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increased; in company he is ill at ease, and only at home in his work.

The impression he produces is that of a dreamy, abstracted student, but he is neither dreamy nor abstracted in his own study; vigor and activity mark his habits of systematic labor and regular hours for eating, sleeping, walking and working.

He lives very quietly, a happy family life, depending chiefly for companionship upon a very limited circle of friends, upon his wife and, until a short time ago, upon his son Sigurd Ibsen, row attaché to the Norwegian Minister at Washington, U.S.A.-Temple Bar.

ADVERTISING IN CHINA.

IN the Voyage of the Sunbeam the late Lady Brassey translated from Brazilian newspapers certain advertisements of slaves for sale, remarking that the presence of announcements of such a kind in journals of standing showed, not only that the sale of slaves was carried on freely and openly in Brazil, but that Brazilian public opinion found nothing to object to in the practice. There can be little doubt, indeed, of the value to an inquiring sociologist of the advertising columns of a leading paper. Advertisements give unconscious, and therefore trustworthy, evidence of the current standards of intelligence, morality, and refinement, quite as much as of the prosperity or poverty of a country. It is not time wasted, then, to take up the advertisement-sheet of that comparatively modern institution the Chinese vernacular press, and see what light it throws on Chinese manners and morals.

In China proper there are at present four daily papers-one published at at Canton, one at Tientsin, and two at Shanghai. Of these, the first is the only one not under foreign protection, and probably for this very reason its advertisement sheet contains little of interest. It is largely occupied, in fact, by the puffs of an enterprising English druggist. The most characteristic advertisements are to be found, for those who have patience and eyesight, in the Shên Pao, or Shanghai Gazette. This paper was started in 1872 by an English resident as a commercial speculation. The native editor was given practically a free hand, while immunity from mandarin resentment was secured by the foreign ownership. In consequence the new venture, when its merits were once understood, became a Cave of Adullam for all Chinamen with a grievance. It took, in fact, the place of the indigenous "nameless placard." What that was

(and is) the unfortunate foreign settlers in the Yangtse valley know only too well. If a Chinaman considers himself wronged, and believes that the wrongdoer has the ear of the "parent of his people," the local magistrate, he does not-for that were folly-go to law. Nor does he lie in wait for his adversary and knife him surreptitiously-your true Chinaman is far too prudent for that. Early some morning appears on a convenient and conspicuous wall, by choice in the near neighborhood of the offender, a full and particular, though possibly not over-true, account of his transgression, the whole professedly written by a Friend to Justice. Precisely how far in the direction of scurrility the writer will venture to go depends on the amount of support he can expect from public opinion. If the party attacked be the self-denying Sisters of Mercy with their hospitals and crèches, or the Catholic missionaries (who, pace the correspondent. of Truth, are not beloved by the Chinese), then any amount of filthy abuse may be indulged in with comparative impunity. Officialdom, on the other hand, must only be impugned in general terms. To say that “ every civilian has three hands, every army officer three feet'-in other words, to impute venality to the magistrates and cowardice to the military

is a stale truism which no official would venture to confute by a beating; but if the Friend of Justice indicts some individual magistrate by name, as he sometimes does, then matters will be made serious for him-when he is caught. Now, it very soon occurred to the Friends of Justice aforesaid that, all things considered, it would be much more satisfactory if the necessary reviling could be performed without any of the unpleasant conse. quences usually found to result from manuscript placarding. Accordingly they

hastened to patronize the new press, protected as it was by the still powerful foreigner. Of course, the obscene lies directed against foreign missionaries were inadmissible, and too luxuriant abuse was pruned down. Still, enough remained to furnish forth a crop of libel actions had China been blessed with a Lord Campbell, and to keep several deserving barristers from starvation if the genius had been known in China. For many weeks the columns of the Shanghai paper a few years ago were adorned with the portrait of a bespectacled and befeathered mandarin. Above the portrait appeared the legend,"He still wears a red button and a peacock's feather”. -as who should say, He still styles himself a Right Honorable and a K.C.B. Below the portrait was the indictment, commencing with this promising sentence: "Behold a cashiered Intendant of Hupeh, a man without a conscience, an avaricious schemer, one whose vileness is patent to all!" Then followed names and details, which it were tedious to repeat. The defendant, if we may so regard him, had overdrawn his account at his pawnbroker's, and, as an official of his degree might do, had repudiated the debt. The sole redress the plaintiff could obtain was the pleasure of seeing his enemy posted everywhere as "expelled from the Service, leaving a legacy of disgrace to his descendants, ashamed of himself, but still boasting of his rank." moral to us seems, How very much more lively, and to novelists of the Charles Reade school more valuable, would the columns of the 'Tiser be if English pawnbrokers were allowed to advertise their transactions and libel their customers in this very outspoken fashion!

