John Nicol in China - the 1790's
from The Life and Adventures of John Nicol, Mariner, pages 160-161:
We sailed for Wampoa, where I was kindly received by my Chinese friends...
...There is no change of fashion: the oldest articles you can fall in with are the same make and fashion as the newest, and a traveller who visited the country two hundred years ago could know no difference but in the men. They would be new, the old having died; the present race, I may say, wearing their dress and inhabiting their houses without the least change in the general appearance.
The only instrument of music I saw was a bagpipe, like the small Lowland pipe, on which they play well. Their gongs cannot be… more >>
cite as
John Nicol, and Tim Flannery (ed.), The Life and Adventures of John Nicol, Mariner (2000), p. 160-161. https://led.kmi.open.ac.uk/entity/lexp/1394294320657 accessed: 18 September, 2024
Listeners
Listening to
hide composersChinese folk music |
Experience Information
Date/Time | the 1790's |
Medium | live |
Listening Environment | in the company of others, outdoors |
Notes
John Nicol, mariner, born 1755 in Currie near Edinburgh, recounted his travels over 25 years of seafaring to John Howell of Edinburgh in 1822. This episode took place during a visit to China while serving aboard the Nottingham, 1793-94 According to Nicol, Joss is a river deity, to whom sacrifices of burned paper were made on every sampan whenever the weather turned bad
Originally submitted by Ivan Hewett on Sat, 08 Mar 2014 17:10:13 +0000