Another year we saw a similar sight, only much more picturesque. As we were going up-river, we met a boat coming down, and in the bow of it there was a man kneeling quite upright, with hands held up as if imploring. In the great beauty of a still reach in the Gorges it was a very moving spectacle; but it was only a rough-and-ready way of punishing a man accused of having tried to steal from his fellows.
I see I have said nothing of medicines. You can buy rhubarb in bulk quite fresh in Szechuan. It grows chiefly on the Tibetan border. Even under the Sung Dynasty the Chinese had three hundred and sixty-five kinds of drugs and one hundred and thirteen kinds of formulæ. But they use rough decoctions, and make tisanes from their drugs; they never make extracts, nor use minute and accurate weights to dole them out.
The ancient Chinese used metal models to exhibit man's inner structure; and everything that is most rare and dear they think must be useful for a medicine,--snakes, scorpions, the velvet off a deer's horns, a dead caterpillar with grass growing out of its head, tigers' bones, beautiful orchids, of which last whole boatloads float down from Chungking to Ichang. A Chinaman loves medicine; nothing pleases him better than to take it; and the European is always being asked for remedies, not so much because he believes foreign remedies to be good, but because he has found out to his delight and amazement that they are to be had for nothing. One doctor, delighted at the great reputation he thought he was acquiring amongst Chinese, was disgusted to find that as soon as he ceased giving away bottles with his medicines patients ceased to apply for them. But the benefits of quinine are so striking, that a Chinaman is ready to ask for this, even when you put it into his mouth for him. They suffer very much from fever, poor people! and when one thinks how many years they have stood the violent changes of their climate without ever a respite, and how much we ourselves lose our energy when exposed to them, one begins to feel more tolerance for a Chinaman's apparent inertia. Besides, what has he to gain by exerting himself? If he become rich, is not the life of a rich Chinaman so dull that only opium makes it possible to endure it? Once let Chinamen get a taste of the enjoyment of life, and they will be a different people. Now they suffer from fever as we do; they dislike bad smells, too, it seems--for no nation more delights in sweet-smelling flowers; they get depressed, and hipped as we do; and they have no light literature, no sports, very little of a newspaper press, no picture-galleries, no concerts, no bands, no intercourse with women, except of the baser sort. No wonder they look dull. And how they love to be amused!