CHINESE AMUSEMENTS.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXIX, Issue 4194, 29 August 1874, Page 3

CHINESE AMUSEMENTS.

It would be difficult to find a people with a keener “sense of humour, or more devoted to pleasure than the Chinese, and in this they differ not one whit from ourselves ; music, the stage, the pleasures of the table, its sensual gratification and intercommunication of ideas, and the perusal of light literature. No house is without its musical talent, and at all hours of the day and night, on passing through the streets, will be heard the twanging of the harp or guitar, the shrill notes of the flute, or the screeching falsetto of some accomplished vocalist. To the Chinaman, no doubt, those strains and sounds convey all the ecstatic thrill which a Paganini, or a Sims Peeves would excite in the minds of a European. But the effect which they usually had on the writer was that of a sharp twinge of colic, and being no musician, he can only describe the airs as akin to those of which the nursery story tells us the old cow died. A theory has, however, been started about the chords of the human voice. It is fortunate for the European ear that it has proved itself capable of appreciating those which are artificial. ...... The Chinaman is a most constant playgoer, and he has every opportunity for indulging his passion. Each village has its stage—a raised platform placed outside the big gate of the village temple where performances in the open air are constantly taking place. These performances are usually the thank - offering of some devout worshipper, or the result of a fine imposed upon some delinquent member of a society or guild, so that attending the theatre in China is not so expensive as at home. The performers are strolling actors, carrying with them all their properties ; they require no drop scene, wings, or other paraphernalia requisite for the most unimportant private performance in English houses ; a raised platform is quite sufficient for this purpose, and ten dollars will, hire the services of a first-rate company for one evening. Their repertoire, always a very large one, consists of historical representations of terrific single combats and battles of rival claimants to power or the throne, and farces chosen from every-day subjects, replete with humour and ridiculous situations, but hardly, from their ■ coarseness, presentable to an English audience. A dinnergiving nation is the Chinese ; dinners which would astonish even the proverbial aldermanic capacity, by the number and variety of the courses, and though stiff and formal at the first, loud and boisterous as the wine begins its work, and joke and pun are bandied about ; their freedom of speech, the copiousness, and the limitation at the same time to a very small number of sounds, of their monosyllabic language, giving them a great power in double enten dre , pun and riddle ; while their literature teems with humourous stories and tales, though few will bear the telling to the more refined Englishman ; and those few are hardly worth it when divested of that which makes them agreeable to the Chinese mind.— Oriental,