Chinese,

Contents

CBAPTIK

I Daily Life of Foreigners in China .

II The Portuguese and Camoens in China .

II The Portuguese And Camoens In China

When Luther, iVVoIsey and the Pope were the names that clamored loudest in the world, a few swarthy Lusitanian adventurers in half-decked caravels, had taken so long a journey that the fame and luxuries of the old world were of small import to them in their remotest exile. From the yellow Tagus and Lisbon they had come to the red delta of the Canton Ri\ er, in China. The colony exists to-day, and I found the dried-leaf charm of the dim past clinging to the yellow and blue chunam (stucco) walls of sunny INIacao. The dangers of the past are also a present reality on these, the most dangerous waters of the world, from a police standpoint. A river trip is spiced with the risk of piratical attacks. The creeks and upper reaches of the delta, between the Chu and Sikiang Rivers give refuge to nearly naked and bronzed bucaneers, who frequently fire from the sorghum brakes upon passing steamboats. xA.ll the native junks which ply on the WTst River to the silk plantations, are equipped with cannon of antique pattern, and handgrenades.

The handsomest steamboat east of Suez, the Heimgshan, leaves Hong-Kong for ]\Iacao at two o’clock, arriving at sundown. The trip is to the mouth of the Pearl River, and across more open water than the voyage to Canton. Differing from Chinese and mediaeval cities, for in the spirit of the latter it was partly planned, Macao, filling up the end of a narrow-necked peninsula, is walled only on two sides, the north and the south. The sea itself, providing the moat on the east and west, has always proved to be the stronger barrier. The Chinese at will have leaped the Porta Cerco wall, but on many occasions the Macaense prevented the landing of the Dutch along the eastern beach by the guns of Bomparto, Francisco and Guia forts. The city’s incorporated name is “ Cidade da Nome de Deos, Nao ha outra mais leal ” : “ City of the Name of God, most loyal of the Colonies,” which honor was accorded it by Dom Joa IV., in 1642. The Boa Vista is a castle-like hotel on the Penha Heights, which overlooks the sixteenth century Bomparto fort and the great half moon Praya Grande bay. It is the most picturesquely situated and cleanest hotel in the Orient, and has been a source of national jealousy between Portugal, France, China and England. France has been endeavoring to secure it as an advance post toward Canton, for if England ever takes the Yangtze basin, France is going to demand the whole coast from Tonquin to Fu-kien, including the two Kwang Provinces and Yunnan, to the capital of which she is now sending a railway from Haiphong.

The Boa Vista’s fish and game dinners are famous throughout the East. It also makes a specialty of Portuguese wines, from the light Colares to golden port. The drive from the band gardens along the cliffs to the Areia Preta bathing beach rivals Hong- Kong’s noble Jubilee Road, and both of these oriental roads, hanging over the sea, surpass Nice’s Corniche Road in foliage and color. Through the productive, intensively-developed Chinese truck-farms runs the wide Avenida Vasco da Gama, as far as Mongha Fort. Over Cacilhas Bay is the picturesque Montanha Russa Park, which is graded like a grassy volcano. All were built by chained convict and impressed soldier labor. Few now frequent these noble, highly maintained roads, as the courtly dark Macaenses have drifted to Hong-Kong to earn a livelihood, and the historic little colony, Europe’s first conquest in Cathay, is lapsing into merely a sanitarium and pleasure resort, from which place neither Manila’s Baguio or Hong-Kong’s peak promise to displace it. Macao’s unique feature in this respect is the steadyblowing through the hot months of the sou-west monsoon. Should this breeze lapse for a moment, death would come to thousands from the awful heat resulting. As you look at night from the wide verandas of the Boa Vista hotel, you notice lights like fireflies flitting along the Praya Grande. They are the lanterns of the few who must be abroad late, or of adventurers who are returning from the fan-tan gambling-houses. The lukongs will challenge none who bears a light. In all oriental cities there are more private watchmen than police.

The hospitality of the Macaense is proverbial. Their table conspicuously displays the influence the Chinese have had upon them during four centuries: candy flavored with arbutus and haw seeds ; laoping pasties made of water chestnuts and flour and colored the popular citron yellow; coagulated duck’s blood pudding; bamboo shoots preserved in sugar; and carambola and mango jellies. As butter is scarce, you can taste the sesamum oil in food.