The

Here is another advertisement of the same class, but of wider interest :

A Husband in search of his Wife.

In July, 1878, I, Chang Shan-ch'un, of Wu-chang, married the daughter-in-law of one Wang, a girl whose maiden name had been Kung, in my native district, and marriage-papers were drawn up in evidence. We lived together as husband and wife in kind

ness and affection for seven years, without any break in our friendly relations. My wife is 27 years old this year. My nephew was transferred the year before last to Tientsin by H.E. Li Hung-chang, and invited me to accompany him, which, owing to the strong op. position of my wife, I did not do. Last June, however, I followed my battalion to their

quarters near the West Gate of Shanghai. This March we removed to the Hui-fang Lou, when, it seems, my wife, under the pseudonym of Chou Ai-ch'ing (Chou l'Amoureuse), began to frequent the Ti-i teahouse, a circamstance of which I was at the time in total ig. norance. Later on a Huchou man, whose name I do not know, went privately with my wife to a temple to burn incense. He had the effrontery to wear a blue button and the medallion and beads of an official. This went on until at eight o'clock on the evening of the 17th instant my wife secretly fled from our

house taking with her a bundle. I crossquestioned the nurse and so became acquainted with the foregoing facts.

I cannot control my wrath and bitterness, My wife has, it is plain, been enticed away by this rascal's deceit. How, I wonder, can

a mere tailor's block like this succeed in beguiling a girl who has a lawful husband? Surely he has not law or justice before his eyes. It is on this account that I am advertising. Should any kind-hearted gentleman who can do so give me information by letter, I will reward him with twenty dollars; should he bring her back, I will gratefully give him forty. I will most certainly not eat my words. His kindness and benevolence for a myriad generations, to all eternity, shall not be forgotten.

But before my eyes is still my one-year-old baby girl, wailing and weeping night and morning. Should that rascal presume on his position and obstinately retain her as his mistress, not only to all eternity shall he be infamous, not only shall he cut short the line of his ancestors and be bereft of posterity, but we three-father, son, and little daughter will risk our lives to punish him. I hope and trust he will think thrice, and so avoid an after-repentance. I make this plain declaration expressly.

Letters may be addressed to No. 4 Hui-fang

Lou.

Note the neat allusion to 66 my nephew," who is under the patronage of no less a person than His Excellency the Viceroy of Chibli.

About the same time appeared in the Shen Pao an advertisement which I translated for its English contemporary, the North China Herald. I was gratified, some months later, to find that it had, by the obliging instrumentality of the Central News Agency, been disseminated among various home papers. But the agent (to whom I make my bow) did not consider the form of my translation suited to English ideas. In my anxiety to preserve the spirit of the original I had translated it literally, so that the heading ran "Beware of incurring Death by Thunder !"'

The agent (I humbly acknowledge the extent of his erudition) knew that

death, if it happens at all under these circumstances, is not, in England nowadays, ascribed to thunder. He therefore altered the heading to "Death by Lightning." Last century one of the Jesuit missionaries in Peking (I think Père Amyot) complained, but not quite as deferentially as I have done, of similar editing. "I "I wrote," he said, "in my letters to Paris of the drawbacks to Peking streets, describing them as full of dust in winter and a sea of mud in summer. My publisher objected to this as contrary to universalthat is, to his experience, and has made me speak of the mud in winter and the dust in summer, as though Peking were Paris." In Chinese thunderstorms the lightning plays a comparatively innocuous part its sole use is to enable the offended deity to see his victim and so wield the bolt with deadlier effect. I had to thank the agent for other corrections which were no doubt, from a literary point of view, great improvements, but were not a closer rendering of the original. That ran as follows.

Beware of incurring Death by Thunder!

Your mother is weeping bitterly as she writes this for her boy Joy to see. When you ran away on the 30th of the 8th moon the shop-people came and inquired for you, and that was the first news we had I nearly died of fear at the time, and since then sleep and food have been in vain, and I am weeping and sobbing still. The letter that came from beyond the horizon I have, but it gives no place or abode where I might seek you. I am now at my last gasp, and the family has suffered for many days from grievous insults. If you delay longer and do not return, I cannot, cannot bear it, and shall surely seek an end to my life, and then you will stand in peril of death by thunder. If you come, no matter how, everything is sure to be arranged. I have thought of a plan, and your father may still be kept in ignorance. My life or death

hangs on the issue of these few days. Only

pray that all kind-hearted people everywhere will spread this abroad so that the right person may hear of it. So will they lay up for themselves a boundless store of secret merit. Written by one in Soochow city.

