China and the West

Kipling, Rudyard. Works.
1884
Kipling, Rudyard. The gate of the hundred sorrows. In : Civil and military gazette ; September 26 1884). In : Kipling, Rudyard. Plain tales from the hills. (Calcutta : Thacker, Spink and Co. ; London : W. Thacker, 1888).
[The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows follows one man's descent into the ethereal world of a Calcutta opium den and explores the surreal and surprising interactions between its eclectic clientele.]
No; the old man knew his business thoroughly, and he was most clean for a Chinaman. He was a one-eyed little chap, not much more than five feet high, and both his middle fingers were gone. All the same, he was the handiest man at rolling black pills I have ever seen. Never seemed to be touched by the Smoke, either; and what he took day and night, night and day, was a caution. I've been at it five years, and I can do my fair share of the Smoke with any one; but I was a child to Fung-Tching that way. All the same, the old man was keen on his money: very keen; and that's what I can't understand. I heard he saved a good deal before he died, but his nephew has got all that now; and the old man's gone back to China to be buried… He had spent a good deal of his savings on that, and whenever a new man came to the Gate he was always introduced to it. It was lacquered black, with red and gold writings on it, and I've heard that Fung-Tching brought it out all the way from China… The old man would have died if that had happened in his time. Besides, the room is never cleaned, and all the mats are torn and cut at the edges. The coffin is gone--gone to China again--with the old man and two ounces of Smoke inside it, in case he should want 'em on the way…

1888
Kipling, Rudyard. In an Opium factory. In : Pioneer ; 16th April (1888).
"But why are you so particular about the shell ?" Because of the China market. The Chinaman lokes every inch of the stuff we send him, and uses it. He boils the shell and gets out every grain of the lewa used to gum it together. He smokes that after he has dried it.

1888
Kipling, Rudyard. In black and white. (Allahabad : A.H. Wheeler, 1888).
"Call up your beast", said the planter, and deesa shouted in the mysterious elephant-language, that some mahouts believe came from China at the birth of the world, when elephants and not men were masters…
Pambé waited too ; but his Bombay wife grew clamorous, and he was forced to sign in the 'Spicheren' to Hongkong, because he realized that all play and no work gives Jack a ragged shirt. In the foggy China seas he thought a great deal of Nurkeed…

1888
Kipling, Rudyard. Under the deodars. (Allahabad : A.H. Wheeler, 1888).
Trans-Asiatic Directs, we met, soberly ringing the world round the Fiftieth Meridian at an honest seventy knots; and white-painted Ackroyd & Hunt fruiters out of the south fled beneath us, their ventilated hulls whistling like Chinese kites…

1891
Kipling, Rudyard. American notes. (New York : M.J. Ivers, 1891).
A ponderous Irish gentleman, with priest's cords in his hat and a small nickel-plated badge on his fat bosom, emerged from the knot supporting a Chinaman who had been stabbed in the eye and was bleeding like a pig. The by-standers went their ways, and the Chinaman, assisted by the policeman, his own…
The Chinaman waylays his adversary, and methodically chops him to pieces with his hatchet. Then the press roars about the brutal ferocity of the pagan…
But he is according to law a free and independent citizen--consequently above reproof or criticism. He, and he alone, in this insane city, will wait at table (the Chinaman doesn't count)…
Only Chinamen were employed on the work, and they looked like blood-besmeared yellow devils as they crossed the rifts of sunlight that lay upon the floor. When our consignment arrived, the rough wooden boxes broke of themselves as they were dumped down under a jet of water, and the salmon burst out in a stream of quicksilver. A Chinaman jerked up a twenty-pounder, beheaded and detailed it with two swift strokes of a knife, flicked out its internal arrangements with a third, and case it into a blood-dyed tank. The headless fish leaped from under his hands as though they were facing a rapid. Other Chinamen pulled them from the vat and thrust them under a thing like a chaff-cutter, which, descending, hewed them into unseemly red gobbets fit for the can. More Chinamen, with yellow, crooked fingers, jammed the stuff into the cans, which slid down some marvellous machine forthwith, soldering their own tops as they passed. Each can was hastily tested for flaws, and then sunk with a hundred companions into a vat of boiling water, there to be half cooked for a few minutes…
Our steamer only stayed twenty minutes at that place, but I counted two hundred and forty finished cans made from the catch of the previous night ere I left the slippery, blood-stained, scale-spangled, oily floors and the offal-smeared Chinamen…
Yet there are other powers who are not "ohai band" (of the brotherhood)--China, for instance. Try to believe an irresponsible writer when he assures you that China's fleet to-day, if properly manned, could waft the entire American navy out of the water and into the blue…

1891
Kipling, Rudyard. The disturber of traffic. In : Atlantic monthly ; Sept. (1891).
"I'm off", says the merchant skipper. "My ownders dont wish for me to watch illuminations. That strait's choked with wreck, and I shouldn't wonder if a typhoon hadn't driven half the junks o' China there."

