furnishing on the street in summer free drinks, not of intoxicants,
but of tea. The tea is poured hot into earthen jars which stand inside
small booths. Beside the jar is a bamboo dipper, and any passerby may
stop and quench his thirst. The tea stations are scattered at frequent
intervals throughout the foreign settlements as well as the Chinese
City, and are an inestimable boon, particularly to the hard-working
coolies.
Another charity that well illustrates the poverty of China is the
conservation of waste rice. Rice is China’s staff of life. The servant
calls his master to eat not by saying “Dinner is ready,” but “Rice is
ready.” To waste rice is a sin; to save it, meritorious. As junks laden
with rice from the country around are poled down the river and creeks
to Shanghai, a few handfuls of the precious grain inevitably sift out
from the bags onto the bank. This is picked up by benevolently minded
persons, along with the mud in which it has fallen, and afterward
laboriously separated and washed. Some hundreds of pounds in the course
of a year are collected in this way and distributed to the poor. A
number of local Chinese guilds during the coldest winter weather, are
in the habit of feeding daily large numbers of the suffering poor, who
line up at specified hours for their allotted portion; also generous
sums of money are contributed annually by the Chinese and sent to the
districts devastated by flood and famine to relieve the destitute.
Perhaps the most significant event of the last year in Shanghai was
the organization by young Chinese women of a Social Service League.
The leaders are Christians, who in a tactful but persistent way, are
sure to make their influence felt. Already as a beginning five free
day-schools for the poor, with a total attendance of several hundred,
have been started and others are expected to open soon. A Sunday School
taught by volunteer workers is held in connection with each day-school.
It is the plan to dot the city with these charity schools, which
divide the day between the study of the Chinese language and manual
training. The whole financial burden is met by the League members and
their interested friends, while a few, ladies of high position, who
heretofore have led self-centred lives, are giving several hours a week
to teaching. The movement is attracting wide attention.
XIV
THE ROMANCE AND PATHOS OF THE MILLS
It was the close of a cold December afternoon, and a raw penetrating
wind was blowing. In the mill district out Yangtsepoo way the road was
alive with people. Women and little children, with a sprinkling of men,
were hurrying along the dusky highway on foot and in wheelbarrows,
for it was nearing six o’clock, the hour of the night shift. In front
of one of the great cotton mills a crowd of shivering humanity had
gathered waiting for the Sikh policemen to throw open the gates. Faces
were blue and pinched, shoulders bent, and hands drawn up for warmth
inside the padded cotton sleeves. Nearby, within a shallow niche in the
brick wall stood a small, solemn-faced boy, perhaps seven years old. He
looked like a young sentinel, straight as a ramrod, arms stretched down
close to his body. When asked what he was doing he replied briefly,
“Keeping warm,” and tried to hug a little closer the sheltering wall.
Poor laddie, the whistle would soon blow calling him on duty to work
without intermission amid pounding machinery and dizzily whirling
spindles, until the welcome signal set him free at six o’clock in the
morning.
The story of cotton-growing in China is not a very old one. It began
only a few hundred years back, some say in the eleventh, others in
the thirteenth century, when the first cotton seeds were brought here
from Chinese Turkestan. Strangely enough, it was a woman who gave the
cultivation of cotton its initial impulse, for not until Lady Hwang,
public-spirited and enterprising, took it upon herself to distribute
cotton seeds among the farmers of the Yangtse Valley, was the plant
grown to any extent. This valley is to-day the most flourishing cotton
producing district in the country. Ninety per cent of China’s millions
dress in cotton, a coarse, strong cloth, dyed blue. But what did the
people wear in the long ago before the cotton plant had ever been heard
of? Did peasant as well as prince array himself in silk and fine linen?
What we do know is that the introduction of cotton was strenuously
opposed by the silk and hemp growers. It is a curious fact that as
early as 500 A.D. reference is found in Chinese books to “cotton
robes,” though they were evidently regarded as rarities and were
doubtless brought into the country by travellers, or as tribute for the
august ruler of the Flowery Kingdom.