A visit to the opium farm, as you drive up the tortuous Rua da Penha, affords a curiosity. The lane which runs along the low, dreary factory smells of the narcotic fumes, and not a green blade grows. Look through the bars. They are boiling, stirring and straining the balls from India, which they have mixed with the lower grade pods from their own Yunnan fields, in brass dishes, till finished like brown treacle the mixture is poured into water-buffalo horn cups. These cups are incased in tin, and again in camphor-wood. There is a great park-like, stone-paved court attached to the factory, but none save an Occidental is ever seen in it. The factory boys are more stupefied for sleep than play, after their work. All the opium brought to America is made at this farm. The ships lie twenty miles away, just off the edge of the smuggling shallows, at the famous Ko who w- Yang anchorage, where arms are dealt in at night over the sides of phantom ships, for pirates and the Young China party. Old-fashioned Portuguese gunboats, like the Diu and Goa, with low waists and high bulwarks, and Armstrong guns on wooden carriages lashed to the deck, escort the prize-laden, high-sterned junks from the crowded inner anchorage to the mail steamers. I once returned on the gunboat with the tanned Legionaires of the romantic little kingdom. The men could recite the epic of Camoens with that pathos which is possible only by those who have a proud past, but no possible future. The shippers of the opium are quite justified in their fears that pirates may dash out for the million-dollar cargo from behind Taipa, Don Joao or Lapa Islands.

Lonely Portugal, the relict of a great race, sits in her ancient palace surrounded by portraits of a famous past. The names she whispers in her melancholy are Da Gama, who gave the world the sea-link to India; Prince Henry the navigator, who suggested to Columbus his ambitions; and Camoens, who was the Chaucer of the Portuguese language, and one of literature’s five great epic writers. He was the greatest genius of Portugal, versed in the

Oldest ruin (1594 A.D. ) of European association in China, faqade of San Paulo Cathedral. i\Iacao. The Chinese classic,

" Ming- Shi." lauds the architecture. Quaint bronze statues were cast at Bocarro's gun foundry at Macao in i6th century.

Macao, looking from Penha Height to Cape Sao Francisco. Famous Praya Crande drive facing water; Guia liglithouse in riglit distance, and Monte Fort in left distance, both first of their kind in China.

COPVRIOHT, t*M. TMl W MtRRUl COMPANY

Macao, looking from Cai>e Sao h'rancisco to Penha Heights. Hotel “Boa \'ista " in distance.

classics like Milton, a warrior of Sydney’s stamp, a dashing courtier, and a traveler of Cervantes’ wit. Portugal may be notable again, when Brazil, her offspring by blood and literature, dominates in South America. She exists to-day as a tragically discontented decadence in Europe; a sunny spot in China; a group of forsaken cathedrals on the Malabar Coast, and a neglected blur of uninhabited territory under the blue-and-white flag-of-the-castles, in Africa.

Half-way between Hong-Kong and Canton, on a narrow peninsula of canal-veined Heang-Shan district of Kwangtung Province, between the Pearl River and the sea, is the settlement of Macao, holding in its arms, toward the cool sou-west monsoon a flashing blue bay, which dashes its waters over the long walls of the circling Praya Grande. It is the Naples of the Orient in appearance, color, joy and carelessness. Here in 1557 came Camoens, a political exile, and here he wrote half of The Lusiad, thus producing in China a supreme work of European literature, in days when the American hemisphere loomed like cliffs of wonder in the uncertain mists of early discovery, and when the morning star of Shakespeare had not yet risen on the minds of mankind. Camoens’ luxuriant garden and grotto overlook the inner and outer harbors, which were covered in his day, as on the golden afternoon when I saw them first, with a forest of yellow and brown matting sails of junks. Little, however, was the poet’s heart fed by the argosies of silver, golden brocades, ivory, pearls, porcelain, camphor, and silk, passing homeward to his cruel Lisbon. He was weaving another web, and his heart, bitter in exile, was wounded to produce the poetic pearls of a second Odyssey.

