AN OPIUM RECEIVING SHIP OR “GODOWN” AT SHANGHAIThe Imported Indian Opium is Stored in These Ships Until it Passes the Chinese Imperial Customs
THE OPIUM HULKS OF SHANGHAI“They Symbolize China’s Degredation”
It is a lively day on the river. Admiral Brownson’s fleet of white cruisers lie at anchor in midstream. A lead-gray British cruiser swings below them, an anachronistic Chinese gunboat lower still. Big black merchantmen fill in the view—a P. and O. ship is taking on coal—a two-hundred-ton junk with red sails moves by. Nearer at hand, from the stone quay outward, the river front is crowded close with sampans and junks, rows on rows of them, each with its round little house of yellow matting, each with its swarm of brown children, each with its own pungent contribution to the all-pervasive odour. Gaze out through the forests of masts, if you please, and you will see two old hulks, roofed with what looks suspiciously like shingles, at anchor beyond. They might be ancient men-of-war, pensioned off to honourable decay. You can see the square outline of what once were portholes, boarded up now. The carved, wooden figure-heads at the prow of each are chipped and blackened with age and weather. What are they and why do they lie here in mid-channel, where commerce surges about them?
These are the opium hulks of Shanghai. In them is stored the opium which the government of British India has grown and manufactured for consumption in China. They symbolize China’s degradation.
Theopium provinces of China—that is, the provinces which have been most nearly completely ruined by opium—lie well back in the interior. They cover, roughly, an area 1,200 miles long by half as wide, say about one-third the area of the United States; and they support, after a fashion, a population of about 160,000,000. There had been plenty of evidence obtainable at Shanghai, Hankow, Peking, and Tientsin, of the terrible ravages of opium in these regions, but it seemed advisable to make a journey into one of these unfortunate provinces and view the problem at short range. The nearest and most accessible was Shansi Province. It lies to the west and southwest of Peking, behind the blue mountains which one sees from the Hankow-Peking Railroad. There seemed to be no doubt that the opium curse could there be seen at its worst. Everybody said so—legation officials, attachés,merchants, missionaries. Dr. Piell, of the London Mission hospital at Peking, estimated that ninety per cent. of the men, women, and children in Shansi smoke opium. He called in one of his native medical assistants, who happened to be a Shansi man, and the assistant observed, with a smile, that ninety per cent. seemed pretty low as an estimate. Another point in Shansi’s favour was that the railroads were pushing rapidly through to T’ai Tuan-fu, the capital (and one of the oldest cities in oldest China). So I picked up an interpreter at theGrand Hotel des Wagon-lits, and went out there.
THE VILLAGES WERE LITTLE MORE THAN HEAPS OF RUINSThese Holes in the Ground are Occupied by Formerly Well-to-do Opium Smokers
AT LAST HE CRAWLS OUT ON THE HIGHWAY, WHINING, CHATTERINGAND PRAYING THAT A FEW COPPER CASH BE THROWN TO HIM
The new Shansi railroad was not completed through to Tai-Yuan-fu, the provincial capital, and it was necessary to journey for several days by cart and mule-litter. While this sort of travelling is not the most comfortable in the world, it has the advantage of bringing one close to the life that swarms along the highroad, and of making it easier to gather facts and impressions.
Every hour or so, as the cart crawls slowly along, you come upon a dusty gray village nestling in a hollow or clinging to the hillside. And nearly every village is a little more than a heapof ruins. I was prepared to find ruins, but not to such an extent. When I first drew John, the interpreter’s, attention to them, he said, “Too much years.” As an explanation this was not satisfactory, because many of the ruined buildings were comparatively new—certainly, too new to fall to pieces. At the second village John made another guess at the cause of such complete disaster. “Poor—too poor,” he said, and then traced it back to the last famine, about which, he found, the peasants were still talking. “Whole lot o’ mens die,” he explained. It was later on that I got at the main contributing cause of the wreck and ruin which one finds almost everywhere in Shansi Province, after I had picked up, through John and his cook, the roadside gossip of many days during two or three hundred miles of travel, after I had talked with missionaries of life-long experience, with physicians who are devoting their lives to work among these misery-ridden people, with merchants, travellers, and Chinese and Manchu officials.
Before we take up in detail the ravages of opium throughout this and other provinces, I wish to say a word about one source of information, which every observer of conditions inChina finds, sooner or later, that he is forced to employ. Along the China coast one hears a good deal of talk about the “missionary question.” Many of the foreign merchants abuse the missionaries. I will confess that the “anti-missionary” side had been so often and so forcibly presented to me that before I got away from the coast I unconsciously shared the prejudice. But now, brushing aside the exceptional men on both sides of the controversy, and ignoring for the moment the deeper significance of it, let me give the situation as it presented itself to me before I left China.
There are many foreign merchants who study the language, travel extensively, and speak with authority on things Chinese. But the typical merchant of the treaty port, that is, the merchant whom one hears so loudly abusing the missionaries, does not speak the language. He transacts most of his business through his Chinese “Compradore,” and apparently divides the chief of his time between the club, the race-track, and various other places of amusement. This sort of merchant is the kind most in evidence, and it is he who contributes most largely to the anti-missionary feeling “back home.” Themissionaries, on the other hand, almost to a man, speak, read, and write one or more native dialects. They live among the Chinese, and, in order to carry on their work at all, they must be continually studying the traditions, customs, and prejudices of their neighbours. In almost every instance the missionaries who supplied me with information were more conservative than the British and American diplomatic, consular, military, and medical observers who have travelled in the opium provinces. I have since come to the conclusion that the missionaries are over-conservative on the opium question, probably because, being constantly under fire as “fanatics” and “enthusiasts,” they unconsciously lean too far towards the side of under-statement. The published estimates of Dr. Du Bose, of Soochow, president of the Anti-opium League, are much more conservative than those of Mr. Alex Hosie, the British commercialattachéand former consul-general. Dr. Parker, of Shanghai, the gentlemen of the London Mission, the American Board, and the American Presbyterian Missions at Peking, scores of other missionaries whom I saw in their homes in the interior or at the missionary conference at Shanghai, and Messrs.Gaily, Robertson, and Lewis, of the International Young Men’s Christian Association, all impressed me as men whose opinions were based on information and not on prejudice. Dr. Morrison, the able Peking correspondent of the LondonTimes, said to me when I arrived at the capital, “You ought to talk with the missionaries.” I did talk with them, and among many different sources of information I found them worthy of the most serious consideration.
