The Human Race

Yet Turkey possesses a kind of system of popular representation. The inhabitants of Constantinople elect ayams, real delegates of the people, whose business it is to watch over the safety and the property of individuals, the tranquillity of the town, to oppose the unjust demands of the pachas, the excesses of the military, and the unfair collection of taxes. These duties are gratuitously performed by the most trustworthy men among the inhabitants. The ayams undertake all appeals to the pacha, when there exist any just grounds of complaint, and if he does not satisfy them, they carry their appeal to the sultan.

Every trade and handicraft in Turkey possesses a kind of guild or corporation which undertakes to defend the rights of the association and of its individual members. The humblest artisan is protected in all legal matters by this corporation. It is unnecessary to say that the corporation enforces its rights before the judges by pecuniary means.

111. – A TURKISH BARBER.

It is a great mistake to imagine that the Mussulman religion predominates in Turkey. In Turkey in Europe, not more than a quarter of the population profess the creed of Mahomet. The remainder are Christians, subdivided into the leading sects of that faith. The Greeks, the Servians, the Walachians, and the inhabitants of Montenegro belong to the eastern Greek Church. The Armenians are numerous, and are the more powerful on account of their known character for austerity and honesty. Other religious communities, such as the Jakobites, called Kopts in Egypt, the Nestorians, and the Maronites, have some influence, from the unity which reigns among their different sects; the Druzes, for instance, defy the Mahometans to their very face. There are more Jews in Turkey in Europe, than in any other country.

All these brotherhoods, excepting the Druzes and the Maronites, were formerly deprived of the free right of worship, were liable to marks of ignominy, and were handed over, defenceless, to injustice. But in the beginning of our century, an edict of the sultan declared all his subjects, regardless of their religion, equal in the eyes of the law.

Mahometanism, which prevails in Turkey, and in the greater portion of the East, dates from the 610th year of our era. Its principal doctrines are purification, prayer, and fasting. The fasting takes place in the month of Ramazan, a month which is the Mussulman’s Lent, and during which all food must be abstained from in the daytime. It is followed by the festival of Beyram, during which the faithful are allowed to make up for their preceding abstinence. A legal charity is instituted by their creed. It consists in giving every year to the poor a fortieth part of their movable property. Another religious injunction is the pilgrimage to Mecca, which every Mussulman is obliged to undertake at least once in his lifetime.

Their devotions take place five times a day. Friday is the day of rest for the Mahometans, as Sunday is that of the Christians, and Saturday that of the Jews.

Mahometanism has inherited from the ancient Arabs the practice of circumcision. Mussulmans are forbidden to drink intoxicating drinks, but are allowed to marry four wives, and to make concubines of their female slaves. Their religion deprives them of all liberty of will, as it tells them that everything that can happen, either for evil or for good, is settled beforehand. It is this fatalism that paralyzes all individual enterprise, and prevents the march of progress.

Mahometanism has not been more exempt than other creeds from schisms, which have brought to pass religious wars always so terrible in their consequences.

Its precepts, which have their advantages from a religious point of view, have many disastrous consequences when we regard mankind’s physical constitution. The interdict on the use of wine, for instance, has given rise to the secret consumption of alcoholic drinks, and to the public use of opium.

112. – TURKISH PORTER.

The Turks, although their literary civilization is still in its infancy, possess a system of public education. The mosques of Constantinople, of Broussa, and of Adrianople, have colleges attached to them. Young men are sent from all parts of the Mussulman empire to these colleges, where they receive some amount of education. When they have finished their course of study, in which the commentaries on the Koran play the principal part, and when several examinations have tested their proficiency, the pupils receive the title of mudir or professor. All civil and judicial posts are monopolized by this educated class.

But in Turkey, what knowledge there is, remains absorbed among a small quantity of individuals; no channel exists for the free intercommunication of ideas.

