The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864

Pancratius. It shall be heard on earth no more! And yours?

A Baron. Alexander von Godalberg.

Pancratius. It is already erased from the list of the living. Go!

Bianchetti (to Leonard). They have repulsed us for two long months; their arms are wretched, and their accoutrements utterly worthless.

Leonard. Are there many of them left?

Pancratius. They are all given over to you for execution, that their blood may flow as an example to the world. But if there is one among them who can tell me where Count Henry hides, he shall have his life for his information!

Many Voices. He vanished from our sight at last.

The Godfather. Great Pancratius, I appear as mediator between you and your prisoners; spare these citizens of noble birth, because they have given up to you the keys and strongholds of the castle of the Holy Trinity!

Pancratius. I have conquered by my own strength, and need no mediator. You will yourself take charge of their immediate execution!

The Godfather. My whole life has been that of a good citizen. I have frequently given proof of true patriotism. When I joined your cause, Pancratius, it was not with the intention of leading my own noble brethren to—....

Pancratius (interrupting him). Seize the old pedant! away with him! let him join his noble brethren!

The soldiers surround the Godfather and the prisoners.

Where is Count Henry? Has no one seen him, dead or living? A purse of gold for Henry, if only for his corpse!

A division of soldiers descend the wall from above.

The Leader of the Division. Citizen general! by the command of General Bianchetti, I stationed myself with my detachment, on the west side of the bulwark; upon our entrance into the fort on the third bastion to the left, I observed a man standing, unarmed, but bleeding and wounded, by a dead body. I cried immediately to my men: 'Hasten your steps, we must reach him!' but before we could approach him, he ascended a steep cliff overhanging the valley, stood for a moment on a sharp and jutting point of rock, and fixed his haggard eyes upon the depths below. I saw him, then, extend his arms like a swimmer about to make a sudden plunge; he threw himself forward with all his force; I saw him a moment in the air, and we all heard the noise made by the fall of the body as it pitched and fell from rock to rock into the abyss below.

This is the sword which we found but a few steps from the spot on which we first observed him.

He hands a sword to Pancratius.

Pancratius (examining the sword). Drops of blood stain the handle, but here are the arms of his house! It is the sword of Count Henry!

He alone among you all has kept his plighted faith; to him be endless glory—to you, traitors, the guillotine!

General Bianchetti, you will see that the fortress of the Holy Trinity is razed to the ground, and will also superintend the execution of the prisoners!

Leonard!

He withdraws with Leonard.

A bastion on the north tower. Pancratius, Leonard.

Leonard. You require repose after so many sleepless nights; you look wearied and exhausted with ceaseless labor.

Pancratius. The hour of rest has not yet struck for me, and the last sigh of the last of my enemies marks the completion of but half my task. Look upon these heavy mists, these swamps, these desert plains; they stand between me and the realization of my plans. Every waste on earth must be peopled, rocks removed, lakes and rivers everywhere connected; a portion of the soil must be awarded to every human being; the teeming hosts of the living must far outnumber the multitudes who have perished; life and universal prosperity must fill the place of death and ruin, before our work of general destruction can be at all atoned for. If we are not to inaugurate an era of social and widespread happiness, our work of havoc and devastation will have been worse than vain!

Leonard. The God of Freedom will give us power for gigantic tasks.

Pancratius. What! You speak of God! Do you not see that it is crimson and slippery here—that we are standing deep in human gore?

Whose blood is this beneath our feet?

There is nothing behind us save the court of the castle; no one is near us. I know that we are quite alone, and yet, Leonard, I feel there is another here!

Leonard. I see nothing but this bloody corpse.

Pancratius. It is the corpse of his faithful old servant—that is only a dead body; but a spirit haunts this spot, and stands beside me; this cap—see, his arms are embroidered upon it; Count Henry's shield; look, Leonard! there is the jutting rock o'erhanging the abyss—upon this very spot his great heart broke!

Leonard. How pale you grow, Pancratius!

Pancratius. Look up! IT is there! above you! Do you not see it?

