Rickshaw Puller Insurance

Lao She started writing his great novel Rickshaw Boy in the spring of 1936 and it appeared in the early months of 1937 in installments in magazines. It is a great description of the undoubtedly hard life of the ubiquitous rickshaw puller that was a feature of life in all Chinese cities at the time. Still, nowhere does Lao She mention that Camel Xiangzi might have had an insurance policy in his back pocket! Still, I think this insurance only applied in Shanghai’s International Settlement while poor Camel was trudging round the dusty hutongs of Peking at the time.