"Coolie" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... among the poorest class of the Japanese people is not confined to their treatment of foreigners; it extends to all their daily relations with one another. A nearly naked coolie pulling a heavy cart begs a light for his cigarette with a bow that would ...
— The Critic in the Orient • George Hamlin Fitch
... scrubbing process by adapting its position to the requirements of the operator. It will frequently bury its head completely beneath the water, and merely protrude the extremity of its trunk to breathe above the surface. The coolie is most particular in scrubbing every portion of the animal, after which it will usually stand within the tank or river and shower volumes of water from its trunk over its back and flanks. When well washed, it appears a thoroughly clean black mass, but in a few minutes ...
— Wild Beasts and their Ways • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... not forgotten him yet?" Victor enquired in simulated surprise. "Have you neglected to remark that since the blunderer failed to find the Council Chamber that night, when his raid at the Red Moon netted him only a handful of coolie gamblers and drug-addicts, he has left ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... impossible. From Gupis onwards we had to be content with the usual hill track of these countries, good enough for a country pony, but still nothing to be proud of; here we discarded our Government mules, and took coolie transport instead. The march from Gupis to Dahimal is a long, trying one, up and down all the way. Cobbe, who was on rearguard, didn't get in till long ...
— With Kelly to Chitral • William George Laurence Beynon
... It was not often he was away from Marie, but he meant to take his time this evening. It was nearly five miles to Burton's plantation at Halaliko, and half an hour would finish his business there. He knew that, as soon as he left, Marie would tell the native servant to go to her bed in the coolie lines, and then she would herself retire; and when he returned he would find her lying asleep with her ...
— Rodman The Boatsteerer And Other Stories - 1898 • Louis Becke
... entirely, slavery as an institution is due to the low moral standard set up by the Koran. Were it not for love of sensual indulgence, slavery would long ago have died a natural death. Over and over again has it been proved that voluntary service is far cheaper than enforced labour. An Indian coolie will work all day, and ask for little more than enough to keep body and soul together. This much the slave-owners are compelled to give to keep their slaves in health. Slaves are valuable property, and it is cheaper to feed them well than badly. But over ...
— General Gordon - A Christian Hero • Seton Churchill
... to see a workman, dressed in shabby clothes full of dirt, sitting next to a millionaire or a fashionable lady gorgeously clothed. Cabinet officers and their wives do not think it beneath their dignity to sit beside a laborer, or a coolie, as he is ...
— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang
... extravagantly that our country could support easily the total population of China, or as great a population per square mile as that of Italy. If it did so it would be only on the penalty of lowering wages toward, if not quite to, the level of the Chinese coolie or of the Italian peasant. Great metropolitan dailies gravely present as an argument in favor of unrestricted immigration, the proposition that "if" the cheaper immigrants would but go upon our "waste" land (which ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... steamer bound for Havana and New York, followed by friendly faces and good claret to the last, leaving three baskets of champagne and about a ton of flowers out of account. For an account of Havana, Matanzas, Spanish atrocities, Cuban exports, coolie slavery, and the like topics, the reader is respectfully referred to the book since published by Sir Robert,—"Eight Months in the United States, Cuba, and Canada,"—a work pronounced in critical quarters "the best book of travels in America ever published in England" (high praise, surely), though ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... a cluster of small rooms or dens, fitted with couches and bunks. It needed no description to make the purpose plain. The whole process of intoxication by opium was before me, from the heating of the metal pipe to the final stupor that is the gift and end of the Black Smoke. Here, was a coolie mixing the drug; there, just beyond him, was another, drawing whiffs from the bubbling narcotic through the bamboo handle of his pipe; there, still beyond, was another, lying back unconscious, half-clad, repulsive, a very sorry reality indeed to the gorgeous dreams that are reputed to follow in ...
— Blindfolded • Earle Ashley Walcott
... purposes—and the fast-following effects of opening up the resources of the back districts. In these regions labor is the great difficulty, and one needs to hold both patience and temper fast with both one's hands when watching either Kafir or Coolie at work. The white man cannot or will not do much with his hands out here, so the navvies are slim-looking blacks, who jabber and grunt and sigh a good deal more than ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... opinion that the suppression of his export slave trade to the Americas was a grave mistake. It has been fraught with untold suffering to the African, which would have been avoided by altering the slave trade into a coolie system. ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... of the sea. From barges filled with her cargo, the stuff was being heaved up on the dock by a lot of Irish bargemen. Italian dockers rolled it across to this German ship, and on deck a Jap under-officer was bossing a Coolie crew. These Coolies were dwarfs with big white teeth and stooping, round little shoulders. They had strange, nervous faces, long and narrow with high cheek bones and no foreheads at all to speak of. Their black eyes gleamed. Back and forth they ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole
... with the chance of his breaking the wires with his teeth. After a while I heard the coolies approaching, and my brother scolding them, and urging them to hasten on. Just as their heads appeared above the bank, the foremost coolie tripped his foot and fell—I groaned with disappointment—presently, my brother came along with them, and brought the battery to my feet; a good deal of the acid had been spilt, but, with the aid of a bottle of fresh acid we had brought along with us, we soon got the battery up ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... poverty of the Indian capital, would not necessarily explain their walking in company through the early dusk of a December evening in Bentinck Street. It seems desirable to supply a reason why anyone should be walking there, to begin with, anyone, at all events, not a Chinaman, or a coolie, a dealer in second-hand furniture, or an able-bodied seaman luxuriously fingering wages in both trouser pockets, and describing an erratic line of doubtful temper toward the nearest glass of country spirits. Or, to be quite comprehensive, a ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... came. He carried her letter out to a favourite haunt of his in a sunny coolie where an old creek-bed was marked by straggling willows, and there, throwing himself down upon the sloping grass, he ...
