Page:Illustrations of China and Its People vol. I. 2ed edition.pdf/25



BOAT-GIRLS.

HESE are the two daughters of a respectable boating family. They have been trained to the use of the oar, and the management of boats, from earliest childhood. Happy for them they are not slaves, purchased by some designing dame, and destined for a worse fate than the life of careful industry common to the labouring poor of Canton.

The hat worn by the elder sister is made of ratan, closely woven, and varnished so as to render it waterproof; it affords protection from the sun as well as the rain, and serves, indeed, all the purposes of an umbrella. It has, too, this advantage, that, while it shelters the body, it gives the wearer the free use of her arms.

Hundreds of the small passenger boats that ply for hire about the wharves of Canton, are managed by young girls, whose pride it is to keep them bright and attractive-looking. Each boat has a small cabin, open in front, having its floor covered with white matting, a broad, raised seat, covered with like material, on which the passenger will find a tobacco pipe, spills, and the apparatus for procuring a light. The walls of the little cabin are adorned with pictures and small mirrors. The girls propel the boat from behind, and are separated from the passenger by a partition of wood, or bulkhead. Viewed from without, the boat has an equally attractive appearance, every board of the deck has been scoured with sand, until it rivals in whiteness the matting within, while a stand fixed on the bamboo roof of the cabin supports a little garden of favourite flowers. The girls, dressed with modest simplicity, deck their glossy black hair with some bright-coloured flower that heightens the effect of their dark eyes, and olive skins.

A CANTON BOAT-WOMAN AND CHILD.

ANY thousands of the population of Canton pass their lives in their boats,— in them they are born, and from them they are carried to their graves. These floating dwellings afford many advantages to their poor owners, who, had they to live on land, would be crowded into miserable makeshift hovels in the unhealthiest quarters of the city. There they would have to inhale the polluted air of a neglected neighbourhood, as even in the most fashionable localities of a Chinese city all sanitary regulations are ignored. In a boat the owner finds profitable employment for himself and his family, and in many instances, a clean, comfortable, and attractive looking home, while he can shift his anchorage at pleasure, and move to where the society may be most congenial to his tastes, enjoying a degree of social intercourse by his nightly changes unknown even to the most favoured of those who dwell upon the land. When he visits his friends his house and family go with him. In time of sickness he moors close to his physicians, in some healthy country district, where an invalid can breathe purer air; or, it may be, hard by a favourite shrine, where he can solicit the aid of its healing spirit, the efficacy of whose powers has been handed down by tradition, and on whom he implicitly relies.

The old woman in the photograph is the grandmother living with her son's family in the boat; she still works cheerfully at the oar to help the domestic earnings; and nurses, all the while, one of the grandchildren. Probably this is the eldest son, the pride of the family, and the hope of her old age. The babe is carried in a cloth slung over the shoulders, after the manner of the Chinese race, and he presses his face against the back of his bearer during his hours of sleep. This custom is so common, as to account, to some extent, for the flat faces and broad noses of the boating and labouring classes in China.