Their kodjas, or writers, have indeed given their fellow countrymen a large number of works, much esteemed by them – works on the Arabic and Persian languages, on philosophy, on morality, on Mussulman history, and on the geography of their country. But these writings, whatever their value, never reach the mass of the nation. There are but few printing presses in Turkey; the copyist’s art, such as it existed in Europe in the middle ages, still flourishes there. The state of literature in Turkey shows us what modern civilization would have become in Europe, without the assistance of the printer.

With this general want of literary and scientific knowledge, we naturally expect to find Turkey far behindhand in art, in manufactures, and in agriculture. The latter, in fact, is in a sad state throughout the whole extent of the Ottoman empire. Manufactures exist in a few towns; in Constantinople, in Salonica, in Adrianople, and in Rustchuk. Their principal manufactures are carpets, morocco leather, a little silk, thread and swords. Their commerce consists in the export of their raw produce; such as wool, silk, cotton, leather, tobacco, and metals, particularly copper; wine, oil, and dried fruit are also largely exported. The Turks are good cloth manufacturers, gunsmiths, and tanners. Their works in steel and copper, and their dyes, are equal to the best articles of European manufacture.

The Greeks, who are very numerous in Turkey, follow all kinds of trades and callings. They make the best sailors of the Ottoman empire, while the Armenians are its keenest traders. The latter travel all over the interior of Asia and India; they have branch establishments and correspondents everywhere. Most of them, while pursuing some mechanical art, are at the same time the bankers, the purveyors, and the men of business of the pachas, and other great officials. Jews show in a less favourable light in Turkey than in Europe; any business suits them, if they can make something out of it.

Figs. 111 and 112 represent two common Turkish types – a barber and a street porter.

CHAPTER III.

SINAIC BRANCH

The nations belonging to the Sinaic branch (from the Latin Sinæ, Chinese) have not the features of the Yellow Race so well defined as those belonging to the Mongolian branch. Their nose is less flattened, their figures are better, and they are taller. They early acquired rather a high degree of civilization, but they have since remained stationary, and their culture, formerly one of the most advanced in the world, is now very second rate compared to the progress made by the inhabitants of Europe and America. Chemical and mechanical arts were early practised and carried very far by nations belonging to the Sinaic branch. Living under a despotic government, and accustomed to abjectly cringe to those in authority, this race developed a peculiar taste for ceremony and etiquette. Their language is monosyllabic, their writing is hieroglyphic, and these facts perhaps account for the scant progress made by their civilization in modern times.

113. – INDO-CHINESE OF STUNG TRENG.

The Sinaic branch comprises the Chinese, the Japanese, and the Indo-Chinese families.

114. – INDO-CHINESE OF LAOS.

The Chinese Family

The Chinese, amongst whom, out of all the Yellow Race, civilization was the first to develop itself, have the following characteristic features. Width and flatness in the subocular part of the face, prominent cheek bones, and obliquely set eyes. Their features as a whole partake of the type of the Mongol race: that is to say, they have a broad coarse face, high cheek bones, heavy jaws, a flat bridge to their nose, wide nostrils, obliquely set eyes, straight and plentiful hair, of a brownish black colour with a red tint in it, thick eyebrows, scanty beards, and a yellowish red complexion.

They constitute the principal population of the vast empire of China, and extend even further. Many have settled in Indo-China, in the islands of the Straits, and in the Philippine islands. China in four thousand years has been governed by twenty-eight dynasties. The emperor is merely an ornamental wheel in the mechanism of the Chinese government, the councillors possessing the real power. Centralization plays a powerful part in the administrative organization of the country. The emperor’s authority is founded on a secular and patriarchal respect, boundless in its influence. Veneration for old age is a law of the state. Infirm old men, too poor to hire litters, are often seen in the streets of Pekin, seated in little hand carriages, dragged about by their grandchildren. As they pass, the young people about receive them respectfully, and leave off for the moment their play or their work. The government encourages these feelings by giving yellow dresses to very old men. This is the highest mark of distinction a private individual can receive, for yellow is the colour reserved for the members of the imperial family.

Their respect for their ancestors is also carried very far by the Chinese. They practise a kind of family worship in their honour.

115. – A YOUNG CHINESE.

