Democratic Sentinel, Volume 19, Number 34, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 30 August 1895 — A CHINESE CITY. [ARTICLE]

A CHINESE CITY.

Picturesque Scenes in Quiirsww, on the Grand Canal. Quinsan lies at the end of a spar of | the famed Grand Canal, which hi, | next to the Great Wall, the noblest . work of the Chinese. Pagodas are | not common in China. You do not see one in every day of travel, so I remember that one is on the lone mountain that dominates the approach to the city. The outside town, such as lies by every gate to every city, is a place where a painter could spend a year to better advantage than.ln most painters’ resorts in southern Europe. Rows of white walls, heavily roofed with black tiles, face the water. The corners of all the roofs are turned up, and some have doable corners. A few roofs, no less picturesque, are of gray thatch, and a few walls are black or gray or blue, or even dark red. Fancy the gorgeonsness of the scene, with the people crowding there in new blues and faded blues! Bamboo balconies push out to the water’s edge, and carry idle women and men, in pretty clothes, looking at us. The open shops disclose workmen making shoos or coffins, or cooking the wonderful bean curd —foundation of a hundred dishes. As the heart of the place is reached it becomes picturesque beyond description. High stone walls shut in the water, and on these rise houses of white staff, with cumbrous jet roofs, and the most ornate, the most fanciful windows, paned with glossy inside scales of oyster shells. Stone steps lead down to the water, and each bears a women washing clothes or rinsing lacquered wooden pots. Sunflowers and pumpkin vines in bloom peep over the walls of the houses, and beside the walls of the stream ars innumerable boats, tied to carved dragons’ heads, crabs, grotesque faces and pretty carvings of many sorts cut in the granite. At all the doorways are tall and often handsome men in long silk coats and silken half breeches bound tight around their ankles. At the windows are the round faced, full lipped women. On and on we float. And presently we discover the long low walls of Quinsan, made ever famous by the valor of General Gordon . Under the interminable low walls of what we call Roman brick are plantations of sunflowers, and then more white and black houses. They face another jumble of boats of every fashion, from the stately cargo and chop boats to the rows of slender express boats, waiting, like omnibuses, for passengers for Soo chow and Shanghai The dyers’ shops hangout long strips of blue cloth; a bridge is draped with colored stuffs hung there to dry; an enormous vermillion banner floats from a boat that, like hundreds beside. is orange toned beneath its sheen of Ning po varnish.