— The Prospector - A Tale of the Crow's Nest Pass • Ralph Connor
... along the pier and upon reaching the reputed opium den, knocked briskly on the door. The Chinese proprietor evidently suspected the purpose of his visit, however, for he was unable to gain admittance. So that night, wearing the huge straw sun-hat and flapping garments of blue cotton of a coolie, he tried again. This time in response to his knock the heavy door swung open. Within all was black and silent as the tomb. The lintel was low and Jennings was compelled to stoop in order to enter. As he cautiously set foot across ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... carrier, porter, bearer, tranter|, conveyer; cargador[obs3]; express, expressman; stevedore, coolie; conductor, locomotive, motor. beast, beast of burden, cattle, horse, nag, palfrey, Arab[obs3], blood horse, thoroughbred, galloway[obs3], charger, courser, racer, hunter, jument[obs3], pony, filly, colt, foal, barb, roan, jade, hack, bidet, pad, cob, tit, punch, roadster, goer[obs3]; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... inauguration of President Hayes a commission of inquiry had visited the coast and examined many witnesses. The commission reported that the resources of the Pacific states had been more rapidly developed with coolie labor than they would otherwise have been, but that the Chinese lived under filthy conditions, formed an inferior foreign element and were, on the whole, undesirable. It recommended that the executive take steps in the direction of a modification of the existing treaty with China, for fear ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... with the two flaps, that any attempt to open the latter released the upper end of the heavy cover and allowed it to fall down in the trench. A couple of goats were tied at the far end of the pen as a bait, and were kept there constantly, food being taken to them by a convict coolie. After the trap had been set for some time, the coolie who fed the goats came running to the house one day with the news that a tiger was caught in the trap. Of course every one set out immediately to secure the animal. The tiger had evidently ...
— Prisoners Their Own Warders - A Record of the Convict Prison at Singapore in the Straits - Settlements Established 1825 • J. F. A. McNair
... Moreover, her fuel-oil tankage isn't sufficient to take her too far foreign and back; added to which she is under American registry, employing American seamen, and I'd rather lay her up than put a coolie crew aboard and compete with the British tramps, with their Lascar and Chinamen, at six and seven dollars a month. We've been running her in our own trade; but the lumber market is very dull and she has but one more cargo in sight; after that is freighted, ...
— Cappy Ricks • Peter B. Kyne
... hundred. When the wind is not fair they must row or tow; and towing is not like towing along the Thames! Suddenly you see the men leap out and swarm up a precipice. Presently they appear high above, creeping with the line along a ledge of rock. And your "boy" remarks nonchalantly, "Plenty coolie fall here. Too high place." Or they are clambering over boulders, one or two told off to disentangle the line wherever it catches. Or they are struggling along a greasy slope, their bare feet gripping the mud, hardly able ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... were clumsy,' Moti answered. Moti was peevish that afternoon. The Maharajah had refused him a gun, and he particularly wanted a gun, not to shoot anything, but to frighten the crows with and perhaps the coolie-folk. To console himself Moti had eaten twice as many sweetmeats as were good for him, and was in ...
— The Story of Sonny Sahib • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... began to flow swiftly to the quay. Jack and his companion stepped ashore, each with a large kit-bag in hand. They had travelled light, and all their luggage was with them. Buck held up a finger, and a Chinese coolie darted up to them, his rickshaw running easily behind him. The two bags were pitched into the light vehicle, and Buck bade the man ...