Leonard. I see nothing but a broken mass of clouds drifting down, and surging o'er the top of yonder craggy peak o'erhanging the abyss, which is turning crimson in the setting sun.

Pancratius. A fearful symbol burns upon it!

Leonard. Lean upon me! How ghastly pale you grow!

Pancratius. Millions of men obeyed my will; where are they now?

Leonard. Do you not hear their cries? They ask for you, their saviour.

Look not on yon steep cliff; your eyes are dying in their sockets as you gaze upon it!

Pancratius. HE stands there, motionless; three nails are driven in Him; three stars; His outstretched arms are lightning flashes!

Leonard. Who? Where! Revive!

Pancratius. Galilæe Vicisti!

He falls dead in the arms of Leonard.

SELF-SACRIFICE

That for which man offers up his blood or his property, must be more valuable than they. A good man does not fight with half the courage for his own life that he shows in the protection of another's. The mother, who will hazard nothing for herself, will hazard all in the defence of her child; in short, only for the nobility within us—only for virtue—will man open his veins and offer up his spirit; but this nobility—this virtue—presents different phases: with the Christian martyr, it is faith; with the savage, it is honor; with the republican, it is liberty.—Analect.

SHANGHAI: ITS STREETS, SHOPS, AND PEOPLE

China has always been looked upon by Europeans and described in both ancient and modern works as 'the unchanging country,' and it is a common fallacy that the China of to-day is exactly what it was a thousand years ago; that foreign trade and intercourse have had and can have no effect upon the manners or ideas of the people, and that the descriptions we read of Chinese towns and their inhabitants, written twenty years ago, would answer for the same places to-day. In a measure this is true, but it is not true of the cities which have been opened to foreign trade, or in fact of any of the Chinese cities where foreigners have been settled since the war of 1857 and treaties of 1858.

Since that time the progress of Shanghai, Foo-Chow, Amoy, and Hong-Kong (which last, however, is purely a British colony) has been amazing, and men who visited China ten years ago would not recognize these places. Indeed, it is not unlikely, with the rapid extension of Chinese trade, and the removal of the prejudices of the people, that the history of Chinese cities, like those of the Western States and California, will have to be rewritten every ten years to be at all correct.

This is peculiarly the case in respect to Shanghai, which, from an insignificant place, almost unknown in the western world, has sprung up to an importance in trade surpassing that of any city on the China coast. It has, from its proximity to the tea district, and easy communication with the vast country watered by the Yang-tze river, taken almost without an effort the great trade that once centred in Canton, and every year shows a greater amount of tonnage in the Woosung river, and larger exports of tea, silk, and cotton.

Approaching the entrance to the Woosung river from the Pacific, the waters of the Yang-tze are plainly discernible at sixty to seventy miles from its mouth, and when near the point where the ship's head is turned from the broad current of the great river into that of the Woosung, a thick, yellow mud rolls out with the tide, and discolors the water as far as the eye can reach. It is like the waters of the Nile or the Mississippi, turbulent in the great tideways, and heavy with the coloring matter of the soil it has washed for thousands of miles. It is evident that we are approaching a great commercial city, although for miles we can see only a low coast, well cultivated, but without signs of a town. The number of ships and steamers passing in and out on a fine day would remind a New Yorker of the fleet that is always beating through the Narrows, or is to be seen from the heights of Neversink. In the three hours it took us to run from the light-ship to the anchorage at Woosung, no less than seven large steamers passed us, outward bound.

The tide in the Yang-tze and its branch, the Woosung, runs with tremendous force, having a rise and fall of eighteen feet at spring tides, and few ships are able to proceed beyond Woosung with a single tide, Shanghai lying twelve miles above. They anchor among a fleet of native junks from the trading places on the Yang-tze, bound to the same port, and awaiting a change of tide, which the Chinese sailors celebrate by a great hubbub on the poops of their unwieldy-looking vessels, with tom-toms and other instruments of the same nature. This fleet of junks and sampans is a curious sight to the stranger approaching the China coast for the first time, and, with a ramble through the filthy village of Woosung, occupies the time which the tides compel him to spend there.

