1770 CHINESE 413 
In manner they are always civil, or rather obsequious ; 
in dress always neat and clean in a high degree, from the 
highest to the lowest. To attempt to describe either their 
dresses or persons would be only to repeat some of the many 
accounts of them that have already been published, as every 
one has been written by people who had much better oppor- 
tunities of seeing them, and more time to examine them 
than I have had. Indeed, a man need go no farther to 
study them than the China paper, the better sorts of which 
represent their persons, and such of their customs, dresses, 
etc., as I have seen, most strikingly like, though a little in 
the caricatwra style. Indeed, some of the plants which are 
common to China and Java, as bamboo, are better figured 
there than in the best botanical authors that I have seen. 
In eating, they are easily satisfied, not but that the richer 
have many savoury dishes. Rice, however, is the chief food 
of the poor, with a little fish or flesh, as they can afford it. 
They have a great advantage over the Malays, not being 
taught by their laws or religion to abstain from any food 
that is wholesome, so that, besides pork, dogs, cats, frogs, 
lizards and some kinds of snakes, as well as many sea 
animals looked upon by other people to be by no means 
eatable, are their constant food. In the vegetable way, they 
also eat many things which Europeans would never think 
of, even if starving with hunger; as the young leaves of 
many trees, the lump of bractew and flowers at the end of a 
bunch of plantains, the flowers of a tree called by the Malays 
combang ture (Aeschinomine grandiflora), the pods of kellor 
(Guilandina moringa), two sorts of blites (Amaranthus), all 
which are boiled or stewed; also the seeds of taratte 
(Nymphea Nelumbo), which indeed are almost as good as 
hazel nuts. All these, however, the Malays also eat, as well 
as many more whose names I had not an opportunity of 
learning, as my illness rendering me weak and unable to go 
about prevented me from mixing with these people as I 
should otherwise have done. 
Tn their burials the Chinese have an extraordinary super- 
stition, which is that they will never more open the ground 