The phrase, “opium province,” means, in China, that an entire province (which, in extent and in political outline, may be roughly compared to one of the United States) has been ravaged and desolated by opium. It means that all classes, all ages, both sexes, are sodden with the drug; that all the richer soil, which in such densely-populated regions, is absolutely needed for the production of food, is given over to the poppy; that the manufacture of opium, of pipes, of lamps, and of the various other accessories, has become a dominating industry; that families are wrecked, that merchants lose their acumen, and labourers their energy; that after a period of wide-spread debauchery and enervation, economic, as well as moral and physicaldisaster, settles down over the entire region. The population of these opium provinces ranges from fifteen or twenty million to eighty million.
“In Shansi,” I have quoted an official as saying, “everybody smokes opium.” Another cynical observer has said that “eleven out of ten Shansi men are opium-smokers.” In one village an English traveller asked some natives how many of the inhabitants smoked opium, and one replied, indicating a twelve-year-old child, “That boy doesn’t.” Still another observer, an English scientist, who was born in Shansi, who speaks the dialect as well as he speaks English, and who travels widely through the remoter regions in search of rare birds and animals, puts the proportion of smokers as low as seventy-five per cent. of the total population. I had some talks with this man at T’ai Yuan-fu, and later at Tientsin, and I found his information so precise and so interesting that I asked him one day to dictate to a stenographer some random observations on the opium problem in Shansi. These few paragraphs make up a very small part of what I have heard him and others say, but they are so grimly picturesque, and they give so accurately the sense of the mass of notes and interviewswhich fill my journal of the Shansi trip, that it has seemed to me I could do no better than to print them just as he talked them off on that particular day at Tientsin.
“The opium-growers always take the best piece of land,” he said, “in their land—the best fertilized, and with the most water upon it. They find that it pays them a great deal better than growing wheat or anything else. Around Chao Cheng, especially, they grow opium to a large extent just beside the rivers, where they can get plenty of water. The seeds are sown about the beginning of May, and they have to be transplanted. It takes until about the middle of July before the opium ripens. Just before it is ripe men are employed to cut the seed pods, when a white sap exudes, and this dries upon the pod and turns brown, and in about a week after it has been cut they come around and scrape it off. The wages are from twenty to thirty cents (Mexican) per day. Men and women are employed in the work. The heads of the poppy are all cut off, when they are dried and stored away for the seed of the next year.
“It is a very fragile crop, and until it gets to be nine inches high it is very easily broken. Thefull-grown poppy plant is from three to four feet high. The Chao Cheng opium is considered the best.
“In the Chao Cheng district the people have been more or less ruined by opium. I have heard of a family, a man and his wife, who had only one suit of clothes between them.
“In Taiku there is a large family by the name of Meng, perhaps the wealthiest family in the province of Shansi. For the past few years they have been steadily going down, simply from the fact that the heads of the family have become opium-smokers. In Taiku there is a large fair held each year, and all the old bronzes, porcelains, furniture, etc., that this family possesses are sold. Last year enough of their possessions were on sale to stock ten or twelve small shops at the fair.
“Another man, a rich man in Jen Tsuen, possessed a fine summer residence previous to 1900. This residence contained several large houses and some fine trees and shrubs, but during the last seven years he has taken to opium and has been steadily going down. He has been selling out this residence, pulling down the houses and cutting down the trees, and selling the wood andold bricks. He is now a beggar in the streets of Jen Tsuen.
“All through the hills west of Tai Yuan-fu the peasants are addicted to the use of opium. About seventy per cent. of the population take opium in one form or another. I was speaking to a number of them who had come into an inn at which I was stopping. I asked them if they wanted to give up the use of opium. They said yes, but that they had not the means to do so. Everybody would like to give it up. The women smoke, as well as the men.
“The smoker does not trouble himself to plant seeds, nor to go out.
“The houses in Shansi are very good; in fact, they are better than in other provinces, but they are rapidly going to ruin owing to the excessive smoking of opium, and wherever one goes the ruins are seen on every side. On the roads the people can get a little money by selling things, but off the main roads the distress is worse than anywhere else.
“Up in the hills I stopped at a village and inquired if they had any food for sale, and they told me that they had nothing but frozen potatoes. So I asked to be shown those, and I wentinto one of the hovels and found little potatoes, perhaps one-half an inch across, frozen, and all strewn over thekang(the brick bed), where they were drying. As soon as they were dry, they were to be ground down into a meal of which dumplings were made, and these were steamed. That was their only diet, and had been for the past month. They had no money at all. What money they had possessed had been spent on opium, and they could not expect anything to make up the crop of potatoes the following autumn. I noticed in a basin a few dried sticks, and I asked what they were for, and the man told me they were the sticks taken from the sieve through which the opium was filtered for purification. These sticks are soaked in hot water, and the water, which contains a little opium, is drunk. They were using this in place of opium. I gave this man twenty cents, and the next day when I returned he was enjoying a pipe of opium.
“While passing through an iron-smelting village I noticed that the blacksmiths who beat up the pig iron were regular living skeletons. They work from about five in the morning until about five in the evening, stopping twice during that time for meals. When they leave off in theevening, after a hasty meal they start with their pipes and go on until they are asleep. I do not know how these men can work. I presume that it was the hard work that made them take to opium-smoking.
“On asking people why they had taken to the drug, they invariably replied that it was for the cure of a pain of some sort—for relieving the suffering. The women often take to it after childbirth, and this is generally what starts them to smoking.
“The wealthier men who smoke opium nearly all day cannot enter another room until this room has first been filled with the fumes of opium. Some one has to go into the room first and smoke a few pipes, so that the air of the room may be in proper condition.
“There was an official in Shau-ying who used to keep six slave girls going all day filling his pipes. The slave girls and brides very often try to commit suicide by eating opium, owing to the harsh treatment they receive.”
Everywhere along the highroad and in the cities and villages of Shansi you see the opium face. The opium-smoker, like the opium-eater, rapidly loses flesh when the habit has fixed itselfon him. The colour leaves his skin, and it becomes dry, like parchment. His eye loses whatever light and sparkle it may have had, and becomes dull and listless. The opium face has been best described as a “peculiarly withered and blasted countenance.” With this face is usually associated a thin body and a languid gait. Opium gets such a powerful grip on a confirmed smoker that it is usually unsafe for him to give up the habit without medical aid. His appetite is taken away, his digestion is impaired, there is congestion of the various internal organs, and congestion of the lungs. Constipation and diarrhœa result, with pain all over the body. By the time he has reached this stage, the smoker has become both physically and mentally weak and inactive. With his intellect deadened, his physical and moral sense impaired, he sinks into laziness, immorality, and debauchery. He has lost his power of resistance to disease, and becomes predisposed to colds, bronchitis, diarrhœa, dysentery, and dyspepsia. Brigade Surgeon J. H. Condon, M. D., M. R. C. S., speaking of opium-eaters before the Royal Commission on Opium, said: “They become emaciated and debilitated, miserable-looking wretches, and finally die, mostcommonly of diarrhœa induced by the use of opium.”