1891
Kipling, Rudyard. Life's handicap : being stories of mine own people. (London : Macmillan, 1891).
The wandering jew.
By the extension of the Brahmaputra Valley line to meet the newly-developed China Midland, the Calais railway ticket held good via Karachi and Calcutta to Hongkong. The round trip could be managed in a fraction over forty-seven days, and, filled with fatal exultation, John Hay told the secret of his longevity to his only friend, the house-keeper of his rooms in London…
The limitations of Pambe Serang.
He was a Malay born in India: married once in Burma, where his wife had a cigar-shop on the Shwe Dagon road; once in Singapore, to a Chinese girl; and once in Madras, to a Mahomedan woman who sold fowls…
In the foggy China seas he thought a great deal of Nurkeed, and, when Elsass-Lothringen steamers lay in port with the Spicheren, inquired after him and found he had gone to England via the Cape, on the Gravelotte….
Georgie Porgie.
If you will admit that a man has no right to enter his drawing-room early in the morning, when the housemaid is setting things right and clearing away the dust, you will concede that civilised people who eat out of china and own card-cases have no right to apply their standard of right and wrong to an unsettled land… When the Government said that the Queen's Law must carry up to Bhamo and the Chinese border the order was given, and some men whose desire was to be ever a little in advance of the rush of Respectability flocked forward with the troops…
The courting of Dinah Shadd.
'Wid that I tuk off my gloves--there was pipe-clay in thim, so that they stud alone--an' pulled up my chair, lookin' round at the china ornaments an' bits av things in the Shadds' quarters….

1891
Kipling, Rudyard. The light that failed. In : Lippincott's monthly magazine ; Jan. (1891).
Chap. 2.
'First the bloomin' rudder snaps,' said he to the world in general; 'then the mast goes; an' then, s' 'help me, when she can't do nothin' else, she opens 'erself out like a cock-eyes Chinese lotus.'…
The young man produced more sketches. 'Row on a Chinese pig-boat,' said he, sententiously, showing them one after another…
Chap. 4.
Nothing will pay me for some of my life's joys; on that Chinese pig-boat, for instance, when we ate bread and jam for every meal, because Ho-Wang wouldn't allow us anything better, and it all tasted of pig,— Chinese pig… 'Don't see it. When I was on that Chinese pig-boat, our captain got credit for saving about twenty-five thousand very seasick little pigs, when our old tramp of a steamer fell foul of a timber-junk. Now, taking those pigs as a parallel'…
Chap. 8.
'Wait a minute. She had been in the China passenger trade and her lower decks had bunks for two thousand pigtails…

1892
Kipling, Rudyard ; Balestier, Wolcott. The Naulahka : a story of West and East. (London : Heinmann, 1892).
Chap. 6.
He had purchased guns, dressing-cases, mirrors, mantelpiece ornaments, crochet work, the iridescent Chrismas-tree glass balls, saddlery, mail-phaetons, four-in-hands, scent-bottles, surgical instruments, chandeliers, and chinaware by the dozen, gross, or score as his royal fancy prompted…

1893
Kipling, Rudyard. Barrack room ballads and other verses. (London : Methuen, 1893).
Kipling, Rudyard. Mandalay. MS 1890. In : Living English poets. (London : Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1893). [Geschrieben 1890].
[Repetition in the last lines] : An' the dawn comes up like thunder outer China 'crost the Bay!
Kipling, Rudyard. Shillin' a day.
My name is O'Kelly, I've heard the Revelly
From Birr to Bareilly, from Leeds to Lahore,
Hong-Kong and Peshawur,
Lucknow and Etawah,
And fifty-five more all endin' in "pore"…

1895
Kipling, Rudyard. The brushwood boy. In : The century magazine ; Dec. (1895).
Seeing the lily was labeled "Hong-Kong", Georgie said : "Of course. This is precisely what I expected Hong-Kong would be like. How magnificent ! "

