are headed, as a rule, by two characters, hsün jen, search for a man.' The latter of these two is, under ordinary circumstances, written much like the Greek A; but where the 'man' is in the honourable position of a husband or a son the character is inverted, either to attract attention, or, as some Chinese explain it, because a man, you see, cannot run away on his head.' Some of these 'searches' would seem as pathetically hopeless as was that of the aged father of one of the English officers murdered in Peking in 1860. Here, for instance, is a tragedy of that very year (the advertisement appeared some seventeen years later):— The lady Huang, née Ssă-ma, of Yu-heng Hall, at Wuch'êng, seeks for her son. This son, Nien-tsu ( Mindful of Ancestors '), was carried off by the Taiping rebels on Christmas Day, 1860. He was 14 years old at the time, and his father, Ts‘ai, was dead. All these years nothing has been heard of him, and his mother's suspense and trouble have been very heavy. Should any who know of his whereabouts do her the honour to write and inform her, she will, as she is bound, gratefully recompense them. If they can bring him back to his home she will reward them with a hundred pieces of foreign money. She will assuredly not eat her words. A quest. Wu-ch'êng, 'The Five Ramparts,' is a well-known countrytown near Hui-chou, whence the Fychow teas take their name, and where Robert Fortune procured for Assam the tea-plants in the celebrated journey which has had such mixed results. It all but ruined the China tea-trade, but it supplied the local colour for 'By Proxy.' The clan or family of Huang (Yellow')—a common enough surname elsewhere-owns a great part of Wu-ch'êng. This family was represented for four generations in the Han-lin, the Academy of China, and forms part, therefore, of the strange literary aristocracy of that cultured empire. This wandering heir would rank (in that benighted land) with the cadets of Courtenay or the descendants of the Plantagenet. Many other proofs of the devastation caused by the Taiping rebellion are to be found in the advertisement-sheets of to-day. Here is one which, at the same time, is an unconscious satire on the difficulties of communication; for Wuhsi, where the advertiser lives, is in the next province to Anch'ing: Chang Mei-erh, formerly in the registry office of the District Magistrate of Wuhsi, was carried off by the rebels in 1863. His wife, née Shao, has rebuilt their house on the old site, and employs a man to conduct the business for her. She is informed that her husband is living at Anch'ing, outside the West Gate. Should any gentleman do her the favour to conduct him back to his home, she will be greatly indebted to him. But the persons advertised for are not all victims of these oldtime troubles. The kidnapper has something to answer for, or ill-advised curiosity. Notice. My second son, Huai-po, a boy of tender years and no great parts, was educated at home in the country and had no knowledge of the world. Even when we came to Shanghai last year he stayed indoors learning his lessons, and never left the house till one day, the 28th July last, when he went out to get cool and never returned. We searched everywhere for him, but found no trace. I ought to say that the boy was altogether unacquainted with the customs of Shanghai and the character of the people, and I fear that he has been decoyed away by scoundrels for some bad purpose. The gold charms he was wearing and the silver he had about him will not, I am afraid, be sufficient for his necessities; on the contrary, he will be borrowing money or doing something of the kind. In that case I will not hold myself liable. Should any of my relatives or friends see him, I earnestly hope they will direct him to return at once, and so earn my gratitude. [Here follow the prudent advertiser's name and address.] In the following advertisement, headed (despite its object) 'Search for a Man,' the 'man' is not inverted, probably because he is only an insignificant slave-girl : Lost to-day, a slave-girl named Feng-p‘ing (‘Phoenix Screen'), aged just 14, a Cantonese, dark-complexioned, with slightly protrusive front teeth, dressed in a tunic of blue cotton, with a green wadded cotton jacket, black cotton drawers, white stockings, and cloth shoes, but with no other garments. She went out this morning at eight o'clock to buy things and has not been seen to return. Should anyone detain her and bring her back, I will recompense him with ten large pieces of gift silver. 'Gift silver' is literally 'flowery red silver,' for dollars given as presents should bear some device cut in red paper, usually the character for 'joy redoubled.' If I purposed to provide in the course of this one article an adequate description of the whole contents of an average advertisement-sheet of the Shên Pao, I should have been obliged to allow less space than I have done to the 'hue and cry.' Taking a number of the paper at random, I find that it contains 116 advertisements, which may be classified thus: Native theatres, 3; sales by auction, 9; lotteries, 18; medicines and medicos, 32; new books and new editions, 15; 'hue and cry,' 4; houses to let, 3; steamers to leave, 4; general trade announcements, 17; miscellaneous, 11. Nearly half the general trade announcements and about a third of the miscellaneous' are foreign, as are all the sales by auction and a fair proportion of the medicines. The rest may be taken as purely native. The remarkable preponderance of gambling and medical advertisements will be noticed at once; indeed, I cannot help thinking that (except in the matter of theatres) the proportions which the various entries in this list bear to one another correspond pretty closely to the ingredients of a Chinaman's character. The one thing which he will import, whether into his country or himself, in practically unlimited quantities, is physic. China is the happy hunting-ground of the patent-medicine man. This is no new discovery, for more than one foreign drug company has flourished, and is flourishing, through the fact. With a spirit of reciprocity which she does not exhibit on all occasions, China returns the kindness of Messrs. Eno, Fellows, Beecham, &c., by exporting her medical men (save the mark!)