JOHN CHINAMAN IN SAN FRANCISCO. 161 



" live/' vigorous, generous, and semi-occasionally vicious. The papers of San Francisco will, 

 however, compare favourably with those of any other American city, short of New York 

 and Boston. The sailor will find the city as advanced in all matters pertaining- to modern 

 civilisation, whether good or bad, as any he has ever visited. The naval officer will 

 find admirable clubs, and if of the Royal Navy will most assuredly be put on the books 

 of one or more of them for the period of his stay. He will find, too, that San Francisco 

 hospitality is unbounded, that balls and parties are nowhere better carried out, and that the 

 rising generation of California girls are extremely good-looking, and that the men are 

 stalwart, fine-looking fellows, very unlike the typical bony Yankee, who, by-the-by, is 

 getting very scarce even in his own part of the country, the New England States. 



If Jack has been to China, he will recognise the truth of the fact that parts of San 

 Francisco are Chinese as Hong Kong itself. There are Joss-houses, with a big, stolid- 

 looking idol sitting in state, the temple gay with tinsel and china, metal-work and paint, 

 smelling faintly of incense, and strongly of burnt paper. There are Chinese restaurants 

 by the dozen, from the high-class dining-rooms, with balconies, flowers, small banners 

 and inscriptions, down to the itinerant restaurateur with his charcoal-stove and soup-pot. 

 Then there are Chinese theatres, smelling strongly of opium and tobacco, where the 

 orchestra sits at the back of the stage, which is curtainless and devoid of scenery. The 

 dresses of the performers are gorgeous in the extreme. When any new arrangement of 

 properties, &c., is required on the stage, the changes are made before your eyes ; as, for 

 example, placing a table to represent a raised balcony, or piling up some boxes to form a 

 castle, and so forth. Their dramas are often almost interminable, for they take the reign 

 of an emperor, for example, and play it through, night after night, from his birth to his 

 death. In details they are very literal, and hold " the mirror up to nature " fully. If 

 the said emperor had special vices, they are displayed on the stage. The music is, to 

 European ears, fearful and wonderful a mixture of discordant sounds, resembling those 

 of ungreased cart-wheels and railway-whistles, mingled with the rolling of drums 

 and striking of gongs. Some of the streets are lined with Chinese shops, ranging from 

 those of the merchants in tea, silks, porcelain, and lacquered ware a dignified and polite 

 class of men, who are often highly educated, and speak English extremely well to those 

 of the cigar-makers, barbers, shoemakers, and laundry-men. Half the laundry-work in 

 San Francisco is performed by John Chinaman. There is one Chinese hotel or caravan- 

 serai, which looks as though it might at a stretch accommodate two hundred people, in 

 which 1,200 men are packed. 



The historian of the future will watch with interest the advancing or receding waves 

 of population as they move over the surface of the globe, now surging in great waves of 

 resistless force, now peacefully subsiding, leaving hardly a trace behind. The Pacific Mail 

 Steamship Company's steamers have brought from China to San Francisco as many as 

 .1,200 Chinamen and, very occasionally, of course, more than that number on a single trip. 

 The lowest estimate of the number of Chinese in California is 70,000, while they are 

 spread all over the Pacific states and territories, and, indeed, in lesser numbers, all over 

 the American continent. One finds them in New England factories, New York laundries, 

 and Southern plantations. Their reception in San Francisco used to be with brickbats and 



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