LI HUNG CHANG'S FURS.
TI HUNG CHANG is believed to be the richest man in the world. This belief certainly gains credit from a glimpse at one portion of his invested capital which has recently made its appearance in the City of London. Among other sources of income, the great Chinese satrap draws an annual tribute of precious furs from one of the Northern provinces. This is said to be the mountain and forest district of North-West Manchuria, whose "natural com- modities" of fur-bearing animals are mentioned by the Emperor Kien Lung in the pious work in which the Im- perial author describes the country still held sacred as the dwelling-place of the spirits of his ancestors. Part of the tribute of the Russian Tartar tribes is also collected in the form of sables, and it is known that while the poor 'Tartars send in the finest skins in true loyalty to the Czar, dishonest officials substitute inferior furs, and the choice skins in the Imperial wardrobe come not from tribute but from purchase. They manage these things better in China. Li Hung Chang has immense warehouses in Pekin crammed with precious furs from top to bottom, and no middleman pilfers the choice skins on their way to this repository. It has been done, but Li Hang Chang is a watchful ruler, and it is rumoured that the punishment inflicted was so appro- priate and diverting that no one has ever meddled with Li's tribute sables since. There is an immense demand for rare furs in China. A nation in which neither men nor women wear jewels, but which has an exquisite taste for personal luxuries, finds a substitute for jewels in costume. An Indian or Afghan Prince will perhaps dress in white cotton, provided this be set off by some priceless gems on his sword, dagger, and turban. A Chinese Mandarin's sole jewels may be a few bits of jade or carnelian, but he makes up for this in summer by the richness of his silks, and in winter by wearing robes of furs so splendid that it needs a certain education to appreciate the full beauty of the costume. It has long been known that the Chinese furriers were the best in the world ; and that except in the dyeing of sealskins, their treat- ment of the far itself, especially in improving its tint and lustre, was unrivalled. It was not, however, sus- pected that they could improve on the work of Nature. An inspection of some of Li's furs recently sent to London showed that this was a task not beyond the art of the ancient civilisation of the Far East. There were three or four robes which raised a certain excitement of admiration, even among the purely commercial experts of the wholesale far trade. One of these robes was constructed with a special object. The aim of the Chinese furrier had been to make a skin of sable magnified to the size of the skin of a bear. In addition to creating a gigantic sable, this genius also wished that the animal should have fur with the hair all lying parallel; whereas in nearly every far except that of the seal, when the long hairs are removed the grain and direction follow the anatomy of the body, and give an unevenness to the whole. To effect these objects the artist had cut out the " tit-bits " of sable skins, and divided these into tiny strips averaging from an inch to half an inch in length. These strips were all from the same part of the sable's body, and were covered with fur of even length, lustre, and thickness. They were then sewn together with minute art, so that at the back the skin looked like a patchwork of tiny parallelo- grams like the squares on a fritillary flower, averaging from three to four in the square inch. In front the fur was abso- lutely uniform, homogeneous, and apparently without seam or joining,—the kind of giant sable skin which might appear in dreams as the ideal of a Russian bride's trousseau. But Li Hung Chang's farriers had produced something better than this,—a fur robe which can justly claim to be an im- provement on anything that Nature has given us in the rarest furs of beasts. Sable was again the material used. In this robe also the skins were divided, and rejoined so as to secure uniformity of tint, fur, and setting. But in the robe so made the artist had inserted at intervals the skin of the sable's shoulder and fore-paw. This, when cut out, laid flat, and sewn together, with a little addition to the curves, forms an " ocellus " like a peacock's eye in sable damask, for the tint of the robe was uniform, and only the difference in the lie and texture of the far produced the ornament. The result was the creation of a sable skin, adorned at regular intervals with an apparently natural ornament of peacock's eyes, such as one sees in the tail of the white peacock, indicated by the same alternations of reflection and lights as in damask. The magnificence of this conception needs no comment.
Three other masterpieces of this peculiar art deserve men- tion. One is a robe of skins of the red fox (not the English reynard, but the Canadian red fox), with fur various in tint but comparable in colour to the different shades of red amber. In the golden parts were set "eyes" of the bright black foot of this fox, with the smoother and darker red of the leg above it, on the same principle as the insertion of " eyes " in the sable skin, but this time with a contrast of colour as well as of tone. The second was a robe of pieces from the back of the "cross fox," so joined that they appeared to be taken from some much larger animal. These were left the natural colour, a cold grey and yellowish brown, but set in a bed of far dyed chocolate colour. In the third the Chinaman had succeeded in creating what was apparently a new animal! The robe, like all the others, was in the shape of a cross of five cubes. Each of these squares appeared to be the skin of a single animal, dark puce colour on the other edges, with irregular circles of minute white dots in the centre, increasing from an indistinct greyish brown on the outside to clear white in the inner circles. This apparently natural ornament might have de- ceived any one who did not know the actual colours and limits of all natural furs. On examining the back of this robe it was seen to be made up of minute pieces sewn together in concentric circles, the pieces being no larger than those in the tessellated pavement now so commonly seen on hall floors. It was, in fact, a piece of fur mosaic. If China is opened up to European trade a new reservoir of precious furs will be tapped for New York, Paris, and London. The latter is now the metropolis of the fur trade, and it is to London that the greater part of the catch in North America, Alaska, Siberia, and Australia is brought and collected until it is dispersed over every country in the world in the sales of Sir Charles Lampson and the Hudson's Bay Company. Hitherto Pekin has been the other centre of the trade, but not a rival, because the millions whom it supplied were within what was practically a closed market. All that was good was absorbed by China, and only a few inferior skins were exported, though sea-borne furs, especially those of the various red, white, and " cross " foxes, have always been welcome cargoes. It remains to be seen whether the attrac- tion of London will not draw from Pekin at least a share of its immense stock. It is believed that this will take place, and that the furs will be exported in the finished state, and present to the West a luxury almost as new as the original export of Chinese silks or Chinese porcelains. There is almost as much difference between the finished furs from
Pekin, more beautiful than Nature made them, and the "raw furs" in the Hudson's Bay sales, in the same condition as they were stripped from the dead animal, as there is between spun silk and the same substance in the cocoon. And while the art of the Pekin furrier excels that of Europe, there is some- thing in the climate of the Northern mountains and the Western plateaus of China peculiarly favourable to the perfect growth of far and feathers. Just as there are half-a-dozen Chinese pheasants which vie in plumage with the most gorgeous birds of the tropics, so even the domestic animals of the colder provinces seem to develop a special quality of fur, wool, or hair, to which the delicate pro- cesses of the dressers impart an added beauty. Thus Thibetan lamb-skin, after it has passed through the hands of the Chinese curriers, becomes a thing of beauty and intrinsic excellence hardly exceeded by the rarer furs. The leather is as soft as kid and white as milk, and the fleece attached to it takes the texture and gloss of white floes-silk. Even the chow-dogs of Manchuria grow true fur in the winter, and are bred for the sake of their coats ; while the skins of the cat and the squirrel from the same district deserve a place not among the cheaper, but the choicer, grades of fur. Manchurian cat-skins are as superior to those of the specially bred black cats of the Bavarian Alps as that of the Manchurian tiger is to the coat of its Indian relative. The reverse is seen in Japan, where the mountain districts yield furs of the smallest size. The skin of a Japanese mink, for example, is about one-third the size of the large North American animal of the same species. The railway and the coming settlement of the East Manchurian region will not probably affect this ancient source of supply to the Pekin market. It is the central plains, not the forest- covered Khingan mountains, or those between the Ussuri and the Sungari valleys, which will feel the effect of civilisation.
Previous page