There are many different creeds in China. The Buddhist faith, so widely spread in Asia, is the most general; but the higher classes follow the precepts of Confucius. But great religious toleration exists in the Celestial Empire. The men of the higher classes affect a well founded contempt for the external forms of worship, and the mass of the people do not attach much importance to them. Many widely differing creeds are seen side by side throughout the whole empire.

116. – CHINESE SHOPKEEPER.

The Buddhist priests are called Bonzes.

117. – CHINESE LADY.

The position of women is in China a humble one. She is considered inferior to man, and her birth is often regarded as a misfortune. The young girl lives shut up in her father’s house, she takes her meals alone, she fulfils the duties of a servant and is considered one. Her calling is merely to ply the needle and to prepare the food. A woman is her father’s, her brother’s, or her husband’s property. A young girl is given in marriage without being consulted, without being made acquainted with her future husband, and often even in ignorance of his name.

The wealthy Chinese shut their wives up in the women’s apartments. When their lords and masters allow them to pay one another visits, or to go and see their parents, they go out in hermetically closed litters. They live in a wing of the building, reserved for their use, where no one can see them.

118. – CHINESE WOMAN.

It is otherwise amongst the poorer classes. The women go out of doors with their face uncovered; but they pay dearly for this privilege, for they are nothing but the beasts of burden of their husbands. They age very rapidly.

Polygamy exists in China, but only on sufferance. A man of rank may have several wives, but the first one only is the legitimate one. Widows are not allowed to remarry. Betrothals often take place before the future husband and wife have reached the age of puberty. A betrothed girl who loses her betrothed can never marry another.

119. – MANDARIN’S DAUGHTER.

A marriage ceremony at Pekin takes place as follows. The bride goes in great state to the dwelling of the bridegroom, who receives her on the threshold. She is dressed in garments embroidered with gold and silver. Her long black tresses are covered with precious stones and artificial flowers. Her face is painted, her lips are reddened, her eyebrows are blackened, and her clothes are drenched with musk. Many of the Chinese women have the complexion and the good looks of Creoles; a tiny well shaped hand, pretty teeth, splendid black hair, a slender supple figure, and obliquely set eyes with a piquancy of expression that lends them a peculiar charm. The drawback to their appearance is their lavish use of paint, and their small crippled feet.

The Tartar and Chinese ladies composing the court of the Empress, as well as the wives of the officials residing in the capital, do nothing to distort their feet, except to wear the theatrical buskin, in which it is very difficult to walk. But a Chinese woman of good middle class family would think herself disgraced, and would have a difficulty in getting a husband, unless she had crippled her feet. This is what is done to give them a pleasing appearance. The feet of little girls of six years of age are tightly compressed with oiled bandages; the big toe is bent under the other four, which are themselves folded down under the sole of the foot. These bandages are drawn tighter every month. When the girl has grown up, her foot presents the appearance of a closed fist. Women with their feet mutilated in this manner walk with great difficulty. They move about with a kind of skip, stretching out their arms to keep their equilibrium.

Another of their conventional points of beauty is to wear their finger-nails very long. For fear of breaking them they cover them with little silver sheaths, which they also use as ear-picks.

A quantity of toilet accessories gives a peculiar appearance to the costume of the inhabitants of the Celestial Empire. Fans, parasols, pipes, snuff-boxes, tobacco-pouches, spectacle cases, and purses, are all hung at the girdle by silken strings. The use of the fan is common to both sexes, of all classes.

The kang, at once a bed, a sofa, and a chair; some mats stretched upon the floor; and a few chairs or stools with cushions on them, are to be found in every room of a Chinese house. The interior of these dwellings is a true citadel of sloth. The Chinaman squatted on his mat, dallying with his fan and smoking his pipe, is amused at the European who actually takes the trouble to use his legs.

To give a more exact idea of domestic Chinese life, we will give a few extracts from the interesting travels of M. de Bourboulon, a French consul in China, travels edited by M. Poussielgue, and published in the “Tour du Monde” in 1864.