-chiefly, I am happy to say, to the Pacific Slope. There in particular the next ruling passion of the Chinaman is given full play, if it be true that clauses are still inserted into labour contracts permitting the labourer to spend his evenings at the card house.' Every Chinaman is at heart a gambler, and though his native lotteries (one of them somewhat strangely known as the White Pigeon') are spasmodically interdicted by his authorities, nothing prevents him from having a monthy fling at the Manila Lottery, that chief support of Philippine finance. But with all his fondness for plunging and quackery he is the better sort of him—a reading animal, and 13 per cent. of advertisements devoted to literature is no bad measure of the interest he takes in books. The three theatres whose advertisements appear day after day in the Shanghai native press are all situated within the limits of the Foreign Settlements, and are an ingenious combination of indigenous and imported ideas. Until their introduction by Europeans some thirty years ago, the natives of Central China were accustomed to associate theatrical entertainments with some 'joyous affair,' such as marriage, the birth of a son, promotion in the Civil Service, or a successful speculation. A wealthy individual or guild provided the spectacle and, reserving the best places for the invited guests, admitted the company without charge to the rest of the space. Usually the entertainment was held in the courtyard of a temple or guildhall, on a permanent stage advanced from the centre of one side, and ten feet or so above the entrance to the enclosure. Opposite stood the shrines of the p'u-sa, or presiding deities, on either hand were galleries for the guests and their families, while the area was free to all. If no temple or guildhall was available, a rough platform roofed with matting was hastily erected on some vacant land, and the performance little less enjoyed. The actors were provided, on application, by a theatrical company, and varied in number from twenty or thirty to two or three hundred. The cost to the donor would in like manner range from 18 to 100 dollars a day-or from 3l. to 167. Such to this day remain the theatrical entertainments of China, except at a few places like Shanghai, where the influence of foreigners has been able to overcome a natural antipathy on the part of the Chinese public to pay for a spectacle. At Shanghai the scale of charges is as follows: Boxes, 6 dollars; stalls, per head, 40 cents (16d.); pit, 20 cents; front gallery, 10 cents; back gallery, 5 cents. These translations are, it is perhaps as well to add, only approximate. The general plan of the theatres there resembles to a great extent the courtyard of a guildhall as already described; only in this case the whole is roofed in and lighted with the 'self-lit flame' (gas or electricity), and no space is wasted on unappreciative p'u-sa. The stalls, more literally the middle seats,' consist of benches with attendant tables, on which cakes, samshoo, and melon-seeds are served to all who call for them. A more elaborate feast can be had in the private boxes, a ruder repast in the pit. In fact, it might be better to describe these places as music-halls rather than theatres, seeing there is no stint of drinking but of music or acting little or none. That, at least, is the impression a prejudiced Westerner brings away: to the native playgoer they are the supreme delight of the Paris of China, Shanghai. 6 Two performances are given daily, a matinée from one to four, and an evening performance from six till midnight. From first to last some twenty plays may be acted, no unnecessary time being lost by intervals between each. As at this rate even the considerable répertoire of Chinese playwrights would not long suffice, it frequently happens not only that the same house repeats its plays on successive nights, but that the same piece or pieces are announced for the same evening by more than one theatre. And this brings me back to the Shên Pao and its advertisements, which I have somewhat neglected. The names of the three theatres ('tea gardens' they prefer to call themselves) are the Old Red Cassia Tree, the Chant to the Rainbow, and the Celestial Fairies'. Here is one day's programme of the last of these: THE FAIRIES' TEA GARDEN. The 9th of the 10th moon: Daylight performance. The 9th of the 10th moon: Evening performance. The Pacifying of the Northern Seas. Two Faithful unto Death. A new play dealing with Civil and Military Officials, TEN TIMES A WARRIOR. The Lamp of the Precious Lotus. White Sparrow Temple. The Mount of Fragrance. The subjects of these are drawn, some from mythology, more from history, a few from everyday life. The Dragon's Cloak,' for instance, describes the investiture by his army of Chu Yuanchang, the celebrated founder of the Ming Dynasty, in 1368; the Jasper Terrace,' the journeyings of the ancient emperor Mu (B.C. 985), and his visit to the Kunlun Mountains and the fairy Queen-mother of the West. The Story of the Changed Sword' and the 'Abuse of Ts'ao-Ts'ao' are both taken from the Record of the Three Kingdoms' (A.D. 220-265), a well-known work, which, though it exonerates the Chinese from a certain apparent want of idealism, hardly deserves to be called, as some would call it, the rose Iliad of China. Visiting the Ten Fanes' depicts the passage through the Ten Hells of Kuan-yin, Goddess of Mercy, and Buddhist counterpart of the Regina Cœli. The auctioneers' notices, which come next in the advertisement-sheet, refer for the most part to the so-called auction sales of cargoes imported from Europe and disposed of piecemeal in Shanghai. Some few have relation to that more familiar domestic form which makes the auction a charm to young and a pain to old householders at home. In China we waste but little sympathy over a sale of our own or our neighbour's effects. Population is so fleeting that one has little time to become attached to a clockca`e or an armchair. Both are parted with with no more regret |