Golfing Round the World
Chapter XIII Off the Course Again
At first sight Shanghai has a look of London, the Whangpo is about the same width as the Thames at Waterloo Bridge, and the sweep of the Bund with its consulates and commercial palaces strongly recalls the Embankment, and eke the weather in March, sunshine and bitter winds and falls of evanescent snow.
As usual I set out to spy out the Golf country but I got no further than the racecourse where the links were closed on account of the weather. I did not make the acquaintance of the Shanghai Golf Club which I understand possesses a fine course, so I spent the two days of our stay in port frequenting the vast hotels, seeing the sights, and learning a new and fascinating game called 'Spotting the Stumer'.
The sport commences on the voyage in the tender from Woosung, where the Whangpo debouches into the muddy yellow Yangtsekiang, up fourteen miles of winding river between flat mud banks to Shanghai. Shanghai was once on the sea, so that all the land now to the seaward is Yangtse deposit. The river passage however, is full of interest as it is literally packed with traffic of stately junks and picturesque native craft. On board were some money merchants who sold us little stacks of ten cent pieces which we were told would be useful small change in Shanghai, and so they were if you knew the right ones. To the innocent and untutored eye they all appeared to be of equal genuineness. True, some had little spots or stains upon them apparently produced by marking with an indelible blue pencil. I regret my visit was not long enough for me to acquire any notable proficiency in this Chinese national sport, but the currency dealers on that Woosung tender were certainly one up on me.
I took a tram ride to the uttermost limits of Shanghai and offered some of these pieces for my fair. They were politely but firmly rejected by the conductor who urbanely drew my attention to a placard which announced that 'The Company hereby gives notice that they will not accept ten cent pieces issued by the Municipality of Wun Tung'. I gathered, perhaps erroneously, that if you went to Wun Tung they would refuse pieces issued by Hang Men, and Hang Men would have nothing to do with truck from Sing Hi, and so on.
These ten, twenty five and fifty cent pieces are nickel silver coins and worth about three to fifteen pence according to denomination, and one would naturally suppose that you could exchange ten, or four, or two of them for the really beautiful hundred cent Yuan, better known as the Mexican Dollar. But no such thing. If you want to acquire one of these much prized medals, and they are works of art with a design of Britannia ruling the waves on the head, and most beautiful Chinese characters on the tail, you must produce, not only your ten ten cent pieces of unimpeachable character, but also a variable and enormous mass of copper coins representing unlimited quantities of 'Cash' and probably a bit of cumshaw (backsheesh) as well. And of course vice versa if you are a seller.
I coveted some picture post cards in a shop in Bubbling Well Road. I entered the emporium and selected a couple of dozen and asked how much. We retired to a back parlour with the postcards and I was invited to take a seat. My host, for they treat you as they would an honoured guest, said "One Dollar". I replied "Me no wanchee". This was common form and I should have committed a breach of etiquette if I had said otherwise. At fifty cents I felt it incumbent on me to accept and I did so, I hope gracefully. I tendered one silver dollar Mex and received fiify cents change, all pukkah I believe, and as much 'cash' as I could convenienttly carry in one hand.
I have that 'cash' still, and very useful my family find it in acquiring a recondite knowledge of Chinese geography which confounds their tutors and endows them with a well deserved reputation for originality and independent research.
Now a silver dollar is certainly larger than our half crown which is apparently its sterling value, and if one knew how it is conceivable one might amass a large fortune by repeated purchases of a coin worth forty pence by payment of one worth only thirty, but you would have to make sure that it was a genuine dollar you were buying for the wily Celestial has been known to expend at least three weeks in sawing one of these precious coins into two flats halves, chiselling out as much silver as he reasonably could without defacing the outer surfaces, replacing his abstractions with lead, and hermetically and invisibly sealing the joint, so that no one save a fellow Oriental could possibly detect any difference. As Bret Harte so sagely observed "For ways that are dark, And tricks that are vain, the Heathen Chinese is peculiar" - and very amiable withal.
