A DAY IN OLD CANTON.

Pelorus Guardian and Miners' Advocate., Volume 23, Issue 8, 30 January 1912, Page 2

A DAY IN OLD CANTON.

“I had been living near Canton for ten months,” says a writer in the Shanghai “Mirror,” “before I mustered ’ courage enough to visit it. Finally a party of six of us, with three bearers each and a Chinese guide, spent a day exploring the curious old city.

“First we went to a dark, dingy passage known in China as a street, in which almost every shop worked and sold only ivory. Here we saw the most beautiful things, ranging from carved trsl s at £.IOO apiece to napkin rings for live shillings, which would have cost five times as much in America. “Our guide next took us -to the kingfisher’s feather shoe's. This work, Which is very i.ea :til ll l, consists of inlaying pieces of silver with the feather cut in most minute pieces. It requires a most steady hand, as the pieces of feather cannot be seen with the naked eye, they are cut so small. For this work a kind of microscope used by watchmakers is necessary.

“It is quite common to find children of eight or nine years working at this silver and feather industry. We were told by tbe guide that these people so engaged became blind after ten years or so at this work.. “Here I purchased a scaff pin representing a butterfly with its wings in-, laid with blue kingfisher’s feathers, its body being striped with same. It cost me eighteen pence, and I have heard that others like it have cost the tourist thirty shillings, and been thought cheap at that. “We next paid a visit to the jade stone shops. These are all in one street as far as we could .see, and all do cutting and grinding. ’ The stone seems very hard to cut. We saw one workman holding a piece of jade for quite ten minutes on the cutting stone (a small grindstone with a sharp edge), and after all this had made only a very slight impression.

“Here we saw them making the j watch charms and earrings for the Chinese lady. The earrings seemed to he made in great quantities in the form of a circle with a hole in the centre. We did not purchase any of this stone as it is very costly and far above our means. | “When wff left the jade shops we 1 took a loo!; at the sandlcwood ones, which also seemed to be confined to one street. The work here is very much like the ivory work, the articles being very similar, napkin rings, ' card cases, junks, sampans, lans, boxes, .&c., the pattern in carving . being exactly alike. I’Next we visited the ‘silk, piece goods huts.’ The word lint seems out of place in conjunction with silk piece goods, but one cannot call ■'them anything better, with their muddy floors and plank beds placed in the same room with the machine for weaving, which takes up the majority of the one-roomed lint. “We arrived when the work was in full swing. One man passing the. shuttle backward and forward and all talking and singing to each other; one little boy -up at the top of the machine manipulating a kind erf 1 stringed instrument that formed the design in the cloth, there being about j a hundred strings to this arrange- 1 ment, yet the small fellow can talk to you, and very seldom looks at the strings he pulls, yet seldom makes a | mistake, Four persons seem to work : at one machine. “We left these hard-working natives to go a little further and came to the ‘glass-bangle huts.’ These are even poorer than the silk-piece-goods huts. The bangles are made by melting coloured glass over a charcoal fire of great heat, the glass being held just inside the furnace ; wheft on the point of running it is turned around on the rod as an opium smoker cooks opium. “This is done without any glass falling into the furnace, and requires much practice, as the worker has to work behind a screen in which a small hole is pierced. This is to protect him from'the heat, “When the glass is in a fit state, it is quickly withdrawn and held above a revolving fireclay barrel turned on a stick held in the work- 1 man’s left hand, the glass dropping : from the rod in a long thread on to the barrel, which makes one circuit, joining the two ends—is cut off short, and the bangle is formed on the fire-' clay barrel, and after cooling is taken off and filed down and made fast to cards in pairs and exported to all parts of China. “As time was flying and we were rather tired, we asked our guide to take us to the water clock that we had heard such a lot about. . So, mounting our Chairs, we proceeded to the house in which it is situated. Going upstairs, we went into a room and were shown four kongs,- the uppermost being the largest, the next lower one somewhat smaller, and so on, the bottom one the smallest. “The top kong was filled with water, which was allowed to drop into the next kong, and from this kong into the next, it going through each kong until it reaches the lower one. As the water dropped into the lower kong it floated a flat piece of wood on which a stick or gauge is placed upright in the centre, and on which the hours and minutes are marked ; this corresponding to a cover half over the top ot the kong gives the time, the reading on the stick appearing above the cover is the time. This, according to our watches, was a f£w minutes out, but after running for years and centuries, as it bad been, puts our best chronometers to shame.”