JOSS • FREE TRANSLATOR.ORG • Definition of Joss

... crowd in the streets or on the wharves. At night we may visit China without the trouble of a voyage, and perambulate a city of 25,000 Celestials under the safe guidance of an Irish-accented detective. So often have the features of Chinatown been described—its incense-scented joss-houses, its interminable stage-plays, its opium-joints, its drug-stores with their extraordinary remedies, its curiosity shops, and its restaurants—that no repetition need be attempted here. We leave it with a sense of the curious incongruity which allows this colony of Orientals to live in the ...

— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead