Chinese Sketches | Page 6

way with the
theatres. Their occupation is gone. For the space of one year neither
public nor private performance is permitted. During that time actors are

outcasts upon the face of the earth, and have no regular means of
getting a livelihood. The lessees of theatres have most likely feathered
their own nests sufficiently well to enable them to last out the
prescribed term without serious inconvenience; but with us, actors are
proverbially improvident, and even in frugal China they are no
exception to the rule.
Officials in the provinces, besides conforming to the above customs in
every detail, are further obliged on receipt of the "sad announcement"
to mourn three times a-day for three days in a particular chapel devoted
to that purpose. There they are supposed to call to mind the virtues of
their late master, and more especially that act of grace which elevated
each to the position he enjoys. Actual tears are expected as a slight
return for the seal of office which has enabled its possessor to grow rich
at the expense too often of a poor and struggling population. We fancy,
however, that the mind of the mourner is more frequently occupied
with thinking how many friends he can count among the Imperial
censors than in dwelling upon the transcendent bounty of the deceased
Emperor.
We sympathise with the bereaved mother who has lost her only child
and the hope of China; but on the other hand if there is little room for
congratulation, there is still less for regret. The nation has been
deprived of its nominal head, a vapid youth of nineteen, who was
content to lie /perdu/ in his harem without making an effort to do a little
governing on his own responsibility. During the ten years that
foreigners have resided within half a mile of his own apartments in the
palace at Peking, he has either betrayed no curiosity to learn anything at
all about them, or has been wanting in resolution to carry out such a
scheme as we can well imagine would have been devised by some of
his bolder and more vigorous ancestors. And now once more the
sceptre has passed into the hands of a child who will grow up, like the
late Emperor, amid the intrigues of a Court composed of women and
eunuchs, utterly unfit for anything like energetic government.
The splendid tomb which has been for the last twelve years in
preparation to receive the Imperial coffin, but which, according to

Chinese custom, may not be completed until death has actually taken
place, will witness the last scene in the career of an unfortunate young
man who could never have been an object of envy even to the meanest
of his people, and who has not left one single monument behind him by
which he will be remembered hereafter.

THE POSITION OF WOMEN
It is, perhaps, tolerably safe to say that the position of women among
the Chinese is very generally misunderstood. In the squalid huts of the
poor, they are represented as ill-used drudges, drawers of water and
grinders of corn, early to rise and late to bed, their path through the vale
of tears uncheered by a single ray of happiness or hope, and too often
embittered by terrible pangs of starvation and cold. This picture is
unfortunately true in the main; at any rate, there is sufficient truth about
it to account for the element of sentimental fiction escaping unnoticed,
and thus it comes to be regarded as an axiom that the Chinese woman is
low, very low, in the scale of humanity and civilisation. The women of
the poorer classes in China have to work hard indeed for the bowl of
rice and cabbage which forms their daily food, but not more so than
women of their own station in other countries where the necessaries of
life are dearer, children more numerous, and a drunken husband rather
the rule than the exception. Now the working classes in China are
singularly sober; opium is beyond their means, and few are addicted to
the use of Chinese wine. Both men and women smoke, and enjoy their
pipe of tobacco in the intervals of work; but this seems to be almost
their only luxury. Hence it follows that every cash earned either by the
man or woman goes towards procuring food and clothes instead of
enriching the keepers of grog-shops; besides which the percentage of
quarrels and fights is thus very materially lessened. A great drag on the
poor in China is the family tie, involving as it does not only the support
of aged parents, but a supply of rice to uncles, brothers, and cousins of
remote degrees of relationship, during such time as these may be out of
work. Of course