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Updated: May 22, 2025
The river in the neighbourhood of Canton is so covered with junks, sampans, and other craft, that, in comparison to it, the Thames at Henley during regatta week would look like a deserted waste of water. One misses at Canton the decorative war-junks of the Shanghai River.
Venders were everywhere, many with hot rice and bean curd. Street cleaners in bright-red cotton jackets were busy with the mud puddles. The river swarmed with sampans and barges and launches. There was only one lifeless thing in all Shanghai that morning the German Club. In the city hospital the man Morrissy, his head in bandages, smiled feebly into Cunningham's face.
They got into their sampans; but they remained near the Blanchita, evidently desirous to see her sail. They had not to wait long, for the anchor was weighed, and the captain rang the gong. She went off at her usual speed, and the Dyaks expressed their astonishment in various ways. "Dinner all ready, gentlemen," said Pitts as soon as the steamer was well under way.
Then we enter the magnificent harbour of Yokohama with its hundreds of sampans, junks, tugs, ships, steamers, and every other craft. The smaller craft surround us clamorously, and looking down upon them we see that in almost every case there is a cat on board the junks, many of them tabby or tortoise-shell.
This gentleman was very kind and very polite, and while he was on board the party from the Blanche came to the ship in the steam-launch. He was introduced to everybody, and advised the travellers to take Chinese sampans for their visit to the shore, for the novelty of the thing. The water around the ship was covered with them, and a sufficient number of them were taken to accommodate the party.
Sampans with fish and fruit and vegetables swarmed about, while overhead gulls wheeled and swooped and circled. One of the sampans was hailed, and a rope-ladder was lowered. Shortly a man descended laboriously. He was dressed immaculately in a suit of heavy Shantung silk. His face was half hidden under a freshly pipeclayed sola topee sun-helmet.
It was Georgina's rainbow letter, and the colors of the rainbow were repeated again and again by the reds and yellows and blues of that fleet of sampans. But as the Doctor read on Dave listened more intently, so intently, in fact, that he withdrew his attention entirely from the window, and leaning forward, buried his face in his hands, his elbows resting on his knees.
When the French Mail arrived at Saigon, Ouk was able to replenish his supply of betel nut and sirra leaves, buying them from coolies in bobbing sampans, which sampans had been allowed to tie themselves to the other side of the steamer. At Singapore also he bought himself more betel nut and sirra leaves, but after leaving Singapore he was unable to replenish his stock, and consequently suffered.
Jack was too absorbed in the scene to utter a word; the minarets of the mosques, the vast spire of Shway Dagon, the famous pagoda, its crest of gold glittering in the last rays of the sun; the crowd of masts, the native boats, the swift little sampans darting hither and thither, the quaint up-river craft, the Chinese junks all was so new and strange and wonderful that he could not gaze enough upon the scene.
The first impression of Canton is one of noise, a fearful din rising and falling in a kind of cadence, and seeming to proceed largely from an immense flotilla of boats extending a long way, tied, in a majority of cases, seven and eight rows deep craft of all kinds, sampans, junks, rice boats, freight, each with its quota of humanity, for this is a veritable floating city, with a life all its own, and almost wholly independent of the Canton proper which we were about to visit and which numbered a hundred thousand souls.
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