The Sun.
London, England, 1858-03-30 00:00:00

LONDON, TUESDAY EVENING, MARCH 30, 1858.

CHINA.

(From the Times' Correspondent )
CANTON, FEB. 15.
I am weary of walking the slippery alleys of
Canton. Six weeks hero have rendered "us all
familiar with every object of interest. Not that we
know our way about The inhabitants, when they
go far abroad, often :tarry a fan with a plan of the
city upon it ; and wise mandarins sometimes have
a Chinese compass in their chairs. Even the few
main thoroughfares are not easily to be recognised
if you come into • them unawares, th streets so
muck resemble each other in their irarrowness,
their pendant signboards, their drifting crowds, and
their lines of Shops. If you take a Chinese guide
from the east he dOes not know the west. We are
about to name the principAl thoroughfares and to
put up boards in English,- French, and Chinese, for
the benefit of future tourists ; but at present Can-
ton is not a city easy :o be learnt by heart.
We sleep—that is t) say, four of us sleep—in a
building very like a cucumber frame without any
gla.s. It is true that the absence of glass has been
proposed to be supplied by the presence of gauze
paper, but as nearly every pane is torn, the north
wind which whistles shrewly at night finds means
of bringing us a mormog supply of colds. Let me
endeavour to tell howsome of us who may happen
not to be on duty sometimes pass our day,.
After comfortable ahliitiiani in the abundant
Ivarrir waters of this yteititti, - for the water is
positively warm as it comes from the wells, and
atter a campaigning breaktast, we sally forth armed
with revolvers and stout walking sticks. The Com-
missioners' Court in the (mitt r quadrangle is already
sitting, The three Commis=ioners, in their square
open pavilion, are trying a rape ease, and hundreds
of Chinese, an order:y crowd, are looking
on. Tete culprit is a fresh-coloured Irish boy,
of the Marine force, and the complainant is
a little weazened old woman, who totters upou her
small sheep's feet, and talks voluble Cantonese
against the erect young soldier. The English police
corroborate her story. lam afraid there can be no '
doubt ab, ut the fact. The boy was drunk and in-
discriminating. He had offered violence to that
quaint creature. He is found guilty, and 50 lashes
write in red letters upon his back the Cantonese
Cou.nissiouers' version of the axiom • ' si, non caste,
tamen mute."
The open space in front of the GJvernot's ya-
mun is more than an acre in area, and abuts upon
the Great East and West-street. We no longer
call it " the street of benevolence and love." Per-
haps we go westward, and, pushing through the
crowd, and averting our eyes from the too
tempting curiosity shops, we arrive at the gates
of the Tartar Yamun, with its two colossal marble
lions in front. I have already spoken of this
place as a scene of desolation. It is rapidly
returning to its former grandeur. In an incredibly
short space of time the Chinese workmen, set in
motion by barbarian dollars, have repaperedell the
walls, botchd up all the holes, and, mowing ways
through the bamboo jungle, have discovered little
nooks mith terraces and small bridges, and curious
pavilions—gentle accts ores to the mighty halls
which are to form the quarters of the forces. The
Freuch are taking great pains to restore the portions
they have chosen. Le Capitaine Martineau has
his private rooms, his chapel, his prison, and his
office. A few dashes of the paint brush do wonders
in a Chinese building. The Tartar yamun soon
look ,as imposing as it did wheni t was the palace of
the Southern King of China. The wilderness in

