28nd November.
Tuere is a general consensus of opinion among residents in Shanghai that the tall red-brick barracks with which the business part of the Settlement is being covered are_not really wanted here. Almost without exception they are portentously ugly and, as our correspo: dent. " L." pointed out some days ago in a letter headed" A Crying Necessity," our streets are much too narrow for them, and a fool-passenger walking up the Kiukiang Road, for instance, feels like, to use the Chinese proverb, a frog in a well. As we have said before, the residents here don't want these tall houses, and we are sure no architect here can be proud of them, so they musi be built to satisfy the avarice of the two chief classes landowners here: the absentees and the Chinese. It is about fifteen years since Mr. P. J. Hughes, then Bri Consul -here, pointed out that two-thirds of the land here was owned by Chinese, in the names of foreigners, and we know that nearly all the remainder is owned by absentees, the result of which is that little else is thought of than getting the largest possible return out of it. Most residents here will agree that three stories, that is a ground floor and two upper floors, is the proper limit for houses in Shanghai, and those who look alittle below the surface wil! con. clude that the architects an Council are working together, in the best interest of the people who live in Shanghai, to secure the observance of this limit. This seems an optimistic statement, in the face of the fact that there are now many four, five, and even six-storied buildings in Shanghai, But it will be observed by the thoughtful that in all these buildings kitchens are carefully placed in the raul, which means that sooner or later or before very long, the roofs will catch fire, Now when a building catches fire down below, the minutes, if there are any, are either suffocated by the smoke er are seriously injured by jumping out of the windows; but whea it catches fire in the roof the inmates can walk comfortably down stirs, carrying under their arms anything they particularly want to save. Then the artfulness of the Council comes in the appliances of the Fire Department are carefully adapted to buildings not over, cay sixty feet in height, and as soon as the building bur down to about what we have sai the proper standard height for buildings in Shanghai, the fire department comes into action and the fire is put out. The absentee landlords and the Chinese landowners would be up in arms at once, through their agents, if a by-law were passed that no building should be over sixty feet in height, and so the desired end is attained in the indirect way we have indicated. The working of this scheme—it surely cannot be imaginary—was seen: on Thursday; the house attacked by fire had a kitchen in the roof; the roof caught fire. Were the fire department and the water supply designed cope with such an outbreak, it could have been extinguished in half-an-hour; but the rules we have outlined were observed; firemen came, hose trucks, engines, hook-and-ladder trucks, all the paraphernalia, were drawn up round the building, and as soon as its two superfluous stories were burnt off, the fire was put out, and brokers were allowed to drive up and down the Bund again. This is how, as we gather from observation, a wise Council, with the aid of wise architects, achieves a public benefit which it would not dare even to aim at directly, We are quite sure that we are on the right tack in making these remarks, because it is over four months since we drew public attention to the inadequacy of the Fire Departmenv's appliances, and as far as we know nothing has been done in the interval to remedy the deficiencies. There must be a reason for this. We take no credit to ourselves for pointing out the inadequacy last July, for everybody who took any interest in the matter knew of it as well as we did.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.