— Jack Haydon's Quest • John Finnemore
... such a fellow applies himself to all the advantages which the law will afford him, and sometimes—if his counsel be men of talent—succeeds in compelling his judges to receive him as innocent. I remember the celebrated case of Sir Coolie Condiddle of Condiddle, who was tried for theft under trust, of which all the world knew him guilty, and yet was not only acquitted, but lived to sit ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... pay a contractor two dollars per month for food, they not being permitted to eat anything at the hotel. A coolie's board costs about five cents per day. For this he gets an abundance of coarse rice and cabbage spiced with pieces of dried fish and pickles, and upon such a diet lives from year to year. Clothing is estimated at two to three dollars ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... reached TERRA FIRMA safely, after a perilous run, though at the same side we started from, and a long distance from our point of previous departure. On at length reaching the opposite side, we found a disconsolate coolie bemoaning himself and reckoning his bones, having also fallen down the snow, while a little further on we came upon the bhistie lamenting over a similar disaster. The latter functionary had also lost a valuable pot of virgin honey, which had only come up from ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight
... determine whether he is superior to his host and hostess—or the opposite. It is already decided for him, by the laws of etiquette. For the guest at the formal dinner must accord every respect and honor to his host and hostess not in the servile manner of the coolie towards the mandarin, of course—but in the captivating and charming manner that bespeaks ...
— Book of Etiquette • Lillian Eichler
... (coolies). These are recruited in certain districts of India, usually by sending good reliable men, already in your employ, to their home country, under a contract to pay them so much a head for every coolie they can persuade (by lies or otherwise) to come to your garden. The coolies must then bind themselves to work for you for, say, three to four years. They are paid for their work, not much it is true, but enough to support them with comfort; the men about three annas ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson
... A coolie made a lunge at her. With closed fist Page Hanaford struck him full in the face; the other arm shielded Zura. Another man spat at her, and met the fate of his brother from Page's well-directed blow. There is nothing so savage as a Japanese mob ...
— The House of the Misty Star - A Romance of Youth and Hope and Love in Old Japan • Fannie Caldwell Macaulay
... eat some morsels of chocolate, that our liking for these delicacies has set minds and bodies at work all the world over! Many types of humanity have contributed to their production. Picture in the mind's eye the graceful coolie in the sun-saturated tropics, moving in the shade, cutting the pods from the cacao tree; the deep-chested sailor helping to load from lighters or surf-boats the precious bags of cacao into the hold of the ocean liner; the skilful workman roasting the beans until they fill the room with a ...
— Cocoa and Chocolate - Their History from Plantation to Consumer • Arthur W. Knapp
... packed lines of shipping, and landing as a stranger at Port Louis, perhaps the first thing to engage attention is the strange mixture of nations,—representatives, he might at first be inclined to imagine, of half the countries of the earth. He stares at a coolie from Madras with a breech-cloth and a soldier's jacket, or a stately bearded Moor striking a bargain with a Parsee merchant. A Chinaman with two bundles slung on a bamboo hurries past, jostling a group of young Creole exquisites ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... guarded by the natives, especially from the English. The gentlemen had therefore to disguise themselves as much as possible, one pretending to be a rich Yankee, who had purchased large estates between Santos and San Paulo, which he had determined to work with slave instead of coolie labour. He was supposed to have come to Rio to select some slaves, but would be obliged to see and consult his partner before deciding on purchase. They were taken to a small shop in the city, and, after some delay, were conducted to a room upstairs, where they waited a quarter of an hour. ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... of the middle west and of course started a laundry, since that seems to be the natural vocation of every Chinaman, be he coolie or mandarin. ...
— American Fairy Tales • L. Frank Baum
... inexhaustible supply of industrious coolies ready to work very long hours for wages upon which an English working-man would find it literally impossible to keep body and soul together. Nevertheless, it is not the underpaid Chinese coolie whom Lancashire has to fear, and China will not become a formidable competitor until improvement in methods and education enables the Chinese workers to earn good wages. Meanwhile, in China, as ...
— The Problem of China • Bertrand Russell
... different peoples, we shall find it not only molding their language forms, both written and spoken, but manifest as well in their art, philosophy, and even their social polity. And of course we must be fair in our comparisons, and not set a Chinese coolie in the concrete against an English statesman, nor any concrete example of another kind of culture in its decay with the highest bloom to which we believe our own type to ...
— Commentary Upon the Maya-Tzental Perez Codex - with a Concluding Note Upon the Linguistic Problem of the Maya Glyphs • William E. Gates
... to Pathankote, a distance of 54-1/4 miles, in two days. Major Curry, who was in command, gave each man a coolie for his baggage, and ordered the men to get to Duneera the first day the best way they could. At Duneera they halted for the night, and the next day pushed on in the same manner to Pathankote, where they immediately entrained ...
— The Record of a Regiment of the Line • M. Jacson
... necropsy made on a coolie child of nearly twelve months, in which it was seen that in the place of a kidney there were two left organs connected at the apices by a prolongation of the cortical substance of each; the child had died of ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... Parsee merchants with large stakes in the State and well-appointed residences, people whose very religion exacted the most scrupulous cleanliness and who had all proved themselves obedient and law-abiding. These were classed under one rubric with the vastly inferior coolie labourer, with Kaffirs and Hottentots, and actually compelled to abandon their stores and residences to reside in one common ghetto upon the outskirts of the towns, a measure which entailed great losses apart from ...