The junks give proof that if there have been great changes in the trade of China and in the appearance of the cities where foreigners have established themselves, there certainly has been none in the mode of ship building, and in the thousand curious and uncouth ways of working, acting, and living which have been for generations handed down from father to son, and which are at the present time in no ways altered from what they were a thousand years ago. No people in the world are slower in admitting the ideas of foreign nations, or in taking advantage of the most obvious improvements daily before their eyes; and, although the improvements introduced by English and Americans in steamers and vessels adapted for the navigation of their rivers are so far acknowledged by them as to lead to the discontinuance of junk building to a marked extent, yet the vessels they now build are of the same uncouth, clumsy, and expensive shape as the first they ever put on the stocks.

Their anchors are still of wood, and occupy the greater part of the vessel before the foremast; and, instead of cables, they still have immense coils of rough rope like a hair lariat. The sails are still of bamboo mats, although occasionally a piece of good American or English duck is to be seen, stretched on bamboos in the style of the old-fashioned square sail, and once, on the river Min, we saw a native pilot-boat rigged with the regular fore-and-aft cut, her sails having evidently been fashioned by a foreign hand.

Out of hundreds of junks moored in the Woosung river it was impossible to find one without the great staring eye under what is called, by courtesy, the bows, and not a few of them had the open mouth of a dragon, with ugly teeth, painted under it, near the water-line, the corners being drawn down, and the eye (from their desire that it should see 'all ways at once') having a horrid squint. This gave to the boat a lugubrious expression—if such a term may be allowed—ludicrous in the extreme; and with fifty or a hundred junks drawn up in squadrons, squinting and making faces at each other, nothing more thoroughly Chinese could well be imagined.

Conspicuous among this fleet were the timber vessels, which were so loaded as to be able to move only with the tide. The art with which their lading was tied to the vessels, so as to preserve their shape while stretching far over the water on either side, was admirable; and, out of fifty timber junks, all seemed to be loaded in precisely the same manner. This was accomplished by laying the ends of the poles, tied in fagots, toward the bows, while their smooth, round butts were exposed to the action of the tide. The sticks being of uniform length and thickness, tapering evenly, and about twenty feet long, it was easy to arrange their fagots so as to give them the swelling lines of a ship, and enable the junk to breast the storms of the coast without damage to her cargo.

Woosung, itself, is a place of no interest whatever—a filthy village, with a market place on the river; the remains of old forts in its neighborhood, and extensive rice and cotton fields about it, presenting the only points worthy of note.

There is an old Joss house on the outskirts of the village, occupied by the French as a barracks, or 'garrison of occupation for the protection of the coast,' as a cadaverous old soldier told us, manned by twenty-six soldiers, without earthworks or protection of any kind. They constitute the 'foreign population' of Woosung, and might as well be drafted to some more healthy locality for any good that they can do. Such as we saw looked like men just recovering from cholera or yellow fever.

While lying at Woosung waiting for the tide to change, we were frequently reminded that we could not be far from a great commercial entrepôt of the world, by seeing five or six large ships, of one thousand tons each, rush past with the tide in as many hours, tea-laden and bound to Europe; but none of our company were prepared for what we saw as we first rounded the point where a good view of Shanghai is obtained, and saw, in the brilliant light of a harvest moon, the dense forest of masts that filled the river. I have seen the mass of shipping in the Pool at London, and in the Mersey at Liverpool, in the East river at New York, and the Delaware at Philadephia, in Boston and San Francisco harbors, and in all the other ports of China, and among them all Shanghai holds no mean rank. The summer of 1863, from peculiar circumstances, the dullness of freights elsewhere, and the depredations of the Alabama and other piratical cruisers, called to the China coast, and especially to Shanghai, as fine a fleet of clippers as was to be found in any port of the world; and on that bright mid-summer night we found them anchored in three parallel rows, crossing the channel of a river half a mile wide, and stretching for a mile and a half, if not two miles, up and down before Shanghai.