“A Chinese palace,” says M. Poussielgue, “is thus laid out: more than half the site is taken up with alleys, courts, and gardens crowded with rock-work, rustic bridges, fishponds full of gold fish, aviaries stocked with peacocks, golden pheasants, and partridges from Pe-tche-li, and especially a quantity of painted and varnished porcelain and earthenware jars, containing miniature trees, vines, jessamines, creepers and flowers of all kinds. The principal room on the ground floor opens on to the garden; a piece of open trellis work separates it from the sleeping apartment. The ground floor also comprises the dining-room, the kitchen, and sometimes a bath-room. When there is a second story, called leou, it contains beds and lumber rooms. The entrance-hall is invariably sacred to the ancestors and to the guardian spirits of the family. In every room the kang, which serves as a bed, a sofa, or a chair; and thick mats, laid upon the floor, are to be met with. The actual furniture is scanty; a few chairs and stools made of hard wood, with cushions placed on them; a small table in red lacquer work; an incense burner; some gilt or enamelled bronze candlesticks; flower stands and baskets of flowers; some pictures drawn on rice paper; and finally the inevitable tablet inscribed with some moral apothegm, or a dedication to the ancestors of the master of the house. There are no regular windows; a few square openings, pierced in the side wall where the rooms open on a court or garden, or inserted beneath the double beams supporting the roof where the apartment might be overlooked from the street or from the neighbouring houses, allow a dim light to penetrate through the cross laths of their wooden lattices which serve as fixed blinds to them (figs. 120 and 121).

“The wealthy, abandoning themselves to a luxurious idleness, spend half their existence in these secluded chambers; it is almost impossible for a European to procure admittance to them, for communicative as the Chinese are in business, at festivals, or at receptions, they are extremely reserved on all points concerning their domestic life.

120. – CHINESE BOUDOIR.

“Physical idleness is carried to an enormous extent in China; it is considered ill bred to take walks, and to use the limbs. Nothing surprises the natives more than the perpetual craving for exercise that characterizes Europeans. Squatted on their hams, they light their pipe, toy with their fans, and jeer at the European passers-by, whose firm measured footsteps carry them up and down the street. It is necessary to make excuses for coming neither on horseback nor in a palanquin, when paying an official visit, for to do so on foot is a sign of but little respect for the person visited.

“The palanquin is in constant use. Large depôts of these, where one can always be hired at a moment’s notice, are established in Peking. A palanquin carried by six coolies costs about a piastre per day; with four coolies half a piastre; with only two, a hundred sapecas. The French Legation keeps twenty-four palanquin porters, dressed in blue tunics with tricolor collars and facings. Palanquins are usually open both in front and behind; they have a small window at the side, and a cross plank on which the passengers sit.

“The rage for gambling is one of the curses of China; a curse that has begotten a thousand others, in all ranks and at all ages. One meets in the streets of Peking a quantity of little itinerant gaming stalls; sometimes consisting of a set of dice in a brass cup on a stand, sometimes a lottery of little sticks marked with numbers, shaken up by the croupier in a tin tube. We saw crowds round these sharpers, and the passing workman, yielding to the irresistible temptation, loses in an hour his day’s hard earnings. The coolies attached to the French army used to thus lose their month’s pay the day after they got it; some of them having pledged their clothes to the croupiers, who do a little pawnbroking into the bargain, had to make their escape amid the jeers of the mob, and used to return to camp with nothing on but a pair of drawers.

“Cock and quail fighting are still practised as an excuse for gambling by the Chinese, who stake large sums on the result. The wealthy and the mercantile classes are just as inveterate gamesters as the common people; they collect in the tea-houses and spend day and night in playing at cards, at dice, at dominos, and at draughts. Their cards, about five inches long, are very narrow, and are a good deal like ours, with figures and pips of different colours marked on them. The game most in vogue seems to be a kind of cribbage. Their draughtsmen are square, and the divisions of the board are round. Their dominos are flat, with red and blue marks. They play at draughts also with dice, a sort of backgammon. Professional gamblers prefer dice to any other game, as it is the most gambling of all. When they have lost all their money, they stake their fields, their house, their children, their wives, and, as a last resort, themselves when they have nothing else left, and their antagonist agrees to let them make such a final stake. A shopkeeper of Tien-tsin, who was minus two fingers of his left hand, had lost them over the dice box. The women and children are fond of playing at shuttlecock; it is their favourite game, and they are very expert at it. The shuttlecock is made of a piece of leather rolled into a ball, with one or two metal rings round it to steady it; three long feathers are stuck into holes in these rings. The shuttlecock is kept up with the soles of their slippers, which they use instead of battledores; it is very seldom allowed to fall.

