rge army of
Chinese--more than I imagined existed in China itself--encamped in
spacious streets and houses, some of them sending block-tin to Singapur,
some driving fine carriages, others making shoes, chairs, clothes, and
every other thing that a large town desires. They were the first army
corps on the march of the Mongol. The scouts are at Calcutta, and a
flying column at Rangoon. Here begins the main body, some hundred
thousand strong, so they say. Was it not De Quincey that had a horror of
the Chinese--of their inhumaneness and their inscrutability? Certainly
the people in Penang are not nice; they are even terrible to behold.
They work hard, which in this climate is manifestly wicked, and their
eyes are just like the eyes of their own pet dragons. Our Hindu gods are
passable, some of them even jolly--witness our pot-bellied Ganesh; but
what can you do with a people who revel in D. T. monsters and crown
their roof-ridges with flames of fire, or the waves of the sea? They
swarmed everywhere, and wherever three or four met, there they eat
things without name--the insides of ducks for choice. Our deck
passengers, I know, fared sumptuously on offal begged from the steward
and flavoured with insect-powder to keep the ants off. This, again, is
not natural, for a man should eat like a man if he works like one. I
could quite understand after a couple of hours (this has the true
Globe-trotter twang to it) spent in Chinatown why the lower-caste
Anglo-Saxon hates the Celestial. He frightened me, and so I could take
no pleasure in looking at his houses, at his wares, or at himself....

The smell of printer's ink is marvellously penetrating. It drew me up
two pair of stairs into an office where the exchanges lay about in
delightful disorder, and a little hand-press was clacking out proofs
just in the old sweet way. Something like the _Gazette of India_ showed
that the Straits Settlements--even they--had a Government of their own,
and I sighed for a dead past as my eye caught the beautiful official
phraseology that never varies. How alike we English are! Here is an
extract from a report: "And the Chinese form of decoration which
formerly covered the office has been wisely obliterated with whitewash."

That was just what I came to inquire about. What were they going to do
with the Chinese decoration all over Penang? Would they try to wisely
obliterate that?

The Straits Settlement Council which lives at Singapur had just passed