The hue and cry is constantly raised in the columns of the Shen Pao and its contemporaries. Advertisements of this class are headed, as a rule, by two characters, hsün jen, "search for a man." The latter of these two is, under ordinary circumstances, written much like the Greek A; but where the "man" is in the honorable position of a husband or a son the

character is inverted, either to attract at tention, or, as some Chinese explain it, "because a man, you see, cannot run away on his head." Some of these "searches" would seem as pathetically hopeless as was that of the aged father of one of the English officers murdered in Peking in 1860. Peking in 1860. Here, for instance, is at tragedy of that very year (the advertisement appeared some seventeen years later) :—

The lady Huang, née Ssă-ma, of Yu-heng Hall, at Wuch'êng, seeks for her son. This son, Nien-tsu ("Mindful of Ancestors''), was carried off by the Taiping rebels on Christmas Day, 1860. He was 14 years old at the time, and his father, Ts'ai, was dead. All these

years nothing has been heard of him, and his mother's suspense and trouble have been very heavy. Should any who know of his whereabouts do her the honor to write and inform her, she will, as she is bound, gratefully recompense them. If they can bring him back to his home she will reward them with a hundred pieces of foreign money. She will assuredly not eat her words. A quest.

Wu-ch'êng, "The Five Ramparts," is a well-known country-town near Huichou, whence the Fychow teas take their name, and where Robert Fortune procured for Assam the tea-plants in the celebrated journey which has had such mixed results. It all but ruined the China teatrade, but it supplied the local color for "By Proxy." The clan or family of Huang ("Yellow")-a common enough surname elsewhere-owns a great part of Wu-ch'êng.. This family was represented for four generations in the Han-lin, the Academy of China, and forms part, therefore, of the strange literary aristocracy of that cultured empire. This wandering heir would rank (in that benighted land) with the cadets of Courtenay or the descendants of the Plantagenet.

caused by the Taiping rebellion are to be Many other proofs of the devastation

found in the advertisement-sheets of today. Here is one which, at the same time, is an unconscious satire on the difficulties of communication; for Wuhsi, where the advertiser lives, is in the next province to Anch'ing :

Chang Mei-erh, formerly in the registry office of the District Magistrate of Wuhsi, was carried off by the rebels in 1863. His wife, née Shao, has rebuilt their house on the old site, and employs a man to conduct the business for her. She is informed that her husband is living at Anch'ing, outside the West Gate. Should any gentleman do her the favor

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to conduct him back to his home, she will be greatly indebted to him.

But the persons advertised for are not all victims of these old time troubles. The kidnapper has something to answer for, or ill-advised curiosity.

Notice.

My second son, Huai-po, a boy of tender years and no great parts, was educated at home in the country and had no knowledge of the world. Even when we came to Shanghai last year he stayed in doors learning his les. sons, and never left the house till one day, the 28th July last, when he went out to get We searched everycool and never returned. where for him, but found no trace. I ought to say that the boy was altogether unacquainted with the customs of Shanghai and the char. acter of the people, and I fear that he has been decoyed away by scoundrels for some bad purpose. The gold charms he was wearing and the silver he had about him will not, I am afraid, be sufficient for his necessities; on the contrary, he will be borrowing money or doing something of the kind. In that case I will not hold myself liable. Should any of my relatives or friends see him, I earnestly hope they will direct him to return at once, and so earn my gratitude.

[Here follow the prudent advertiser's name and address.]

In the following advertisement, headed (despite its object) "Search for a Man," theman" is not inverted, probably because he is only an insignificant slavegirl:

Lost to-day, a slave girl named Feng-p'ing ("Phoenix Screen"), aged just 14, a Cantonese, dark-complexioned, with slightly protrusive front teeth, dressed in a tunic of blue cotton, with a green wadded cotton jacket, black cot ton drawers, white stockings, and cloth shoes, but with no other garments. She went out this morning at eight o'clock to buy things and has not been seen to return. Should any one detain her and bring her back, I will recompense him with ten large pieces of gift

silver.

"Gift silver" is literally" flowery red silver," for dollars given as presents should bear some device cut in red paper, usually the character for “ joy redoubled." If I purposed to provide in the course of this one article an adequate description of the whole contents of an average advertisement-sheet of the Shen Pao, I should have been obliged to allow less space than I have done to the "hue and cry." Taking a number of the paper at random, I find that it contains 116 advertisements, which may be classified

thus :

Native theatres, 3; sales by auction, 9; lotteries, 18; medicines and medicos, 32; new books and new editions, 15; "hue and cry," 4; houses to let, 3; steamers to leave, 4; general trade announcements, 17; miscellaneous, 11.

