The Chinese in San Francisco.

Te Aroha News, Volume VII, Issue 453, 12 March 1890, Page 6

The Chinese in San Francisco.

Sib Edwin Arnold continues his account in the ‘ Daily Telegraph ’ of his visit to the United States of America. His last letter is devoted to a description of San Francisco and the Chinese dwellers in California. The capital of California, he writes, is like nothing else in the United States. A city only forty years old, with a population of nearly 360,000 souls, with rateable estate valued at 1,800,000 dollars, San Francisco bears everywhere amid her exuberant prosperity tokens of her rapid growth. Splendid palaces of commerce or pleasure alternate with low shanties of framework or adobe huts, and in her very midst nestles the hideous and uncleanly Chinese quarter, which, when really finished, she will not tolerate. Sacramento, Dupont, Jackson, Pacific, and Commercial Streets form the Chinese quarter. 1 had themistaken notion that the Californian Canton was situated at the water’s edge,and always wondered why the San Franciscans could not put up more patiently with what I had imagined to be a sort of Flowery Land Wapping.

Wallowing Like Pigs and Burrowing Like Rats. I wonder no longer at the impatience of the San Franciscans against the almondeye ! folks, ncr at the occasional violence of the ‘ hoodlums ;’ for the Chinese city here, which I have again and again explored, is a most unmitigated nuisance to the Californian capital, and a perpetual danger tp its health and peace.. You come upon.it quite suddenly. You turn abruptly from a causeway full of splendid shops and handsome restaurants into narrow lanes where the odd names of pig-tailed merchants alternate in English characters with long swinging tablets in blue, yellow, and vermilion, covered with the Chinese inscriptions denoting their trades and commodities. The Chinese do not live in this extraordinary quarter, but wallow like pigs and burrow like rats. Thecellarsot every low and filthy tenement in the twenty or thirty streets inhabited by them are choked with them, packed away at night like sardines. You enter any one of these and plunge down a rotten staircase into a dark narrow passage, on either sde of which are ranged double bunks, one above the other like those on board the most crowded emigrant ship. In the passageway some are frizzling absolutely repulsive articles of diet over lamps or charcoal fires -—in the bunks, stretched on bits of matting, others are lying asleep, or mending their unwashed clothing, or smoking tobacco and opium. Thedailv and nightly arrangements of these Chinese are, in truth, one long and constant contempt of every accepted principle of sanitation ; yet they live and thrive, and aie reputed by no means especially unhealthy. Thanks to the sandy soil on which San Francisco is built, the Chinese landlord or Tenant-of a house in this quarter can delve, as'deeply as he likes in the way of subterranean dens, and many, of these underground burrows go 30 feet into the earth.

What tiie Ch/nesk Eat. Sir Edwin next, describes a visit to an opium-den, and goes on to observe that there are those who think that opium keeps the Chinaman from fever and pestilence in such horribly c’ose lairs. Certainly his ordinary dietseems to need some corrective. One explores the groceries, eating-houses, and druggists’ shops of the region with much suffering to the olfactory nerves and total loss of any appetite for lunch. Food may be simple and even coarse without becoming repulsive, but the Chinese * chareutier ’ aims at and attains the ghastly and the grotesque in all his wares. The carcases of his pigs suggest murder rather than slaughter, so blood-boltered are they if fresh—so mangled and glistening with red grease if pickled. He splits open his ducks and geese, and flattens them, insides and all, into frightful, oily, black trapezoid? of shining leather. In one jar he k'ops decomposed shrimps, in another rats’ tails, in a third the eyes of fishes, in a fourth onions soaked in treacle, while shoots of bamboo pickled in brine, and seaslugs rolled in sugar occupy other receptacles. A particular delicacy was pointed out in the shape of a dozen lizards spitted together on a stick, and dried.in the form of mouldy grey vine-leaves. Mongolian Pharmacy. In a Alongolian pharmacy, hard by, the ‘ materia medica ’ was even more astonishing. The chemists of the Celestial Kingdom deal still in all those strange, farfetched, and extremely nasty preparations which physicked our Middle Ages. Among the ordinary proscriptions hanging on the file of this Chinese ‘Apothecaries’ ITall’ was one which, being translated, ran, ‘Let him take at the third hour, with root of lily, dried dust of snake, bone, so much, and of red pepper, and of willow shavings, and the dung of bats in oil.’ The establishment was full of slicing machines, cutting up all sorts of leaves and twigs into medicinal form, and a Chinaman in blue shirt and pigtail was seated on a bench wording with his feet an iron wheel up and down a metal groove, in order to grand the ingredients of pills and potions as unsavory as that mentioned.