How the Chinese Economise.

Te Aroha News, Volume VI, Issue 361, 20 April 1889, Page 4

How the Chinese Economise.

The Chinese are pre-eminently economical, whether it be in limiting the number of wants, in preventing waste, or in adjusting forces in such a manner as to make a little ref resent a great deal. The universal diet consists of rice, beans, millet, garden vegetables and fish, with a little meat on high festivals. Wholeoome food in abundance may be feupplied at less than Id a day for each adult, and even in famine times thousands of persons have been kept alive for months on about r>d a day each. This implies the existence of a high degree of culinary skill in the Chinese. Their modes of preparing food are thorough and various. There is no waste ; everything is made to do a« much duty ,as possible. What is left is the veriest trifle. The physical condition of the Chinese dog or cat, who has to live on the leavings of the family, shows this ; they are clearly kept on starvation allowances. The Chinese are not extremely fastidious in regard to food ; all is fish that comes to their net, and most things come there sooner or later. Certain disturbances of the human organ-

isation, duo to eating diseased meat, are well recognised among the people ; but it is considered better to eat the meat, the cheapness of which is certain, and run the risk of the consequences, which are not quite certain, than to buy dear meat, even with fche assurance of no evil results. Indeed, the meat of animals which have died of ordinary ailments is rather dearer than that of those which have died in an epidemic such as pleuropneumonia. Another example of careful calculating economy is the construction of the cooking pots and boilers, the bottoms of which are as thin as possible thab the contents may boil all the sooner, for fuel is scarce and dear, and con&ists generally of nothing but the stalks and roots of the crops, which make a rapid blaze and disappear. The business of gathering tuel is committed to children, for one who can do nothing else can at least pick up straws and leaves and weeds. In autumn and winter a vast army of fuel gatherers spread over the land. Boys ascend trees and beat them with clubs to shake off die leaves ; the very straws get no time to show which way the wind blows before they are annexed by some enterprising collector. Similarly, professional manure collectors swarm over all the roads of the country. Chinese women carry this minute economy into their dress ; nothing comes amiss to them ; if it. is not used in one place it is in anotrer, where it appears a thing of beauty. Foreign residents who give their cast-off clothes away to Chinese may be assured that the careei of usefulness of these garments is at last about to commence. Chinese wheelbarrows squeak for the want of a few drops of oil ; bub to people who have no nerves the squeak is cheaper than the oil. Similarly, dirt is cheaper than hot water, and so, as a rule, the people do not wash ; the motto, " Cheaper than Dirt," which the soap dealer puts in his windows, could not be made intelligible to the Chinese. To them the average foreigners are mere soap-wasbeis. Scarcely any tool can be got ready-made ; it is so much cheaper to buy the parts and pub them together for yourself, and as almost everybody takes this view, readymade tools are not to be got. Two rooms are dimly lighted with a single lamp deftly placed in a hole in the dividing wall. Chinese, in fact, seem to be capable of doing almost anything by means of almost nothing. They will give you an iron foundry on a minute .'cale of completeness in a backyard, and will make in an hour a cooking range, of strong and perfect draft, out of a pile of mud bricks, lasting indefinitely, operating perfectly, and costing nothing. The old woman who in her last moments hobbled as near as possible to the family graveyard, in order to die so as to avoid the expense of the coffin-bearer?, was Chinese.— 'North China Herald.'