Nearly half the general trade announcements and about a third of the "miscellaneous" are foreign, as are all the sales by auction and a fair proportion of the medicines. The rest may be taken as purely native.

The remarkable preponderance of gambling and medical advertisements will be noticed at once; indeed, I cannot help thinking that (except in the matter of theatres) the proportions which the various entries in this list bear to one another correspond pretty closely to the ingredients The one of a Chinaman's character. thing which he will import, whether into his country or himself, in practically unlimited quantities, is physic. China is the happy hunting-ground of the patentmedicine man. This is no new discovery, for more than one foreign drug company has flourished, and is flourishing, through the fact. With a spirit of reciprocity which she does not exhibit on all occasions, China returns the kindness of Messrs. Eno, Fellows, Beecham, etc., by exporting her medical men (save the mark)-chiefly, I am happy to say, to the Pacific Slope. There in particular the next ruling passion of the Chinaman is given full play, if it be true that clauses are still inserted into labor contracts permitting the laborer to spend his evenings at "the card house." Every Chinaman is at heart a gambler, and though his native lotteries (one of them somewhat strangely known as "the White Pigeon") are spasmodically interdicted by his authorities, nothing prevents him from hav ing a monthly fling at the Manila Lottery, that chief support of Philippine finance. But with all his fondness for plunging and quackery he is the better sort of him a reading animal, and 13 per cent. of advertisements devoted to literature is no bad measure of the interest he takes in books.

The three theatres whose advertisements appear day after day in the Shanghai native press are all situated within the limits of the Foreign Settlements, and are an ingenious combination of indigenous and imported ideas. Until their intro

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duction by Europeans some thirty years ago, the natives of Central China were accustomed to associate theatrical entertainments with some joyous affair," such as marriage, the birth of a son, promotion in the Civil Service, or a successful speculation. A wealthy individual or guild provided the spectacle and, reserving the best places for the invited guests, admitted the company without charge to the rest of the space. Usually the enter tainment was held in the courtyard of a temple or guildhall, on a permanent stage advanced from the centre of one side, and ten feet or so above the entrance to the enclosure. Opposite stood the shrines of the p'u-sa, or presiding deities, on either hand were galleries for the guests and their families, while the area was free to all. If no temple or guildhall was available, a rough platform roofed with matting was hastily erected on some vacant land, and the performance little less enjoyed. The actors were provided, on application, by a theatrical company, and varied in number from twenty or thirty to two or three hundred. The cost to the donor would in like manner range from 18 to 100 dollars a day-or from 37. to 167.

Such to this day remain the theatrical entertainments of China, except at a few places like Shanghai, where the influence of foreigners has been able to overcome a natural antipathy on the part of the Chinese public to pay for a spectacle. At Shanghai the scale of charges is as follows: Boxes, 6 dollars; stalls, per head, 40 cents (16d.); pit, 20 cents; front gallery, 10 cents; back gallery, 5 cents. These translations are, it is perhaps as well to add, only approximate. The general

plan of the theatres there resembles to a great extent the courtyard of a guildhall as already described; only in this case the whole is roofed in and lighted with the "self-lit flame" (gas or electricity), and no space is wasted on unappreciative p'u-sa. The stalls, more literally "the middle seats," consist of benches with attendant tables, on which cakes, samshoo, and melon-seeds are served to all who call for them. A more elaborate feast can be had in the private boxes, a ruder repast in the pit. In fact, it might be better to describe these places as music-halls rather than theatres, seeing there is no stint of drinking but of music or acting little or

none.

That, at least, is the impression a prejudiced Westerner brings away to the native playgoer they are the supreme delight of the Paris of China, Shanghai.

Two performances are given daily, a matinée from one to four, and an evening performance from six till midnight. From first to last some twenty plays may be acted, no unnecessary time being lost by intervals between each. As at this rate even the considerable répertoire of Chinese playwrights would not long suffice, it frequently happens not only that the same. house repeats its plays on successive nights, but that the same piece or pieces are announced for the same evening by more than one theatre. And this brings me back to the Shen Pao and its advertisements, which I have somewhat neglected. The names of the three theatres ( tea gardens" they prefer to call themselves) are the Old Red Cassia Tree, the Chant to the Rainbow, and the Celestial Fairies'. Here is one day's programme of the last of these :

THE FAIRIES' TEA GARDEN.
The 9th of the 10th moon: Daylight performance.

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