New Year’s Eve,[232] according to the Chinese Calendar, was celebrated by the discharge of thousands of crackers and other fireworks, that being their manner of announcing to the world that the ceremony of propitiating their household gods had begun; the object in view, absolution for equivocal acts committed during the past twelve months. For several previous days the city was _en fête_; establishments closed; caricatures distributed as so many valentines; visits of friendship and of ceremony exchanged; family and other misunderstandings arranged; much feasting and carousing indulged in; houses swept and garnished in token that all things unpleasant, whether physical or ethical, had been cast out. The fronts of houses were decorated with strips of vermilion-coloured paper containing expressions of good-will and congratulation; ornamental lanterns were everywhere on sale, for purposes of illuminations, their shapes various and often grotesque, as fishes, frogs, dragons, and monsters of various forms. Buddhist temples had on their altars a series of gigantic candles, all “dyed red,” bearing designs of dragons and other mythical creatures, before which people knelt with every appearance of devotion.
It became a source of interest to a few of us to visit places and institutions of purely Chinese origin or character. Of such places, a public bathing establishment was one, the interior well lighted, spacious, pervaded by steam from water heated by a furnace, the fuel of which consisted of reeds and straw. A series of troughs, and at one end a plunge bath, were being used by considerable numbers of men at a time, the charge for each being about a farthing. Here then were public baths existing as a Chinese institution, though even yet their introduction generally into England remains rather in the initiative than accomplished stage.
Very different in kind was an ice pit, otherwise a large underground room, one part of which was devoted to the preservation of that substance, another having a series of shelves crowded with vegetables and fruit of different kinds. As we descend into that pit, the sensation we experienced was that of comparative _warmth_, so bitterly cold had the wind outside become.