[Illustration: ON THE WAY TO THE MILL]
India gave China her first spinning wheel, and this same crude wheel,
scarcely improved upon at all, is still seen, not only in the interior,
but in many a home in and around metropolitan Shanghai. Multitudes
of families too, as in the olden days, run their own simple hand
loom. Time-honoured customs die slowly in China, but the southern
provinces are the least conservative, and Canton is one of the most
progressive of cities. So we are not surprised to find that about
1870 a Cantonese company started a factory for spinning cotton by
steam-operated machinery. When all was in readiness would the farmers
trust their cotton to this wizard concern? Not a man of them! It
was their firm conviction that by some occult process their dearly
grown product would vanish from sight never to reappear. Thus the
enterprise launched so hopefully was doomed to failure. Twenty years
later, however, the experiment was tried again, and this time with
success. Foreign capital too was attracted to the venture, and at the
close of the Chino-Japanese war, when the new treaty gave assurance of
protection, a number of foreign-owned mills were built. At first they
were operated without profit if not at a positive loss. This was mainly
due to the fact that on account of the sudden and greatly increased
number of spindles the supply of cotton was not equal to the demand,
which caused a rise in price. That is no longer true, and dividends
now are often very large. Cotton, to a greater or less extent, is
grown in every province in China, but the quality is inferior and the
staple short. This is not because of an unfavourable soil and climate,
especially in the lower central provinces, but is wholly due to the
carelessness and ignorance of the farmers. They cultivate the farms in
a haphazard fashion, or strictly speaking, pay no attention whatever to
cultivation, allowing nature to run riot at her own sweet will. There
is no reason why, with the introduction of scientific methods in seed
selection and planting, China in a few years should not see a complete
transformation in the character of her crops. Foreigners are planning
to start an experimental farm in the neighbourhood of Shanghai, and
hope each year to induce a few farmers from the interior to spend
several months working on it and receiving practical instruction. It is
estimated that within the last ten years the acreage devoted to cotton
growing in China has increased one hundred per cent.
Great as has been this advance, the end is not yet, and cotton fields
will continue to multiply. “But where is the land to come from?” some
one asks. “China’s millions must be fed, and surely the rice and wheat
fields can not be sacrificed.” No, but the acres once aflame with the
now prohibited poppy will be available, and then there are the burial
lands. The amount of ground taken up by the mammoth mound-shaped and
horse-shoe graves is enormous, but little by little it is yielding
to the encroachments of Western civilization. At a recent medical
conference in Shanghai, one of China’s most brilliant foreign-trained
doctors, for sanitary and economic reasons dared advocate cremation,
or at least confining the sepulchres of the dead to the hillsides
and other untillable spots. Half of China’s cotton crop is exported
annually to Japan. On the other hand she imports quantities of cotton
from America. Foreign countries send many kinds of cotton cloth to
China, where it is most popular, particularly the cotton prints. While
Japan’s goods flood China’s markets, the Japanese markets are closed
to the finished product from China. Yet it should be easily possible
in the near future for China to supply her own needs, growing the best
quality of cotton, and opening cotton mills all over the country.
This would relieve the congested agricultural districts and furnish
employment to many idle hands.
What the cotton industry in China requires above everything else is the
fostering care of the government. Until this is given there will be
little advance in either quality or quantity of production. The most
the central government has done thus far has been to give its tardy
recognition to “The Cotton Anti-Adulteration Association” of Shanghai,
and to place the testing of cotton against adulteration under a
Commissioner of the Customs, which has led to most beneficial results.
It is a pity that thus far the Chinese-owned mills have declined to
join the Association. The greatest handicap to the native industry
is heavy taxation. In Japan the raw material is imported and the
finished product exported free of duty. In China not only is no such
encouragement given, but internal taxes are levied as well, so that the
farmer must pay to send his cotton down the river to the manufacturer,
the manufacturer to return it in yarn and cloth to the merchant, and
the merchant to pass it on to the country buyer.
