The bedrooms are small, and filled wellnigh to overflowing by an enormous carved bed, with red embroidered curtains hanging from the heavy canopy and long silken tassels draping the four posts. The Chinese do not indulge in mattresses nor springs, sheets, nor pillow-cases. The pillows are small bolsters, and the bedclothing consists of a series of wadded “comfortables” made of silk or cotton. Their dislike of springs is very intense. A hospital for the Chinese was opened in one of the interior towns, and the doctors, wishing to do the very best they could to make their patients comfortable, bought, at great expense, foreign beds with springs. They found, to their disgust, that the patients, as soon as the nurse turned her back, insisted on placing the bedclothing upon the floor and lying there, instead of in the nice comfortable beds that had been provided for them. They claimed that the springs made them “seasick.” When Chinese ladies are calling upon a foreign woman, one of the chief ways to amuse them is to take them over the house and permit them to see the furnishings of the homes of the people from over the sea. They are always intensely interested in the beds and look at the springs from all sides, sitting on them and pressing them down with their hands, finally shaking their heads, as much as to say, “It is past all belief what these strange people will have in their houses.”
CHINESE WOMEN WARMING HANDS AND FEET WITH BRAZIERS.
The chief article of furniture in the kitchen is the stove, a huge affair made of brick. This stove has generally three holes, in which are set the iron cooking-pots, shaped like large washbowls and made of very thin metal, in order that the ingredients may cook with the smallest amount of heat necessary, as the question of fuel is a serious one in China. In the country around Shanghai, rice-straw and faggots are the main fuel, while on every hillside in the country one sees women and children cutting the dried grass and gathering every available thing that may be burned. Because of the lack of body in the fuel it keeps one person busy feeding the fire while another attends to the cooking.
The food served at a feast, and which the average foreigner sees, is quite different from that eaten every day. At a feast there are often twenty or thirty courses. Swallow’s-nest soup, shark-fins, pigeon eggs cooked with nuts, ducks prepared in many ways, fowl, fish, and innumerable sweets. Rice is served as the last course, while at the ordinary dinner it is the principal dish. It is to the Chinese what bread is to the European or potatoes to the Irish. The food is cooked in vegetable oil, made from beans or cabbages, or, for the richer class, from peanuts. The chief meat is pork, which is cut into little bits and cooked with a vegetable. Beef is not used by the average Chinese. The cow is a beast of burden, and none of her products are eaten. I have seen a great official, on being told that the ice-cream he was eating was made of milk, deposit upon his plate the contents of his mouth with more haste than grace. One receives the impression from pictures that the Chinese politely picks up a few grains of rice with his chopsticks and carries them slowly to his mouth. This is a picture of Occidental imagination rather than Oriental reality. He takes with his chopsticks some vegetables from the dishes in the centre of the table, to which all have access, and, after depositing the chosen morsel on the top of his rice, he lifts the bowl to his face and uses his chopsticks to shovel as much of the rice into the opening as its capacity will permit. The Chinese are supposed to be a slow and phlegmatic race, but if one were to judge by the rapidity with which a bowl of rice will disappear, one would easily give them a place among the most rapid and progressive races of the world.