When a man has got himself into this condition, he must have opium, and must have it all the time. I have already pointed out that opium-smoking not only is perhaps the most expensive of the vices, but that, unlike opium-eating, it consumes an immense amount of time. Few smokers can keep slaves to fill their pipes for them, like that wealthy official at Shau-ying. It takes a seasoned smoker from fifteen minutes to half an hour to prepare a pipe to his satisfaction, smoke it, and rouse himself to begin the operation again. If he smokes ten or twenty pipes a day, which is common, and then sleeps off the effects, it is not hard to figure out the number of hours left for business each day. When he has slept, and the day is well started, his body at once begins to clamour for more opium. He must begin smoking again, or he will suffer an agony of physical and mental torture. His ten to twenty pipes a day will cost him from fifty cents or a dollar (if he is a poor man and smokes the scrapings from the rich man’s pipe), to ten or twenty dollars (or more, if he smokes a high grade of opium). I learned ofmany wealthy merchants and officials who smoke from forty to sixty pipes a day.
It is just at this period, when the smoker is so enslaved by the drug that he has lost his earning power, that his opium expenditure increases most rapidly. He is buying opium now, not so much to gratify his selfish vice, as to keep himself alive. He becomes frantic for opium. He will sell anything he has to buy the stuff. His moral sense is destroyed. A diseased, decrepit, insane being, he forgets even his family. He sells his bric-a-brac, his pictures, his furniture. He sells his daughters, even his wife, if she has attractions, as slaves to rich men. He tears his house to pieces, sells the tiles of his roof, the bricks of his walls, the woodwork about his doors and windows. He cuts down the trees in his yard and sells the wood. And at last he crawls out on the highway, digs himself a cave in the loess (if he has strength enough), and prostrates himself before the camel and donkey drivers, whining, chattering, praying that a few copper cash be thrown to him.
Since there are no statistics in China, I can give the reader only the observations and impressions of a traveller. But Shansi Province is full ofruins. So are Szechuan and Yunnan and Kuei-chow, and half a dozen others. It is with the province as a whole much as it is with the individuals of that province. The raising of opium to supply this enormous demand crowds off the land the grains and vegetables that are absolutely needed for human food. The manufacture of opium and its accessories absorbs the energy and capital that should go into legitimate industry. The government of the province and the government of the empire have become so dependent on the immense revenue from the taxation of this “vicious article of luxury” that they dare not give it up. In the body politic an unhealthy condition not only exists, but also controls. Drifting into it half-consciously, the province has been sapped by a vicious economic habit. That is what is the matter with Shansi. That is what is the matter with China. All the way along my route in Shansi I photographed the ruins that typify the disaster which has overtaken this opium province. And a few of these photographs are reproduced here, all showing houses of men who were well-to-do only a few years ago. It will be plainly seen from the cuts, I think, that these ruins are not the result of age.The sun-dried bricks of the walls show few signs of crumbling. The walls themselves are not weather-beaten, and have evidently been destroyed by the hand of man, and not by time.
Chinais the land of paradox. If it is an absolute, despotic monarchy, it is also a very democratic country, with its self-made men, its powerful public opinion, and a “states’ rights” question of its own. It is one of the most corrupt of nations; on the other hand, the standard of personal and commercial honesty is probably higher in China than in any other country in the world. Woman, in China, is made to serve; her status is so low that it would be a discourtesy even to ask a man if he has a daughter: yet the ablest ruler China has had in many centuries is a woman. It is a land where the women wear socks and trousers, and the men wear stockings and robes; where a man shakes his own hand, not yours; where white, not black, is a sign of mourning; where the compass points south, not north; where books are read backward, not forward; where names and titles are put in reverse order, as in ourdirectories—Theodore Roosevelt would be Roosevelt Theodore in China, Uncle Sam would be Sam Uncle; where fractions are written upside down, as8⁄5, not5⁄8; where a bride wails bitterly as she is carried to her wedding, and a man laughs when he tells you of his mother’s death.
Chinese life, or the phases of it that you see along the highroads of the northwest, would appear to be a very simple, honest life, industrious, methodical, patient in poverty. The men, even of the lowest classes, are courteous to a degree that would shame a Frenchman. I have seen my two soldiers, who earned ten or twenty cents, Mexican, a day, greet my cook with such grace and charm of manner that I felt like a crude barbarian as I watched them. The simplicity and industry of this life, as it presented itself to me, seemed directly opposed to any violence or outrage. Yet only seven years ago Shansi Province was the scene of one of the most atrocious massacres in history, modern or ancient. During a few weeks, in the summer of 1900, one hundred and fifty-nine white foreigners, men, women, and children, were killed within the province, forty-six of them in the city of T’ai Yuan-fu. The massacre completely wiped out the missionchurches and schools and the opium refuges, the only missionaries who escaped being those who happened to be away on leave at the time. The attack was not directed at the missionaries as such, but at the foreigners in general. It was widely believed among the peasantry that the foreign devils made a practice of cutting out the eyes, tongues, and various other organs of children and women and shipping them, for some diabolical purpose, out of the country. The slaughter was directed, from beginning to end, by the rabid Manchu governor, Yü Hsien, and some of the butchering was done by soldiers under his personal command. But the interesting fact is that the docile, long-suffering people of Shansi did some butchering on their own account, as soon as the word was passed around that no questions would be asked by the officials.
Apparently, the Shansi peasant can be at one time simple, industrious, loyal, and at another time a slaying, ravishing maniac. The Chinaman himself is the greatest paradox of all. He is the product of a civilization which sprang from a germ and has developed in a soil and environment different from anything within our Western range of experience. Naturally he does not seehuman relations as we see them. His habits and customs are enough different from ours to appear bizarre to us; but they are no more than surface evidences of the difference between his mind and ours. Thanks to our strong racial instinct, we can be fairly certain of what an Anglo-Saxon, or even a European, will think in certain deeply human circumstances—in the presence of death, for instance. We cannot hope to understand the mental processes of a Chinaman. There is too great a difference in the shape of our heads, as there is in the texture of our traditions.
But we can see quite clearly that the imperial government of China is, while it endures, a strong and effective government. It is significant that the Chinese people rarely indulge in massacres on their own account. Why not? The hatred of foreigners must be always there, under the placid surface, for these people rarely fail to turn into slaying demons once the officials let the word be passed around. There have been thirty-five serious anti-foreign riots and massacres in China within thirty-five years, besides the Boxer uprising of 1900; and among these there was probably not one which the mandarins could not have suppressed had they wished. The Boxer troublewas worked up by Yü Hsien while he was governor of Shantung Province. When the foreign powers protested he was transferred to Shansi, which had scarcely heard of the Boxer Society, and almost at once there was a “Boxer” outbreak and massacre in Shansi. The Peking government meanwhile carried on Yü Hsien’s horrible work at Peking and Tientsin. The siege of the legations at Peking was conducted by imperial soldiers, not by mobs. During all the trouble of that bloody summer, Yuan Shi K’ai, who succeeded to the governorship in Shantung, seemed to have no difficulty in keeping that province quiet, though it was the scene of the original trouble.