At present China has approximately forty cotton mills, nearly
two-thirds of which are in and around Shanghai. Three in the city
are owned and operated by the Japanese, several are the property of
European companies, but the majority belong to the Chinese. The oldest
cotton mill, started more than twenty-five years ago in Shanghai,
was financed by China’s great statesman, Li Hung Chang. It is still
running under Chinese management, though the original buildings were
burned a few years ago. This mill is one of the largest, having sixty
thousand spindles. The assistant superintendent is a bright young man
who recently graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, where he
specialized in sociology. He brings to his work high ideals which he
hopes gradually to see realized. The next oldest mill is also Chinese.
Its owner, Mr. C. C. Nieh, an unusual man, recently returned from a
five months’ tour in the United States, where he made a careful and
critical study of cotton growing and cotton mills. It is his purpose
as quickly as possible to bring his mill up to the highest grade of
efficiency. Indeed his American manager reports that his chief is
anxious to advance more rapidly than the operatives can be trained
to follow, and describes him as a “delightful man to work for.” The
largest mill in Shanghai is under British management. It operates
seventy thousand spindles and employs between five and six thousand
hands. One of the newest mills, that represents the very latest thought
in building and equipment, belongs to the Japanese. The brick walls
are lined with cement, the floors are reinforced concrete, while the
saw-tooth roofs, with glass on one side, admit an abundance of light.
The machinery, the best made in England, is operated by electricity,
all of the other mills in Shanghai, except Mr. Nieh’s, using steam. A
peculiarity of this mill is that the majority of the employees are men
and boys, female help being almost exclusively found in the other mills.
A few years ago the Japanese mill owners in Shanghai did a good thing
for themselves and for the Chinese in sending to Japan a hundred
Chinese men and women to take a course of nine months’ instruction in
the mills. Since their return, these trained workers have been used to
teach the raw Chinese mill hands in Japanese employ.
Wages in all the mills are about the same, and are good, as pay goes
in China. Children receive from eleven to fifteen cents a day, women
from fifteen to thirty-five according to their skill, and men fifteen
to twenty dollars a month. This is reckoned in Mexican currency, which
would yield less than one-half that amount in American money. Some of
the mill people come from farms in the suburbs and are in comfortable
circumstances. One or two members of a family may work in the mill, not
so much from necessity as to be able to add a little to the general
income. But others, and these far outnumber the more fortunate class,
are the poorest of the poor, often unable to pay the “cash” or two
required to ride in a wheelbarrow between the mill and their home
which is frequently miles distant. A single instance may be given. A
young girl supports a widowed mother and little brothers and sisters
on two dollars and a half a month. She starts to the mill each morning
at four o’clock, as it takes her two hours to walk there, and when
her day’s work is over, at six in the evening, she is two hours more
walking home. Many a time when the moon is shining the child mistakes
its bright light for dawn and sets out at three or earlier. The walk
is not so bad in pleasant weather, lonely only until she joins crowds
of other mill folk moving in the same direction. But what of the chill
days in winter, with a bleak wind blowing, rain falling, and roads
treacherously slippery with mud? It is hardest for the women who have
bound feet, women too poor to pay for a seat on a wheelbarrow with
five or six others. Yonder comes a group uncertainly picking their way
along in the blinding mist. One poor soul at last reaches the gate of
the mill and drops all in a heap on the cold wet ground to wait for the
blowing of the whistle. “Have you come far?” is asked of her pityingly.
Half fearfully, half defiantly, as if braced for a reprimand, she
struggles to her feet and answers, “From Honkew,” a distance of nearly
three miles. A fleeting smile is by and by coaxed into her pale face,
but she is tired, so very tired, and a long twelve hours of unremittent
labour lies before her. Let us hope she is one who works at a loom, for
then she can have a seat on a narrow bench. The women and children who
watch the spindles must stand the long night through.
