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Updated: June 19, 2025
The five-storied pagoda, the temple of the five hundred genii, the water-clock, the criminal court where several poor wretches are seen almost flayed alive with bamboos-flower-boats, silk, jade-stone, ivory-carving shops, temple of tortures, and a dozen other interesting places are visited under the pilotage of the genial guide and interpreter Ah Kum.
In the industrial quarters, from top to bottom of the five-storied houses, the old private residences still standing in that low-lying district, where the warehouses have such lofty ceilings and majestic double doors, the nights are passed in the making up of gauze flowers and spangles, in the gumming of labels upon satin-lined boxes, in sorting, marking, packing, the thousand details of the toy, that great branch of commerce on which Paris places the seal of its elegance.
In front rose a high tower, with a five-storied roof of green tiles, pierced with five rows of large portholes, from which grinned the mouths of cannon; while to the right and left, as far as could be seen, stretched the gigantic wall surrounding the city, built partly of granite and partly of large gray bricks, with salients, battlements and loopholes, wearing a decidedly martial air.
Viewing Canton from the "five-storied pagoda," or from the dignified elevation of a pawn tower, it is apparent that it is surrounded by a high wall, beyond which here and there are suburban villages, some wealthy and wood-embosomed, others mean and mangy. The river divides it from a very populous and important suburb.
One sultry evening early in July a young man emerged from the small furnished lodging he occupied in a large five-storied house in the Pereoulok S , and turned slowly, with an air of indecision, toward the K bridge. He was fortunate enough not to meet his landlady on the stairs. She occupied the floor beneath him, and her kitchen, with its usually open door, was entered from the staircase.
There is no visible agency of their flight, but once in awhile you shall pass a five-storied building humming with machinery that winds up an everlasting wire cable, and the initiated will tell you that here is the mechanism. I gave up asking questions.
Before them rose slowly from the depth of the night a wonderful shade. It was an object fifty yards long and as high as a house of three stories, having at its side, as it were, a five-storied tower of uncommon structure. "Here is the Sphinx," said the irritated prince, "purely priests' work!
At a crowded teahouse, a few miles from the city, we waited for the stragglers, while many wayfarers gathered in to see me. Prices were ranging higher. Tea here was 4 cash, and not 2 cash as hitherto. But even this charge was not excessive. In Canton one day, after a weary journey on foot through the crowded streets, I was taken to a five-storied pagoda overlooking the city.
It is everywhere draped with ferns, which do not help to keep it in repair. The "Five-storied Pagoda" which flames in red at one of its angles, is a striking feature in the view.
As we sat at mid-day at the five-storied pagoda, which from a corner of the outer wall overlooks the Tartar city, and ever since, through this crowded week, I have wished that the sun would stand still in the cloudless sky, and let me dream of gorgeous sunlight, light without heat, of narrow lanes rich in color, of the glints of sunlight on embroideries and cloth of gold, resplendent even in the darkness, of hurrying and colored crowds in the shadow, with the blue sky in narrow strips high above, of gorgeous marriage processions, and the "voice of the bridegroom and the voice of the bride," of glittering trains of mandarins, of funeral processions, with the wail of hired mourners clad in sackcloth and ashes, of the Tartar city with its pagodas, of the hills of graves, great cities of the dead outside the walls, fiery-red under the tropic blue, of the "potter's field" with its pools of blood and sacks of heads, and crosses for crucifixion, now, as on Calvary, symbolical of shame alone, of the wonderful river life, and all the busy, crowded, costumed hurry of the streets, where blue banners hanging here and there show that in those houses death has stilled some busy brains forevermore.
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