1895
Kipling, Rudyard. An unqualified pilot. In : Windsor Magazine ; February (1895).
He introduced Jim to a Chinaman in Muchuatollah, an unpleasing place in itself, and the Chinaman, who answered to the name of Erh-Tze, when he was not smoking opium, talked business in pigeon-English to Jim for an hour… The cargo of his junk was worth anything from seventy to a hundred and fifty thousand rupees, some of which he was getting as enormous freight on the coffins of thirty or forty dead Chinamen, whom he was taking to be buried in their native country. Rich Chinamen will pay fancy prices for this service, and they have a superstition that the iron of steamships is bad for the spiritual health of their dead… Going down “Garden Reach” he discovered that the junk would answer to her helm if you put it over far enough, and that she had a fair, though Chinese, notion of sailing. He took charge of the tiller by stationing three Chinese on each side of it, and standing a little forward, gathered their pigtails into his hands, three right and three left, as though they had been the yoke lines of a row-boat…

1896
Kipling, Rudyard. Of those called. (New York, N.Y. ; London : Macmillan, 1895).
We were wallowing through the China Seas in a dense fog, the horn blowing every two minutes for the benefit of the fishery craft that crowded the waterways. From the bridge the fo’c’sle was invisible; from the hand-wheel at the stern the captain’s cabin. The fog held possession of everything—the pearly white fog…

1897
Kipling, Rudyard. Captains courageous. (London ; New York, N.Y. : Macmillan 1897).
Ordinarily he would have accepted battle ere it was offered, and have waged a pleasant and unscrupulous campaign. But now he sat limply, his soft black hat pushed forward on to his nose, his big body shrunk inside his loose clothes, staring at his boots or the Chinese junks in
the bay, and assenting absently to the secretary's questions as he opened the Saturday mail…
Now they heard the swish of a water-tank, and the guttural voice of a Chinaman, the click-clink of hammers that tested the Krupp steel wheels, and the oath of a tramp chased off the rear-platform; now the solid crash of coal shot into the tender; and now a beating back of
noises as they flew past a waiting train…
Disko introduced them all in due form. The captain of an old-time Chinaman could have done no better, and Mrs. Cheyne babbled incoherently. She nearly threw herself into Manuel's arms when she understood that he had first found Harvey…

1897
Kipling, Rudyard. The feet of the young men. In : Scribner’s magazine ; December (1897). Introduction.
Several months between the coast of China and the upper Yangtse in the latter part of 1910 added nothing permanent to my collection, but in the Philippine Archipelago, to which I fared next, luc was better…
All along through the Malay States and Siam, and then up and down the Irrawadi, from Rangoon to Bhamo, on the Chinese border of Burma, and back, I was lured on to study after story of "The steaming stillness of the orchid-scented glade"...

1898
Kipling, Rudyard. The day's work.(London : Macmillan, 1898).
The tomb of his ancestors.
"Of course I do," said Chinn, who had the chronicle of the Book of Chinn by heart. It lies in a worn old ledger on the Chinese lacquer table behind the piano in the Devonshire home, and the children are allowed to look at it on Sundays…
The devil and the deep sea.
The man-of-war had towed them to the nearest port, not to the headquarters of the colony, and when Mr. Wardrop saw the dismal little harbour, with its ragged line of Chinese junks, its one crazy tug, and the boat-building shed that, under the charge of a philosophical Malay, represented a dockyard, he sighed and shook his head…
"I don't understand it," said Mr. Wardrop. "Any Malay knows the use o' copper. They ought to have cut away the pipes. And with Chinese junks coming here, too. It's a special interposition o' Providence."…
"Bread upon the waters".
When the maid had removed the cloth she brought a pineapple that would have cost half a guinea at that season (only McPhee has his own way of getting such things), and a Canton china bowl of dried lichis, and a glass plate of preserved ginger, and a small jar of sacred and Imperial chow-chow that perfumed the room…

1898
Kipling, Rudyard. A fleet in being : notes of two trips with the Channel squardron. (London : Macmillan, 1898).
I listened enchanted to weird yarns in which Chinese Mandarins, West Coast nigger Chiefs, Archimandrites, Turkish Pashas, Calabrian Counts, dignity balls, Chilian beachcombers, and all the queer people of the earth were mingled...

