MACAO
January 11th.—This morning we took our passage to Macao on an English
steamer named _The White Cloud_. I turned my back to Canton with great
pleasure. I think China is a frightful country and wish I had never set
foot in it.
After eight hours of crossing, the Portuguese peninsula came to view.
We saw about a hundred cannons on the high forts, protecting Macao from
the side of the sea. Two hundred years have gone by since the shores of
Macao, the oldest European Colony in the Orient, were first visited by
Europeans; in 1720 the Portuguese landed and took possession of it in the
name of their Sovereign. The front of the town bears the inscription in
Portuguese: _Cita de nome de Dios, não ha outra mas leal._ (City in the
name of God, there does not exist a more loyal one.)
On the quay men besieged us with their cards and prospectuses, each
of them trying to lead us into the hotel that they were charged to
represent. We took a Chinese interpreter called Fun, who spoke a few
words of English, and promised to show us all the sights of Macao. He
took us to the Hotel Hing-Kee, standing on the marine esplanade called
“Praia-Grande,” where a military band plays every evening. The hotel is
built Portuguese fashion, with a gallery running around the four sides
of the “patio” leading into the various rooms. The gallery is divided
in several parts by wooden partitions communicating by doors which we
opened, appropriating thus the whole gallery. Outside the air is mild,
but it is very cold indoors; we were obliged to have a fire. In front of
our hotel a boat, belonging to the Portuguese Customs, is moored; the
opposite shore belongs to China.
January 13th.—We went about all day in palanquins, seeing the sights of
Macao. Nearly all the streets bear clerical names: “Rua Padre Antonio,”
“Callada de bon Jesus,” “Traversa de San Agosto.” Macao is a very pretty
town. The houses are generally not more than one storey high, most of
them painted blue, pink, or yellow, with green shutters, and terraces
instead of roofs, all having overhanging balconies reaching out to one
another in friendly wise across the narrow streets, which swarm with
Chinamen, who, contrary to their fellow-countrymen in Canton, look very
peaceful. One of the particular features of the streets of Macao is the
abundance of Portuguese priests, wearing long black beards, and women
enveloped from head to foot in black mantillas. The natives of Macao are
not attractive-looking. They are a race of half-castes—Portuguese father
and Chinese mother, resembling orang-outangs, with their prominent jaws.
Fun suggested that we should visit a silk manufactory, where about
six-hundred Chinese women were employed. Their Superintendent, a fat
Portuguese dame, with a cigarette between her lips, forbad our gentlemen
to pass before the rows of workwomen. After showing us through a dozen
rooms, Fun brought us into a large hall where numbers of Chinese coolies,
in Adam-like dress except the rag-vine-leaf, were occupied in boiling
silk cocoons.
We were carried from the manufactory to the frontier of Macao and China.
Our porters clambered up the stony ladder-staircases bearing the name of
streets, which are all two yards broad, veritable corridors paved with
sharp stones, with grass growing between them. We passed through the
Chinese quarters of the town, where all the fronts of the houses have
recesses containing grotesque-looking idols with twisted legs, the gods
of prosperity, before which incenses are burnt.
Here we are on the frontier called “Porta Portuguese”. Chinese soldiers
guard the boundary. After having set foot on Chinese ground, we were
carried back to Macao by a winding staircase-like path, and passed
before the grotto of Luis Camoens, the celebrated Portuguese poet of the
sixteenth century, exiled in the year 1556 for his daring liberal ideas.
The great poet, who had been shipwrecked in these inhospitable seas,
gained the shore of this newly-founded Portuguese colony, and took refuge
in a grotto situated in a chaotic assemblage of rocks, in the hollow of
a dale, where a monument has been erected to his memory. The site is
desolate and wild, looking upon the Chinese Empire and the ocean, where
there is no land before the icy polar regions. Camoens lamented here his
life of exile, and glorified his country in verse. By the side of the
monument, on a large stone, a book is sculptured in the rock, bearing the
names of all the works of the great poet.
Before returning to the hotel, we went to a Chinese photographer to have
our group taken in palanquins. Our carriers were quite amusingly afraid
of the apparatus, it being against the teaching of their religion to have
their pictures taken, especially together with white-faced men. They
paused, undecided what to do, to fly or to remain, and the next moment
they suddenly disappeared; look where we would, we could in no manner
discover them, and had our group taken sitting in palanquins placed on
the ground.
Macao is a sort of Monte-Carlo of the East, where the principal industry
is play. All the numerous gambling saloons are kept by Chinamen. After
dinner Fun took us to one of these play-houses, where a risky game named
“fonton” goes on. We sat over the gambling tables on the top of a gallery
where the game is carried on also. Our gambling neighbours put their
stakes into a basket which was dropped down into the hall by the means
of a long cord. We saw a venerable white-bearded Chinese croupier take a
handful of counters which he placed on the middle of the table and began
to count them with a long rod. I also tried my fortune and lost a dollar.
Things are done here very unceremoniously; our croupier feeling hot,
undressed and remained almost without clothes!
I wanted very much to see opium-smokers, and Fun led us by a queer old
back-street to a bamboo barrack where a score of half-naked Chinamen
lay on the floor in different stages of intoxication produced by the
effect of opium, with ghastly smiles, their faces expressing the ecstatic
delight of extraordinary bliss; the “haschish” carrying them away into
paradisaical dreams. Beside each smoker a small cocoa-oil lamp was
burning, to light their long pipes saturated with opium. After two or
three puffs, the smokers fell into ecstacies, and swoon away showing the
white of the eyes and looking altogether horrible. The smoke in the room
blinded me and my head swam from the nasty smell of the opium.
January 14th.—To-day we visited the seminary of San Paula, built by the
Jesuits. When we entered the cathedral, a young Irish monk, in the brown
habit of the Franciscan order, girded with a thick cord, came towards us,
breviary in hand, clinking his sandals on the flag-stones. He took my
husband and his companions to show them over the seminary; he said that
ladies are not admitted within the walls of the seminary, and I had to
remain in the cathedral with Maria Michaelovna. We went over the church
and read all the inscriptions, after which we became a little bored and
were pleased when our gentlemen came back, accompanied this time by the
prior of the seminary, a grey-bearded Portuguese padre, round-faced and
benevolent, who happened to be less Puritan than his young colleague, and
invited me to come and drink a glass of Malaga in the refectory, but I
refused point-blank this time.
We were back at the hotel just in time for the table d’hôte. After dinner
we went to the pier, where we admired the phosphorescence of the sea,
produced by the myriads of animalcules with which the ocean is infested
at certain periods. The evening was fine and the air very mild. When we
passed before the Governor’s abode, a sort of pavilion surrounded by a
small garden named “Villa Flora,” we seated ourselves on a broad stone
parapet and listened to the band playing in the “patio” of the villa.
How jolly it was to throw etiquette to the winds, and feel like simple
mortals!
January 15th.—This afternoon my husband called upon the Governor, who
returned his visit an hour later; as to me, I exchanged visiting-cards
with his wife.
January 16th.—This morning we left for Hong-Kong on the boat _Scha_. Our
steamer tugged a barge loaded with cases of opium, for the sum of forty
thousand Mexican dollars. The cargo will be transhipped afterwards on
to another boat bound for the Sandwich Islands and San Francisco. Our
steamer is escorted by a detachment of Portuguese soldiers. After three
hours’ sail we arrived at Hong-Kong.