Adrift in Pacific and Other Great Adventures – 17 Titles in One Volume (Illustrated Edition). Jules Verne
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continued to be the guest of this hospitable house. After Tchoung-Heou’s death, his son, being so accustomed to the amiable man’s company, would never be parted from him.
But, in truth, at the time when this story begins, who would have ever recognized a former Tai-ping, a murderer, plunderer, or incendiary from choice, in this philosopher of fifty-five years, this moralist in spectacles, playing the part of Chinaman, with eyes drawn towards the temples, and with the traditional mustache? With his long robe of a modest color, and a waist rising towards his chest from a growing obesity; with his headdress regulated according to the imperial decree,—that is to say, with a fur hat with the rim raised around the crown, from whence streamed tassels of red cord,—did he not look the worthy professor of philosophy, and one of those savants who write fluently in the eighty thousand characters of Chinese handwriting, and like a littérateur of the superior dialect receiving the first prize in the examination of doctors, with the right to pass under the grand gate at Pekin, which is an honor reserved for the Sons of Heaven?
Perhaps, after all, the rebel, forgetting a past full of horror, had improved by contact with the honest Tchoung-Heou, and had gradually branched off to the road of speculative philosophy.
That is why, on this evening, Kin-Fo and Wang, who never left each other, were together at Canton, and why, after this farewell dinner, both were going along the wharves to seek a steamer to take them quickly to Shang-hai.
Kin-Fo walked on in silence, and even somewhat thoughtfully. Wang, looking round to the right and to the left, philosophizing to the moon and the stars, passed smilingly under the Gate of Eternal Purity, which he did not find too high for him, and under the Gate of Eternal Joy, whose doors seemed to open on his own existence, and finally saw the Pagoda of the Five Hundred Divinities vanishing in the distance.
The steamer “Perma” was under full steam. Kin-Fo and Wang went on board, and entered the cabins reserved for them. The rapid current of the River of Pearls, which daily bears along the bodies of those condemned to death with the mud from its shores, carried the boat swiftly onward. It sped like an arrow between the ruins made by French cannon, and left standing here and there; past the pagoda Haf-Way, nine stories high; and past Point Jardyne, near Whampoa, where the large ships anchor, between the islands and the bamboo palisades of the two shores.
The one hundred and fifty kilometres—that is to say, the three hundred and seventy-five leagues which separate Canton from the mouth of the river—were travelled in the night.
At sunrise the “Perma” passed the Tiger’s Mouth, and then the two bars of the estuary. The Victoria Peak of the isle of Hong-Kong, eighteen hundred and twenty-five feet high, appeared for a moment through the morning mist, when, after the most successful of passages, Kin-Fo and the philosopher, leaving the yellowish waters of the Blue River behind them, landed at Shanghai, on the shores of the province of Kiang-Nan.
CHAPTER III.
In Which The Reader, Without Fatigue, Can Glance Over The City Of Shang-hai.
A Chinese proverb says,—
“When sabres are rusty, and spades bright;
“When prisons are empty, and granaries full;
“When the steps of the temples are worn by the feet of worshippers, and the court-yards of the tribunals are covered with grass;
“When physicians go on foot, and bakers on horseback,—
“The empire is well governed.”
It is a good proverb, and might be applied to all the States of the Old and New World. But, if there is a single one where this desideratum is still far from being realized, it is precisely the Celestial Empire: for there it is the sabres which are bright, and the spades rusty; the prisons which are overflowing, and the granaries empty. The bakers rest more than the physicians; and, if the pagodas attract worshippers, the tribunals, on the contrary, lack neither criminals nor litigants.
Besides, a kingdom of a hundred and eighty thousand square miles, which from north to south measures more than eight hundred leagues, and from east to west more than nine hundred, which counts eighteen vast provinces, not to mention the tributary countries,—Mongolia, Mandshuria, Thibet, Tonking, Corea, the Loo-Choo Islands, &c.,—can be but very imperfectly governed. If the Chinese have a faint suspicion of this, foreigners are not at all deceived. The emperor, who is called the Son of Heaven, the father and mother of his subjects, who makes or unmakes laws at his pleasure, and has power of life or death over every one, and to whom the revenues of the empire are a birthright,—the sovereign before whom brows are bowed to the dust,—shut up in his palace, which is sheltered by the walls of a triple city,—alone, perhaps, considers that every thing is for the best in the best of worlds. It would be unnecessary even to try to prove to him that he is mistaken. A Son of Heaven is never mistaken.
Did Kin-Fo have any reason to think that it would be better to be governed in the European than in the Chinese manner? One would be tempted to think so. Indeed, he lived, not in Shang-hai, but out of the city, in a part of the English concession, which preserves a sort of freedom that is highly prized.
Shang-hai, the city proper, is situated on the left shore of the little River Houang-Pou, which, uniting at a right angle with the Wousung, flows into the Yang-Tze-Kiang, or Blue River, and from there is lost in the Yellow Sea.
It is an oval, extending from north to south, and surrounded by high walls, with an outlet of gates opening on its suburbs. An inextricable network of paved lanes, which would soon wear out sweeping-machines, were they to clean them; gloomy shops, without shutters or any display of goods in their windows, and in which the shopkeepers perform their duties naked to the waist; not a carriage, not a palanquin, and scarcely any horsemen; here and there a few native temples or foreign chapels; for promenades, a “tea-garden,” and a rather pebbly parade-ground, built on an embankment, filled with ancient rice-fields, and subject to marshy emanations; a population of two hundred thousand inhabitants in the streets and narrow houses,—all compose this city, which, though as a place of residence is hardly desirable, is, nevertheless, of great commercial importance.
In this city, after the treaty of Nankin, foreigners for the first time possessed the right to establish stores, and here was the great port opened in China to European traffic: therefore, outside of Shanghai and its suburbs, the government ceded, for an annual sum, three portions of territory to the French, English, and Americans, who number about two thousand.
Of the French concession, there is little to be said, it being the least important. Nearly the whole of it is within the northern enclosure of the city, reaching as far as the Brook Yang-King-Pang, which separates it from the English territory. There stand the churches of the Lazarists and Jesuits, who, four miles from Shang-hai, own the college of Tsikave, where they confer bachelors’ degrees.
But this little French colony does not equal its neighbors: far from it. Of the ten commercial houses founded in 1861, there remain but three; and they even preferred to establish the discount-broker’s office on the English concession.
The American territory occupies that part of the country extending to Wousung, and is separated from the English territory by the Soo-Choo Creek, which is spanned by a wooden bridge. Here are the Hotel Astor, and the Church of the Missions, and the docks erected for the repair of European ships.
But, of the three concessions, the most flourishing is indisputably the English. Here are sumptuous dwellings on the wharves, houses with verandas and gardens, palaces of the merchant princes, the Oriental Bank, the “hong” of the celebrated house which bears the name of the firm of Lao-Tchi-Tchang, the stores of the Jardynes, Russels, and other great merchants, the English club, the theatre, the tennis-court, the park, the racecourse, and the library. Such is that wealthy creation of the Anglo-Saxons, which has justly merited the name of “Model Colony.”
That is why, on this privileged territory, under the patronage of a liberal administration,