Page:Journal of the Right Hon. Sir Joseph Banks.djvu/471

1770 In manner they are always civil, or rather obsequious; in dress always neat and clean in a high degree, from the highest to the lowest. To attempt to describe either their dresses or persons would be only to repeat some of the many accounts of them that have already been published, as every one has been written by people who had much better opportunities of seeing them, and more time to examine them than I have had. Indeed, a man need go no farther to study them than the China paper, the better sorts of which represent their persons, and such of their customs, dresses, etc., as I have seen, most strikingly like, though a little in the caricatura style. Indeed, some of the plants which are common to China and Java, as bamboo, are better figured there than in the best botanical authors that I have seen. In eating, they are easily satisfied, not but that the richer have many savoury dishes. Rice, however, is the chief food of the poor, with a little fish or flesh, as they can afford it. They have a great advantage over the Malays, not being taught by their laws or religion to abstain from any food that is wholesome, so that, besides pork, dogs, cats, frogs, lizards and some kinds of snakes, as well as many sea animals looked upon by other people to be by no means eatable, are their constant food. In the vegetable way, they also eat many things which Europeans would never think of, even if starving with hunger; as the young leaves of many trees, the lump of bracteæ and flowers at the end of a bunch of plantains, the flowers of a tree called by the Malays combang ture (Aeschinomine grandiflora), the pods of kellor (Guilandina moringa), two sorts of blites (Amaranthus), all which are boiled or stewed; also the seeds of taratti (Nymphea Nelumbo), which indeed are almost as good as hazel nuts. All these, however, the Malays also eat, as well as many more whose names I had not an opportunity of learning, as my illness rendering me weak and unable to go about prevented me from mixing with these people as I should otherwise have done.

In their burials the Chinese have an extraordinary superstition, which is that they will never more open the ground