1899
Kipling, Rudyard. Letters of marque. (London : Edinburgh Society, 1899).
The tower, in the arrangement of its stairways, is like the interior of a Chinese carved ivory puzzle-ball…
Dresen China snuff-boxes, mechanical engines, electroplated fish-slicers, musical boxes, and gilt, blownglass, Christmas-Tree balls do not go well with splendours of a Palace that might have been built by Titans and coloured by the morning sun…

1899
Kipling, Rudyard. Many inventions. (London : Macmillan, 1899).
The disturber of traffic.
But a few weeks after that a couple of junks came shouldering through from the north, arm in arm, like junks go. It takes a good deal to make a Chinaman understand danger. They junks set well in the current, and went down the fairway, right among the buoys, ten knots an hour, blowing horns and banging tin pots all the time… '"I'm off," says the merchant skipper. "My owners don't wish for me to watch illuminations. That strait's choked with wreck, and I shouldn't wonder if a typhoon hadn't driven half the junks o' China there."… They knew from his mouth that he had committed evil on the deep waters,--that was what he told them,--and piracy, which no one does now except Chineses, was all they knew of…
His private honour.
I had just installed myself as Viceroy, and by virtue of my office had shipped four million sturdy thrifty natives to the Malayan Archipelago, where labour is always wanted and the Chinese pour in too quickly, when I became aware that things were not going smoothly with the half-company…

1899
Kipling, Rudyard. Stalky & Co. In : Pearson's, Windsor magazine, Cosmopolis magazines ; April 1897-July 1899. (London : Macmillan, 1899).
Slaves of the lamp.
The pantomime was to be given next week, in the down-stairs study occupied by Aladdin, Abanazar, and the Emperor of China…
He has a china basket with blue ribbons and a pink kitten on it, hung up in his window to grow musk in…
"When Stalky blows out his nostrils like a horse," said Aladdin to the Emperor of China, "he's on the war-path. 'Wonder what King will get."…
"Hush, you ass!" hissed the Emperor of China. "Oh, he's gone down to prayers," said Beetle, watching the shadow of the house-master on the wall. "Rabbits-Eggs was only a bit drunk, swearin' at his horse, and King jawed him through the window, and then, of course, he rocked King."…

