one’s neighbors leave one alone, not by the degree one is bothered
with the repeated visits of neighbors, as is the fashion in the
more intrusive Occident. The Chinese illustrate this characteristic
by building a high wall around the clustered buildings of the
home-compound. As a rule, the Chinese rent not; they move not. They
build a time-bronzed, indestructible home, even if it be as simple as
one rough rock laid across two age-silvered boulders. Generations,
down the ages, flow and follow there, as wave follows wave down the
steps of the waterfall. What is the result? A personal fame, heroism
of faith, a love, a depth, a beauty, in none of which our Western life
can offer an equal joy or strength. The Oriental, never having dropped
the extinguished lamp of memory from his hand, is able to follow the
path of history with intensity, satisfaction and certainty, while we
of the West, having no similar assurance, wander the fields of the
earth, unsatisfied still, where our individual name may be carved
with permanence. What hate pursues us? What fate awaits us? It is the
saddest sign in our psychological organization. If we intend to remain
great, we must end this _renting_ of scooped holes in cave apartments,
scatter our big cities into smaller ones, spread out on the land and
give every man a home of his own, and a strong enough one to leave
through the ages to his great-grandson. This is the Chinese way; it
is the only true way, as witness their six thousand years of certain
history, while they take care to-day of four times our population. The
custom of sheltering the families of sons and grandsons within one
patriarchal compound is truly Asian. It is described by Homer in the
sixth book of _The Iliad_ as obtaining in the home of Priam, King of
Troy, B. C. 2500. At New-year time, in Fukien province, all the family
join hands around a brazier which is smoking on a table, to signify the
unity of the family around a common hearth.
The Chinese make a stew of chicken, ginger, lettuce and cucumbers, or
vegetable marrow, and it is very good. Beans are soaked in water and
allowed to sprout before being pickled, or boiled in sugar. Salutes
at feasts are sometimes made in the German fashion by raising the
wine (samshu) cup to the eyes before drinking. The Chinese mix rice,
nuts, flour, fruit and seed in their candies, and their cakes are
highly colored and made very sweet. Where the Germans use vinegar and
salt as a preservative, the Chinese use sugar, and the results, while
surprising, are often delightful. Partly as revealing the sumptuous
table which it is now possible to set at Hongkong or Shanghai, or
Tientsin, and partly to show to what gastronomic heights the treaty
port Chinese rise, I quote the menu of the Wah On Kwong Association, or
Guild, served at one of the Hongkong hotels by Chinese stewards:
Queen olives Caviare on toast
Bird’s Nest soup Chicken soup Fungus soup
Garoupa, shrimp sauce Boiled shark steak
Fillet of beef (Champignon sauce)
Chicken compote Stewed sharks’ fins
Pigeon gelatine Pâté de foie gras en Aspic
Beche de Mer Fried frogs’ legs
Roast saddle of Queensland mutton with jelly
Roast ribs of sirloin of Queensland beef
Roast Kwangtung turkey Boiled fowl
Singapore pine apple Hankau ham Potatoes
Peas Vegetable marrow Salad
Asparagus, olive oil sauce
Victoria pudding Chartreuse jelly
Cakes Mango ice cream
Preserved ginger Small oranges Chinese nuts
Coffee European wines
Lucien Rozet Cliquot Heidsieck Chateau Larose
Medoc Manzanilla Marsala
The iron pans that come from Shansi province are made as thin as
possible so as to economize fuel; indeed, as light fuel as grass and
stalks is used. The kitchen god is Chang Kung, and he was given this
office because “nine generations peacefully inhabited the same compound
when he lived on earth.” As pigs, ducks and geese are driven long
distances to market, little straw sandals are woven for their feet.
This one sometimes sees in Southern France when the frugal peasant is
competing with local railway rates!
An official asked a mannerly subordinate which way he was walking
home, and the latter replied: “Your way, sir.” The same official,
discussing a subject said to the subordinate: “Say what you think.” The
subordinate, who was a good party politician even in China, replied: “I
think what you say.” Some of their proverbs on daily life are:
“Wine will not drown sorrow.”