— Origin of the Anglo-Boer War Revealed (2nd ed.) - The Conspiracy of the 19th Century Unmasked • C. H. Thomas
... it?" said Uncle Richard, turning sharply, and fixing him with his keen eyes, as he had often fixed some deceitful, shivering coolie, who had looked up to him in the past as ...
— The Vast Abyss - The Story of Tom Blount, his Uncles and his Cousin Sam • George Manville Fenn
... supersensitive degree—too clear and active to allow of sleep—and soon came the time when he longed with a great yearning for the sleep that would not come. It seemed cruel and unfair that any beggar, any coolie in the fields, any convict could have this sleep that was denied him. How he tried to fix his mind on quiet scenes with the sound of falling water, or the sound of falling breakers fringing the rocks of perilous seas ...
— Impressions of a War Correspondent • George Lynch
... informed Little Billy. "Smatt's name is a byword with the Pacific traders—the shrewd old spider! 'Nippon Trading Company' is the same syndicate we have done business with; and those yellow financiers of Hakodate and Tokyo have many irons in the fire besides the fur iron. Opium and coolie smuggling into California—both very profitable. And old Smatt looks after their American interests, fixes officials, keeps them clear of the law. It was Smatt who ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... admiral had decided to take passages in her for Frobisher and himself. The Englishman therefore had only to pack the few belongings which he had purchased in the town; and five minutes later the curiously-assorted pair were being conveyed in a rickshaw, drawn by a Chinese coolie, down to the dock, where ...
— A Chinese Command - A Story of Adventure in Eastern Seas • Harry Collingwood
... too. There were rumors that he had been entertained at the palace in Keegark, just as he was usually entertained by the big shipowning nobles here at Konkrook; come to think of it, the last time here, he'd been guest of the Keegarkan ambassador. He went all over Ullr, crusading, traveling coolie-class in disguise on Company ships, according ...
— Ullr Uprising • Henry Beam Piper
... case that we shall give illustrates the singular application by this more than singular judge of the legal maxim caveat emptor. A free coolie possessed of a donkey resolved to utilize the animal in carting grass to the market. He therefore called on another coolie living at some distance from him, whom he knew to own two carts, a small donkey-cart and an ordinary cart for mule or horse. He proposed the purchase of the smaller ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... The women, when young are comely, of a buxom type, and, like the men, with highly-developed calves, the latter always being considered a beauty. The children are frequently remarkably pretty. Khasis carry very heavy burdens, it being the custom for the coolie of the country to carry a maund, or 82 lbs. weight, or even more occasionally, on his back, the load being fixed by means of a cane band which is worn across the forehead; women carry almost as heavy loads as the men. The coolies, both ...
— The Khasis • P. R. T. Gurdon
... heard Petrak whine. "What with packin' the whole blasted cargo into the hills and this jaunt now. Why couldn't he leave it close to the beach, I want to know? Who wants to be packin' it out again some day like a coolie? Snug enough, I say, close down to the water, and who's to know? Think we was buryin' of it for Kingdom Come! Fine job he's ...
— The Devil's Admiral • Frederick Ferdinand Moore
... unit—shifting, often, 240 cubic feet of soil per day, per man. As porters, too, they were beyond rivalry; and their contempt for the German prisoners' capacity in this direction was amusing. A Chinese coolie, watching two prisoners handle a stack of cased goods, could not at last contain himself. He walked up to them, saying: "Hun no damn good," and proceeded to show them how it should be done. The stolidity of the Chinaman is generally proof ...
— Fields of Victory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Kee—the Potato King of Stockton. I know him well. I've had more large deals with him and made less money than with any man I know. He was only a coolie, and he smuggled himself into the United States twenty years ago. Started at day's wages, then peddled vegetables in a couple of baskets slung on a stick, and after that opened up a store in Chinatown in San Francisco. But he had a head on ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... dashed fool of a coolie did. Jumps up as soon as he was brought into court, and whines and scratches at the dock rails and barks, and goes on tremenjus, trying to get ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... to that," von Schlichten said. "He travels on our ships, in disguise, coolie-class, on ...
— Uller Uprising • Henry Beam Piper, John D. Clark and John F. Carr
... affairs. Their taxes, for instance, they assessed and collected themselves. The governor merely informed the headman that he was to produce ten rupees per house from his village. The villagers then appointed assessors from among themselves, and decided how much each household should pay. Thus a coolie might pay but four rupees, and a rice-merchant as much as fifty or sixty. The assessment was levied according to the means of the villagers. So well was this done, that complaints against the decisions of the assessors were almost unknown—I ...