1901
Kipling, Rudyard. Kim. In : McClure's magazine ; December 1900-October 1901. In : Cassell's magazine ; January-November 1901.(London : Macmillan, 1901).
[The story unfolds against the backdrop of The Great Game, the political conflict between Russia and Britain in Central Asia. It is set after the Second Afghan War which ended in 1881. Kim befriends an aged Tibetan Lama who is on a quest to free himself from the Wheel of Things by finding the legendary 'River of the Arrow'.]
Chap. 1.
[Lama's visit in the Lahore Museum] In open-mouthed wonder the lama turned to this and that, and finally checked in rapt attention before a large alto-relief representing a coronation or apotheosis of the Lord Buddha. The Master was represented seated on a lotus the petals of which were so deeply undercut as to show almost detached. Round Him was an adoring hierarchy of kings, elders, and old-time Buddhas. Below were lotus-covered waters with fishes and water-birds. Two butterfly-winged devas held a wreath over His head; above them another pair supported an umbrella surmounted by the jewelled headdress of the Bodhisat….
On his head was a gigantic sort of tam-o'-shanter. His face was yellow and wrinkled, like that of Fook Shing, the Chinese bootmaker in the bazar…
'Aha! Khitai [a Chinaman],' said Abdullah proudly. Fook Shing had once chased him out of his shop for spitting at the joss above the boots…
The lama mounted a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles of Chinese work. 'Here is the little door through which we bring wood before winter. And thou--the English know of these things? He who is now Abbot of Lung-Cho told me, but I did not believe. The Lord—the Excellent One--He has honour here too?...
He had heard of the travels of the Chinese pilgrims, Fu-Hiouen and Hwen-Tsiang, and was anxious to know if there was any translation of their record. He drew in his breath as he turned helplessly over the pages of Beal and Stanislas Julien. ''Tis all here. A treasure locked.' Then he composed himself reverently to listen to fragments hastily rendered into Urdu. For the first time he heard of the labours of European scholars, who by the help of these and a hundred other documents have identified the Holy Places of Buddhism…
It was a piece of ancient design, Chinese, of an iron that is not smelted these days; and the collector's heart in the Curator's bosom had gone out to it from the first. For no persuasion would the lama resume his gift…
The Curator would have detained him: they are few in the world who still have the secret of the conventional brush-pen Buddhist pictures which are, as it were, half written and half drawn. But the lama strode out, head high in air, and pausing an instant before the great statue of a Bodhisat in meditation, brushed through the turnstiles. Kim followed like a shadow. What he had overheard excited him wildly. This man was entirely new to all his experience, and he meant to investigate further, precisely as he would have investigated a new
building or a strange festival in Lahore city. The lama was his trove, and he purposed to take possession. Kim's mother had been Irish, too…
'I beg. I remember now it is long since I have eaten or drunk. What is the custom of charity in this town? In silence, as we do of Tibet, or speaking aloud?' 'Those who beg in silence starve in silence,' said Kim, quoting a native proverb. The lama tried to rise, but sank back again, sighing for his disciple, dead in far-away Kulu. Kim watched head to one side, considering and interested…
'Allah! A lama! A Red Lama! It is far from Lahore to the Passes. What dost thou do here?'
The lama held out the begging-bowl mechanically. 'God's curse on all unbelievers!' said Mahbub. 'I do not give to a lousy Tibetan; but ask my Baltis over yonder behind the camels. They may value your blessings. Oh, horseboys, here is a countryman of yours. See if he be hungry.' A shaven, crouching Balti, who had come down with the horses, and who was nominally some sort of degraded Buddhist, fawned upon the priest, and in thick gutturals besought the Holy One to sit at the horseboys' fire…
Chap. 2.
He began in Urdu the tale of the Lord Buddha, but, borne by his own thoughts, slid into Tibetan and long-droned texts from a Chinese book of the Buddha's life…
The family priest, an old, tolerant Sarsut Brahmin, dropped in later, and naturally started a theological argument to impress the family. By creed, of course, they were all on their priest's side, but the lama was the guest and the novelty. His gentle kindliness, and his impressive Chinese quotations, that sounded like spells, delighted them hugely; and in this sympathetic, simple air, he expanded like the Bodhisat's own lotus, speaking of his life in the great hills of Such-zen, before, as he said, 'I rose up to seek enlightenment.'… The children of the house tugged unrebuked at his rosary; and he clean forgot the Rule which forbids looking at women as he talked of enduring snows, landslips, blocked passes, the remote cliffs where men find sapphires and turquoise, and that wonderful upland road that leads at last into Great China itself…
Chap. 3.
'That is well said.' The lama was much impressed by the plan. 'We will begin tomorrow, and a blessing on thee for showing old feet such a near road.' A deep, sing-song Chinese half-chant closed the sentence…
Chap. 4.
The woman seemed to ask questions which the lama turned over in his mind before answering. Now and again he heard the singsong cadence of a Chinese quotation. It was a strange picture that Kim watched between drooped eyelids…
Chap. 5.
He quoted an old, old Chinese text, backed it with another, and reinforced these with a third. 'I stepped aside from the Way, my chela. It was no fault of thine…
Chap. 6.
'At any rate, the old man has sent the money. Gobind Sahai's notes of hand are good from here to China,' said the Colonel…
Chap. 8.
Mahbub felt in his belt, wetted his thumb on a cake of Chinese ink, and dabbed the impression on a piece of soft native paper…
Chap. 11.
He drew from under the table a sheet of strangely scented yellow Chinese paper, the brushes, and slab of Indian ink…
The lama, both hands raised, intoned a final blessing in ornate Chinese…
'I have, too, our drugs which loosen humours of the head in hot and angry men. Sina well compounded when the moon stands in the proper House; yellow earths I have--arplan from China that makes a man renew his youth and astonish his household; saffron from Kashmir, and the best salep of Kabul…
Chap. 12.
I sat down and cried, Mister O'Hara, anticipating Chinese tortures…
Chap. 13.
Theirs was an almost obliterated Buddhism, overlaid with a nature-worship fantastic as their own landscapes, elaborate as the terracing of their tiny fields; but they recognized the big hat, the clicking rosary, and the rare Chinese texts for great authority; and they respected the man beneath the hat…

1902
Kipling, Rudyard. The butterfly that stamped. In : Kipling, Rudyard. Just so stories for little children. (London : Macmillan, 1902).
One day, when they had quarrelled for three weeks--all nine hundred and ninety-nine wives together--Suleiman-bin-Daoud went out for peace and quiet as usual; and among the orange trees he met Balkis the Most Beautiful, very sorrowful because Suleiman-bin-Daoud was so worried. And she said to him, 'O my Lord and Light of my Eyes, turn the ring upon your finger and show these Queens of Egypt and Mesopotamia and Persia and China that you are the great and terrible King.' But Suleiman-bin-Daoud shook his head and said, 'O my Lady and Delight of my Life, remember the Animal that came out of the sea and made me ashamed before all the animals in all the world because I showed off. Now, if I showed off before these Queens of Persia and Egypt and Abyssinia and China, merely because they worry me, I might be made even more ashamed than I have been.'…

