I.] CHUI-TENG-KA. 17 



Keelnrj,-, which Mr. Taiutor^ has stigmatised as "the fihhiest town 

 in the iniverse," and we wandered about it attended by a small 

 crowd 10 whom European manners and customs were doubtless a 

 novelt_^ . However well one may know China, there is always 

 abundant matter for interest in the thousand and one objects and 

 incidents of daily life that are to be met with in its great towns. 

 Here is a stall surrounded by little children, who are hardly tall 

 enough to place their money upon it. Yet they are not buying 

 luit o'^mbling for the sweet-stuff that is to be had from the blear- 

 eyed old rascal that attends it. That small boy who has just lost, 

 and laereby escaped the almost certain pains and penalties that the 

 inge., ion of the horrible-looking concoction on which he had set his 

 heart would have caused him, goes away muttering words of which 

 I am sure that his papa ought to be informed. He is young yet. 

 In a year or two, should we remain in Chui-teng-ka, — which may 

 Heaven forbid, — we should find hun gambhng still, but with a face 

 as well-bred and impassive as that of the oldest hand round the 

 Ijoard of green cloth at Monte Carlo. Farther on we come upon a 

 hat shop, where the enormously broad, conical head-coverings that 

 they aftect in Formosa are being made. How deftly the half-naked, 

 greasy operator plaits the leaves of which they are constructed ! 

 They are truly Malayan, these hats ; of a genus that is found from 

 ^Malacca eastwards to Ceram, through sweltering Borneo and Celebes, 

 and the smiling Moluccas. Time and locality, just as in the case 

 of the animal kmgdom, have altered them somewhat in shape and 

 material — -have differentiated them into a new species, as a naturalist 

 would put it, but the article itself is just as certainly of JMalay 

 origin as are many of the so-called aboriginal tribes of the island. 

 ^ Below the town the river widens. Piice-fields appear, and the 

 scenery becomes tamer, though the graceful tree-ferns and arrowy 

 betel-pahns redeem it from absolute dulness. Smooth, stolid 

 Chinamen sat fishing by the river side, some wielding a rod of 



"Journal of the North Chma Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society." Xew series. 

 Xo. IX. "The Aborigines of Xorthern Formosa," by E. C. Taiutor, M.A., F.R.G.S. 

 VOL. I. C 