— The Soul of a People • H. Fielding
... 1868, includes provisions for the neutrality of the Chinese waters; for freedom of worship for United States citizens in China, and for the Chinese in the United States; for allowing voluntary emigration, and prohibiting the compulsory coolie trade; for freedom to travel in China and the United States by the citizens of either country; and for freedom to establish and attend ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... and beatable years was Ah Kim. His was the store of Ah Kim Company, and his was the achievement of building it up through the long years from the shoestring of savings of a contract coolie labourer to a bank account in four figures and a credit that was gilt edged. An even half-century of summers and winters had passed over his head, and, in the passing, fattened him comfortably and snugly. Short of stature, his full front was as rotund as ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... utterly frivolous game, the men gayly leaped after him, and were soon engaged in a fascinating struggle with the impeded race. The Judge forgot his lameness in springing over a broken sluice-box; Union Mills forgot his whistle in a happy imitation of a Chinese coolie's song. Nevertheless, after ten minutes of this mild dissipation, the pastime flagged; Union Mills was beginning to rub his leg, when a distant rumble shook the earth. The men looked at each other; the diversion was complete; a languid discussion of the probabilities of ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... save some days on the journey, I decided to go to Chungking on foot, and engaged a coolie to accompany me. We were to start on the Thursday afternoon; but about midnight on Wednesday I met Dr. Aldridge, of the Customs, who easily persuaded me that by taking the risk of going in a small boat (a wupan), and not in an ordinary ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison
... appearance of a town in China. The Chinese merchant is generally a fat round-faced man with an important and business-like look. He wears the same style of clothing (loose white smock, and blue or black trousers) as the meanest coolie, but of finer materials, and is always clean and neat; and his long tail tipped with red silk hangs down to his heels. He has a handsome warehouse or shop in town and a good house in the country. He keeps a fine horse and gig, ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... Hsi Jen, in like manner, despatched a domestic with a pelisse, the worse for wear, lined with fur from foxes' ribs, so Li Wan, having directed a servant to fill a plate with steamed large taros, and to make up two dishes with red-skinned oranges, yellow coolie oranges, olives and other like things, bade some one take them over ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... had evidently been heavily shelled. There was not a trace of any human being, save that in the only room which remained undestroyed, on the matting of the hard Khang—that is the divan which stretches like a platform across three-quarters of every Chinese room—lay the dead body of a Chinese coolie. The dog, the cat, and the ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring
... shrines were decorated and children in holiday dress merrily romped. Why, Mate, it was worth being a ghost just to come back and see how happy everybody was. For on this night of nights, cares and sorrows are doubly locked in a secret place and the key put carefully away. You couldn't find a coolie so heartless as to show a shadow of trouble to his ghostly relatives when they return for so brief a time to hold happy communion with the living. He may be hungry, he may be sick, but there is a brave smile of welcome on his lips ...
— The Lady and Sada San - A Sequel to The Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... a number of half-starving natives, who were caught by the storm and are unable to escape. They are poor people of the coolie classes, and it is no one's business to care for them. Several times parties of them have attempted to sneak out and get away, but each time they have been seized with panic, and have fled back, willing to die with starvation sooner than be riddled by the enemy's bullets. The native troops ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... are provided for the barracks, a number of punkahs being connected so that one coolie fans the occupants of a dozen or more charpoys. In talking about these useful and very necessary servants, some of the comments indulged in by the gentleman who first invited me into the barracks are well worth repeating: "Be jabbers, ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... be made on the words coolly and Coolie. The reader may mix to his own taste. It's too hot for any one to ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 19, August 6, 1870 • Various
... let a better officer go on alone. The ruined tombs of forgotten Mussulman saints heard the ballad of Agra Town, The Buffalo Battery, Marching to Kabul, The long, long Indian Day, The Place where the Punkah-coolie died, and ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... into the wilderness, braving sheer precipice and arctic blizzard in search of mountain pass or lower grade; the man with the pick and shovel, a mighty and ever-shifting army—English navvy, Irish canaller, Chinese coolie, Swede or Italian or Ruthenian—housed in noisome bunkhouses, often fleeced by employment agent or plundering sub-contractor, facing sudden death by reckless familiarity with dynamite or slower death ...
— The Railway Builders - A Chronicle of Overland Highways • Oscar D. Skelton
... his mansion, and sending up our cards, learned from a Coolie of the absence of its master, and entered unhesitatingly upon his grounds. Descending a few steps we came to a splendid aviary placed in the centre of the avenue. It was about fifteen feet in diameter and twenty in height, and contained quite ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay
... while the production and consumption of home necessaries and luxuries have immensely advanced. Great practical improvements are being made everywhere, such as the substitution of steam-power for cattle and water-power. The export of sugar,[J] especially since the introduction of Coolie labor, has advanced rapidly. Before emancipation the highest export was 30,000 hhds., equal to 24,000 hhds. at present weight. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... friends on June 20 for the uplifted plateaux of Lesser Tibet. My party consisted of myself, a thoroughly competent servant and passable interpreter, Hassan Khan, a Panjabi; a seis, of whom the less that is said the better; and Mando, a Kashmiri lad, a common coolie, who, under Hassan Khan's training, developed into an efficient travelling servant, and later into a ...
