social manner. The roads around Shanghai
are fall of such parties on a warm summer's eve.
After the cookshops, the confectioners' attract the traveller's eye. An
immense amount of sweetmeats is consumed by the people, and the
confectioners' shops are proportionally numerous. They are distinguished
by copper caldrons sunk in their counters, which are kept always hot and
full of molasses. With a ladle like a milkman's pint measure, they bring
up the sweet mass for their customers, and their stalls are always
crowded. Not only are these established shops well patronized, but an
immense quantity of candy and preserved fruits is sold by the wandering
peddlers, who manufacture and dispose of their good things wherever they
find customers. Preserved lychee, a fruit that looks like a small prune,
and like it is stewed in sirup, is a great favorite; and the coolies in
the foreign quarters, while resting under their burdens, are not
backward in disposing of a saucer of sweetmeats obtained from the
nearest peddler. These sweetmeats, of all kinds, are esteemed very good
by Europeans, and no doubt are quite the same as we receive from China
put up in big-bellied blue jars; but as sold in the streets, the lack of
cleanliness in the entire outfit of the shop, and the necessity of using
the dishes and China spoons from which one can see the neighboring
coolies gobbling their purchases, holding the dishes up to their very
noses, would deter any man of ordinary fastidiousness from attempting an
immediate experiment to establish their identity.
After eating, we must rank shaving as the second among Chinese
employments. They all wear the cue, even to the infant in arms, whose
mother shaves its head at three months old, and ties up the tiny cue
with a red ribbon, and from that day to the day of his death the child
and man must be periodically shaved; for, of course, no man can shave
his own head. Great is the barber in China, and vast his field of
operations among four hundred millions of people! They shave their
subjects everywhere, even sitting on a stone in an open field, and at
all hours of the day their shops are full. It is in the neatness of his
'shave' and the glossiness of his rich black cue that the Chinese dandy
is distinguishable. Men who cannot afford to shave every day, allow the
hair to grow until the head (always excepting the part which has never
known the razor or the shears) resembles that of a fire zouave just
after
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