Chang Chi Tung, “the great viceroy,” subdued the Upper Yangtse provinces with a firm hand, though the Boxer difficulty there was complicated by the ever-seething revolution. In a word, the officials in China seem perfectly able to control their populace and protect foreigners. As Dr. Ferguson, of Shanghai, put it to me, “No other government in the world can so effectively enforce a law as the Chinese government—when they want to!”
You soon learn, in China, that you can trust aChinaman to carry through anything he agrees to do for you. When I reached T’ai Yuan-fu I handed my interpreter a Chinese draft for $200 (Mexican), payable to bearer, and told him to go to the bank and bring back the money. I had known John a little over a week; yet any one who knows China will understand that I was running no appreciable risk. The individual Chinaman is simply a part of a family, the family is part of a neighbourhood, the neighbourhood is part of a village or district, and so on. In all its relations with the central government, the province is responsible for the affairs of its larger districts, these for the smaller districts, the smaller districts for the villages, the villages for the neighbourhoods, the neighbourhoods for the family, the family for the individual. If John had disappeared with my money after cashing the draft, and had afterwards been caught, punishment would have been swift and severe. Very likely he would have lost his head. If the authorities had been unable to find John, they would have punished his family. Punishment would surely have fallen on somebody.
The real effect of this system, continued as it has been through unnumbered centuries, hasnaturally been to develop a clear, keen sense of personal responsibility. For, whatever may occur, somebody is responsible. The family, in order to protect itself, trains its individuals to live up to their promises, or else not to make promises. The neighbourhood, well knowing that it will be held accountable for its units, watches them with a close eye. When a new family comes into a neighbourhood, the neighbours crowd about and ask questions which are not, in view of the facts, so impertinent as they might sound. Indeed, this sense of family and neighbourhood accountability is so deeply rooted that it is not uncommon, on the failure of a merchant to meet his obligations, for his family and friends to step forward and help him to settle his accounts. It is the only way in which they can clear themselves.
All these evidences would seem to indicate that the Chinese people, on the one hand, have an innate fear of and respect for their government and their law, such as they are; and that the government, on the other hand, is, in the matter of enforcing the traditional law, one of the most powerful governments on earth. None but an exceedingly well-organized governmentcould deliberately incite its people to repeated riots and massacres without losing control of them. The Chinese government has seemed to have not the slightest difficulty in keeping the people quiet—when it wanted to. The story of Shantung Province makes this clear. It was driven into what appeared to be anarchy by a rabid governor. But only a few months later this governor’s successor had little difficulty in keeping the entire province in almost perfect order while the adjoining province was actually at war with the allied powers of the world and was overrun with foreign troops. No; a government which has within it the power, on occasion, to carry through such an achievement as this, can hardly be called weak.
We begin, then, by admitting that the Chinese government has the strength and the organization necessary to carry out any ordinary reform—if it wants to. The putting down of the opium evil is, of course, no ordinary reform. It is an undertaking so colossal and so desperate that it staggers imagination, as I trust I have made plain in the preceding articles. But setting aside, for the moment, our doubts as to whether or not the Chinese government, or any othergovernment on earth, could hope to check so insidious and pervading an evil, we have to consider other doubts which arise from even a slight acquaintance with that puzzling organism, the Chinese official mind. If the Chinese business man is, as many think, the most honest and straightforward business man on earth, the Chinese official, or mandarin, is about the most subtle and bewildering. His duplicity is simply beyond our understanding. He has a bland and childish smile, but his ways are peculiar. Most of us know that our own state department has a neat little custom of issuing letters to travellers ordering our diplomatic and consular representatives abroad to extend special courtesies, and sending, at the same time, a notice to these same representatives advising them to take no notice of the letters. In Chinese diplomacy everything is done in this way, but very much more so. Documents issued by the Chinese government usually bear about the same relation to any existing facts or intentions as a Thanksgiving proclamation does. You must be very astute, indeed, to perceive from the speech, manner, or writing of a mandarin what he is really getting at. Motive underlies motive; self-interest liesdeeper still; and the base of it all is an Oriental conception of life and affairs which cannot be so remodelled or reshaped as to fit into our square-shaped Western minds. No one else was so eloquent on the horrors of opium as the great Li Hung Chang, when talking with foreigners; yet Li Hung Chang was one of the largest producers of opium in China. When the Chinese army, under imperial direction, was fiercely bombarding the legations in Peking, the imperial government was officially sending fruit and other delicacies, accompanied by courteous notes, asking if there was not something they could do for the comfort of the hard-pressed foreigners.
This indirection would seem to be the result of a constant effort, on the part of everybody in authority, to shirk the responsibility for difficult situations. Under a system which holds a man mercilessly accountable for carrying through any undertaking for which he is known to be responsible, he naturally tries to avoid assuming any responsibility whatever. An official is punished for failure and rewarded for success in China, as in other countries. And the official on whom is saddled the extremely difficult jobof pleasing, at one time, an empress who believes that a Boxer can render himself invisible to foreign sharpshooters by a little mumbling and dancing, a set of courtiers and palace eunuchs who are constantly undermining one another with the deepest Oriental guile, a populace with little more understanding and knowledge of the world than the children of Israel in the Sinai Peninsula, and a hostile band of keen, modern diplomats with trade interests and “concessions” on their tongues and machine guns and magazine rifles at call in their legation compounds, is not in for an easy time.
It hardly seems, then, as if we should blame the Chinese official too harshly if his whole career appears to be made up of a series of “side-steppings” and “ducks”—of what the American boxer aptly calls “foot work.” On the other hand, it is not difficult to sympathize with the foreign diplomat who has, year after year, to play this baffling game. He is always making progress and never getting anywhere. He has his choice of going mad or settling down into a confirmed and weary cynicism. In most cases he chooses the latter, and ultimately drifts into a frame of mind in which he doubts anything andeverything. He takes it for granted that the Chinese government is always insincere. It is incredible to him that a Chinese official could mean what he says. And so, when the Chinese government declared against the opium evil, the cynical foreign diplomats and traders at once began looking between and behind the lines in the effort to find out what the crafty yellow men were really getting at. That they might mean what they said seemed wholly out of the question. But what deep motive might underlie the proposal was a puzzle. At first the gossips of Peking and the ports ran to the effect that the real scheme was to arouse the anti-opium public opinion in England, and force the British Indian government to give up its opium business. Very good, so far. But why? In order that China, by successfully shutting out the Indian opium, might set up a government monopoly of its own, for revenue, of the home-grown drug? This was the first notion at Peking and the ports. I heard it voiced frequently everywhere. But it proved a hard theory to maintain.
