My experience was different from that of
Major Davies when he visited this city in 1899. He writes:--
"The people of this town are particularly conservative and exclusive.
They have such an objection to strangers that no inn is allowed within
the city walls, and no one from any other town is allowed to establish a
shop.... When the telegraph line was first taken through here there was
much commotion, and so determined was the opposition of the townspeople
to this new-fangled means of communication that the telegraph office had
to be put inside the colonel's yamen, the only place where it would be
safe from destruction."
The proprietor of the inn in which I stayed was a man of about fifty, of
goodly person and somewhat corpulent, comely presence, good humor, and
privileged freedom. He had a pretty daughter. He was an exception to the
ordinary father in China, in the fact that he was proud of her, as he
was of his house and his faring. But in all conscience he should have
been abundantly ashamed of his charges, for my boy said I was charged
three times too much, and I have no cause for doubting his word either,
for he was fairly honest. I once had a boy in Singapore who acted for
three weeks as a "ganti"[AK] whilst my own boy underwent a surgical
operation, and between misreckonings, miscarriages, misdealings,
mistakes and misdemeanors, had he remained with me another month I
should have had to pack up lock, stock and barrel and clear.
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