CHINESE POLICE.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3147, 29 July 1881, Page 4

CHINESE POLICE.

To preserve the Emperor's peace throughout the realm, the principal agents are the policemen attached to the tribunals small and great, who are known by their red robes, their high black caps, and the official pheasant feather surmounting their heads like a horn. A mere magistrate will preside over a score of these picturesque alguazils, while the yamun of a prefect or a criminal inspector contains fifty or more armed constables, some of whom act as gaolers, and other as headsmen in case of need. The policemer, the actual constables, are divided into privates, and sergeants. They are sheltered in a magistrate's yamun, if bachelors; but if married, they often inhabit a hut within the compound of their superior's dwelling. They eat rice and melons at the charge of the province, and they receive a very small monthly payment, enough to buy tobacco and opium, should their chief not embezzle it on the road. But for this the pheasantplumed care little ; their dependence is on bribery, and where denunciation may cause ruin, and must cause annoyance, no spy need despair of a comfortable living. Curiously enough, the police extort less from the rich than the poor. To crush a wealthy man is not such an easy task as in Mussulman countries, and justice grows gentle as she mounts the social ladder. Even some great mandarin, when degraded for some offence, is not so harshly used as a Turk or Persian of corresponding rank would be by his prince. The villages never have a prison more imposing than a roundhouse where culprits may be locked up while an escort is preparing ; but all walled towns have their penitentiary, where the wretched gaol-birds are crowded together like cattle in a pen, where the scowling governor economises the meagre rations of rice, and where the horrors of Dante's Inferno are squeezed into a small compass. The Chinese of all ranks dread these prison more than death itself. It is not that they are dens of misery, but that the confinement is irksome to poor Ghing, who is used to travel, who is anything but the vegitable we deem him, and who has been in many a town and ranged many a league of land and water. Ching has wonderful powers of endurance; he can sing ?nd chirrup quite blithely on short commons, can sleep in a corner, can be cooped up where elbow-room is scanty, food meagre, and oxygen scarce, and still keep his politeness untarnished and his heart Hunger on compulsion, narrow lodgings on compulsion, a vile shed, a bare yard, frowzy rags, foul straw, the close companionship of lazars and ruffians, all upon compulsion, break down Chings elastic spirit. Welcome death rather than these. And the mandarins are not unwilling to indulge the relative's preference for dpath over •aptivifcv. T --. ; <" do ii' l ' "'■' ' •:•;.: ; where so .v;.» 'u,!m; ,•;;<:, n,• ; ,i. . , v are idle. ■>V"i'Oii h. prisoner d.>e*!,... itself of fho iMiiht of uppiiiil, ho set.;': . languishes lung.—All the Year ■■oui.'i.