In their daily life the Chinese are extremely moderate eaters and mostly tea-drinkers, even the wealthy confining themselves to few and simple dishes of pork, fowl, or fish, with the ever-present accompaniment of rice.  The puppy-dog, on which the people are popularly believed to live, as the French on frogs, is a stall-fed animal, and has always been, and still is, an article of food; but the consumption of dog-flesh is really very restricted, and many thousands of Chinamen have never tasted dog in their lives.  According to the popular classification of foods, those who live on vegetables get strong, those who live on meat become brave, those who live on grain acquire wisdom, and those who live on air become divine.

At banquets the scene changes, and course after course of curiously compounded and highly spiced dishes, cooked as only Chinese cooks know how, are placed before the guests.  The wine, too, goes merrily round; bumpers are drunk at short intervals, and the wine-cups are held upside down, to show that there are no heel-taps.  Forfeits are exacted over the game of “guess-fingers,” for failure to cap a verse, or for any other equally sufficient (or insufficient) reason; and the penalty is an extra bumper for the loser.

This lively picture requires, perhaps, a little further explanation.  Chinese “wine” is an ardent spirit distilled from rice, and is modified in various ways so as to produce certain brands, some of which are of quite moderate strength, and really may be classed as wine.  It is always drunk hot, the heat being supplied by vessels of boiling water, in which the pewter wine-flasks are kept standing.  The wine-cups are small, and it is possible to drink a good many of them without feeling in the least overcome.  Even so, many diners now refuse to touch wine at all, the excuse always being that it flushes the face uncomfortably.  Perhaps they fear an undeserved imputation of drunkenness, remembering their own cynical saying:  “A bottle-nosed man may be a tee-totaller, but no one will believe it.”  To judge from their histories and their poetry, the Chinese seem once upon a time to have been a fairly tipsy nation:  now-a-days, the truth lies the other way.  An official who died A.D. 639, and was the originator of epitaphs in China, wrote his own, as follows:—­

     Fu I loved the green hills and white clouds . . . 
     Alas! he died of drink!

There are exceptions, no doubt, as to every rule in every country; but such sights as drunken men tumbling about the streets, or lying senseless by the roadside, are not to be seen in China.  “It is not wine,” says the proverb, “which makes a man drunk; it is the man himself.”