Omaha Daily Bee Newspaper, January 6, 1901, Page 16

THE Portugal of Asia~-~ First Foreign Colony (Copyrighted, 1900, by Frank G. Carpenter.) MACAO, Dec. 1, 1900.—(8pecial Corre- spondence of The Bee.)—~Macao is the small- est and oldest of all the European colonies of the far east. There were Portuguese traders here sixty-five years after Columbus discovered America and from then until now thia little peninsula, lying off the coast of 8outh China, has practically belonged to Portugal. It is the father of the colonial Pacific, and, although worn out with vice and old age, it 18 one of the interesting spota of east Asia. The Portuguese posses- slons altogether are not more than four square miles. You could crowd them into sixteen 160-acre farms. They consist of some small islands and Macao. Macao does not cover more than 1,000 acres. It is a rocky point of land jutting out from the mouth of the Pearl river, within forty miles in China today. There are pirates operating near here now and one of the wealthiest of the Portuguese residents told me the other day that he hoped I would ask the officials of Canton to send soldiers and drive them out. The Portuguese have fairly good sol- diers themselves, but nothing like they had in the past, and they have to call in the Chinese to assist them. They have been fighting the pirates here for 300 years. When they first settled at Macao the pirates had blockaded Canton. They had held up the merchants and were levying tribute on the people until the Portuguese war vessels came in and cleaned them out. At that time Macao was the commercial center of eastern Asia. The English were afrald to settle at Canton and the British East India company and the Dutch com- pany had houses here. Hong Kong was a THE BAY OF MACAO 18 A PERFECT CRESCENT of Hong Kong and eighty-eight miles of Canton. There are steamers from Macao to thess places every day except Sunday. The boats are about as good as those of the Ohlo river and they do excellent business. Kvery boat has a guard of Portuguese sol- diers to defend the vessel if it is attacked by pirates and to prevent the third-class passengers from taking possession of it In case they should be pirates in disgulse. The decks are so arranged that the third-class passengers can be cut off from the first and second-class by a network of iron bars. 1 came from Hong Kong on the steamer, traveling first-class. During the voyage 1 went below to have a look at the third- class and found myself in the midst of as rough people as 1 have scen on this slde of the world. Some were gambling, others were shoving one another this way and that and the faces of all were those of rowdies. Macao is the most viclous city of the far east. It has three great speclalties—its opium factory, its lotteries and its gam- bling hells Many of our passengers were Chinese on thelr way to buck the tiger in the fantan houses and to indulge in the other vices which are forbidden by law in the English settlement of Hong Kong. There were rich gamblers as well as poor ones. Among the Kuropeans on the upper deck were many Chinese in gorgeous silks, and with them flashily dressed Chinese girls, who, I fear, were not as good as they should be. The powder and rouge on their faces was one-sixteenth of an inch thick, their eye- brows were painted and 1 could see from their little satin shoes, with toes as sharp as a needle, that they had the celebrated “golden 1ily"* feet. Clad in the finest silks they hobbled about over the deck, the rude wind blowing thelr long sacques to and fro and wrapping their full, rich silk pan- taloons about their bandaged legs. In the Portugal of Asia, A ride of four hours brought us into the bay of Macao, one of the most beautiful of the world. It makes you think of the bay of Naples. The harbor is a crescent, walled with houses which might have been lifted up from the streets of Lisbon and dropped out here in China. They are bullt in Portuguese style and painted in all the colors of the rainbow. The walls are bright red, sky blue, rose pink, gray, yellow or glaring white. The roofs are of red tiles. The bulldings are constructed with arcades or cloisters separating thelr walls from the roadway, 8o that you can walk almost any- where and avoid the tropical sun. Many of the houses have bars over thelr windows and doors. They look like jails and were originally so arranged to keep the girls in, after the idea of Portuguese seclusion. 1 kave seen similar windows in the cities of Portuguese South America. They are to be found in Pernambuco, Bahia and Rio de Janeiro, Macao is as old as any of the Brazillan cities, and it has all the Portu- guese customs of centuries ago. It has communlicated these to the Chinese parts of the town, 8o that even the celestials bar their doors, the most ordinary door being wade of a poled ladder which moves back and forth into the walls and is locked there by pins at night. These ladder doors are black and so are the bars fo the windows. Macao is built upon hills. The whole peninsula 1s a mass of rocks with a thin coating of earth, a part of which is covered with houses. The houses run up hill and down and the tops of the hills are guarded by forts. Macao has as many hills as Rome and more forts. The forts were bullt to keep off the pirates. Piracy I8 common mass of barren rocks inhabited by a few fishermen, and no one thought of its being a city. The Portuguese did most of the commerce. They owned this peninsula, paying a nominal rent to the Chinese gov- ernment of about $600 a year. They kept up this rent until fifty years ago, when one of the governors refused to pay it. The Chinese officials then sent Kkidnapers to