t0 the exten* of 10,000 dollars by the Mandarins, in order to pay the expenses of the present war. Thus, as we found the cannon on board the junks primed with the best Dartford powder, so we see that Yeh pays his braves with English plunder quietly accumulated in Hong Kong. The process is this:—The Mandarins seize the fathers, mothers, sisters, and brothers of the juicy comprador, and submit them to a course of slow torture until the squeeze has had its due effect. By this highly effective mode the Mandarins kept all the Chinese in Hong Kong under their control, and draw large sums from the colony. When we come to settle with them we ought to insist upon all this money being repaid; we ought to naturalize the Chinamen who live in our Chinese dominions; and we ought to make extortion from them an offence to be provided for by treaty. Unless you protect these people you cannot expect them to look upon you as their masters.

The elegant Greek slave imposed his language and his modes of thought upon his barbarous Roman master; our civilized Chinese attendants have communicated to us outer barbarians the syntax of the Chinese tongue. They have made for us a new English language, wherein sounds once familiar to us as English words startle us by new significations. According to the canons of criticism they have well done, —

" Dixeris egregie, notum si callida verbum " Eeddiderit junctura novum." Horace must have stolen his ars poetica fi'om Confucius. My friend introduced me to his comprador thus:—

" You see gentleman—you tawkee one piecey coolie one piecey boy—larnt pig-eon, you savey, no number one foolo—you make see this gentleman-—you make him house pigeon." This was said with great rapidity, and in my innocence I believed that my friend was speaking Chinese fluently. He was only talking " Canton English." Translated into the vernacular it would stand, —

" You see this gentleman, —you must engage for him a coolie and a boj— people who understand their business, you know, not stupid fellows; you will bring- them to him, and- then manage to get him. a lodg-ing and furnish it." To whom the polite comprador, leniter atterens cmidam, replied, — " Hab got. I catchee one piecey coolie, catchee one piecey boy. House pigeon number one dearo, no hab got. Soger man hab catchee house pigeon."

" Must got."

« Heuigh."

The basis of this " Canton English"— which is a tongue and a literature for there are dictionaries and grammars to elucidate it, consists of turning1 the "r" into the " 1," adding final vowels to every word, and a constant use of "savey" for "know," "talkee" for "speak," "piecey" for "piece," "number one" for "first class," but especially and above all the continual employment of the word " pigeon." Pigeon means business in the most extended sense of the word. "Heaven pigeon hab got" means that church service has commenced; "Jos pigeon" means the Bhuddist ceremonial; " Any pigeon Canton?" means "Have any operations taken place at Canton?" "That no boy pigeon, that Coolie pigeon," is the form of your servant's remonstrance if you ask him to fill your bath or take a letter. It also means profit, advantage, or speculation. " Him Wang too nrnch foolo, him no savey, vely good pigeon hab got," was the commentary of the Chinese pilot upon the Fatshan Creek business. Until you can not only speak this language fluently, but also,"which is far more difficult, understand it when spoken rapidly in a low monotonous voice, all communication with your servants is impossible. The second morning after I had been installed in my new dwelling my new "boy" Ah Lin, who sleeps on a mat out-

side my door, and whom I suspect to live principally upon successful rat hunts, for he knocks down about three per diem with a bamboo pole as they run about the room —this Ah Lin, drawing- up my mosquito curtains, presenting me with the 6 o'clock cup of tea, staring- at me with his little round eyes, gravely remarked, " Missa Smith one small piecy cow child hab got." It was a long time before I could comprehend that, it being- part of a "boy's" duty to inform his master of .the social events of the colony, he wished to give me to understand that Mrs. Smith had presented her husband with a daughter. It makes a bachelor laugh and an exiled family man almost cry to hear this grotesque caricature of the language of the nursery. , The climate of Hong Kong has not presented itself to me with a pleasant aspect. , The city of Victoria is on the wrong side |of the sugar loaf. That Victoria Peak shuts out the south-west monsoon which blows in grateful breezes upon the southern coast; the heat, therefore, is a stagnant, up and down, fierce, often reflected heat—a heat there is no escaping—which finds you out in your hiding place in a shady verandah, and shoots across from the white face of the opposite house, or up from the surface of the white road, or down at an obtuse angle from the dark cliff of decomposing granite. We new arrivals are told that it is nothing to what it will be in August; but as every European body is already covered with a red rash descriptively called the ■" prickly heat," reputed to be wholesome and frit to be intolerable, we agree that it is impossible that a handful of extra degrees of Fahrenheit can make much difference.

