File:A CANTON BOATWOMAN AND CHILD.jpg

English: John Thomson: MANY thousands of the population of Canton pass their lives in their boats,— in them they are born, and from them they are carried to their graves. These floating dwellings afford many advantages to their poor owners, who, had they to live on land, would be crowded into miserable nlakeshift hovels in the unhealthiest quarters of the city. There they would have to inhale the polluted air of a neglected neighbourhood, as even in the most fashionable localities of a Chinese city all sanitary regulations are ignored. In a boat the owner finds profitable employment for himself and his family, and in many instances, a clean, comfortable, and attractive looking home, while he can shift his anchorage at pleasure, and move to where the society may be most congenial to his tastes, enjoying a degree of social intercourse by his nightly changes unknown even to the most favoured of those who dwell upon the land. When he visits his friends his house and family go with him. In time of sickness he moors close to his physicians, in some healthy country district, where an invalid can breathe purer air ; or, it may be, hard by a favourite shrine, where he can solicit the aid of its healing spirit, the efficacy of whose powers has been handed down by tradition, and on whom he implicitly relies. The old woman in the photograph is the grandmother living with her son's family in the boat; she still works cheerfully at the oar to help the domestic earnings ; and nurses, all the while, one of the grandchildren. Probably this is the eldest son, the pride of the family, and the hope of her old age. The babe is carried in a cloth slung over the shoulders, after the manner of the Chinese race, and he presses his face against the back of his bearer during his hours of sleep. This custom is so common, as to account, to some extent, for . the flat faces and broad noses of the boating and labouring classes in China.