CHINA: Exile In Canton

Canton, where part of China’s Nationalist government had set up shop, was not a city of hope last week, but it certainly was not a city of gloom. TIME Correspondent Dwight Martin cabled:

Fugitives from Nanking and Shanghai snarled and haggled their way through Canton’s grimly thorough customs inspectors, then burst into a boom town. Canton this week was Reno and Juarez, Galveston and Eldorado—all wrapped up in dazzling, neon-splashed tapestry.

Along the swarming Pearl River Bund flashed U.S.-patterned advertisements using scantily clad, busty female forms to sell everything from cosmetics to waterproof wristwatches. Farther uptown, smartly dressed taxi dancers helped tired Chinese and foreign businessmen while away their evenings at California-style restaurants and cabarets to the strains of Rum Boogie and Springtime in the Rockies.

Across the Bund, down pedicab-jammed Tai Ping Road, Canton’s shops and sidewalk stands bulged with everything from leather goods to solid gold rings and brooches. The jewelry, generally regarded as the only remaining safe investment in an inflation area that rivals panicky Shanghai, was selling briskly.

Clicking Busily. In the dismal, 14-story Oikwan (Love-thy-Fellowman) Hotel, white-jacketed room boys scurried about posting newer and bigger rates. Tenants were handed their revised bills once, and sometimes twice, each day. On the tenth floor of the Oikwan were the U.S. diplomats, while on the sixth were the Russians. In between were representatives of the French, British, Dutch and Burmese governments. Said one diplomat over an Oikwan Martini: “This is where the third world war is starting.”

Shopkeepers and restaurant men clicked their abacuses busily. The price of food climbed hourly until dinner for three at the Eighth Heaven atop the New Asia Hotel cost $33 U.S. Not all could stand the pace. Said one minor government official: “All my family has had to eat for a week is bananas.”

Marauding Rats. The first week after Chinese New Year Canton steamed under a tropical sun. Then a biting, near freezing rain hit the city. Ricksha boys and sampan coolies sought refuge in dry alleyways where they spent hours culling their tattered palm-frond raincoats for lice. At night they slept on the sidewalks wrapped in dirty burlap bags awaking only to chase away marauding rats which feast in the swill-strewn streets after the city’s human population has retired.

When the cold struck, upper-class Cantonese got out kerosene stoves to heat their homes. Visitors from the north and foreign diplomats retreated to cold, damp, black-&-white-tiled hotel rooms where they vainly tried to fight off the chill. Said one homesick New Yorker: “You’d think we were exiled in the men’s room of the Pennsylvania Station.”

The boomtown fever was not confined to the Bund and midtown shopping area. At White Cloud airport a C.N.A.C. pilot exclaimed: “My God, there are five new buildings here since my trip last week!” From banyan-shaded Shameen Island (site of the original foreign concessions) the boom fever spread to equally fashionable Tung Shan, where Premier Sun Fo and other officials maintain swank Western-style homes. New arrivals vied eagerly for the few remaining houses and apartments. Key money for a dingy, two-room flat ran as high as $4,000 U.S. On the outskirts of the city hundreds of coolies sweated daily as they hurriedly built shoddy houses.

Snooty Reminder. Canton’s municipal government, creaking and groaning under an extra load created by the mushrooming population (already estimated at more than 1,600,000), was on the verge of complete breakdown. Electricity was sometimes on, sometimes off; tap water was black and brackish; the city’s tiny, overworked fire department screamed up & down streets until its sirens threatened to drown out the busy whistles of the gaily bannered river steamers. On Saturday, one of the bantam-sized fire trucks struck and killed a young woman pedestrian in front of the Oikwan. As it roared on toward its blaze without even slowing down, enraged police and soldiers raced ridiculously after it on foot, brandishing rifles.

Throughout it all, the linguistic battle lines between the Mandarin-speaking refugees from the north and the laughing, dark-skinned Cantonese drew tighter and tighter. The northerners aloofly refused to attempt the Cantonese dialect and its eight singing tones (Mandarin has only four). They snootily reminded their hosts that Canton and Kwangtung Province had been declared a barbarous territory as recently as 1122 B.C.

The Cantonese winked, snickered and doubled their prices as they proudly retorted that crocodiles and elephants that once flourished in Kwangtung promptly left after the arrival of the Cantonese. At week’s end, most northerners agreed that the crocodiles and elephants showed good sense.