The Chinese Home.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLVII, Issue 21, 22 May 1912, Page 59

The Chinese Home.

It is difficult for the Occidental mind to picture the wall-wltbin-wall life of a Chinese home (writes Harriet Monroe, in the March Century). Down a narrow lane one passes between two walls behind which may be hovels or palaces, there is no telling which, since the onestory roofs beyond are invisible. One pulls a string at a gateway, the address of some family of high degree. A servant appears, leads through another gateway. a flowery courtyard, a little room or two, and finally into a reception-room, with its carved wood wainscoting and furniture, its porcelains and jades and brasses, its blue-and-green-and-gold ceiling, and its window pattern of paper panes. Here the hostess appears, offers her Occidental guest tea or champagne, or both, with eakes and candied fruit or lotus-buds. Then she may lead one through other courtyards, all with the usual one-story rooms around them, and into her secluded garden of rocks and pools, of pretty paths and bridges, of clustering trees and flowers. In such a palace as this each courtyard, with its surrounding rooms, may be the special home of one of Hie sons and his wife and children; but somewhere in the maze or walls, under one of the low, tiled roofs, is the common dining-room, with the kitchen beyond. Here the men of the family eat together twice a day, and afterward the women and children. And somewhere also there is a central family hall, with the ancestral tablets, which must have their tribute of incense at proper seasons. These arc held in sueh reverence that no foot may pass above them, and therefore two-story dwellings are unknown in regions uncontaminated by foreign influence.