— Among the Tibetans • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs Bishop)
... the punkah coolie, feeling his presence to be intolerable, and threw himself down with his coat flung open. The oppression of the atmosphere was as though a red-hot lid were being forced down upon the tortured earth. ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... as completely ignored by the Government as it has been by the planters in the legislation adopted with a view to check the evils connected with advances. In order to prove the necessity for further legislation an old planter once printed an account of a case which he took up against a defaulting coolie. His description of the hunt, and the wiles of the defaulting labourer in moving from one part of the country to another, was positively amusing, and showed conclusively that it did not pay to attempt to catch a defaulting labourer. What, then, can be the use of ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot
... carried through a clean and tidy-looking coolie village to a comfortable house of the bungalow type, like those in Mourillyan Harbour, inhabited by Mr. Nash, the proprietor of one of the plantations, and Mr. Levinge, who had kindly arranged a luncheon for us. Australian ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... seven miles. Walking was out of the question, from the state of the roads, so we availed ourselves of wheel-barrows, the only conveyance to be had in these parts. A wheel-barrow is cheaper than a sedan, only requiring one coolie; but is by no means an agreeable ...
— A Retrospect • James Hudson Taylor
... was their objective grew in size. Behind it were the buildings: the large, four-winged central structure and the supplementary workshops and hangars, coolie-quarters and outhouses, all dim and shimmering through the infra-red—the mysterious, lonely citadel of Dr. Ku Sui. There it all was, inside the dome, with the rest of ...
— The Passing of Ku Sui • Anthony Gilmore
... a greater gulf fixed between my Munshi and my 'rickshaw coolie than there is between me and my 'rickshaw coolie, ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... was an automatic determination and advertisement of caste. Thus, at a glance, could one tell, the status of an individual by the degrees of cleanness or of filthiness of his garments. It stood to reason that a coolie, possessing but the clothes he stood up in, must be extremely dirty. And to reason it stood that the individual in immaculate white must possess many changes and command the labour of laundresses to keep his changes immaculate. As for the yang-bans who wore the pale, ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... consolatory in that vision?" I asked, deciding that I might as well convince him he wasn't confronting an untutored she-coolie of the prairie. Whereupon he studied me more pointedly ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... moved across the window of a story-and-a-half white house which might have been either itself or its own outlying barn. A roof, sheer of slant, dipped down over the window, giving the facade the expression of a coolie under peaked hat. ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... now be ruling a lordly household, even wearing the peacock feather and embroidered jacket that were his by right of the Dragon's blood, that blood now hidden under the sun-browned skin of a river coolie. Kan Wong stuffed fine-cut into his brass-bowled pipe and struck a spark from his tinder box. Through his wide nostrils twin streamers of smoke writhed out, twisting fantastically together and mixing slowly with the rising river mist. His pipe became a wand of dreams ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... daughters-in-law were left alone in the house. They were starving, but they did not know how to get any food. One day they heard that a king in a neighbouring country wished to construct a tank and was calling for labourers. So they decided to go to the tank and work there just like common coolie women. Now who do you think the king was? He was the youngest son of the prince of Atpat and the husband of the youngest daughter-in-law. When the prince had lost all his money, his youngest son left the house and set off on a journey. As he travelled ...
— Deccan Nursery Tales - or, Fairy Tales from the South • Charles Augustus Kincaid
... no hurry to let us begin," replied Linforth drily. "There is a Resident at your father's court. Your father is willing, and yet there's not a coolie on the road." ...
— The Broken Road • A. E. W. Mason
... Manila we stopped once more at "The City of Mist," Hongkong, and were entertained all over again. While some of the Chamber of Commerce party were motoring to a dance given in honor of the San Francisco delegates, a coolie was hit and nearly run over. Our host told the coolie to get out of the way, while assuring us that it would not have caused much trouble had he been severely injured. He said, "Labor is so cheap here, some coolies try to get hit to get something ...
— The Log of the Empire State • Geneve L.A. Shaffer
... mouth of the Canton River, 100 m. S. of Canton, forming with Colovane and Taipa since 1557 a Portuguese station (50, mostly Chinese); is a very healthy port, though very hot; formerly it was a centre of the Coolie trade, abolished in 1873, but its anchorage is bad, and since the rise of Hong-Kong its commerce has suffered severely; chief import opium, export tea; it is the head-quarters of ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... and we both remarked how much more interested they appeared to be in these monuments of past events than the corresponding class of English labourers would have been. But on arrival we found there was no question of intelligent historical interest. The fact was that a poor coolie—who had just climbed up the Memorial Tower by the inner staircase—had fallen out of one of the windows described, and was lying on the marble floor below, at the far side from us, crushed and dying. We were told that an Englishman had, fortunately, been present, and had driven off at ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... Anderson begging for alms. Mr. Anderson and his wife were sitting in the verandah drinking their morning tea. It had been a very hot night and there being no electricity in this particular station, Mr. Anderson had to depend on the sleepy punkha coolie. The punkha coolie on this particular night was more sleepy than usual, and so Mr. Anderson had passed a very sleepless night indeed. He was in a very bad temper. A whole life passed among Indian workmen does not generally make a man good-tempered and a hot June in the ...