These are our hot days. But the climate is not without the charm of variety. Sometimes we wake in the morning' to the sound of rushing waters. There is a cascade in the sky. As much water falls in four hours as would make wet weather in England for a month. Then out comes the sun, and the city is one hot vapour bath. Everything is permeated by the steam, and your clothes mildew as you sit still and groan. Towards evening1 you take advantage of a lull and go out to dinner, borne like a Guy Fawkes upon a bamboo chair, with two coolies staggering and gasping under your John Bullish ponderosity. You find every one assembled in white jackets and white trousers in a a large suite of rooms containing 20 open windows and 20 open doors. Suddenly the skies open and the deluge descends, the accompanying tempest sweeps fiercely through every aperture, the doors slam and the verandah blinds clash, rheumatisms and agues riot boisterously about; while in mockery of the windy turmoil the coolie, who has crouched in one corner of the room absorbed in the ecstacles of an opium dream, continues to pull his ordinary gentle pull at the madly swaying punkah. Then you ask those white clad convives how they can face such a douche bath of draughts in such feeble clothings and they confess the horrible hypocrisy of the HongKong- toilette. Underneath those thin white garments every one of them, except the inexperienced recorder of these first impressions, is clad from throat to toe in an undercovering of thick flannel. They promise us four months of beautiful winter, weather, mildly bracing as an English spring. You might as well thus try to console the ice palace that was built upon the Neva. Before these winter months come we shall be racked with rheumatism and expended by furnace heats. Yet Hong Kong is very healthy. Scarcely any English die here. True; but there is an" enormous consumption of quinine and blue pill, and when Jthese lose their effect most Englishmen take to a Peninsular and Oriental steamer. It is a mere question, then, of a preposition whether they are to be carried off, from, or on the island. With such weather we must not wonder that dysentery and diarrhoea and ague are rather prevalent among the seamen and marines who are in the ships and in the fort up the river; or that the marines who on the Ist of June passed many hours in the paddy fields up to their waists in stagnantVater contribute largely to the sick list, nor am I astonished to hear that the large military hospital upon this island has rather more than its average number of occupants. On the other hand, we must acknowledge that all the diseases in this climate are below the waist. We nnver hear that hacking cough which runs like the fire of an awkward squad through the congregation- of an English, church. I brought out a model oi this truly English pest with me, but left it behind in the Mediterranean.

I cannot report very favourably of the "fauna" or the "flora" of the island. Ornamental trees grow very well when planted and nurtured, and some flowers may be culled in a distant, nook called the " Happy Valley," a spot hard bordering upon a wretched village, and a squalid population; but the natural vegetation seems to be a coarse moss, eaten by no quadruped. At any rate, I never saw any four-footed thing grazing upon that green mountain, which rises in full aspect of my window, and upon which as the rains commence I can see the torrents form. Sometimes there is a buffalo seen on the island, but he is usually on his way to the slaughter-house. A cow I never saw; yet there is milk. But that milk j is used by few and shuddered at by many. ! Whence it comes is the darkest mystery of Hong-kong economics. The onljqzcadruped that could be supposed to produce it is the pig—for pigs" do exist in the island; but it is whispered as a caution, and with oblique glance at the milk jug, that the Chinese matron herself—but enough; very few people take milk except that which is sent out in tins. The horse exists in a high state of domesticity. As in Attica, so in Hongkong there is small footing and little forage for horses. In both localities the animal was useless and expensive, and greatly in vogue. Strepsiades at Hongkong dreams as constantly of horses as did Phidippides at Athens.* A badly, bred Arab worth £20 at Algiers and £10 at Tattersall's is worth £200 at Victoria. There is a racecourse round which he will run once a year, and there are two miles of tolerable road along which he may be ridden daily by a long-booted and hunting-whip-bearing proprietor, not scorning exiguis equitare cam-pis. The buffalo and the horse, therefore, exist in a highly artificial condition upon this island; but I could not afford to exclude them from my notice of animated nature in Hongkong, seeing that the materials for observation on that subject are so very limited. In i*ecom pence for the small interest which the island can afford to the equine, bovine, and ovine genera, it is pleasant to be able to testify that the entomologist and the man curious in reptilia may find constant amusement. The winged cockroach is so finely developed and so rich in fecundity that specimens may be seen at all times and in the most handsome drawing-rooms, crawling over the floors and tables by day, in size like mice, and banging against the lamp glasses at nig-ht, in size like birds. The spiders are so colossal that you wonder how they can have fed themselves to such a size, and yet left so many flies undevoured. The mosquitos are so clever in insinuating themselve* 3 through your fortress of gauze, arid they so keenly cut slices out of your fleshy parts, that you hail the dawn of day with the i sensations of an Abyssinian ox. The ser- | pent tribe find the island favourable to their growth, for it was only a short time since that a Regulus, in the uniform of a British Colonel, was brought to a stand by a cobra five feet long — "serp&ns portentosm magnitudinis." He was destroyed, hapi pily, without any loss on the side of the i British. The victory was rendered to an ungrateful country, for the last mail brings intelligence that the field allowance '■ is stopped. The officers see their dollars pass in this dear colony as shillings, and they gently complain that it is " hard lines." I confess I think so too. It is a ! small economy at best. I have already S spoken of the fatness and fertility of the Hongkong rats. When Minutius, the dictator, was swearing Flaminius in as his master of the horse, we are told by Plutarch that a rat chanced to squeak, and the superstitious people compelled both officers to resign their post. Office would be held under great uncertainty in Hongkong if a similar superstition prevailed. Sir John Bowring has just been swearingin General Ashburnham as member of the Colonial Council, and if the rats were silent they showed unusual modest} r. They have forced themselves, however, into a State paper. Two hundred rats are destroyed every night in the gaol. Each morning the" Chinese prisoners see with tearful eyes and watering mouths a pile of these delicacies cast out in waste. It is as if Christian prisoners were to see scores of white sucking-pigs tossed forth to the dogs by Mahomedan gaolers. At last they could refrain no longer. During the punishment of tail cutting, which follows any infraction of prison discipline, they first attempted to abstract the delicacies. Foiled in this, they took the more manly •coxirse. 'They indited a petition in good Chine -c, proving' from Confucius that it is sinful to cast away the food of man, and

praying that the meat might be handed over to them to cook and eat. This is a fact, and if General Thompson doubts it I recommend him to move for a copy of the correspondence.

I may not, however, close this gossiping column of first impressions without sayingthat, despite the difficulties of climate" and of space, the Europeans in Hong-kong- do not seem very unhappy. Colonial politics interpose their difficulties as colonial politics always will; but, these apart, I knowno place where social intercourse is more frank and cordial. The common tie of civilization is a common bond of brotherhood.