June 10.
Ix the fever of reformation which has smitten the Municipal Council like a murrain, it may be a kindness to the members to indicate to them a new field in which to expend their zeal—just as attendants on the mentally deranged humour the patients by pretending to treat their whims seriously. At the same time the reform we would suggest 1s one which, we are certain, would bring down upon the Council, not the matedictions which its efforts have so far unfortunately evoked, but the blessings of this and all future generations. We yeter to the numbering of Shanghai streets. From time to time ladies, who have a great many calls to pay in the calling season, have addressed letters to us, urging that people will put their addresses on their cards. The failure to do so is generally ascribed to survival of old customs, when everyone knew where everybody lived. But a little reflexion will show that the public are wiser in their generation than is often imagined. Even supposing they themselves have ever discovered the number of the house they live in, they know that it would be useless to put it ona visiting card, because nobody else would be able to find it, nor, even if they could, would it be of general utility owing to its want of relationship to any other number in the street.
It is believed that a former secretary of the Council ordered from Home a large consignment of collar-studs for the Chinese police force, overlooking the fact that they are not an article of dress which Chinese use. When this was brought to his attention, he, unwilling to waste the collar studs and not knowing what else to do with them, had the tops! cut off and numbers painted on them, and put them up above the doors of houses as far as they would go round. This explains why so many doors have no numbers at all, though apparently just as important as others that have; while the height at which the numbers are placed is, no doubt, due to the secretary's not wishing his mistake to be found out. If this explanation is not true, we contend that it is not a bit more irrational than the mental processes of whoever it- was that invented these ridiculous little plaques and had them stuck away up where they are quite invisible as'!soon as the light begins to fail. However, like addresses on visiting cards, the size and position of these plaques is really unimportant owing to the capriciousness with which they are pepperboxed along the street. Tt is a literal fact that the present writer, when recently looking for ''16B'" in a certain road and having with some difficulty found ''16,"' was eventually guided by a denizen of the neighbourhood to 168,'' which was quite eighty yards from ''16"' and on the opposite side of the road. In most towns, it is a very common practice to put even numbers on one side and odd on the other. But in Shanghai, though there are streets, we believe, in which the practice obtains, no reliance can be placed on it. In streets where Chinese houses are -inter-sparsed with foreign, the system followed, if any, is absolutely incomprehensible. We admit that it may be difficult to know how to deal with the rookeries to which the only access is one ahey from a main road. But where large recognizable shops are concerned, one fails to see why the numbers might not be affixed impartially. Take, for la-tance, Nanking Road. The numbers succeed each other, though straggling a bit from side to side from 1 to 47-48, up to Honan Road. Then we plunge into Chinese numbers and emerge the delirious product P.325/6,'and probably never existed. though there cannot be. anything like 324 shops in Nanking Road, between the two cross streets named. The French Council do a little better with their numbers, except for the practice. of numbering houses as they may' be twenty years hence. But they rob themselves of all claim to virtue by the delight they take in rechristening roads between night and morning, to do honour to some hero of the moment. So that we may go to sleep in one road and wake up in something totally different, while the good old name has vanished out of the ilirectory for ever.
The whole situation irresistibly recalls the description. of Ober-Ammergau in The Diary of a Pilgrimage."' B,'' it will be remembered, is telling Jerome K. Jerome how to write up his diary, as follows Explain how all the houses are numbered according to the date they were built, so that number sixteen comes next to number: forty-seven and there is no number one because it has been pulled down. Tell how unsophisticated visitors, informed that their lodgings are at number fifty-three, go wandering for days round fifty-two under the not unreasonable impression that their house must be next door, though, as a matter of fact, it is half a mile off at the other end of the village, and are discovered one sunny morning, sitting on the doorstep of number eighteen, singing pathetic snatches of nursery rhymes and trying to plait their toes into door-mats, and are carried away screaming to end their lives in the madhouse at Munich.
Even here, the acute reader will say, there is evidence of an attempt at order, chronology ically, which puts Ober-Ammer-gau above Shanghai. What we would suggest is that, on a given date, with due notice beforehand, the Council should scrap every number in Shanghai and start fresh. It would be expensive, but householders, we are sure, would gladly pay the cost. It would be recouped in the first month by. the saving of time now wasted in looking for numbers which at the Chekiang Road corner with|are not where they should be
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.