1902
Kipling, Rudyard. China-going P. & O.'s. In : Kipling, Rudyard. The crab that played with the sea. In : Collier’s, August (1902). In : Kipling, Rudyard. Just so stories for little children. (London : Macmillan, 1902).
CHINA-GOING P's and 0's Pass Pau Amma's playground close, And his Pusat Tasek lies Near the track of most B.I.'s. U.Y.K. and N.D.L. Know Pau Amma's home as well As the fisher of the Sea knows 'Bens,' M.M.'s, and Rubattinos. But (and this is rather queer) A.T.L.'s can not come here; O. and O. and D.O.A. Must go round another way. Orient, Anchor, Bibby, Hall, Never go that way at all. U.C.S. would have a fit If it found itself on it. And if 'Beavers' took their cargoes To Penang instead of Lagos, Or a fat Shaw-Savill bore Passengers to Singapore, Or a White Star were to try a Little trip to Sourabaya, Or a B.S.A. went on Past Natal to Cheribon, Then great Mr. Lloyds would come With a wire and drag them home! You'll know what my riddle means When you've eaten mangosteens…

1904
Kipling, Rudyard. The muse among the motors. (London : Daily Mail Publ. Office, 1904).
Arterial : Early Chinese
I
FROST upon small rain — the ebony-lacquered avenue
Reflecting lamps as a pool shows goldfish.
The sight suddenly emptied out of the young man’s eyes
Entering upon it sideways.
II
In youth, by hazard, I killed an old man.
In age I maimed a little child.
Dead leaves under foot reproach not:
But the lop-sided cherry-branch — whenever the sun rises,
How black a shadow!

1904
Kipling, Rudyard. Traffics and discoveries. (London : Macmillan, 1904).
Pyecroft's back bent over the Berthon collapsible boat, while he drilled three men in expanding it swiftly; the outflung white water at the foot of a homeward-bound Chinaman not a hundred yards away, and her shadow-slashed, rope-purfled sails bulging sideways like insolent cheeks…
"Those are the beggars we lie awake for, patrollin' the high seas. There ain't a port in China where we wouldn't be better treated. Yes, a Boxer 'ud be ashamed of it," said Pyecroft….

1909
Kipling, Rudayrd. Abaft the funnel. (New York, N.Y. : Doubleday, 1909).
In three minutes a bucket appeared on deck. It was covered with a wooden lid. "Think he have make die this time", said the Chinese sailor who carried the coffin, with a grin…
He was on the ship before I joined her –that's seven years ago, when we were running up and down and around and about the China Seas…
I was new to these waters, new to the Chinaman and his fascinating little ways, being a New England man by raisin. Erastasius was raised by the Devil. That's who his sire was. Never ran across his dam. Ran across a forsaken sea, though, int the 'Whanghoa', a little to the northeast of this, with eight hundred steerage passengers, all Chinamen, for various and undenominated ports… There were ten Americans, a couple of Danes and a half-caste knocking round the ship, and the crew were Chinese but most of 'em good Chinese. Only good Chinese I ever met…
There was no talk of it for a forthnight. We spoke of latitude and longitude and the proper manufacture of sherry cobbler, while the steamer cut upon a glassy-smooth sea. Then we trned towards China and drank farewell to the nearer East. "We shall reach Hongkong without being it" said the nervous lady… The China seas are governed neither by wind nor calm. Deep down unter the sapphire waters sits a green and yellow devil who suffers from indigestion perpetually. When he is unwell he troubles the waters above with his twistings and writhings. Thus it happens that it is never calm in the China seas…
"You may go ! You may go to Hongkong for me !" shouted half-a-dozen little waves together…

1909
Kipling, Rudyard. Actions and reactions. (London : Macmillan, 1909).
"Black Chinese furniture and yellow silk brocade," she answered, and ran downhill…
Trans-Asiatic Directs we met, soberly ringing the world round the Fiftieth Meridian at an honest seventy knots; and white-painted Ackroyd & Hunt fruiters out of the south fled beneath us, their ventilated hulls whistling like Chinese kites…

