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Chinese Cross-Country Carp, a Continuing Conundrum

December 8th, 2009  |  published in Out and About.

photographed in Shanghai, China on August 25, 2007

Imprisoned in the library by the rain while our host was busy elsewhere, the Professor and I had spent the morning rummaging through the shelves. The Professor’s find had been a black-letter treatise on etiquette, in the French of the fifteenth century. I had unearthed from behind a row of tattered magazines what at first sight I had supposed was an empty book-cover, but which had turn out to be an old scrap-album of the kind popular during the first half of the nineteenth century. The album had been begun but never filled up. Its sole contents were a few newspaper cuttings, and the little rice-paper drawing of the goldfish was pasted on the first leaf.

“There is something that strikes me as peculiar about this sketch, but what it is I can hardly say,” I observed as we all three stared at it.

“The mouth is distended in a rather unusual fashion for a carp,” remarked the Professor.

Gilchrist turned to him sharply: “What makes you call it a carp?”

The Professor shrugged his shoulders. “The goldfish is a variety of the carp species,” he replied quietly. “You appear to know that.”

“I know it; but I didn’t think that many other people did.”

“It is a Chinese variety”—the Professor was continuing when I uttered an exclamation. The word China had come to me as a revelation.

“This drawing has come from China!” I proclaimed confidently. “It is not the work of a European.”

Gilchrist nodded.

“Now I understand why it seemed to me that there was something strange about it,” I added.

Excerpted from ‘The Celestial Carp’ by Allen Upward, a short story appearing in The Living Age, volume XIII. Published by the Living Age Company, Boston, 1901.

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