“Gambling, which paralyzes labour, is one of the permanent causes of their pauperism, but there is another, still more disastrous – dissipation. The thin varnish of decency and restraint with which Chinese society is covered, conceals a widespread corruption. Public morality is only a mask worn above a deep depravity surpassing all that is told in ancient history, all that is known of the dissipated habits of the Persians and Hindoos of our own day.

“Drunkenness, as understood in Europe, is one of the least of their vices. The use of grape wine was forbidden, centuries ago, by some of their emperors, who tore up all the vine trees in China. This interdiction having been taken off under the Manchú dynasty, grapes are grown for the use of the table, but the only wine that is drunk is rice wine or samchow. A spirit as strong as our brandy is extracted from this as well as from coarse millet seed. It induces a terrible form of intoxication. The abuse of it by our soldiers in the Chinese campaign caused a great deal of fatal dysentery in the army.

“The tea-houses also sell alcoholic liquor, but the eating-houses and the taverns drive the largest trade in it.

“We cannot speak of the process of the manufacture of tea, nor of the vast amount of labour it employs: the subject properly belongs to southern China; we will only say that the use of tea is as common in the north as in the south. The moment you enter a house, tea is offered to you – it is a sign of hospitality to do so. It is given to you in profusion; the moment your cup is empty, a silent attendant fills it, and your host will not permit you to mention the subject of your visit till you have drunk a certain quantity. The tea-houses are as numerous as cafés and taverns in France; the elegant manner in which they are furnished, and their high charges, distinguish some from others. The rich trader and the idle man of fashion, not caring to mix with the grimy handed workman or the coarse peasant, only frequent those houses that have a fashionable reputation. Tea-houses can be recognized by the large range at the end of their rooms, fitted up with huge kettles and massive tea pots, with ovens and stoves supplying with boiling water immense caldrons as big as a man. A singular kind of time-piece is placed above the range; it is made of a large moulded bar of incense divided off by equidistant marks, so that the lapse of hours can be measured by its combustion. The Chinese can thus literally use the expression, “consuming the time.” Morning and evening the rooms are full of customers, who for two sapecas, the price of entrance, can sit there and discuss their business, play, smoke, listen to music, or amuse themselves by looking at the feats of tumblers, jugglers, and athletes. For the two sapecas they have also the right to drink ten cups of tea (certainly extremely small ones), with which, on trays covered with cakes and dried fruits, a crowd of waiters keep running to and fro.

“One day,” says a letter of M. X., a French officer in the 101st Regiment of the Line, “we determined to dine à la chinoise in a Chinese eating-house. Our coolies arranged beforehand that the price was to be two piastres a head, a large sum for this country, where provisions are so cheap. As a preparation for dinner, we had to thread our way through a labyrinth of lanes, crowded with dens in which crouched thousands of ragged beggars, poisoning the atmosphere with their exhalations. At the entrance to the open space in front of the eating-house stood a quantity of heaps of refuse, composed of old vegetable stalks, rotten sausages, and dead cats and dogs, and in every hole and corner a mass of filth as disagreeable to the nose as to the eye. It required a strong stomach to retain an appetite after running the gauntlet of such a horrible mess. A few tea drinkers and card players were seated at the door, and seemed to care very little for the pestilential character of the neighbourhood. We tried to be equally courageous, and after admiring two immense lanterns which adorned the entrance, and the sign inscribed in big letters, ‘The three principal Virtues,’ we ventured to hope that honesty would prove one of them, and that the tavern keeper would give us our money’s worth.