In the first place, the Chinese government could set up a pretty effective government opium business, if it wanted to, without bothering about theIndian-grown drug. Opium is produced everywhere in China. The demand has grown to a point where the Indian article alone could not begin to supply it. But, on the other hand, the stopping of the importation is necessarily the first step in combating the evil; for, if the Chinese should begin by successfully decreasing their own production of opium, the importation would automatically increase, and consumption remain the same.
In the second place, if it is wholly a “revenue” matter to the Chinese government, why give up the large annual revenue from customs duties on the imported opium? In asking the British to stop their opium traffic the Chinese are proposing deliberately to sacrifice $5,000,000 annually in customs andlikingduties on the imported drug, or between a fifth and a sixth of the entire revenue of the imperial customs.
One very convincing indication of the sincerity of the Chinese government in this matter, which I will take up in detail a little later, is the way in which the opium prohibition is being enforced by the Chinese authorities. But before going into that, I should like to call attention to two other evidences of Chinese sincerity in its waron opium. The first is the patent fact that public opinion all over China, among rich and poor, mandarins and peasants, has turned strongly against the use of opium. I have had this information from too many sources to doubt it. Travellers from the remotest provinces are reporting to this effect. The anti-opium sentiment is found in the highest official circles, in the army, in the navy, in the schools. Within the past year or so it has been growing steadily stronger. Opium-smoking used to be taken as a matter of course; now, where you find a man smoking too much, you also find a group of friends apologizing for him. I have already explained that opium-smoking is not tolerated in the “new” army. There is now a rapidly growing number of officials and merchants who refuse to employ opium-smokers in any capacity.
Now, why is the public opinion of China setting so strongly against opium? Even apart from moral considerations, bringing the matter down to a “practical” basis, why is this so? I will venture to offer an answer to the question. Said one Tientsin foreign merchant, an American who has had unusual opportunities to observe conditions in Northern China: “If the Chinesedo succeed in shutting down on opium, it may mean the end of the foreigners in China. Opium is the one thing that is holding the Chinese back to-day.”
Ten or twelve of the legations at Peking now have “legation guards” of from one hundred to three hundred men each. In all, there are eighteen hundred foreign soldiers in Peking, “a force large enough,” said one officer, “to be an insult to China, but not large enough to defend us should they really resent the insult.”
Twelve hundred miles up the Yangtse River, above the rapids, there is a fleet of tiny foreign gunboats, English and French, which were carried up in sections and put together “to stay.” At every treaty port there are one or more foreign settlements, maintained under foreign laws. The Imperial Maritime Customs Service of China is directed and administered throughout by foreigners; this, to insure the proper collection of the “indemnity” money. Foreign “syndicates” have been gobbling up the wonderful coal and iron deposits of China wherever they could find them. And so on. I could give many more illustrations of the foreign grip on China, but these will serve. And back ofthese facts looms the always impending “partition of China.” The Chinese are not fools. They have sat tight, wearing that inscrutable smile, while the foreigners discussed the cutting up of China as if it were a huge cake. They have seen the Japanese, a race of little brown men, inhabiting a few little islands, face the dreaded bear of Russia and drive it back into Siberia. Now, at last, these patient Chinamen are picking up some odds and ends of Western science. They are building railroads, and manufacturing the rails for them. They are talking about saving China “for the Chinese.” In 1906 they mobilized an army of 30,000 “modern” troops for manœuvres in Honan Province. If they are to succeed with this notion, they must begin at the beginning. Opium is dragging them down hill. Opium will not build railroads. Opium will not win battles. Opium will not administer the affairs of the hugest nation on earth. Therefore, no matter what it costs in revenue, no matter how staggering the necessary reform and reorganization, opium must go.
China may be a puzzling land. The Chinese officials may be capable of the most baffling duplicity. But we are forced to believe thatthey are “sincere” in putting down the opium traffic. It appears, for China, to be a case of sink or swim.
The next question would seem to be, if the Chinese are really trying to put down the opium traffic, how are they succeeding? We will pass over that part of the problem which relates to Great Britain and the Indian opium trade, with the idea of taking it up in a later chapter. Let us consider now what China, flabby, backward, long-suffering China, is actually doing in this tremendous effort to cure her disorder in order that she may take a new place among the nations. We will deal here with the enforcement of the edict in Shansi Province, taking up in later chapters the results of the prohibition movement in the other provinces.
The plan outlined in the edicts prohibiting opium is clear, direct, forcible. It was evidently meant to be effective. It provides (first) that the governors of the provinces shall ascertain, through the local authorities, the exact number of acres under poppy cultivation. The area of the land used for this purpose shall then be cut down by one-ninth part each year, “so that at the end of nine years there will be no more landused for such purposes, and the land thus disused”—I am quoting here from the Chinaman who translated the regulations for me—“shall never be used for the said purposes again. Should the owners of such lands disobey the decree, their lands shall be confiscated. Local officials who make special efforts and be able to stop the cultivation of poppy before the said time, they shall be rewarded with promotions.”
The plan provides (second) that “all smokers, irrespective of class or sex, must go to the nearest authorities to get certificates, in which they are to write their names, addresses, profession, ages, and the amount of opium smoked each day.” Latitude is allowed smokers over sixty years of age, but those under sixty “must get cured before arriving at sixty years of age. Persons who smoke or buy opium without certificates will be punished. No new smokers will be allowed from the date of prohibition. The amount of opium supplied to each smoker must decrease by one-third each year, so that within a few years there will be no opium smoked at all.” Officials who overstep the law are to be deprived of their rank. In the case of common people, “their names will be posted up thoroughfares, and willbe deprived of privileges in all public gatherings.”
Opium dens, as also all restaurants, hotels, and wine-shops which provide couches and lamps for smokers were to be closed at once. If any regular opium den was found open after the prohibition (May, 1907), the property would be confiscated. No new stores for the sale of opium could be opened. “Good opium remedies must be prepared. Multiply the number of anti-opium clubs. If any citizens who can, through their efforts, get many people cured, they will be rewarded.... All officials, and the officers of the army and navy, and professors of schools, colleges, and universities, must all get cured within six months.” And further, it was decided to “open negotiations with Great Britain, arranging with that power to have less and less opium imported into China each year, till at the end of nine years no opium will be imported at all.” The Chinese, it is evident, are not wanting in hopeful sentiment. Reading this, it is almost possible to forget that India needs the money.