Blue, yellow, red and brown, the squat buildings of Macao crowd on rising, uneven ground, and present, with their roofs of heavy tiles, a color scheme worthy of the brush of Velasquez. The streets run a zigzag course, so that from house to house defense could be made against the Chinese, or against the Dutch in the later days of the Colony. These houses are popular with the Chinese, whose superstition it is that a devil can not turn a corner. The shutters of the buildings have fish-scale and pearl-shell windows, which soften in the rooms the intense light of an oriental day. High against the sky-line is the distinguishing ruin of Macao, the windowless Renaissance fagade of the burned San Paulo Cathedral, with its three rows of Corinthian pillars, superimposed on ten Ionic pillars. The antique edifice was erected early in the sixteenth century. The magnificent flight of one hundred stone steps, as wide as the edifice itself, is bound by Time’s hand in plumes of grass and bright oriental blooms, and the night alone swings lamps of worship over the old roofless altar of four centuries ago. In the Se Cathedral I heard a military mass, reminiscent of the cavalcades of Da Gama and Cortez, the host being saluted with presented swords. The Miserere of Gounod was played by a military brass band in the church loft. Little swarthy soldiers, uniformed in blue, swung along the dazzling streets to a march played by the bugle. They wore rimless caps, these reckless ones, suited more for the Estrella Mountains of their homeland than the pitiless suns of the East, but with the impulsive Latins, as with the Chinese, appearance and old customs must never be sacrificed for a mere thing like climate.

The government ration to the soldiers included good Colares wine, poured desecratingly from a tin pail into

THE PORTUGUESE AND CAMOENS 8i pewter cups. The native-born Portuguese, called Macaense, dress in contradistinction to the usual oriental custom, in black, which uncomfortably attracts the actinic rays of the sun. The small ruling class from Lisbon seems out of place in the exotic gowns of European fashion. The Chinese shuffle along the excellent concrete military roads in their gorgeous blouses of purple, yellow and blue, and they look to the manor born. They gather in knots before the wax-model and lantern stores on bright Rua Felicidade, and discuss progress in the ear of the unprogressive. The blue-and-white barred turbans, with long streamers attached, of the imported Sikh police make the most attractive head-gear one could see the world over. The sound of clanking chains approaches along the road, and a band of native prisoners, linked together, who have been working on the highway, are escorted by.

Filled with the piety of Xavier, and following his steps on the same sunny roads, the little Colony is most characteristically solemn and impressive in its Santa Croce procession in June, which reminds one of the Paso processions of Seville. The Legionaires are as disciplinary as the soldiers of Da Gama ; they compel the Protestant stranger at the points of their swords to remove his hat. The music is doleful and fitful sobs fill its pauses. The procession is slow and halting; its color is black where the small number of Europeans and Macaense lead, and purple where the long line of Chinese converts follow. Down the Rua da Se, named from the yellow, Spanishstyle cathedral at its head, it winds to the Praya Grande which skirts the ocean. Camellias, carnations and leaves are scattered at the nine street stations of the Cross. Two children robed in white, and winged as Raphaelic cherubs, lead and regulate the kneeling and the march.

The whole Colony is out upon the harbor street; the women veiled behind their Do cloths are in the windows of the single line of houses which face the bay; the rest of the city is deserted. The Chinese come to wonder especially at the gaily dressed band of converts who are nearly all girl slaves who were purchased in childhood. The Casa Misericordia, the Church Lottery, is strongly represented by liveried officials. Finally a heroic-sized figure of Christ, bearing His cross, is brought forward upon the shoulders of the troops. The flare of the trumpets assails the heathen air; the draped drums roll out the gathering thunder; the emotion of the onlookers contributes sobs, and the little band of Catholic exiles take every thrill of courage possible out of their famous fete. High above the Areia Preta Beach, behind the square walls of the Protestant cemetery which is smothered in a vast foliage, lies the body of Robert Morrison, the pioneer Protestant missionary and translator, whose name is at last coming into its own in a great fame, now that the Christian scriptures are leavening China.