“The flattering tongue wants to fill its pocket.”
“The pot is as strong as its thinnest spot; the chain is as strong as
its weakest ring.”
“Don’t ask your thirsty visitor if he will have tea, because if he is
mannerly he will say, ‘Don’t trouble yourself’; just draw the tea for
him.”
“It’s always the good climber that falls from the top of the tree.”
“Those best find to-day who plan each to-morrow.”
“To-morrow’s always harder before you get to it.”
“A word is fleeter than a gale.”
“The widest field has some one listening at the edge.”
“A grape well chewed is better than a sweet potato swallowed whole.”
“Room in the heart makes room in the house.”
“Because you feel merry, there’s no need to dance when you are on a
horse’s back or in a small boat.”
“Sacrifice one sheep to capture the tiger and save the other sheep.”
“Even honey is not sweet at the end of the meal.”
“A fat cat never got all his food at home.”
“Tightening your drumhead is as good as enlarging your stick.”
“A blind fox catches only a dead fowl.”
XXVI
CLIMATE, DISEASE AND HYGIENE
In the last two years China has surprised the world by carrying out
her agreement to extirpate quickly opium smoking and poppy growing.
It is the most spectacular abatement of a gigantic nuisance that the
world has known. Among the heroes of the reform was Lin Ping Chang, a
grandson of the famous Commissioner Lin who destroyed the chests of
opium at Canton and brought on the war with Britain in 1840. Heredity
obtains in China! It would have taken England and America possibly
fifty years to bring about an equal reform in personal habits, but
the Chinese have for 3,500 years been the most obedient people to
government in the world, “Filial Piety” being the eminent principle of
the religious, social and political life. The good work is going on
apace, and Hongkong and India, thanks to the noble altruism of Lord
Morley, Sir E. Grey, Mr. Asquith and Lloyd George, are with good grace
swallowing the bitter pill of loss of revenue from this lucrative
trade. It was a great victory for religion over commerce, and the
latter died hard, for unregulated commerce is anything but a moralist
at heart. The humanitarian sentiment in Britain, America and China won
over money. Britain in her parliament _Blue Books_ used to say: “Opium
is a legitimate article of trade and a vested right that China is
unable to attack.” To-day John Morley speaks of Britain’s “humanitarian
duty.” Persian opium, which is much denser in morphia than is the
Indian, still comes to Hongkong for Formosa. This is the opium of which
Herodotus in 430 B. C. amusingly wrote as follows, his imagination
supplying his facts: “Though it comes from a most stinking place, it is
itself most fragrant. It is found sticking like gum to the beards of
he-goats, which collect it from the woods.”
Now Japan should obey the humanitarian sentiment of the world, and
stamp out opium in her Formosan colony. The opium conferences at
Shanghai in 1909 and the Hague in 1911, called by America and presided
over by the American, Bishop Brent, have produced wonderful results.
It now remains for the western nations to emulate China’s example and
stamp out morphia. China could well come back at America and say: “What
are _you_ going to do about morphine and hypodermic syringes? You
import yearly 500,000 pounds of opium, and you use only 70,000 pounds
in medicine. As far as morphine goes you are more ‘doped’ than all
the nations combined. You import 200,000 ounces of cocaine each year,
of which only 15,000 ounces are used in medicine.” The exportation of
India opium will cease in 1918, and China will have ceased to grow the
poppy this year. In the heat of the debates in England, Eric Lewis, a
Welsh supporter of Lloyd George’s, proposed that England should buy
all the opium in India, like the famous Chinese Commissioner Lin of
Canton, dump it in the sea, and indemnify by a loan of $40,000,000 the
poppy growers of Bengal. Now let us cease to criticize Britain, for if
she grossly sinned, she has repented and made amends, as could now be
expected of a Britain which has recently established national pensions
for her aged, and brought her educational extension, employers’
liability and land taxation up to the mark set by America.