1910
Kipling, Rudyard. Rewards and fairies. (London : Macmillan, 1910).
The sailor.
In Blackwall Basin yesterday
A China barque re-fitting lay,
When a fat old man with snow-white hair
Came up to watch us working there.
'A priest in spite of himself'.
'Say? I couldn't say a word. I sat choking and nodding like a China
image while he wrote an order to his secretary to pay me, I won't say
how much, because you wouldn't believe it…

1911
Kipling, Rudyard. Puck of Pook's hill. (London : Macmillan, 1911).
'Why, you look just like a Chinaman!' cried Dan. 'Was the man a Chinaman?'…

1917
Kipling, Rudyard. A diversity of creatures. (London : Macmillan, 1917).
'I maintain nothing. But is it any worse than your Chinese reiteration of uncomprehended syllables in a dead tongue? ' 'Dead, forsooth!' King fairly danced. 'The only living tongue on earth! Chinese! On my word, Hartopp!'…
'Absolutely and essentially Chinese,' said little Hartopp, who, alone of the common-room, refused to be outfaced by King. 'But I don't yet understand how Paddy came to be licked by Winton. Paddy's supposed to be something of a boxer.'…
"Go and guard your blessed road," he says to the Fratton Orphan Asylum standing at attention all round him, and, when they was removed--"Pyecroft," he says, still _sotte voce_, "what in Hong-Kong are you doing with this dun-coloured _sampan_?"…

1918
Kipling, Rudyard. A flight of fact. In : Nash’s Magazine ; in : Pall Mall Magazine ; June (1918).
There was a chap of that name about five years ago on the China Station. He had himself tattooed al! over, regardless, in Rangoon. Then he got as good as engaged to a woman in Hongkong—rich woman too. But the Pusser of his ship gave him away. He had a regular cinema of frogs and dragonflies up his legs. And that was only the beginnin’ of the show. So she broke off the engagement, and he half-killed the Pusser, and then he became a Buddhist, or something.”…