“There is another drug, called morphia, which has done (thus my Chinaman’s translation) or is doing more harm than opium. The customauthorities are to be instructed to prohibit strictly the importation of it, except for medical uses.”
A clean-cut programme, this; apparently meant to be effective. It was with no small curiosity that I looked about in Shansi Province to see whether there seemed any likelihood of enforcement. The time was ripe. It was April; in May the six months would be up. Opium had ruled in Shansi: could they hope to depose it before the final havoc should be wrought?
The nub of the situation was, of course, the limiting of the crop. Theoretically, it should be easier to prohibit opium than to prohibit alcoholic drinks. Wines and liquors are made from grains and fruits which must be grown anyway, for purposes of food. It would not do to attempt to prohibit liquor by stopping the cultivation of grains and fruits. The poppy, on the other hand, produces nothing but opium and its alkaloids. In stopping the growth of the poppy you are depriving man of no useful or necessary article. The poppy must be grown in the open, along the river-bottoms (where the roads run). It cannot be hidden. As government regulating goes, nothing is easier than to find a field ofpoppies and measure it. The plans of the Shansi farmers for the coming year should throw some light on the sincerity of the opium reforms. Were they really arranging to plant less opium? Yes, they were. Reports came to me from every side, and all to the same effect. West and northwest of T’ai Yuan-fu many of the farmers had announced that they were planting no poppies at all. This, remember, was in April: planting time was near; it was a practical proposition to those Shansi peasants. In other regions men were planting either none at all, or “less than last year.” The reason generally given was that the closing of the dens in the cities had lessened the demand for opium.
The officials were planning not only to make poppy-growing unprofitable to the farmers, they were planning also to advise and assist them in the substitution of some other crop for the poppy. But here they encountered one of the peculiar difficulties in the way of opium reform, the transportation problem. All transportation, off the railroads, is slow and costly. No other product is so easy to transport as opium. A man can carry several hundred dollars’ worth on his person; a man with a mule can carry severalthousand dollars’ worth. That is one of the reasons why opium is a more profitable crop than potatoes or wheat. But the law descends without waiting for solutions of all the problems involved. The closing of the opium dens all over Shansi had the immediate effect of limiting the crop. It also had the effect of driving out of business a great many firms engaged in the manufacture of pipes and lamps. Sixty-two manufacturing houses in one city, Taiku, either went out of business altogether during the spring months, or turned to new enterprises. I add an interesting bit of evidence as to the effectiveness of the enforcement. It is from a missionary.
“I was calling on one of the foreigners in T’ai Yuan-fu and found a beggar lying on one of the door-steps, with his pipe and lamp all going. I told him to clear out. I asked him why he was there, and he told me he had nowhere else to go, now that the smoking-dens were all closed, and that he had to find some sheltered nook where he could have his smoke.”
It was not the plan to close the opium sale shops; theoretically, it will take nine or ten years to do that. But after closing all the places where opium was smoked socially and publicly, it shouldbecome possible to register all the individuals who buy the drug for home consumption. It was the closing of the dens, the places for public smoking, in all the cities of Shansi, which had the immediate effect of limiting the crop and the manufacture of smoking instruments. The one hundred and twenty-nine dens of T’ai Yuan-fu were all closed before I arrived there. In T’ai Yuan-fu, as in Peking, you could buy an opium-smoker’s outfit for next to nothing. Cloisonné pipes, mounted with ivory and jade, were offered at absurd prices.
One of the saddest features of the situation in Shansi is the activity of the opium-cure fraud. The opium-smoking habit can be cured, once the social element is eliminated, as easily as the morphine or cocaine habits—more easily, some would claim. I do not mean to say that a degraded, degenerate being can be made over, in a week, into a normal, healthy being; but it does not seem to be very difficult to tide even the confirmed smoker over the discomfort and danger that attend breaking off the habit. In Shansi, as in all the opium provinces, “opium refuges” are maintained by the various missions. The usual plan is to charge a small fee for themedicines administered, in order to make the refuges self-supporting. It takes a week or ten days to effect a cure by the methods usually followed. The patient is confined to a room, less and less opium is allowed from day to day, stimulants (either strychnine or atropine) are administered, and local symptoms are treated as may seem necessary to the physician in charge. Some of the missions at first took a stand against the reduction method, believing that medical missionaries should not administer opium in any form; but after a death or two they accepted the inevitable compromise, recognizing that it is not safe to shut down the supply too abruptly. But the number of these refuges is pitifully small beside the extent of the evil. They have been at work for a generation without bringing about any perceptible change in the situation. There are now fewer refuges than formerly in Shansi Province, for none of the missions is fully recruited as yet, after the terrible set-back of 1900.
The opium-cure faker in China, as in the United States and Europe, usually sells morphia under another name. Dr. Edwards, the author of “Fire and Sword in Shansi,” last year spent five weeks in travelling northwest of T’ai Yuan-fu,and reported finding a great many men employed in selling so-called anti-opium medicines. The demand for cures existed everywhere. Now that the popular sentiment is setting in so strongly against the opium habit, the Chinese are peculiarly easy prey for these rascals. They have no conception of medicine as it is practiced in Western countries, and eagerly take whatever is offered to them in the guise of a “cure.” The following, told to me by an Englishman who lives in the province, illustrates this:
“There is a lot of mischief being done in Shansi just now by men who have bought drugs in Tientsin, are selling them at random, and making a good thing for themselves. I was travelling one day and was taken violently ill, and I happened to reach a place where I knew a man who had some drugs, so I sent for him and asked him to bring me some medicine. He came along with three bottles, none of which was labelled. He could not tell me what any one of them contained. He said they were all good for stomach-ache, and proposed to mix the three up and give me a good, strong dose. It is needless to say I refused. That man is running a proper establishment and making a lot of money on the drugs hesells, and that is all he knows about the business.”
The upshot of my investigations and inquiries in Shansi was that the anti-opium edicts were being enforced to the letter. This conclusion reached, I naturally looked about to find the man behind the enforcement. Judging from the work done, he should prove worth seeing. Further inquiries drew out the information that he was one of the three rulers of the province, with the title of provincial judge, and that his name was Ting Pao Chuen.
Calling upon a prominent Chinese official is, to a plain, democratic person, rather an impressive undertaking. The Rev. Mr. Sowerby had kindly volunteered to act as interpreter, and him I impressed for instructor and guide through the mazes of official etiquette. It was arranged that I should call at Mr. Sowerby’s compound at a quarter to four. From there we would each ride in a Peking cart with a driver and one extra servant in front. There was nothing, apparently, for the extra servant to do; but it was vitally important that he should sit on the front platform of the cart.
