work, although some of the tools used are exceedingly
clumsy in appearance from our own point of view.
Passing down some of the streets beneath the shade of
the piazzas, one meets with general stores of every description,
each with its little stall right outside the door
close to the path. Here you can purchase almost everything
; tools, nails and screws, needles, pencils, cotton,
cutlery, ammunition, old Tower muskets—indeed nearly
everything in the way of hardware goods, whether
Chinese or European. The European goods are such as
are especially made for this market, and the prices are
surprisingly low.
It is curious to observe how some industrial products
are universally used here to the exclusion of others. For
example, “ Bryant & May’s ” matches, so common at
home, are here supplanted by a neatly made “ Tand-
stickor,” ten little boxes of which are made up into a
packet, which sells for as low as six cents, although ten
cents is always asked of strangers. In many Chinese
and Kling shops European tinned provisions and patent
medicines may be obtained at a very slight advance on
home prices, as these petty traders watch the sales of old
ships’ stores very closely, and are thus enabled to
purchase very cheaply.
The Chinese compete with all comers in cheap labour;
and their innate capacity for imitation enables them to
do so very often with advantage in the case of manufactures.
If you can only give a Chinese workman a
pattern or sample of the goods you require—whether
boots, clothing, cabinet work, or jewellery, he may be
trusted to imitate the same even to a fault. They are
most industrious, having apparently no regular hours of
labour, but often toiling from early morning until far
into the night for a scanty pittance ; but no matter how
small their earnings, they generally contrive to save
something. Indeed it is difficult to say whether tis their
industry or their thrift which most deserves commendation.
Of course they have their faults as a people, and
most serious some of them are; and wherever they are
admitted as emigrants, a strong hand is needed to keep
them in order.
For opening up new trading enterprises or colonies in
the East their aid is invaluable, as they are most frugal,
and possess a peculiar habit of making the best of circumstances.
In Sarawak, and also in the British colony
of Labuan, the money derived from the opium and spirit
farms form a main feature in the revenue, so that eastern
colonies, in favouring Chinese emigration, add to their
revenue by their expenditure as well as by their labour.
Many, by thrift and frugality, rise to positions of affluence,
and then it is curious to see how thoroughly they
fall into the ways of the class to which they reach. This
makes a Chinese colony so prosperous as a rule ; for if a
man has money he is sure to spend it either in trade, or
in a fine house, garden, servants, horses and carriages,
and other luxuries. As a rule they deal with their own
class, but they take to European luxuries very kindly.
I was asked out to dine several times at the houses of
wealthy Chinese whilst in the East, and was at first
rather disappointed at the thorough European character
of the repast. Clean cloth, knives and forks of course ;
and every course might have been prepared in Pall Mall,
if we except the curries; and it is but natural that the
curries of the East are inimitable elsewhere. You get
most delicately prepared pastry, and ten to one, roast
beef and plum pudding, which are all the world over
understood to be our national dishes.
A gentleman told me that once when in Paris, just