The employees carry their lunch in a small round basket, all of uniform
size. The basket is half filled with cold boiled rice, and set in the
midst of it is sure to be a little bowl containing a few mouthfuls
of bean curd, salt fish or some other simple relish. Before eating,
the food is warmed by pouring boiling water into the basket and
allowing the water to filter through the rice and out at the bottom.
Hot water is also furnished in the mills for tea. In the new Japanese
mill tea itself is given the hands. “Not the best kind,” says the
superintendent, “but nevertheless, tea.” This mill has rough dining
halls for its employees, and allows a half hour at noon and the same
at midnight for eating. Another mill gives fifteen minutes at noon
and at midnight. An Englishwoman living in the neighbourhood says she
always awakens at night when the great engines stop their throbbing and
thinks with tender pity of the wan-faced women and wide-eyed little
children toiling across the way while she rests in her comfortable
bed. In most of the mills no intermission whatever is granted for rest
or food, and the people eat whenever they are hungriest, snatching a
morsel now and then as they tend their looms or watch their reels and
spindles. Formerly mothers brought their nursing babies to the mills,
and laid them at their feet while they worked, but this is no longer
permitted in the large mills. Some relative, it may be a grandmother,
carries the little one to the mother to nurse twice a day, in the
middle of the morning and again in the afternoon. Mothers who work at
night often draw from the breast before they leave home sufficient milk
to last the baby until they return in the morning.
All of the mills run their spinning department through the twenty-four
hours, but weaving can not be done as well at night, so the looms shut
down. One mill makes its day fourteen hours long. “And these little
children must stand and work all those hours?” asked a visitor of the
manager. “Yes,” and with a slight shrug of the shoulder, “rather hard
on them, isn’t it?” “But then you know how it is in the Chinese shops,”
he added, “they keep their apprentices at work often eighteen and
twenty hours on a stretch.”
The best mills no longer employ very young children, that is tots
of five and six. This is not so much in the interest of the children
as because the little ones are found to be more of a hindrance than
a help. But parents try to smuggle them in past the keen-eyed Sikh
policemen at the gate, who are kept busy at the times of shift driving
them out.
The hiring of women and girls is generally committed to Chinese
forewomen, who are responsible for keeping their full quota at
work. These women are usually shrewd and business-like, with a full
appreciation of the dignity of their position. One recently entered
the first class compartment of a tramcar. She wore the loose blue
gown, apron, and head cloth of the working people and when the Chinese
conductor came by he addressed her gruffly. “Old woman, you belong
in the third class. Get out of here.” “Why should I get out?” she
responded with spirit, “I have money to pay for a seat in the first
class.” The conductor changed his tone and manner at once, recognizing
a dominant personality behind the coarse clothes. “Pardon me, Madame,”
he said and meekly took the proffered coppers. The mills as a rule
give four holidays a month, though they are not always Sundays. Some
employees object to Sunday as a holiday as they say it brings bad luck.
The Chinese for so many centuries have been an agricultural race that
they do not take as kindly to mechanical labour as the Japanese, who
have long had industrial training in the schools and make at first
steadier, more dependable mill hands. Yet these patient, plodding
people, with almost unlimited endurance, are capable of being trained
to do the highest grade of work. The improvement of their material
condition is a crying need. Said the superintendent of one of the
foreign-owned mills: “I have been in this work in Shanghai now for
twenty years, and I hope I may not leave for home till I have seen the
employees in the mills better housed, fed, clothed, and educated. But
employers can not do this until the Chinese government enables them
to compete on better terms than at present with others in the cotton
market.” Mr. Nieh is making practical application of his philanthropic
principles in an effort to divide the twenty-four hours into three
shifts instead of two, and as fast as possible to dispense with child
labour, so that the boys may be free to enter the public school
which is being built on land donated by him near his mill. This same
generous-hearted man, who recently accepted the Christian faith, is
also planning for a girls’ school, a day nursery, and a hospital in the
mill district. Several years ago he and his wife, also a Christian,
threw open their beautiful private garden as a playground for street
children. When remonstrated with by their friends they replied
smilingly, “We feel it is selfish to enjoy it alone.” The recently
organized “Mill Owners Association of Shanghai” it is expected will
pave the way for concerted action in relation to needed reforms.
