Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1859 edition. Excerpt: ...with its million of population, and its age-accumulated horrors, vice and corruption, plethoric, and full--fattened and enfeebled by oriental luxury, facilitated, not controlled, by a material religion, and aided by art enough to concentrate without refining. Travelers in the United States are constantly annoyed by the ferocious importunity and deafening cries with which hackmen are permitted to assail them at the railroad depots. All this is scarcely equal to the solicitations of the Tanka girls of China. These girls do all the boating on the river--such as carrying passengers and messages between the shipping and the shore. Their boats, roofed over with matting, are exceedingly neat, every thing being scrupulously clean, and the smallest thing having its proper place. Order and system are especially necessary to this neatness, as the boat is the permanent dwelling of its three or four inmates--their kitchen, dining-room and bed-chamber. The women wear loose Chinese trowsers and short frock of dark blue pongee silk, with heavy ear-rings, bracelets, and anklets of a pearl-colored stone, or of silver. The young ones are, many of them, quite good looking, with cheerful faces, framed in a bright-colored kerchief thrown over the head, and fastened under the chin, and in the smiling, merry animation with which they urge you to employ their boats, many of them display beautifully regular and white teeth. Their feet are bare. These boats rushed and crowded upon our steamer, as we came to the anchorage, in the most reckless manner, and the captain told me they are frequently upset, and their inmates drowned. We had anchored immediately in front of the Hongs, or Factories--that little spot, of all Canton, in which are shut up all the foreign...