— Indian Ghost Stories - Second Edition • S. Mukerji
... caste has degenerated into a fastidious tenacity of the rights and privileges of station. For example, the man who sweeps will not take an empty cup from your hand; your groom will not mow a little grass; a coolie will carry any load, however offensive, on his head, but even in a matter of life and death would refuse to carry a man, for that is the business of ...
— Across India - Or, Live Boys in the Far East • Oliver Optic
... paid for this hovel the sum of fifteen dollars a month. It had three rooms, one without a floor. The road ran past the door, and a few feet beyond was the river. By spending money rather liberally he managed to hire the coolie who had accompanied him to south Formosa. With his servant's help Mackay had his new establishment thoroughly cleaned and whitewashed, and then he moved in his furniture. He laughed as he called it furniture, for it consisted ...
— The Black-Bearded Barbarian (George Leslie Mackay) • Mary Esther Miller MacGregor, AKA Marion Keith
... process at Labuan, first, because the ship lies so far from the shore, and next, because of the insufficiency of convenient boats, and the necessary coolie labour to put the coal on board, thus it took us two whole days to get in as many hundred tons. By the evening of the 14th however, we had cleared the islands, and shaped course for Manilla ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... Kingdom. Associated Words: Japanese, geisha, coolie, Mikado, samurai, shizoku, heimin, kwazoku, Mongol, Mongolian, kimono, Dairi, daimio, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... the Jack-fruit, which resembles the bread-fruit. This latter, Mr Sedgwick told us, attains the weight of nearly seventy-five pounds; so that even an Indian coolie can only carry one at a time. The part, he showed us, which is generally eaten, is a soft pulpy substance, enveloping each seed. The bread-fruit was baked entirely in the hot embers. It tasted, I thought, very much like mashed potatoes ...
— In the Eastern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... will not become a dishonorable tool. You have offered me freedom and jewels. No; I repeat, I will free all slaves, abolish the harems, the buying and selling of flesh; I will make a man of every poor devil of a coolie who carries stones from ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... observed Billy. "I hope that you won't think it silly If I say that this heat Makes me think 'twould be sweet If one were a coolie in Chile!" ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... the custom of nearly all men here above the rank of coolie to carry swords or other weapons. For are these Rajputs not of a proud and warlike race, as may be seen by their bearing; and is not their Maharana of the longest lineage in India, and the highest in rank of all the Rajput princes? A few miles from ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson
... that was! Half-singing, half-booming, the "whant-whong-goom-along" of the running coolie chanting as he runs seemed mixed with it, till, his anger breaking bounds, he let fly with the strap in his hand, catching the other across the shoulder of the arm that ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... are involved in the substitution of the locomotive for the coolie as a motive power, the freight car for the wheelbarrow in the shipment of produce, and the passenger coach for the cart and the mule-litter in the transportation of people. Railways will inevitably inaugurate in China ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... small amounts of freight, in Manila as in all places in the Orient, the ubiquitous Chinese coolie is the usual means of transportation, and with a huge load at each end of a bamboo pole across his shoulder he shambles along with a curious gait, between a walk and a run, that he seems capable of sustaining ...
— Wanderings in the Orient • Albert M. Reese
... Everything looked most auspicious for the rearing of a wonderful cage-bred and cage-born chimpanzee, the second one ever born in captivity. Instead of carrying her infant astride her hip, as do orang mothers, and the coolie women of India, Suzette astonished us beyond measure by tucking it into her groin, between her thigh and her abdomen, head outward. It was a fine place,—warm and soft,—but not good when overdone! When Suzette walked, as she freely did, she held up the leg responsible for the ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... attributed to popular discontent at his misgovernment. In 1803, only four years after the death of Keen Lung, Kiaking, while passing through the streets of his capital in his chair, carried by coolie bearers, was attacked by a party of conspirators, members of one of the secret societies, and narrowly escaped with his life. His eunuch attendants showed considerable devotion and courage, and in the struggle ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... at Mount Edgcumbe for the last ten years. He is remarkable for the way in which he maintains order and control over all his numerous native workmen. In the mill itself there are 160 men employed, everyone of whom is a Coolie. There is not a single white man on the premises, excepting two English clerks in the counting house. I was astonished at the perfect order which reigned in the mill, where I spent some time. Everyone appeared to perform his allotted task with activity, cheerfulness, and ...
— A Winter Tour in South Africa • Frederick Young
... one coolie from the plantation for the doctor, who lived fifteen miles away. Another man he sent up the hill as fast as he could go with a note preparing his wife for their arrival, and the whole white-faced party was out waiting for it as the slow ...