A Peking cart is a red-and-blue dog house,balanced, without springs, on an axle between two heavy wheels. The sides, back, and rounding roof are covered with blue cloth. A curtain hangs in front. In the middle of each side is a tiny window, and it is at such windows that you occasionally get the only glimpses you are ever likely to get of Chinese ladies. There is no seat in a Peking cart; you sit on the padded floor. When you get in, the servant holds up the front curtain, you vault to the front platform, and, placing your hands on the floor, propel yourself backward, with as much dignity as possible, taking care not to knock your hat against the roof, until you have disappeared inside. If you are long of leg, your feet will stick out in front of the curtain, leaving scant room for the two servants, who sit, one on each side, with their feet hanging down in front of the wheels. The two carts, two drivers, and two extra servants, set out from the Baptist Mission compound, to convey Mr. Sowerby and me to the Yâmen, or official residence, of His Excellency.
Every Yâmen has three great gates barring the way to the inner compound. If the resident official wishes to humiliate you, he has his man stop your cart at the first gate and compels youto enter on foot. Fortunately for us, since it was raining hard, His Excellency had chosen to treat us with marked courtesy. The carts halted at the second gate while Mr. Sowerby’s servant ran in with our red Chinese cards. There was a brief wait, and then we drove on through a long courtyard to the inner or screen gate, where massive timbered doors were closed against us. Soon these swung open; the carts crossed a paved yard and pulled up under the projecting roof of the Yâmen porch; and we scrambled down from the carts, while two tall mandarins, in official caps and buttons, dressed in flowing robes of silk and embroidery, came rapidly forward to meet us. One of these, the younger and shorter, I recognized as Mr. Wen, the interpreter for the Shansi foreign bureau.
The other mandarin was a man of ability and charm. Some of us, perhaps, have formed our notion of the Chinaman from the Cantonese laundryman type which we may have seen at his bench or on the Third Avenue elevated railway in New York. This would be about as accurate as to call the coster at his barrow the typical Englishman; just about as accurate as to call the Bowery loafer the typical American. His Excellencyappeared to be close to six feet in height; he was erect and lithe of figure, with marked physical grace. He greeted Mr. Sowerby by clasping his hands before his breast and bowing, then turned, and with a genial smile extended his right hand to grip mine. He used no English, but the Chinese language, as he spoke it, was both dignified and musical, and not at all like the singsong jabbering I had heard on the streets and about the hotels.
Ting led the way into a reception-room which was furnished in red cloth and dark woods. There was a seat and a table against each side, and two red cushions on the edge of a platform across the end of the room, with a low table between them. An attendant appeared with tea. Ting took a covered tea bowl in his two hands, extended it towards me, bowed, then placed it on the low stand—thus indicating the seat which I was to take, on the platform. Mr. Wen said, in my ear, “Sit down.” Mr. Sowerby was placed at the other side of the stand; the two Chinese gentlemen seated themselves at the two side-tables, facing each other. One thing I remembered from Mr. Sowerby’s coaching—I must not touch my bowl of tea. I must not even look atit. The tea is not to drink; it is brought in order that the caller may be enabled to take his leave gracefully. The Chinese gentlefolk are so wedded to life’s little ceremonies that guest and host cannot bring themselves to talk right out about terminating a visit. The guest would shiver at the notion of saying, “Well, I must go, now.” Instead, he fingers his tea bowl, or perhaps merely glances at it; and then he and his host both rise.
His Excellency fixed his eyes on me and uttered a deliberate, musical sentence. “He says,” translated Mr. Sowerby, “that you have come to help China.” I am afraid I blushed at this. It had not occurred to me to state my mission in just those words. I replied that I had come, as a journalist, to learn the truth about the opium question. We talked for an hour about the wonderful warfare which China is waging against her besetting vice. “China is sincere in this struggle,” he said. “Public opinion was never more determined.” He asked me if I had investigated the new Malay drug which had lately been heralded as a specific for opium-poisoning. “If,” he said, “you should learn of any real cure, while you are investigating this subject, I wish youwould advise me about it.” I promised him I would do so. I had already heard from a number of sources that Ting was personally giving two to three thousand taels a month (a tael is about seventy-five cents) to the support of opium refuges and for the purchase of drugs for distribution among the poor. “China is sick,” he said; “she must be cured so that she may hold up her head among the nations.”
Shortly after we had driven back through the rain and had mounted the stairs to Mr. Sowerby’s library, a Yâmen runner was shown into the room, bearing presents from the provincial judge. The runner bowed to me and presented his tray. On it, beside the large red “card” of Ting Pao Chuen, were four bottles of native wine, or “shumshoo,” two cans of beef tongue, and two cans of sauerkraut!
Inher development China is dependent on the adoption of Western ideas and is influenced by the example set by Western civilization. This modernizing influence is strongest at the point where the Westerner meets the Chinaman, where the two civilizations come into direct contact. At Shanghai, Tientsin, Hankow, Hongkong, and the other ports there are some thirty to forty thousand Europeans, Englishmen, and Americans. They build splendid buildings and lay good pavements. They bring with them the best liquors. The life they live gives about as accurate an impression of Western civilization—of what the Western nations stand for—as the great majority of the Chinese (a most observing race) are ever likely to receive. We have examined into China’s sincerity, now let us examine into the honesty of purpose of the foreign “concessions” and “settlements” which fringe the China Coast. If these communities are representing our civilization out there,it seems fair to ask whether they are representing it well; for if they are misrepresenting us, if they are contributing to the sort of international misunderstanding which breeds trouble, we may as well know it.
When, in the course of her gropings and strugglings towards civilization, China turns for enlightenment to the great, successful nations of Europe and America, what does she see? Well, for one thing, she sees Shanghai.
Shanghai has been called the Paris of the extreme East. It is the paradise of the adventurer and the adventuress, of the gambler, the beach-comber, and the long-chance promoter. Midway of the China Coast, at the mouth of the mighty Yangtse River, it is the principal port of entrance into China. From England, Germany, France, Australia, Japan, the United States, and Canada comes an endless column of steamships to Shanghai. To Hongkong, Saigon, Bangkok, Singapore, Chefoo, Tientsin, and the uppermost ports of the Yangtse, 1,250 miles inland, go endless columns of steamships from Shanghai. And of the travellers on these ships nearly all have, or expect to have, or have had, business or pleasure at Shanghai.
It is the most truly cosmopolitan city in the world; for Paris, after all, is mainly French; London, after all, is mainly English; New York, after all, is mainly American. Shanghai has its French hotels, its imposing German Club, its English Country Club, its race-track, its Russian Bank, its Japanese mercantile houses, its American post-office. It is ruled by a council of Englishmen, Germans, and Americans. It is policed by English bobbies, Irishmen, Sikhs from India, and Chinamen. On the Bubbling Well Road, of a sunny spring afternoon, where the latest thing in motor cars weaves through the line of smart carriages, you may see Spaniard elbowing Filipino, Portuguese jostling Parsee, Austrian chatting with Bavarian; and they all talk, gamble, drink, and buy in pidgin English.