On the fifth day of the fifth moon, the Chinese hold their religious procession of Ken Yuen, their greatest democrat whom they have canonized, which ceremony, however, takes place on the water, and the Macaense become the spectators. Flimsy bamboo stands, bound together with rattan only, are erected, and their not infrequent precipitation in the excitement causes vast loss of life. The island communities of Taipa, Joao, Lapa and Heungshan send boats, very like our war canoes, only that the bow and stern are carved into the form of a dragon. The ceremony includes the casting of gifts and sacrifices into the water, which was copied by the Venetian doges when they heard the tales which Marco

Polo brought home. The festival closes with racing on a vast scale. The boats are all overmanned, sometimes with sixty paddlers, and the gunwales are often only five inches above the choppy water. A platform is raised in the waist, on which stands a naked man who beats the stroke on a gong for his bareback crew. Native women are, of course, kept at home. In the exciting finish I have seen the stroke raised to seventy-five. The irregularity of the paddling as much as the collisions is responsible for the swampings. The whole world has leaped in alarm when telegrams have come from Yuet Shing on the Kau Kwan reach of the West River, of the loss of one thousand lives through the tumbling of one of the stands during the wild finish of the races there. After the races, the boats paddle to all the villages of the sea delta. Wafted into your room on the Penha Height at Macao by the sou-west monsoon, far into the night, like the classic echoes of the strokes of Jason’s crew, come the sounds of the gongs and the paddles of these dusky boatmen as they visit and challenge for the morrow among the bays of Taipa and Joao.,

Once a month, on a Sunday, crowds from Hong-Kong repair to Macao, to a classic little building with white barred windows, on the Rua da Se, to witness the drawings of the Misericordia Lottery, which is the most extensive in the East and has given Macao the name of the oriental Monte Carlo. The officers are in uniform and have just come from special benediction for the drawing, and mass in the Se Cathedral close by. Inside a railing the costumed committee sit, with a smile upon their countenances, which is half between the cupidity of a gambler and the satisfaction of a virtuous judge. A trumpet is blown for eclat. Around goes the great brass globe, while every breath is held. The dice-like number, which falls out only one at a time, is passed to three persons, two of whom witness the number, and the last steps forward and theatrically announces it to the assemblage beyond the rails. This lottery draws from Manila three hundred thousand pesos annually; from Hong- Kong six hundred thousand dollars, Mexican. For its franchise it is compelled to maintain Macaense charities, including a college named for St. Joseph, under the direction of the church; hence the religious name of the lottery. It also pays a heavy tax to the “ Governmento Leal,” half of which assists to maintain the fine local roads; a quarter goes home to Portugal to be lost in the aristocratic halls of the white Ajuda palace on the cliffs of Belem; and a quarter helps to support the poorer Portuguese colony of Timor near Sumatra. In comparison with this lottery the largest bank of Macao, the Po Hang, hides its diminished head.

In the arch of the half moon bay at Macao, between the forts of Bomparto and Francisco, just before you turn up the street by the park where the Portuguese bands play on Sunday afternoons, you will notice an unusual house for the East. It faces the purple bay where the fishing junks are drying their brown nets on yellow mainsails. The windows are of imported stained glass, and the grilles are painted white. It is the only house you have ever seen in China where the blue stucco is not scaling or lichening like an architectural leper. You are told the owner is a rich Chinese, or a Tsai-shu, and that his country place is among the Heungshan Hills where he was born in poverty, ten miles away on execrable roads, which pass through acres of graves, underneath wonderful tamarind trees, and past the golf course of the navy and outdoor staff of the Imperial Customs Service, where the holes are earthen cups hammered into the stony hillside. I took a ’rickisha, with two pushmen and made the trip, which is one of as many ups and downs as a Gulf Stream passage when the wind is against the tide. It w'ould have been better to have taken a barrow, especially between Passalcao and Chinsan. At the Porta da Cerco, where the soldiers are drinking imported Colares wine, and lolling under the trees, you leave Portuguese territory, and enter old China. The truck gardens smell noisome, but are luxuriant in appearance. The chow dogs are barking like a side-battery. The tillers never leave their fields to look at you, a Fung Kwei, and the coolie, though weighted with two heavy pails hanging from a bamboo borne upon his bare shoulders, steps off the road into the swamp to let you pass, but he does not look up. The manners of China, by the Tao Li code, are self-effasive. At the outskirts of a village, you come to the country seat. Hand-cut granite walls inclose a lawn where horned black water-buffalo feed. The tea-house at the gate is open for you to step in and rest. You pass through doors which are always open, to the rock garden, the lily pools, the fir forest, and the flat gardens of clipped chrysanthemums nearer the house. Cool stone seats are everywhere, roofed over to hold off the great sun. The master sends you tea, even though you have not sent in your card, you being only a hurried foreign visitor of no significance, who has heard that his grounds are open to every one. In our land the seat would cost a million. There is not an establishment in the village worth twenty dollars, but the religion of China requires that a man shall return to his birthplace. The remarkable man whose homes these were, died at the Praya Grande house in