Macao. They watched for the governor, and when he came outside the city they as- sassinated him. My guide showed me the place where they killed him, and 1 put my hand on the stone where he was laid when his head was cut off. The head was taken to Canton, but that act stopped all payment of rent and since then China has recognized the Portuguese rights to this territory. The City of Macao, Still the Macao of today Is largely Chinese. The colony has 78,000 people, and of these about 74,000 are Chinese, 4,000 are Portuguese and in addition there are 160 Kuropeans, not including the Portuguese officials. There are sixty English and as far as I can find no Americans. The Por- tuguese run the colony. They have a gov- ernor appointed by the king of Portugal, a little army and one or two boats. The gov- ernor has a cabinet, and there are so many officials that you would not dare to run an automobile through tke town for fear of knocking one down. The place has a good revenue, and it spends it right royally. Everything in the town is taxed. The land covered with houses pays 3 cents a square yard, Every trade pays its license, and goods coming into the city from the coun- try must pay toll. This is so of chickens, vegetables, eggs and other such things. A large part of the income is from gov- ernment wonopolies, which are farmed out to the highest bidder. One company, for instance, has the iight to manufacture oplum, and it makes something like a million dollars’ worth of this product a month., Another pays for the making of tobacco and a great number for the keep- ing open of gambling houses and lottery shops. Macao Is now the center of the lot- tery business of Asia. The Manila lottery has moved here. It has its regular draw- ings and its tickets are scattered through- out the western Pacific. There are all kinds of subordinate lotteries and policy shops. The Chinese have their own games of craps and come here to play them. You can bet on any kind of a number or combination of numbers. You can buy tickets in lotteries at 10 cents aplece, or you can lay dowa your $5 and have a chance at a grand prize worth tens of thousands of dollars. The gambling hells I speak of in another letter l They bring in $1060,000 a year to the gov ernment revenue, Portuguese Kidnapers, For a long time the government money by sanctioning the trade in Chinese coolles. Until twenty-five years ago Macao was a half-way station for this trade be tween the United States, South America and Australia and China. The coolies were enticed to Macao, put into jails and hell until the ships were ready to carry them to different parts of the world. Thousands were kiduaped and carried to the islands off the coast of South America, where they were forced to dig out the guano. They were cruelly treated and so many of them died that it is not uncommon today to find coolle corpses in the guano dug up. Otheis were sent to the Isthmus of Panama to work on the railroad and canal. Many went mad and committed sulcide there, so much so that one station on the railroad is now kmown as Matachin, or dead China- made man. Others were shipped to the sugar plantations. of the West Indies and the Gularnas and others under contract to th: United States and AustraliA. 1In all about a half milifjon Chinese were thus carried away. The emperor at Pekin objected again and again, but it was not until 1875 that the traffic was stopped. Macao is well governed. How much the governor saves out of the colony’'s income I don't know, but he spends enough to have good roads and good order. The city is as clean as a new pin. The roads are smoother than the asphalt streets of our national capital and as beautiful as those of Central park. About the harbor runs a wide boulevard shaded by banyan trees, the branches of which interlook overhead., The water {8 kept back by walls of stone, and there are seats here and there where one can sit and enjoy the beautiful views. The roads leading up the hills into the city are well paved and those which go out over the peninsula are as well kept as the boulevard about the bay. The road metal of Macao Is ma lam, over which you glide in your jinriksha as on a path of velvet, There is not a stone nor a rut to be found anywhere. The roads are made and kept in order by human la- bor. Horges are as few in Macao as in Venice. The chief animal employed is the human animal, that queer two-legged bird without feathers. The dirt carts are pulled by men, the jinrikshas have human trot- ting horses, and every dray is pushed or pulled by men or women Much of the dirt for the roads is carried in baskets. ‘The most common carriers are the women, each of whom is loaded with two half bushel baskets full of stone or earth, which she bears along upon the ends of a pole which rests on her shoulders. The aver- age wages for women are about 5 cents a day, and I am told that human muscle is cheaper than mule muscle, The stamping and pressing down of the road is done by men and women with hand stamps. The material is pulverized to a dust and then straw mats are laid down and the last stamping is upon these and not upon the dirt itself. 