Meanwhile the officers of the ship, in an armed fast-boat, paid frequent visits to the city; at times for visits merely and purchases, and at others, when emergency seemed to require, with armed cutters and howitzers. The objects on the route all became familiar, as if going up and down one of our own rivers—the pagodas, the water-side joss-houses—the rows of the plantain-trees skirting the fields, and the big-sailed craft going lazily along in the mud canals that intersected them. We soon came and went through the huge water-craft moored head and stern in the approach to the city, and through the lanes of the innumerable small boats, with their three hundred thousand water population, or noticed the small ferryboats, in which, at the fourth of a cent each, thirty thousand people cross and re-cross daily, without interest almost. You might stroll the streets beyond the walls, and purchase the curiously-carved ivory and the many elegant and ingeniously-made articles of China, but the shopkeeper was in considerable trepidation and would speculate much on the “too muchee bobbery,” as he called the anticipated fighting.
I was there during the feast of the Lanterns. In going out from the solitary hotel, kept by Acow—_compradore_ of one of our former commissioners to China, from whom, I suppose, he learned the little English he knew—you generally, through the volunteer aid of the Jemmy-Twitcher Mongols, immediately part with your kerchief and gloves, and it is no matter that you saw the celestial who took them, for if he once mixes with the crowd you could no more undertake to individualize him than you would be able to tell a particular spoke in a revolving-wheel. By you, passes a fellow with as much timber locked around his neck, for some offence, as a mortar-board would contain. Of the innumerable gongs beating, one struck at intervals attracts your attention. The fellow who strikes it is walking the street in front of a bare-backed malefactor, whose queue is wrapped around his head, and whose hands are tied behind him. As he walks, at each tap of the gong from the man in front, a following attendant lashes him with split ratan. It would take too long to enumerate the scenes witnessed in a Chinese street. During the day the bonzes marched through the streets attired in their yellow robes, stopping at intervals to chin-chin joss, by beating on gongs. At night tall prosceniums and staging are erected at the entrances of streets, just inside of their gates, and extending up as high as the roofs of the houses. These are most gorgeously and grotesquely decorated, and lit up with large fantastic lanterns and small lamps, looking like hundreds of illuminated lemons; adown either side of the streets are hung other lanterns in front of each store-door. The expense of all this, and the compensation of the performers, who represent the “sing-song” on the stage, and go on with their horrible caterwauling to the great delight of the throng in the narrow street below, is paid by subscription from the occupants of the street. An old Chinaman, of whom we purchased chess-men, advised us not to be away from our hotel too long, as there were many “two facee—no good pigeon-men”—in the crowd, who had no love for foreigners.