1920
Kipling, Rudyard. Letters of Travel (1892-1913). (London : Macmillan, 1920).
Only the Chinaman washes the dirty linen of other lands…
The speech of the Outside Men at this point becomes fearfully mixed with pidgin-English and local Chinese terms, rounded with corrupt Portuguese…
Consuls and judges of the Consular Courts meet men over on leave from the China ports, or it may be Manila, and they all talk tea, silk, banking, and exchange with its fixed residents…
And it must be prejudiced, because it is daily and hourly in contact with the Japanese, except when it can do business with the Chinaman whom it prefers. Was there ever so disgraceful a club!...
The imaginative eye can see the most unpleasant possibilities, from a general overrunning of Japan by the Chinaman, who is far the most important foreign resident, to the shelling of Tokio by a joyous and bounding Democracy, anxious to vindicate her national honour and to learn how her newly-made navy works…
The permanent residents are beginning to talk of hill places to go to for the hot weather, and all the available houses in the resort are let. In a little while the men from China will be coming over for their holidays, but just at present we are in the thick of the tea season, and there is no time to waste on frivolities…
A knot of Chinamen were studying a closed door from whose further side came a most unpleasant sound of bolting and locking up. The notice on the door was interesting. With deep regret did the manager of the New Oriental Banking Corporation, Limited (most decidedly limited), announce that on telegraphic orders from home he had suspended payment. Said one Chinaman to another in pidgin-Japanese: 'It is shut,' and went away. The noise of barring up continued, the rain fell, and the notice stared down the wet street…
Malays, Lascars, Hindus, Chinese, Japanese, Burmans—the whole gamut of racetints, from saffron to tar-black—are twisting and writhing round it, while their vermilion, cobalt, amber, and emerald turbans and head-cloths are lying underfoot. Pressed against the yellow ochre of the iron bulwarks to left and right are frightened women and children in turquoise and isabella-coloured clothes. They are half protected by mounds of upset bedding, straw mats, red lacquer boxes, and plaited bamboo trunks, mixed up with tin plates, brass and copper hukas , silver opium pipes, Chinese playing cards, and properties enough to drive half-a-dozen artists wild…
A great stretch of that distance is as new as the day before yesterday, and strewn with townships in every stage of growth from the city of one round house, two log huts, and a Chinese camp somewhere in the foot-hills of the Selkirks, to Winnipeg with her league-long main street and her warring newspapers…
The men won't get up and attend to these things, but we would. If we had female suffrage, we'd shut the door to all the Irish and throw it open to all the Chinese, and let the women have a little protection.'…
If we could only manacle four hundred Members of Parliament, like the Chinese in the election cartoons, and walk them round the Empire, what an all-comprehending little Empire we should be when the survivors got home!...
The teacher holds up pens, reels, and so forth, giving the name in English; the children repeating Chinese fashion…
The Chinaman has always been in the habit of coming to British Columbia, where he makes, as he does elsewhere, the finest servant in the world. No one, I was assured on all hands, objects to the biddable Chinaman. He takes work which no white man in a new country will handle, and when kicked by the mean white will not grossly retaliate. He has always paid for the privilege of making his fortune on this wonderful coast, but with singular forethought and statesmanship, the popular Will, some few years ago, decided to double the head-tax on his entry. Strange as it may appear, the Chinaman now charges double for his services, and is scarce at that…
Another man was a little more explicit. 'We desire,' he said, 'to keep the Chinaman. But the Japanese must go.'…
'Well, you can't expect a man with all the chances that our country offers him to milk cows in a pasture. A Chinaman can do that. We want races that will assimilate with ours,' etc., etc….
'For political reasons, I believe. We do not want People who will lower the Standard of Living. That is why the Japanese must go.' 'Then why keep the Chinese? ' 'We can get on with the Chinese. We can't get on without the Chinese. But we must have Emigration of a Type that will assimilate with Our People. I hope I have made myself clear?'…
A Chinaman costs fifty or sixty dollars a month now. Our husbands can't always afford that. How old would you take me for? I'm not thirty. Well thank God, I stopped my sister coming out West. Oh yes, it's a fine country—for men.' 'Can't you import servants from England?' 'I can't pay a girl's passage in order to have her married in three months. Besides, she wouldn't work. They won't when they see Chinamen working.' 'Do you object to the Japanese, too?' 'Of course not. No one does. It's only politics. The wives of the men who earn six and seven dollars a day—skilled labour they call it—have Chinese and Jap servants. We can't afford it. We have to think of saving for the future, but those other people live up to every cent they earn. They know they're all right. They're Labour. They'll be looked after, whatever happens. You can see how the State looks after me. A little later I had occasion to go through a great and beautiful city between six and seven of a crisp morning. Milk and fish, vegetables, etc., were being delivered to the silent houses by Chinese and Japanese. Not a single white man was visible on that chilly job…

1926
Kipling, Rudyard. Debits and credits : short stories. (London : Macmillan, 1926).
The Janeites.
Our Battery Sergeant Major nearly did. For Macklin had a wonderful way o' passing remarks on a man's civil life; an' he put it about that our B.S.M. had run a dope an' dolly-shop with a Chinese woman, the wrong end o' Southwark Bridge. Nothin' you could lay 'old of, o' course; but--' Humberstall let us draw our own conclusions.
'Not as a rule. I was then, though, or else Macklin knew 'ow to deliver the Charges properly. 'E said 'e'd been some sort o' schoolmaster once, and he'd make my mind resume work or break 'imself. That was just before the Battery Sergeant-Major 'ad it in for him on account o' what he'd been sayin' about the Chinese wife an' the dollyshop.'…
The bull that thought.
I gathered that he had spent much of his life in the French Colonial Service in Annam and Tonquin. When the war came, his years barring him from the front line, he had supervised Chinese wood-cutters who, with axe and dynamite, deforested the centre of France for trench-props.

1930
Kipling, Rudyard. Thy servant a dog : told by Boots. (London : Macmillan, 1930).
The Commander told a tale of an ancient destroyer on the China station which, with three others of equal seniority, had been hurried over to the East Coast of England when the Navy called up her veterans for the War…

1932
Kipling, Rudyard. Limits and renewals : stories. (London : Macmillan, 1932).
At any rate, in that hour, between them it was born. They went to a theatrical wigmaker and bought lavishly of grease-paints for Chinese, Red Indian, and Asiatic make-ups, as well as for clowns and corner- men…

1937
Kipling, Rudyard. Something of myself : for my friends known and unknown. (London : Macmillan, 1937).
A servant, precisely because he is a servant, has his izzat--his honour--or, as the Chinese say, his 'face.' Save that, and he is yours…
For the Pen, when it is writing, can only scratch; and bottled ink is not to compare with the ground Chinese stick…