Interspersed among these ships of all nations whose flags are known on the seas, were steamers of all sizes, from the little tugboat to the large steamers, like the Poyang of fifteen hundred tons, plying on the Yang-tze and between the ports on the China sea, the Yellow sea, and in Japan. Of these, no less than seventy-one belong to or trade with Shanghai, and at that time there could not have been less than forty in port.

Beyond the vessels at anchor in the stream, the space to the very banks of the river was filled up and covered by a cloud of Chinese junks, sampans, and river boats of every class and name.

We were before one of the great cities of the world, or one that is yet to be known as among its most flourishing. The moonlight was reflected from a long row of stately buildings, palaces in extent and noble proportions, which lined the bank of the river for more than a mile. These were the residences and mercantile houses of the merchants, the public buildings, and the 'foreign concessions' in general, as they are called. Beyond them could be seen the dim, turreted outlines of the Chinese city, now closed and hushed for the night, but seemingly of vast extent. The first and overruling impression here, as in all European settlements on the China coast, except Canton and Swatow, was the grand scale on which everything was done. The residences or hongs of the merchants seemed planned by liberal minds, and executed by as liberal hands. Space and money are not spared, and to obtain coolness and comfort in so hot a climate, the ceilings of rooms are made very high, few of the houses having more than two stories. Generally the material is the small, over-baked and dark-colored brick of the Chinese, overlaid with stucco; but occasionally a house is seen built of stone, one or two of the largest and most valuable being entirely of granite. Generally these hongs stand in spacious enclosures, or compounds, filled with rare tropical trees and the bamboo so common in China.

The finest residences are on the river bank or Bund, as it is commonly called; but the city stretches for several squares back from the river, being densest in the English Concession. The American quarter, Hong-Que, although not as well filled with fine houses, is the next in importance, while the French Concession, nearest to the great city within the walls, is meanly built, and has more of the native element than either of the others. For, although it is contrary to Chinese law for any native to hold property in any of the foreign possessions, in practice large numbers of Chinamen rent tenements from their foreign owners, and even own them, the property standing, for convenience' sake, in the name of some foreign resident in trust. Thus there has gradually grown up around and upon the concessions a large Chinese city, believed by many to contain almost as large a population as the city within the walls. This is not incredible when we consider that the excesses of the Tae-Pings in Soo-Chow, a large city about thirty miles from Shanghai, have driven vast numbers of its inhabitants to the latter place, which, being already densely crowded, has overflowed its walls, and, as the presence of Europeans has made Shanghai, as it were, a city of refuge for the exiles, they have naturally crowded around the foreign settlement. In this manner the population of Shanghai and its environs has been prodigiously augmented within the last two years, and from a place of six hundred thousand inhabitants, it has become one of more than a million of people. It is extremely difficult to obtain even an approximate estimate of the population of a Chinese city. The estimates of the Chinese are totally unreliable, varying sometimes in the most ridiculous manner, and generally being preposterously exaggerated, while the estimates of strangers or foreigners, unacquainted with the marvellous abundance of human life in very small spaces, as it is seen in China, are very rarely correct. For instance, it is not uncommon to find that residents of this city differ as much as a million of people in their views of its population, their estimates ranging from nine hundred thousand to two million. It is not unlikely that a medium between these two extremes will prove to be correct, the figure twelve hundred thousand appearing to be the favorite at present among those conversant with the great changes of the last year.1

