[Illustration: CHINESE HYDRAULIC APPARATUS.]
There is a tribute of white wax sent every year to Peking; and to see it going down-river in native junks, or being trans-shipped from that more romantic mode of travel into an ordinary steamer, has a certain fascination for me: but the real romance about the white wax is that hurried midnight journey across the Szechuan mountains before it has ever come into the world at all. And it rather spoils the interest than otherwise to be told such dry facts as that from Hankow every year fifteen thousand piculs of white vegetable wax are exported, Chinkiang, Tientsin, Canton, and Swatow each requiring one thousand piculs, Shanghai absorbing seven thousand, and exporting four thousand more to other places. But any one who has been benighted on a lonely hillside or on the banks of some unknown river knows the transport of delight with which a light in the distance is recognised. With what joy one gradually convinces oneself it is coming towards one, and in the end has to restrain oneself from embracing the always sympathetically joyful lantern-bearer; and so in those twinkling lights along little-trodden paths, or in scattered Chinese homesteads of many curves and courtyards, once more the romance attaching to the white wax reasserts itself.
Grass-cloth is another very interesting Chinese industry. It is produced from a nettle, and with large wooden things like butter-pats and a rough bamboo thumb-protector the women beat out the fibre on the threshing- or drying-floor in front of the farmsteads. I often wonder grass-cloth is not more common in England. Perhaps it lasts too long to pay to import. It is very cool, and like a glossy kind of linen, but far more durable. Cotton goods are made at home. They do not crease as our cottons do; they let the air through like cellular goods, and are therefore very wholesome wear in summer; and they last for ever.
Ningpo carvings, fanciful and rich, but in rather perishable wood, Canton ivory carvings, and silks generally, are too well known to need description. Only, till I went to China, I had no idea new patterns of silks came out nearly every year even in that most conservative country, and are much sought after. Fans are recorded as having been used to keep the dust from the wheels of the chariots as far back as the Chow Dynasty, 1106 B.C. Ivory fans were invented by the Chinese 991 B.C.; but it was not till the fifteenth century the folding-fan, long before invented by the Japanese, found its way into China. In the west of China it is, however, still not etiquette to carry such a fan to a party; for it looks as if you had no servant to stand behind your chair and hold it for you when you do not want it. The Chinese ivory fans are carved all over right through till the whole looks like lace, the part not taken up by the design being very delicately cut in short perpendicular lines.