Feb. 25.
Wxo says that Shanghai is not China? Literally, of course it is not, inasmuch as it has been set aside for the residence of foreigners, notwithstanding the rate at which they are an-unally being pushed over the boundary by the invading host of Chinese. And metaphorically it is not, in respect of roads such as China never dreamed of, and the motor-cars that fly along them and the manifold evidences of Western influence in dress and department, schools, colleges, and political and social panaceas. But there are times when these new lendings are laid aside, when our Chinese fellow-residents seem deliberately to throw themselves back into all the immemorial practices of their forefathers and the foreigner and all his ways, even in this foreign reservation, seem to be submerged in the flood of Chinese tradition reasserting itself in every street and household. At such times one wonders whether seven hundred thousand Chinese are not at least as likely to mould wventy thousand foreigners as the foreigners to mould them, and whether all the motor-cars and felt hats and sanitary apphanoes which we have introduced—though certainly breeding new wants—have made the'
Chinese of Shanghai an fond so very different from their fellows in the rest of China.
Go out into the streets of Shanghai after midnight on the fourth day of the China New Year holiday—that is to say for the dawn of the fifth day, when custom prescribes that honour be paid to the gods of riches of the five ways. For on the fifth day business begins to be resumed, shops are opened once more and sacrifices are offered to the said gods of riches, in order that they may smile upon their suppliants and grant them prosperity in their business through the coming year. This is not a treatise on Chinese religious practices, which indeed the present writer is quite unfitted to attempt, but merely a description of things seen between twelve and one o'clock last Monday night—and that, be it especially noted, not in any back street of an exclusively Chinese quarter, but in the Nanking Road, where foreign architecture, goods and
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.