Unfortunately this vast increase in so short a period has led to great mortality among the Chinese, from the dense crowding it has occasioned, and in the summer months they are severe sufferers from Asiatic cholera, which rages among them with shocking mortality. The air, even of the foreign concessions, becomes tainted by the foul miasma rising from the Chinese city, and no part of Shanghai can be esteemed healthy in the months of July and August. A more perfect system of drainage in the foreign concessions will probably lessen the mortality among Europeans, and it is pleasing to note that this matter is now receiving the attention which should have been given to it years ago; but no system of laws or attempts at organizing better sanitary arrangements can seemingly be successful among the Chinese themselves. Large sums of money are now appropriated annually for these purposes, according to their own account, but the mandarins embezzle it, the work is left undone, and the filth and horrible stench of a Chinese city is indescribable; it is something monstrous. Europeans and Americans, accustomed to their own cleanly cities, cannot conceive of it. New York streets have an unenviable notoriety on the Western continent for their dirty condition, but New York is a garden of roses compared with a genuine Chinese city, such as Shanghai within the walls. Even the Chinese, who might be supposed to be accustomed to it, carry little bags of musk to their noses as they ride through in their sedans; and half the Chinese women one meets in Shanghai hold the nostril with the forefinger and thumb, with a grace and dexterity only acquired by long practice.

Mr. Fortune, the celebrated botanist and indefatigable Chinese traveller, gives to Tient-sin the glory of being the filthiest and most noisome of Chinese cities, although he mentions Shanghai with high honor. Canton, from which Europeans have mainly derived their ideas of China, is comparatively a clean and neat place, far superior to the more northern cities.

To descend from generalities to particulars. The smells are a horrible compound, worse than in Coleridge's 'City of Cologne.' First and foremost are the sewers, which are all open, the deposits of the night-soil of the city, with convenient wells at every corner and in niches in the walls. At these are to be found, at all hours, men with buckets slung on bamboos, filling them for transportation in these primitive open vessels to the farmers, who use the compost on their fields. These wretches, with their vile burdens, are met at every turn, and pass through the streets and roads in long files, loading the air with abominations. No attention is paid to the wells and sewers until they overflow, and, as chance may direct, the coolies take their loads from the most convenient.

This is a terrible nuisance, but it is hardly worse than the odors which arise from the innumerable cook shops, and from the peripatetic bakeries at every corner. What they are cooking, no man knows, but if not dog chow-chow, it is sure to be fried in some vegetable oil that sends up a mighty vapor, hiding the cooks and rolling into the narrow street, where it scarcely finds vent between the overhanging eaves of the houses. The sickening smell of the castor bean seems everywhere. Occasionally the sight and powerful odor of hard-boiled and rotten goose eggs, split open to show that they are either rotten or half hatched, attract the Chinese epicure. The oily cakes and crullers that the wandering baker is frying for a group of children, powerfully offend European olfactories, although so tempting to the half-naked brats. Many different and offensive odors come from these greasy cook shops, but the offence in almost every instance can be traced home to the vegetable oils, greasy and rancid, which seem to pervade all Chinese cookery, as it is seen in the streets of the cities. Many of the dishes, but for this oil, would be quite tempting; and such, as have tasted them in the houses of the rich, assure us that they are not so bad as they smell. The much-talked-of edible bird's-nest soup is really a fine dish. The substance, after it is prepared, all the dirt and feathers being separated from it, is as clean and pure as isinglass, which it greatly resembles in appearance. Great care is taken to make it pure before it is sold for use, and in the shops at Canton it may be seen in every stage of manufacture. Their ducks and geese are fine birds, and, with excellent pork, and their never-failing rice, are the favorite dishes of such as can afford them; which, by the way, they really know how to cook—an art that is very little understood in England or America.

Dog chow-chow, kittens, rats, and mice, with crickets and locusts, are only eaten by the vilest of the vile—poor wretches, who must support themselves and families on a pittance of about fifteen or twenty dollars a year.

Of course there are many things in their way of cookery, and in their tastes for such articles as sharks' fins, fish maws, beche-de-mer, etc., which are revolting to an educated stomach; but in their way the Chinese are quite as dainty as the most fastidious of other lands, and in fine vegetables, fish, and fruits they enjoy as much variety and evince as discriminating a taste as any people in the world. Their fish are sold in the markets alive, and taken from the tanks as selected by the purchaser. Their way of drinking tea will be found, after familiarity, superior to ours, for when milk is not used the finer aroma of the leaf is obtained. Indeed, they are very particular in regard to the quality and decoction of their tea, totally refusing the poisonous green teas that are consumed in such quantities in England, and especially in America.