So thoroughly successful was the Chinese government in restricting the
planting of the poppy even in distant Yunnan province, that in 1911 the
passenger earnings of the new French railway from Haiphong to Yunnan
were greater, because men fed on maize, instead of diseased by opium,
are both strong and wealthy enough to travel. Maize succeeded the
poppy. When China was attacking the use of opium in the mandarinate,
one official wrote to the Board of Constitutional Reform: “His Majesty
can send me the silver cord (for suicide by strangulation) but I _can
not_ give up opium.” They did give it up, for an opium smoker was
denied his right to plead in court, and his office was taken from him.
At plowing time, revenue officers were sent into Yunnan, Szechuen and
other poppy provinces, to see that poppy seed was not sown. The opium
cure, which is either swallowed or administered hypodermically, is
given the patient at the same time the drug is, and if his stomach only
was concerned, he is so nauseated that in five days he will give up the
indulgence. The cure contains fifteen per cent. tincture belladona,
fluid extract of prickly ash (xanthoxylum), and fluid extract of
hyoscyamus. Another cure includes iron, coffee, quinine, strychnine,
gentian and capsicum, with temporary injections of morphine in cases
of collapse. In a former book, _The Chinese_, I affirmed that China
and India could soon economically recover from the prohibition of
opium planting if the same attention were directed to other fields. I
shall instance Yunnan alone. In the first year of the prohibition the
province suffered. In 1910 and 1911 the increase in silver, copper and
tin mining, and maize cultivation had alone reimbursed Yunnan for all
her loss of opium revenues, and a sobered people realized that they
were even then only beginning to find their energies for legitimate
enrichment. The burning of pipes continues in China. In _The Chinese_
I related some dramatic occurrences in Shanghai. In September, 1911,
Chinese gathered on the athletic field of the Tientsin Y. M. C. A. and
burned 100,000 opium pipes, and at Yunnan City, under the auspices of
Governor Li Chin Hsi, a great burning was held on the parade ground of
the arsenal; the new military, the police and bands attending to add
éclat to the function.
Doctor Buchanan, of India, has discovered that cats are immune to
China’s curse, bubonic plague, and that they can safely destroy the
rats which carry the germs. But cats and dogs indulge in fleas, and
the flea is as busy in transporting the plague germ as are the rats.
Poison and traps are the things to use against rats, and cats and
dogs should be asked to retire, too, until China cleans herself up
a bit, when she can probably safely indulge in bench shows of her
famous chow and Pekingese dogs! Even the fur marmot has been asked to
go, since the pneumonic plague epidemic in Manchuria in the winter
of 1910. That awful epidemic revealed a new scourge, even worse than
bubonic, to the startled world. Bubonic thrives in dampness in the
south in summer time. Pneumonic thrives in indoor winter conditions.
America was represented on the field by Doctor R. P. Strong, of Manila,
Doctors Aspland and Stenhouse, and the medical missionaries Sinclair,
Gibb and Mary Ogden; Japan by Doctor Kitasato, who discovered the
bubonic bacillus at Hongkong in 1894; Russia by Doctor Haffkine and
Doctor Zabolothy; China by Doctor Wu Lien Teh; England by Doctor A. F.
Jackson, who fell a martyr, to the great grief of all China; Scotland
by Doctor Ross, of Mukden. Though no victim recovers, the germ can not
live outside in dry air. The doctors and sanitary corps, inoculated
with Yersin serum, or Haffkine’s or Kitasato’s prophylactic lymph, at
once equipped themselves with masks and surtouts, and the scene was
one which Manzoni might have novelized. Often dying men were seen to
struggle up to the pile of bodies among which were their fathers, bow
low in filial, Confucian ancestor worship, even to pour out libations
and present sacrifice, and then join the heap in a delirious death
agony. Such a tragic attitude could be possible only in a land of
ancestor worship.