As an offset to the supposed unfriendly attitude towards foreign devils which is occasionally commented on in our Home Press I may recite an incident that occurred in the densely crowded Chinese city during our stay in port. A lady sightseer had her handbag snatched from her while riding in a rickshaw up one of the exceedingly narrow streets where everyone jostles everybody. Immediately the crowd took up the chase, captured the thief who was made to restore the stolen property, and was then promptly handed over to the police.
It is in this same teeming centre of Shanghai that you see the Willow Pattern Tea House, visit the Joss house, stroll through the market - market and joss house are inextricably mingled together and see the Mah Jongg makers at work to the accompaniment of the squawks, screeches and trills of thousands of birds in their cages. In an old stone garden of great antiquity I saw latticed windows glazed with faintly blue fish scales.
Somewhere along the Bubbling Well Road there is a Hotel DU PLUS GRAND LUXE, possessing a superb circular ball room wherein a fountain splashes merrily in the centre. It is a rendez vous where international Shanghai dines and dances with great persistence. It is gay in the better sense of that ambiguous word. As I was leaving this exhilarating palace of Terpsichore, there drew up beside the entrance an enormous super landaulette with chauffeur and footman in black livery. Seated in the lighted interior was one of China's warlords in khaki uniform. I have never seen, at any time, such an expression of rage and malevolence as was depicted on his face. Why and what was the cause I shall never know, but I would wager that someone within that ballroom, whither he had despatched his footman with a message of enquiry, was, in military argot, 'badly for it'. In that one fleeting glimpse I thought I sensed a tragedy and yet it may have been merely the gentleman's unfortunate everyday and ordinary facial aspect.
In China apparently you can never tell, for in Peking I was to get another thrill. This time it was three men chained together in a tumbril, which under military escort was clattering its way along the Chien Men, the great wide street along which the Emperor used to pass from the Forbidden City to the Temple of Heaven. It was just a common cart, wisps of straw were blowing from it in the strong gusts of icy north wind. The three men were grinning, apparently amused at the spectacle around them, and yet I was credibly informed that they were proceeding on their last journey to the place of execution.
He who visits Peking must perforce see sights and the number of them is legion. Fortunately for such a feckless globetrotter as I was, there was no need to take any trouble or put oneself out in the least degree. Merely to be in Peking is a continual fees to the eye. The high gardens walls of childhood's days seemed unscalable. In Peking they are three or four or five times the height and so many mysteries are concealed by them, that life becomes one great intriguing question. What, oh what is on the other side? You see therefore how the walls of Peking resemble Death. To some extent the mystery is solved, in that the Forbidden City remains 'Forbidden' no more. One may wander through its vast courts at will, and observe with wonder and pained surprise that grass is growing on the red and blue and green and yellow tiled roofs.
But there is still mystery and enough to spare. There are no omnibuses in the world tall enough to enable one to see over the walls of Legation Quarter. Even there under the aegis and protection of all the great nations of the world, the man in the street sees nothing but walls and occasional gates like young Marble Arches impenetrably concealing their interiors from view, with colossal doors studded with colossal nails.
In its vast wide streets stretching away in straight lines to illimitable vistas, in its buildings and palaces, its towering archways and gates, and above all its walls, Peeking creates an impression of staggering immensity. Not even New York with its deep canons of streets below the skyscrapers, nor London which is bijou by comparison can convey anything so imposing to the senses as the long high pink wall facade of the Forbidden City with its huge legendary Chinese lions on guard before its giant portals. In the great avenue before it, perhaps wider than the Champs Élysées, there is the perpetual pattering of thousands of pairs of slippered feet, for one half of the population pull junrikishas, while the other half ride in them.
I enjoyed the hospitality of a gentleman who had lived most of his life in Peking. He had a very charming house in the Imperial City situated just outside the pink walls of Forbidden City. The long low bungalow literally rambled about a garden, where rice birds, dear to players of Mah Jongg twittered and chirped in the trees, the whole of course surrounded by a high wall with a sort of portcullis affair for the one and only entrance. My friend wisely dissuaded me from golf, as not only would the course be plagued by whirlwinds of dust in the prevailing north easterly gales blowing off the snow clad Mongolian Mountains, but also, as he pointed out, I had better take the opportunity of seeing the Great wall and the Summer Palace and other famous places and obviously I could not do both.