Houses of China in 1914
"Let us now take a peep at a Chinese home,—or the house that makes the home. It may be of any grade, from a mud hut or a bamboo shack…
From: Unknown To: 1914 C.E.
Note: This article has been excerpted from a larger work in the public domain and shared here due to its historical value. It may contain outdated ideas and language that do not reflect TOTA’s opinions and beliefs.
“Introductory,” from Home Life in China by Isaac Taylor Headland, 1914.
I wish to say in the beginning that it will not be my design to give a dark picture of the Chinese home, neither will I try to paint any pictures in high colours. There will be bright as well as dark pictures in poor as in rich homes. There are many people who suppose that because a child is poor it leads a dull life.
Now it was my fortune—as it was yours—to be born a barefoot child. But it was my good fortune—as it may not have been yours—to have grown up a barefoot boy, for no one who has been raised in affluence and ease can appreciate the joys and sorrows of the poor. A farmer's boy, compelled to struggle from morn till night, to help to pay rent and make a living, can have more fun on a single fourth of July or Christmas holiday, with twenty-five cents to spend, than a son of wealth, with three hundred and sixty-five days of idleness and an unlimited bank account, can have in a year.
We will therefore not take it for granted that a child is not happy because it is poor, nor will we suppose that a child is happy because it is rich. It is a great thing to have been born poor and to have grown up through all grades of society. It helps you to understand children. It helps you to understand men. It helps you to see the occasions for smiles as well as for tears in the homes of all grades of society. It is hard to judge properly what you have not yourself lived through.
Let us now take a peep at a Chinese home,—or the house that makes the home. It may be of any grade, from a mud hut or a bamboo shack in a little country village, to a brick house with black ebony carvings and green glazed tile roof in the capital of the empire or republic. The little folks will be the same. The general structure of the buildings will be the same. The plan and architecture will be the same. The customs will be the same. The furniture will be in general the same, though withal common and coarse or rich and fine.
They will eat their food with the same kind of utensils, in the same general way, and it will be in a measure the same kind of food. Their clothes will be of the same pattern, made in the same style. They will dress their hair in the same way, paint and powder their faces in the same way, and make their shoes and stockings with the same kind of needle and thread. And they will have done this for so many centuries that they will think the same kind of thoughts in the same way, until they sit, and walk, and talk, and get angry revile, or be happy and sing, in the same way, and it will all be different from the same things when done in any other country in the world.
The house, then, that we call the home will be a one-story building with three rooms in a row. The door will enter the centre of these three rooms, which will be reception room, parlour, dining room, hall, and general living room. Opposite the door, against the wall, there will be a square table with a straight-backed chair on either side, while stands, with chairs beside them, will occupy the centre of each side wall.
Above the table, decorating the wall, may be four written scrolls, or a painting in the form of a hanging scroll (kakemono, the Japanese call it, though the Chinese call it chung tang), with a written scroll on either side. The partitions between the rooms, if it is an adobe house (dried brick), will be dried brick walls but if it is a brick house of the middle or better class, the partitions will be panelled board up four or five feet from the floor, with panelled lattice to the ceiling, papered with thin white paper, and a small painting either in colours, or black and white, in each of the panels.
The ceiling will be of paper, made in squares of about 18x20 inches, finished or glazed on one side with fish-bone or fish-scale dust (oyster-shell dust), and pasted on a framework made of broom-corn stalks, stiffened with a wooden panelling. The house will face south, if it is in the north of China, and the other half of the south wall will be lattice windows, covered with thin white paper instead of glass. This is for the purpose of getting all possible sunlight into the room during the winter, while they live and work out of doors during the summer.
The wealthier homes, where they have no concern about fuel, may have a narrow five-foot veranda extending the whole length of the front side of the house, while the poorer ones may erect a mat awning during the hot summer months.
The end rooms of the building will be alike, from ten to fifteen feet square, depending upon the wealth of the person. The south half of the floor in North China will be built up eighteen inches above the other half. This constitutes the bed. It is built of brick or dirt, with flues under the top layer, and a fireplace under the front with a place for a pot over the fire.
In the morning, and in the evening, or, if they can afford it, all day, they build a fire under the bed. The smoke, soot, gas, and ashes all go up through the flues and heat the bricks of the bed, so that when you retire, instead of having one hot brick in your bed you go to bed on a bed of hot bricks. Someone has facetiously called this “solid comfort.” They go to bed on top of the stove. The fuel is usually cornstalks, grass, weeds, old matting, or anything that will burn, or, best of all, coal balls made of anthracite coal dust mixed with clay, which supports complete combustion.