— Queensland Cousins • Eleanor Luisa Haverfield
... foreseen, to wit, with regard to Article I.; because it has already been proposed by Her British Majesty's Government, and accepted by this Government with regard to the difference in respect of Article 14 of the Convention arising in the matter of the so-called Coolie question, which was settled by Arbitration; because the Right Honourable the Secretary of State, Mr. Chamberlain, himself, in his letter of the 4th September, 1895, to His Excellency the High Commissioner at Cape Town, favours this principle in the same question, where he says: 'After ...
— A Century of Wrong • F. W. Reitz
... obis are for the wealthy Japanese; the poor cannot afford them, and dress very simply. The coolie—the Japanese working man—goes almost naked in the warm weather, wearing only a pair of short cotton trousers, until he catches sight of a policeman, when he slips on his blue cotton coat, for the police have orders to see that he dresses himself properly. His wife wears a cotton kimono, and ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Japan • John Finnemore
... appeared to her sinks of abomination, reeking with blood, in contrast to her little island where petty larceny was about the standard of current misdeeds, with, now and then, some more pronounced crime—and that only amongst the imported coolie labourers on sugar estates or the negroes of the town. But in Europe these things were being done daily by a wicked population of white men amongst whom, as that ruffianly, aristocratic old Miss Jacobus pointed out, the wandering sailors, the associates of her precious papa, ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... and exchange place for products from north and south. Seldom do caravans from either direction go farther than this point. Here the merchants rest for a month or two and barter their goods. Tents of every kind, camels, yaks, mules and horses, coolie transports of various races, men of many languages and many religions, give to this high-laid town a truly cosmopolitan stamp in the summer time when the passes are open.[1238] Kabul, which lies at an altitude of nearly 6000 feet near the head of the Kabul River, ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... went on to Dannhauser, which consists of a railway station, two farms, a store, a couple of coolie stores, a mine, and a few huts. We approached with magazines charged and expected to see a Boer every minute, but found that they were not expected to come down as far as that till next day. I then made my way slowly back by the main road, and reached camp about 5 P.M., ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 2 (of 6) - From the Commencement of the War to the Battle of Colenso, - 15th Dec. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... doing that for?" she asked suddenly. For a blue-clad coolie was working his way through the crowded docks, banging violently on a gong. The sound ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... "glittering generalities," as, that "eggs was eggs," and that the return of them on the fowl's part, in consideration of an advance of corn, was not altogether a voluntary barter,—quite, in short, after the pattern of Coolie apprenticeship. And thus the high moral lesson of the morning was sadly shaken. Of course this boy did not belong to any of the model mammas, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... women of Oriental lands. Their home life is a sealed book to the average person visiting China. Books about China deal mainly with the lower-class Chinese, as it is chiefly with that class that the average visitor or missionary comes into contact. The tourists see only the coolie woman bearing burdens in the street, trotting along with a couple of heavy baskets swung from her shoulders, or they stop to stare at the neatly dressed mothers sitting on their low stools in the narrow alleyways, patching clothing or fondling their children. They see and hear the boat-women, ...
— My Lady of the Chinese Courtyard • Elizabeth Cooper
... their miseries are but one degree removed from those of the utterly destitute. Indeed we scarcely know which is the most to be pitied, the beggar who, if he has nothing, has perhaps at least the comfort that nobody is dependent on him, or the poor coolie who with his three or four rupees a month has from five to eight, or more, mouths to fill! Fill did I say? They are never filled! The most that can be done in such cases is to prolong life and to keep actual starvation at bay, and that only ...
— Darkest India - A Supplement to General Booth's "In Darkest England, and the Way Out" • Commissioner Booth-Tucker
... laborers with whom I had recently toiled in railroad gangs, in a stone-quarry of Oklahoma, and the cotton-fields of Texas. The endurance of these fellows living on corn and beans is remarkable; they were as superior to the Oriental coolie as their wages to the latter's eight or ten cents a day. In this case, as the world over, the workmen earned about what he was paid, or rather succeeded in keeping his capacity down to the wages paid him. Many galleries ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... a soul-filling amusement. Much may be said of "the golden fleece," but these are no modern Argonauts. They are money-making as our friends the Jews, but no "high emprise" or "grand endeavor" fires their calm pulse, and much as has been written of the coolie system and the "Six Companies," nothing has been adduced which seems adequate ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 12, December, 1889 • Various
... and the Man's Wife and the Tertium Quid watched and talked for a couple of hours while the grave was being deepened. Then a coolie, taking the earth in baskets as it was thrown up, ...
— Under the Deodars • Rudyard Kipling
... what is the matter with me. It is a coolie disease from Sumatra—a thing that the Dutch know more about than we, though they have made little of it up to date. One thing only is certain. It is infallibly deadly, ...
— The Adventure of the Dying Detective • Arthur Conan Doyle
... he caught sight of her, standing, in habit and terai, on the open space where her tent had been, supervising the departure of her last load of luggage, and listening patiently to tales of coolie villainy and extortion poured forth by her Kashmiri ayah, on a high note ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver |
