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In Suifu there are two magistrates, both with important yamens. The Fu magistrate is the "Father of the City," the Hsien magistrate is the "Mother of the City;" and the "Mother of the City" largely favours the export opium trade. When Protestant missionaries first came to the city in 1888 and 1889 there was little friendliness shown to them.
Now the law is more lenient, and wives accused of such a dreadful offence are beaten nearly to death, and when recovered, if they do recover, are given as concubines to low officials in the Palace or at some of the Yamens.
But the pagodas and yamens of the Celestial Empire can wait awhile, here is Tiflis before my eyes; walls of the citadels, belfries of the temples belonging to the different religions, a metropolitan church with its double cross, houses of Russian, Persian, or Armenian construction; a few roofs, but many terraces; a few ornamental frontages, but many balconies and verandas; then two well-marked zones, the lower zone remaining Georgian, the higher zone, more modern, traversed by a long boulevard planted with fine trees, among which is seen the palace of Prince Bariatinsky, a capricious, unexpected marvel of irregularity, which the horizon borders with its grand frontier of mountains.
In the open country, far from habitation, the traveller comes across groups of bare walls with foundations still uncovered, and dismantled arches, and broken images in the long grass, that were formerly yamens and temples in the midst of thriving communities.
Here, as in all yamens, the detached wall or fixed screen of stone facing the entrance is painted with the gigantic representation of a mythical monster in red trying to swallow the sun the Chinese illustration of the French saying "prendre la lune avec les dents."
It was, instead, the face of a desperate, possibly dangerous man, who had brooded over this monomania in the gorges of the great Chinese river, in the filthy yamens of barbarous mountain towns, in the forts of hill-robbers who practiced extraordinary cruelties.
Green-eyed envy in imperial pavilion and courtrooms has often stood sponsor to the wildest lawlessness. A base and extortionate government has often driven men in sheer self-defence to tearing down yamens and hunting down the "tiger" mandarin. The present Manchu dynasty seized the Dragon throne in 1644. For one hundred and fifty years China enjoyed comparative peace and prosperity.
Those who were concerned in the matter were so engagingly impressed with the incomparable literary merit displayed in the production that they counselled a great number of copies being made ready in order, as they said, that this person should not lose by there being any delay when once the accomplishment became the one topic of conversation in tea-houses and yamens.
The yamens and palaces of your distinguished friends would echo with the once honoured name of Wang Ho, now associated with every form of malignant distemper and impending fate. All would hasten to withdraw themselves from the contagion of your overhanging end."
Temples abound, and spacious yamens and rich buildings, the crowning edifice of all being the Temple to the God of Literature. Distances are prodigious in Chungking, and the streets so steep and hilly, with flights of stairs cut from the solid rock, that only a mountaineer can live here in comfort. All who can afford it go in chairs; stands of sedan chairs are at every important street corner.
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