Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-7479d7b7d-68ccn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-13T21:13:41.740Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Letter II: The Old and the New • Letter II

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 May 2022

Get access

Summary

Sir Harry Parkes—An “Ambassador's Carriage”—Cart Coolies.

YOKOHAMA, May 22.

TO-DAY has been spent in making new acquaintances, instituting a search for a servant and a pony, receiving many offers of help, asking questions and receiving from different people answers which directly contradict each other. Hours are early. Thirteen people called on me before noon. Ladies drive themselves about the town in small pony carriages attended by running grooms called bettos. The foreign merchants keep kurumas constantly standing at their doors, finding a willing, intelligent coolie much more serviceable than a lazy, fractious, capricious Japanese pony, and even the dignity of an “Ambassador Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary” is not above such a lowly conveyance, as I have seen to-day. My last visitors were Sir Harry and Lady Parkes, who brought sunshine and kindliness into the room, and left, it behind them. Sir Harry is a young-looking man scarcely in middle life, slight, active, fair, blue-eyed, a thorough. Saxon, with sunny hair and a sunny smile, a sunshiny geniality in his manner, and bearing no trace in his appearance of his thirty years of service in the East, his sufferings in the prison at. Peking, and the various attempts upon his life in Japan. He and Lady Parkes were most, truly kind, and encourage me so heartily in my largest, projects for travelling in the interior, that. I shall start, as soon as I have secured a servant. When they went, away they jumped into kurumas, and it was most, amusing to see the representative of England hurried down the street, in a perambulator with a tandem of coolies.

As I look out. of the window I see heavy, two-wheeled man carts drawn and pushed by four men each, on which nearly all goods, stones for building, and all else, are carried. The two men who pull press with hands and thighs against a cross-bar at the end of a heavy pole, and the two who push apply their shoulders to beams which project behind, using their thick, smoothly-shaven skulls as the motive power when they push their heavy loads uphill. Their cry is impressive and melancholy.

Type
Chapter
Information
Unbeaten Tracks in Japan
Revisiting Isabella Bird
, pp. 8 - 9
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Print publication year: 2018

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×