This settlement of fifteen thousand Europeans, living apart from that public opinion which compells the maintenance of a social standard in every European country, and indifferent to that local public opinion which keeps up a certain curious standard among the Chinese themselves, seems to have practically no standard at all. The problem of every decent American or Englishman who finds himself established in business iswhether he dare bring his wife and family and introduce them into circles so degraded that families disintegrate and children grow up under disheartening influences. The heavy drinking of the China Coast ports is proverbial, yet the drinking seems little more than an incident in a city where the social atmosphere is tainted and altogether unwholesome.
I stood one night in the barroom of one of the big hotels. It was one o’clock in the morning, and nearly every one of the dozen white men in the room was more or less drunk. They were roaring out maudlin songs, and shouting incoherent cries. Two men, well-dressed gentlemen, were on the floor. And behind the bar, yawning, waiting for an opportunity to close up and go to sleep, stood two Chinese men and one boy. They were neat, respectful, and perfectly sober. Their almond eyes flitted about the room, taking in every detail of that beastly scene. It would be impossible to say what they were thinking, but I observed that they did not smile as a Chinaman usually does. Perhaps, to the reader who does not know the China Coast, it seems unfair to cite this case as an example of the active influence of our civilization in China. I will notdo so. I will merely ask if you could ever hope to make those three young Chinamen believe that our civilization is superior to theirs.
Where such a low moral tone prevails, in a self-governing community, it is bound to limit the perception and the power of the government of that community. Let any observing visitor acquaint himself with Shanghai and its social and moral standards (which will not be difficult, for these will be thrust upon him soon after his arrival) and he will soon see for himself that the residents of Shanghai, while they freely and hotly criticize their council, never accuse it of priggishness or of moral restraint. This is enough to show that the council makes no effort to oppose the prevailing sentiment. The gambling business attains, in Shanghai, to the altitude of a considerable industry. During the race weeks, spring and fall, the vacant lots near the race-track are rented at high rates by those gamblers of all nations who have no regular quarters, and the games go on merrily in the open air, within full view of the crowds in the road. Now seven of the nine members of the council are Englishmen. English ideas are supposed to prevail in the settlement, feebly seconded by German andAmerican. And the laws under which Shanghai is theoretically governed forbid gambling.
All the lower forms of organized vice combine to form a large and highly profitable branch of Shanghai’s commerce. Partly because of the willingness of the locally stronger nations to shoulder off the responsibility for a disgraceful state of things, and partly because of the number of adventurous and unprincipled Americans who have drained off to the China Coast, America has had to endure more than her share of the blame for this condition. For years every degraded woman who could speak the language has called herself an “American girl”; until the term, which at home arouses a natural pride, has grown so unpleasant that decent Americans have chafed under the insult. To-day it is best not to use the phrase “American girl” on the China Coast.
Of the other and less vicious sorts of adventurers who turn up like bad pennies at Shanghai, the beach-comber is easily the most picturesque. Many writers, notably Robert Louis Stevenson, have employed him as a character in fiction. The majority of the beach-combers probably are or have been seafaring men. Next in numerical order, probably, come the discharged soldiers andthe deserters. It takes either a certain amount of money or a certain amount of ability for any unattached American or European to get out to the China Coast, and an equal amount for him to get back. Therefore the stranded soldiers and sailors, brought out there at the cost of nation or ship owner, beating their way from port to port, drinking, gambling, starving, ready for any dubious enterprise that promises quick returns on a small investment, are a sorry lot. The sharps, swindlers, and shadowy promoters, on the other hand, are men necessarily possessed either of money or wit sufficient to get them out to China, and not unnaturally they represent the higher grades of their various crafts. From Peking to Hongkong, the coast is infested with these gentlemanly rascals, each with impressive garments and a convincing story. Josiah Flynt once wrote a tale of some enthusiastic young promoters who undertook, at a considerable outlay in capital and in personal risk, to sell a steam calliope to the Grand Lama of Thibet. After a brief acquaintance with the diverse and ingenious schemes that sprout, flower, and go to seed on the China Coast, this tale seems not nearly so improbable as it perhaps sounds to the casual reader.
Other, and more recent, types of adventurers are the stranded free-lance journalist and camp-followers who were lured Eastward by the prospect of pickings along the trails of the Japanese and Russian armies during the late war, and who later found themselves unable to get back home. In 1906, Consul-General Rodgers, of Shanghai, reported as follows on the subject of unscrupulous Americans who have been imposing on the Chinese to the detriment of American trade:
“There are many things which can be given as current reasons for retarding American trade in the Orient. The advent of a class of Americans, like those who came from Manila after a brief experience there, and those who tried their fortunes in connection with the events of the Russo-Japanese War, has done a great deal to injure the American name and reputation with the Chinese. This class, usually indigent, has, by reason of imposition upon the Chinese, destroyed to some extent a confidence which has existed for many years and which had borne good fruit. There are good reasons for saying that every American firm which contemplates sending a representative to China should be very certain of his character, and, other things being equal, should choose thequiet, orderly person rather than the reverse type, in spite of the current opinion that such are indicated for the Orient.”
If Shanghai is the sort of a place that it would here appear to be, if it sets a vicious example in its government, in its business practice, and in the character of many of its inhabitants, the fact would seem to indicate that it is most decidedly misrepresenting out there the sort of civilization that we, Europeans as well as Americans, have always supposed that we stood for. It would appear that the Chinese, at the point of contact with our civilization, are getting a false impression of us. It would be easy to dismiss as remote and unimportant the vicious example set by a group of adventurers and promoters on the China Coast; but unfortunately this little group is the most important single contributing factor in the exceedingly delicate matter of the rapidly developing relations between China and the great Christian nations.
The influence of the Shanghai example on China is real and positive. Geographically, Shanghai commands the trade of the middle coast, the immense Yangtse Valley, and the Grand Canal. Every night a big river steamerleaves for Hankow and the intermediate river ports. Every day a big river steamer comes in from the same cities. Trading junks and small steamers innumerable ply between the river and coast ports and Shanghai. Chinese merchants come from hundreds of miles around to trade with the foreigners or with the native “compradores” attached to foreign houses. On their return to their various interior cities or villages these traders spread tales of the foreign devils who inhabit the great city near the sea. Foreign merchants, travelling salesmen, engineers, and insurance agents travel up and down the great river, up and down the coast; they penetrate, by steamer, railroad, mule-litter, or cart, into the interior cities of the great provinces, leaving everywhere on plastic minds distinct and ineffaceable impressions of their manners, business methods, and morals.