September, 1906. His name was Ah Fong, and he had been living in retirement for fifteen years with his homely village relatives. Forty years previous he emigrated to Honolulu, where he amassed millions in sugar and labor contracting. He married there a half white and half Kanaka woman, by whom he had thirteen daughters and two sons. When he left Honolulu he gave his wife and daughters, who did not want to go to China, one million dollars. One of the daughters married an admiral in the United States navy, and the others made marriages with white men of some prominence in the territory. Ah Fong brought his son Anthony to China, and to him he has left the greater part of this romantic fortune on the stipulation that he shall follow the religion and patriotic teachings of Confucius. China has had no emigrant whose career has been more picturesque ; she has had no son who was more loyal ; at home among his people they merely tell you that he did his duty to his forefathers and his country, and that he will therefore never lack a male heir to bow before his tablet.

The doorways and gateways are a mine for the illustrator, in their quaint lines of stucco. Through many a gate of ancient wrought iron work glimpses were had of luxuriant tropical gardens, hid behind high whitewashed chunam walls, which glistened like a porcupine with their armor of green, broken Munchen bottles stuck in the plaster. From ten a. m. until four p. m. the almost breezeless, burning streets are deserted. In the silent night the native watchman drags his wooden sandals noisily along and strikes his drum as he goes his rounds, so that thieves and evil spirits may know his whereabouts, and work elsewhere.

, When England, in the days of Henry VIII. was warring no farther away from home than France, Macao, at the end of the earth, was strenuous in daring struggles. The Dutch attacked St. Francis Fort, but drew off their battered boats in defeat. The old copper cannon still glisten on the picturesque ramparts, and beneath the white stucco sentry boxes. At the Monte Fort they cast cannon, and when war of their own was not on, turned a penny by selling the armament (the institution of manufactures in China), as in 1651, to the king of Cochin China. In 1622, two hundred Spanish infantry, and some cannon arrived from Manila to help the Macaense against the Dutch. In Macao of to-day, opium is taxed and gambling farmed, to feed the depleted purse of a decaying Portugal. Macao was the emporium of Southern China until 1840, when she was superseded by British Hong-Kong, which lies forty miles eastward, and that the feeling of resentment toward the British still rankles in the Macaense breast on this account, is evidenced by Montalto de Jesus’ history of Macao, published as late as 1902, when every one supposed that the remembrance of the slave barracoons and opium had been lost long ago.

In this old city of China, once lived and wrote the illustrious poet whose name reads like a jewel, and is sounded with the rich vowels of Greece. Camoens was over forty when he completed his epic. He died in Portugal, alas a victim of the Black Death, which, in its own melancholy haunts, he had defied a thousand times. The bubonic plague which was then attacking Europe, originated in the territory of Camoens’ exile. It exists there to-day, and is the terror which arises every May in Hong-Kong and Canton, alarming the ships that ply therefrom to every European port. In Camoens’ time the plague went overland from mephitic Yunnan to Burmah, following the Moorish traders from China to India, and the Red Sea, and by Arabic caravan to Constantinople and Venice. I'o trace its dire sweep through Milan and London, we need only read the terror-stricken pages of Manzoni and Pepys. Camoens, like Cervantes, in the fashion of the time, was soldier before being poet. He was a Hermes in regular features and curly yellow hair. In those days statesmen were poets first and courtiers afterward. Such were the talented and gallant Sortelha and Conde de Vimiosa. The Infanta, Donna Maria, led her court in epigram and sonnet. Portugal in the days of Camoens was a forerunner of what England was to become in the time of Raleigh. Arms, adventure and literature danced the measure, and the actor played equally well all three roles. For a while Camoens was the favorite of the Lisbon Court, until that unfortunate day when his admiring eyes fell on the golden-tressed Donna Caterina, kneeling at prayer in the Church of the Chagos. Then his woes began, but with his woes upgrew his character, his interest in mankind of all colors and religions, and his fame. The Donna Caterina was of the queen’s household, and the court opposed a suit, which was beyond his station. But this temerity also was the fashion of the time, for poor Tasso had similarly loved at Ferrara.

Camoens was born in 1524 at Lisbon. The world had almost forgotten classicism. The Renaissance and Boccaccio were long asleep. Chaucer had died in England, and all seemed dark again. It was yet a long cry to the births of Shakespeare and Milton. The Renaissance had sown the seed of ideals, but the seed was slumbering. In Camoens’ time, Portugal was to rise, thrilled with the new life, and her glory it was to give India, South

America, Asia, and the seas of all the globe to the vision and touch of marveling men. It was a generation of gods, but as ever the gods whom men make have feet of clay. Greece’s clay was State’s rights politics; Portugal’s was ill-distributed wealth. Camoens’ fate drifted into a current that bore him far from his sun, the Donna Caterina, and a rival Andrade de Caminha, who could also touch the lyre, but dressed in a more fashionable livery, displaced him. Banished by captious royalty from the court, Camoens fought under his country’s flag in Africa with no diminution of patriotism, which showed the man he was, because in those days there was no democratic sentiment to laugh with those whom society snubs. In leading a boarding party over the bulwarks of a Moorish galley off Ceuta, he lost his right eye. With the dauntless spirit of the traveler, but with the broken heart of a lover, at twilight on a day in March, 1553, aboard the San Bento, he put out once more from the golden Tagus. He was then twenty-nine years of age. In nine months he was in Goa, on the Malabar coast of India, and it was here on his way home with his immortal poem. The Lusiad, seventeen years later, that he was to hear of the death of the inspirer of his youth, the Donna Caterina. Life for a while was adventure only. The feats of arms were considerable, sometimes two thousand being slain. In winter there w’ere Moors to pursue at Ormuz, and through the summer heat, in dissipated days for most of his companions, they dreamed at Goa. Owing to a satire of Camoens, who was engaged in more intellectual if not more tactful work than wine-bibbing. Governor Barreto banished him from Goa to the little colony of Macao in China.

When the discouraged poet first saw Macao from the sea he wrote : “ In this lonely, sterile, sun-scorched land

did fortune will that my life be passed, and in fragments be scattered throughout the world.” Here he finally found the cords of life pulling taut, and the breeze sure and full, with a course laid which he might sail, unpursued of enemies. He had a luxuriant garden; a small competence as “ Trustee of the Estates of Those at Home,” for the faint-hearted soon left if they might ; and a devoted Javanese slave. The angel of fame, as present in the ends of the earth as in the temple of Delphi, gave him a language to seal to a people, and an epic whose theme is the widest man has sung. In the yellow matting junk sails of the Pearl he dreamed that he beheld the argosies of classic song, and the gong of the Confucian rang in his fancy as the cymbal of Bacchus. Without the accommodating temper of the soldier, the poet’s imagination in him would have sunk in despair. Courage held him up in his lonely life. Poesy was the bread of his soul. His theme was his nation, and patriotism was held by him almost in a frenzy. His was that refined patriotism which sees one’s country, not as she is or has treated him, but as she would be when he had in love remolded her.

I have seen the proud Macaense gathered about the poet’s bust at the famous grotto at Macao, while an orator, tearful with emotion, recited the proud cadences of the great song of his dying race. Camoens was the Homer of the Portuguese, and Da Gama and Albuquerque were his Ulysses and Eurylochus. Almost within his lifetime, Portugal was the shore that abutted on the sea of oblivion. Within his memory, the African coast had been ventured along. Good Hope rounded, Azores found, Brazil discovered by accident, India linked by a sea route,