A Chinese Beggar at Canton

A Chinese Beggar at Canton

Canton

By H. F. Gordon

Canton the pulse of the Orient, ever drab, ever changing, yet ever the same since history has kept authentic records. — Sleepy, languid, hot deathly hot, unkept, unclean, ununiform,wending its own peculiar way down the annals of time, sinister and quiet, to the casual observer to be shunned as a pestilence. Canton, the second largest non-Christian city in the world, where five thousand diseased and maimed beggars daily plead for existence from the healthy and strong; the city with five hundred thousand floating population dwelling on the river, from birth until death, with no joy of living, no ambition, no hope for the future, just resignation to the monotonous sameness of their lives; Canton, the city that never sleeps, yet is always sleeping; the center of plots and intrigues; the city with the deadly sucking undertow of vice, and crime, and disease, which, if it ever gathers you to its bosom, you are lost. Yet why that peculiar hypnotic attraction experienced by adventurers and cosmopolites? that desire to blend with the Celestials' calm indifference to fate, and drift with the tide in this most peculiar of all places?