0 st Cu in Axsin, Macao was for centuries the center of Christianity in Asia. The troubles which the missionaries are now having with the Chinese, and especially the Roman Catho- lics, calls attention to the fact that right here was where the Christians began their first work., They had missionaries here before there was a church on the North American continent. I spent an hour the other day in wandering through the ruins of a great cathedral which was constructed here eighteen years before the Pilgrims first set foot on Plymouth Rock. This was the Church of Saint Paul, founded in 1602 and burned in 1833. A roadway thirty feet wide leading up granite steps to a platform 100 feet high brings you to the site of the ca- thedral. There is. a court in front of it flagged with stone covering one-fourth of an acre, and back of this rises the mag- nificent facade of the church, adorned with life-sized statues of the saints in bronze and with the carvings of angels and devils in granite, I wandered for some time about the court, It is now grass grown and given up to the Chinese. Indeed, its condition today is sadly typical of the trouble the missionaries have had in Christianizing China. Upon the court across which the Christian worship- ers of 300 years ago passed are trays filled with incense sticks spread out to dry, in order that they may be used in worshiping the heathen gods in the Chinese temples, The platform was covered with these yellow sticks, some s big around as a lead pencil and others as large as a knitting needlo. Some are straight and others of spiral shape, like the pin wheels our boys use on the Fourth of July. There is an incense factory beside the church and its workmen use the platform as a drying ground. Next to the church rises the great fort ILLUSTRATED BEE. CHINESE-PORTUGUESE SOLDIEGRS mazcury, so built that it commands the city for miles. It, too, has seen its best days. The many soldiers which it once held have passed away, and it is fast crumbling to ruins. The Macao of today is a Catholic city. It has a number of good churches and one large cathedral. I attended church in the latter one Sunday. The structure covers more than a quarter of an acre and its au- dience room has a beautifully arched ceil- ing at least seventy-five feet above the floor. The interior is finished in white, the woodwork being beautifully carved. The confessionals are black, trimmed with gold, and the altar is a mass of silver virgins and angels looking out over immense silver candlesticks, each of which has its blazing light. Crystal chandeliers hang from the ceiling, their hundreds of prismatic pend- ants shining like diamonds under the rays of the candles, as the Chinese coolie moves from one to the other with a step- ladder, lighting them. There were no seats in the church. The floor was filled with kneeling figures. Hundreds of women in dark gowns with dark shawls draped like cowls about their heads knelt there like an audience of nuns. Among them were Portu- guese men, dressed in black, and in and out, going to and fro through the crowd, and later on celebrating the mass before the altar, were the priests clad in gorgeous gowns of white silk. There were choir boys, with their gowns decorated with white lace, and incense boys who swung lamps to and fro while the thin, aromatic smoke curled upward, filling the air. 1 noticed many Chinese and half-castes among the audience. Several of the choir boys wore pig tails and some of the priests had Chineses features. There are 2,000 Chinese Christians in Macao and many of them are rigid keepers of the faith. Husiness and Manufacturing. is falling off in business. Its com- mercial importance has been taken by Hong Kong and it is now to a large extent a health and gambling resort for other parts of China. It has two good hotels—one, the “Boa Vista,”” on a bluff at the end of the Praya, and the other, the “Hing Kee" hotel, in the center of the harbor crescent. 1 stopped at the “Hing Kee.” It is named of Saint Paul, an enormous mass of stoneafter its proprietor, a Chinese, who charges January 6, 1001, WITH HALF-CASTE OFFICIALS. his guests about $3 a day for his beniguant smile, It was here that I picked up a guide, a Portuguese gentleman who weighed 300 pounds, his extra heaviness necessitating two men to the jinriksha which hauled him around, at extra cost to me. With him I visited the business parts of the city. The stores are small and more like Portuguese stores than those you see in Hong Kong and Shanghai. Much of the business is done by the Chinese, who have monopolized all the good things in manufacturing and com- merce. I spent one afternoon in the tea and mat- ting factories. Macao exports about a half miliion dollars’ worth of tea every year— some good and much bad, Some of the tea is made up of redried leaves, good tea belng mixed with the refuse, and the mixture sold as good tea. The bulk of this goes to India. The ordinary methods of manufacture are the same as 1 have seen In other parts of Cbina. They give one an idea of how the tea we drink is prepared for the market. Come with me and take a look at it. Let us enter the drying room. There are a hundred half-naked Chinese bending over baskets under which charcoal fires burn. They lean over and put their bare arms icto the baskets and mix up the tea. Some of them are perspiring, and the white drops pour down among the leaves. Some breathe hard as they bend over, and the microbes of their breath mix with the microbes of the sweat, but do not affect the aroma. Take another picture. In the room just beyond they are picking over the tea. A hundred black-haired, slant-eyed, yellow- faced women squat on low benches, with flat baskets before them. Each basket has its pile of tea leaves upon it, and the woman sorts these over with her long- nailed fingers to get out the twigs and the dirt. See how rapidly they work. Their delicate hands move quickly, for they are paid by the basket, and they have to work fast to make their wages of from 3 to 6 cents per day. We ask the manager how long they have been here. He says they have already worked eight hours, and that (Continued on Seventh Page.) NEW BUILDING OF THE JOHN DEERE PLOW COMPANY, OMAHA .