Although cotton is an exotic in China proper, silk is a native product.
More than four thousand years ago, in the dim, semi-prehistoric days,
China alone of all the countries in the world, understood the art
of sericulture. Again it was a woman to whom she was indebted, for
tradition has it that as early as 2600 B.C. the wife of the great
emperor Hwang-ti experimented with silk-worms and finally discovered
a way of unwinding the silk from the cocoons much in the same manner
that it is done now. This was a precious secret and China guarded it
jealously. But during the fifth century of the Christian era it leaked
out, as secrets often will, and lo, it was a woman who divulged it,
which is not as surprising a happening as might be. It fell out that
the Prince of Khotan in Chinese Turkestan wedded a Chinese princess,
and when the bride was being conducted to her new home, so the story
goes, she managed to carry with her, concealed in her headgear and at
the risk of her life, some seeds of the mulberry plant and eggs of the
silk-worm. Thus sericulture became known in Central Asia and later in
Europe. It is an interesting coincidence that while it was Khotan that
learned the art of silk manufacture from China, it was also Khotan that
furnished China with her first cotton seeds several centuries later. So
the debt was paid back in part.
Though China shared with the rest of the world the secret of
sericulture, yet up to within fifty years she possessed half the
world’s trade in silk. Then Japan outstripped her in the race and now
leads in silk production and export. It is generally admitted that this
would not have happened had the Chinese Government realized the value
of the silk industry sufficiently to foster it, abolish undue taxation,
and introduce scientific methods of sericulture. As it is, under
favouring conditions she may regain what she has lost, for the finest
cocoons are found in China, with a tenacity far beyond that of any
others. While there is not a province where silk-worms are not raised,
broadly speaking two-thirds of the silk produced in China comes from
the Yangtse valley and the country north of it, and the other third
from the south. Filature steam mills are of recent date. During long
centuries it was on crude hand reels that the delicate thread was spun,
and equally crude hand looms wove it into the exquisite fabrics so dear
to the heart of womankind. Even now there are no silk looms in China
run by machinery. All the weaving is done on hand looms. Their familiar
thud, thud is heard everywhere. As the traveller stops to look into one
of the small, smoke-blackened shops, where half a dozen people it may
be are busy with their shuttles, he marvels that textiles so rare and
beautiful can come forth from such an environment. Usually a city is
celebrated for some one kind of silk, or a province perhaps for two or
three hundred varieties.
It was not till 1882 that an unsuccessful attempt was made to start
a steam silk filature mill. Ten years later a few were in operation,
most of them under Chinese management. As in the case of cotton mills,
foreign capital was not invested largely in silk filatures till the
close of the war between China and Japan. By 1901 there were 28 mills
in Shanghai, the number being about the same to-day. The largest mill
in this early period employed 90 men, 630 women and 385 children. It
requires considerably less capital to launch a silk filature mill
than a cotton mill, but it is a more precarious venture. Cocoons must
be ordered at the time the eggs are hatched and put in cold storage,
but it is impossible to foretell what the market will be when they
are delivered nearly a year afterward. It is most desirable that the
filature mills be maintained, as their silk brings two or three times
the price of that spun on hand-looms, and the greater part of the gain
goes in wages to the employees.
Industrial conditions, in some respects, are rather better in the silk
filatures than in the cotton mills. The mills close down at night, not
for humanitarian reasons, however, but because the work can not be done
well after dark. Sundays are usually holidays. In some of the mills
work continues every other Sunday. Fifteen minutes are allowed in the
morning for breakfast and an hour at noon for dinner and rest. In at
least one of the Chinese mills mothers keep their nursing babies with
them, the tiny things lying all day on the floor at the mother’s feet.
They seldom cry. It seems as if they knew by instinct that they must
not. The lesson of patient endurance is learned early in China.