its rear, with its central tempi.° arid ancient trees,
will be again a pleasant park. It is 60 acres. We
flushed a woodcock there during a recent walk.
If we retrace our steps and pass again eastwards
we shall revisit the other great official yamuns.
Twenty times may we go about these great strag-
gling places before we become aware of all their
walls contain. Behind the treasury, the portals
whereof seem to be in the centre of an overpeopled
neighbourhood, I have counted 30 bead of deer,
their horns appearing and disappearing in the
coarse bamboo jungle. There are not five men
beside myself who know that this miniature deer-
forest exists iu Canton City, or, despite the pre-
vost-marshal, venison would not be so unknown in
our cparter4. These wilderne:ses w ill,doubt-
less, soon be cleared ; and before we leave they will
become parade-grounds, or, perhaps, encamp-
ments ; but it shows how little our English resi-
dents know of what is just an inch beyond their
noses, that they, in their northern newspaper,
made pea merriment of my early statement that
there were park-like grounds within the circuit of
the Canton walls. Our rambles are, however,
more usually among the intricately reticulated
streets. As we make our way towards the south•
west, by aid of our Chinese compass, we pass guests
proceeding to a marriage, with the wedding pre-
sents in long procession behind their chairs—whole-
roasted pigs, cakes, and comfitures, and baskets
whose contents we can only guess at. Perhaps—
it has happened more than once—there is a terrific
sound of rapid wheels. There is an alarm of fire,
and the fite brigade, in their uniform caps, are
dragging a fire engine along the
pavement of black
granite at a tremend.)us pace. These firemen are
fine fellows. In the heat of our bombardment we
saw them working their engines under fire, and
once at last we blew up engine and firemen toge-
ther by a shell. As we near the southern parts,
the shops are
passing under the wall of the old city, we come
upon lower neighbourhoods,
.and
adapted to the wants of the waterside population.
Here (if you observe curiously the shops which are
filled with the sun-dried comestibles the Chinese
love) you may find dried rata with their tails
fully projected, and leaving no doubt of their class
and order in creation. Look carefully into that
finely browned roast
pig and you will discover it
to be a dog. Puppies are also borne by in open
wicker baskets, and their fate and ultimate &Asti-
nation are not ambiguous. But these peculiarities
are not common, and are not ostentatiously dis-
played. You must have an old habitue of the fac•
tories with you, or you would not discover them.
The rats are field rats, caught and dried after har-
vest, and the dogs have been carefully fed upon
rico and meal. We do the Chinese much wrong in
the matter of their food. Tneir pork is far more
white and delicate in flavour than the pork we see
exposed in London, and it is fed w;th a care and
cleanliness from which some English dairies might
well take pattern.

Threading our way, under the guidance of some
experienced friend, we come to a carpenter's shop,
fronting the entrance to a small potter's field. It
is not a rood in area, of an irregular shape, re-
sembling most an oblong. A row of cottages open
into it on one side ; there is a wall on the other.
The ground is covered with half baked pottery ;
there are two wooden crosses formed of unbarked
wood, standing in an angle, with a shted of rotting
rope hanging from one of them. There is nothing
to fix the attention in this small enclosure, except
that you stumble against a human skull now and
then as you walk along it. This is the Aceldama,
the field of blood, the execution-ground of Canton.
The upper part of that carpenter's 'hop is the place
where nearly all the European residents have, at
the price of a dollar each, witnessed the wholesale
massacres of which Europe has heard with a
hesitating scepticism. It was within this yard
that that monster Yeh has within two years
destroyed the life of 70,000 fellow-beings. Ti,ese
crosses are the instrumeuts to which those victims
were tied who were condemned to the special
torture of being sliced to death. Upon one
of these the wife of a rebel General was stretched,
and by Yeh's order her flesh was cut from her body.
After the battle at Whampoa the rebel leader
escaped, but his wife fell into the hands of Yeh—
that was how he treated his pr!soner. Her breasts
were first cut off, then her forehead was slashed and
the skin torn down over the face, then the fleshy
parts of the body were sliced away. There are
Englishmen yet alive who saw this done, but at
what period of the butchery sensation ceased and
death came to this poor innocent woman none can
tell. The fragment of rope which now hangs to one
of the crosses was used to bind a woman who was
cut up for murdering her husband. The sickening
details of the massacres perpetrated on this spot
have been related to me by those who have seen
them, and-Who take shame to themselves while they
confess that after witnessing one execution by Gut-
ting on the cross the rapidity and dexterity with
which the mere beheading was done deprived the
execution of a hundred men of half its horror. The
criminals were brout,ht down in gangs, if they
could walk, .or brought down in chairs and shot
out into the yard. The executioners then arranged
them in rows, giving them a blow behind which
forced out the head and neck and laid them conve-
nient for the blow. Then came the warrant of
death. It is a banner. As soon as it is waved in
sight, without verbal order given, the work began.
There was a rapid succession of dull crunching
sounds—chop, chop, chop, chop. No second blow
was ever dealt, for the dexterous manalayers are
educated to their work. Until they can with their
heavy swords slice a great bulbous vegetable as thin
as we slice a cucumber they are not eligible for
their office. Three monde a head ;Adage, In on.)