"One of the residents in the house, only a few months out from England, was Mr. W. W. Mundy, who, being fond of boating, kept a small boat for his own use, and he proposed to take us to the other side of the [Pearl] river to see some of the famous flower-gardens at Fa-ti, a village near the mouth of the creek by which the waters of the north and west rivers reach Canton, falling into the main channel opposite Shamien.  To ascend this creek was a work of extreme care and patience, so dense was the crowd of boats of all sizes passing in both directions, but we had by the way many opportunities of seeing the strange, modes of life adopted by an amphibious population.  At length we got alongside some stone steps and landed, leaving the boat's crew to wait for us.  Our friend was well known there, and we were very politely ushered into a Chinese 'nursery-garden.'  The Chinese, like the Japanese, curiously combine an intense natural love of flowers with a strange taste for artificially dwarfed and distorted plants and shrubs.  Thus, in the gardens which we visited on that day, we found beautiful plants of azaleas, althæas, lilies, and the splendid crimson hibiscus.  The camellias were out of season, but jasmines, ixoras, chrysanthemums, balsams, and alamandas were, with many other flowers, in full beauty; and these gardeners are all [393] through the year in the habit of sending constant supplies of bouquets and pot-flowers for a few dollars a month.
        "But, amidst all these beauties, the grotesque element was made to predominate.  Potted shrubs and plants of all descriptions, twisted and trained into strange forms, were all around us.  There was a bamboo grown in the shape of a moving serpent, and close by was an evergreen bush trained into the similitude of a stag, horns and all.  Dolphins seemed rather fashionable, standing on their heads, with curved tails on high, and fitted with huge artificial eyes staring over the edge of the flower-pot.  Other shrubs were trained into all kinds of strange figures of men and women, partly helped out by comical heads, arms, and legs, of terra-cotta, forming exquisitely ludicrous effects.  Others again were in their natural shapes, but excessively dwarfed; it is said that one of the Foreign Ministers in Japan was favoured with the sight of three trees of different kinds, all grown in perfect form, and entirely enclosed in a single box of about six inches in diameter! I examined some of the Chinese dwarfs pretty closely, and it seemed to me that an important element in producing them is the constant worrying of the plant by disturbing its roots, and pulling the crown rather out of the ground, so as to keep it with as little vitality as possible.
        "We had a long ramble in several of these gardens, and as our kind companion and guide steered the boat back again, we little thought that in another month he was to be the victim of Chinese pirates.  He went down the river in the American steamer 'Spark' and was peacefully dozing over a cigar, when the ship was seized [394] by a gang of miscreants who had come on board, secretly armed, but in the guise of common country-people.  The captain and officers were killed, and Mr. Mundy was stabbed in nearly every part of his body: they tore off his watch and rings, and left him on the deck for dead.  Then, finding that he was not quite dead, they laughed at his agonies while smoking his cigars: they lifted him up, pretending to throw him overboard, but disappointed him by dropping him on the deck again; and they tore out the handkerchief which he had stuffed into his ripped-up side.  After some hours of this horror, the pirates were taken off in a confederate junk which was looking out for the fellow-conspirators: the survivors then crawled out of their hiding-places, and the pilot, whose life had been spared, took the vessel into Macao, where Mr. Mundy was ultimately healed of nearly a score of wounds, several of which had actually touched both heart and lungs.  It is supposed that his miraculous cure was aided by the fact of his having so nearly bled to death that there was nothing left for fever to lay hold of.  He came home soon afterwards, and, though greatly shaken in nerve, he seemed a great credit to the Portuguese surgeons at Macao." 2

1        Hinchliff, Thomas Woodbine, M.A., F.R.G.S. Over The Sea and Far Away, a narrative of wanderings round the world London: Longman, Green, and Co.; 1876), pg. vii, Preface;

http://www.virtualtourist.com/travel/Europe/Switzerland/Canton_du_Valais/Zermatt-689741/Off_the_Beaten_Path-Zermatt-BR-1.html;

http://members.virtualtourist.com/m/3a000/a864d/;

http://www.horizonbook.com/mountaineering.html.

2        Hinchliff, pp. 392-394.

The "one of the Foreign Ministers in Japan" reference in the second paragraph above apparently refers to Germain Felix Meylan, Dutch East India director at Dejima in 1830.

See also Abel for more details about the Fa-ti gardens.