It will be observed that the bricks of this brick bed, or stove—for the people literally sleep on top of the stove—take all the heat out of the fuel so that none of it is wasted by going up the chimney—which, by the way, is no part of the ordinary Chinese house. Why have a chimney to carry off three-fifths of your heat? The smoke and gas come out into the room. You open the windows and doors and let it out, and you keep all the heat inside. The better class homes heat the houses with brass or clay stoves or braziers, with coal balls or charcoal for fuel, which are lighted outside until the gas is driven off and then carried into the house, while the fireplace under the bed is on the veranda instead of in the room.
Such is the simple Chinese home where father, mother, and children dwell. But very few Chinese homes are simple. As soon as the boys are old enough to marry, as we shall show in a later chapter, a wife is found for each of them in order, and they bring their wives, not to the parental roof, but to the parental enclosure, for another three-room building, the exact counterpart of the one we have just described, is erected, and the young couple start in life under the direction and superintendence of the boy’s parents—the girl’s parents-in-law.
This continues for years and centuries, each home losing all of its girls, who are scattered into the homes of as many other people. In this way a single three-room cottage eventually becomes a village, which goes under the name of the Liu village, the Yang village, the Wang village, the Chang village, or the village of the particular family who happened to first live there. These villages of from one hundred to four or five thousand or more are more thickly scattered over the habitable portions of China than single farmhouses over Kansas, Nebraska, or Iowa.
In the above description we have had in mind a family in medium circumstances, who were able to build their house of brick, with tile roof, and with fairly decent furniture. From them we may go in both directions until we come to the poor beggar who lives "from hand to mouth," or, as he says,"yu i wan, ch'ih i wan"—"have a bowl, eat a bowl," or to the sons of wealth who have every luxury that their intelligence or the intelligence of their race can provide.
From our point of view these are not many. For the floors of their houses are of brick. They are without bathroom, water, light, or heating system, except such as we have described—no electric call-bells, though they have human call-bells, in the form of servants, always waiting to do their bidding, for few people in the world are better served than the Chinese. They know how to be served, and they understand how to be servants.
There is no well-flushed sewage system, and the streets, courts, and homes are not clean according to our view of cleanliness. The porous bricks of the floors of ordinary homes contain the sputum and fluids of years, if not centuries, and would violate all our rules of sanitation, and contain microbes enough to depopulate all Europe and America in a single generation.
Their sleeping arrangements are neither clean nor comfortable. On top of the brick bed is a reed mat, and, if they can afford it, a wool or camel-hair rug. On this, when they are about to retire, they spread a ju tzu, or mattress, about as thick as our grandams' wadded comforters, then with a small pillow about the size of a brick, stuffed with grass seed or chaff, many of which have a hole in the centre for the ear to rest in, and another comforter or two to spread over them, or to wrap themselves in, they lie down to pleasant dreams.
The common people use no sleeping garment, and spread their clothing over them at night in lieu of a sufficient amount of bedding. They go to bed shortly after dark, as the "light of Asia," until recently, has been a tallow dip or a bowl of oil with a rag for a wick, and get up at daylight.
In the morning when they arise the bedding is aired, then folded up and put away in chests, or piled up on one end of the brick bed, where it is ready for the following night. They do not use sheets and pillow-cases as we do, and hence—but I do not need to remind my readers of what their imagination may do in a more delicate way.
But I must call their attention to the fact that human parasites—and I wonder if any of my readers have ever been able to answer the question why those things were created (I suppose it was done to keep us clean, for they only go where there is a reasonable amount of dirt)—human parasites of every description abound wherever man is found. And what better than a brick bed as an incubator for the cimex lectularius, or for that matter any of that species.
Suffice it to say that all these things take away from the comforts of home life, and make the word for home, chia (a shackled pig under a roof), seem significant, and are sufficient reason for the ejaculations of Chinese ladies when visiting a foreign home, which are "kan ching! ts'ui kan ching!"—"clean! very clean!"
It is in such a home that the Chinese child is born and reared, and be it remembered to the credit of the child that there are more than 400,000,000 of him without any scientific system of medicine, and in spite of microbes and sanitation.
Headland, Isaac Taylor. Home Life in China. MacMillan Co. 1914.
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