Kingslake, in _Eothen_, describes the quarantined city of Cairo in
1835, when a thousand deaths a day occurred until the terrorized
population hated the name death, and called it with bated breath
“another accident”. I have been through similar nerve-racking
experiences in the plague centers of China, the mentioning of death
and cemeteries being tabooed from polite conversation, though hundreds
were falling. Kingslake’s description is graphic. He went to the only
European physician in the city, and found him wrapped up, suffering
from the plague. The heroic man prescribed for Kingslake. Later,
thinking that he might have recovered, Kingslake sent his servant to
ask the physician to call. “Did you meet him?” The servant replied:
“Yes, I met him coming out of his house,--on his bier!” In the
tenth chapter of _Eothen_, Kingslake recites how the plague in 1835
ruthlessly struck down the brave brothers of the Franciscan monastery
in holy Jerusalem. One quarantined member went on his priestly duty to
the stricken city. On his return to the pest-house, he rang a bell as a
signal that he still lived, and was carrying on the martyr’s work over
the paths that Christ himself trod. When the bell ceased ringing, a new
brother went forth to bury the martyr, and take up his duties which
could only also lead to death.
In 1720, Belsunce, the hero Bishop of Marseilles, seemed alone to
breathe pure air and handle pure food as he moved among the infected
who to the number of 50,000 dropped at his feet. Infection comes
from indoor breathing, direct, or from sputum. Banish dirt, darkness
and foul air, and both bubonics at once commit suicide or die of
starvation. The pneumonic, it will be recalled, swept from Harbin to
Newchwang, and held Europe in terror that it would take the Siberian
goods train westward for St. Petersburg and Berlin. Thirty European
doctors and nurses were martyrs, most of them Russians. The Chinese
permitted what they have never permitted before, the cremation of the
dead, and the segregation of suspects in detention camps. At Harbin
alone there were 1,200 deaths, the dead being cremated in the brick
kilns. If heroic members of any legation staff should be given honors
for the Peking campaign against plague in 1911, there are 20,000
veterans of Hongkong and South China who should be clothed in a coat of
medals for plague dangers they never thought of talking about, except
to say with their guest Kipling that “it was all in the day’s work”. I
have seen the foreign police, soldiers, sanitary corps and volunteers
of Hongkong and Canton tackle multitudinous dangers in epidemics with
all the éclat of a football game, and the men of Bombay regularly
do the same thing. Because of the legations and press bureaus, the
foreigner in North China, God bless him, is much better advertised than
is the foreigner of South China and India. India had one Kipling; South
China is looking for hers!
In a former volume I have instanced some surprising appearances of
bubonic plague in Europe. In September, 1910, a girl, her father,
mother and nurse, died successively under mysterious conditions at
Preston, Suffolk, England. It was later noticed that the rats in the
neighborhood were dying. Examination showed that the black plague
was the cause, and the supposition is that the disease was imported
in grain received from Odessa, Russia, and that the germs developed
under conditions of damp, dirt and darkness. In 1902, Odessa, Russia,
reported a plague case in the house of a baker. In August, 1910, plague
was recrudescent there in the very same house, showing that the bubonic
plague germs had lived eight years. The ineffective measures of the
authorities to destroy the rats caused the spread of the last-mentioned
epidemic. World campaigns against rats will doubtless now occur from
time to time, as insurance companies have taken up the study of the
subject.
Abattoir and market laws calling for foreign supervision and veterinary
inspection were first instituted by Hongkong, and Singapore, Shanghai,
Tientsin, Saigon, Manila, and Tsingtau followed in about the order
named. Partial inspection is exercised at Canton, Hankau, Newchwang,
Peking and other cities. It is one of the things China must and will
soon take hold of, for Sun Yat Sen (Sunyacius) who has done so much
for Chinese reform, is himself a modern physician and has always
lived in foreign or treaty ports. In connection with this, China will
improve her cattle, which are of the wild, buffalo-humped variety,
with an excess of bone. Her Hankau and Manchurian black, as well as
the Kwangtung white, pigs are now going to Liverpool, London, Glasgow
and Bremen. It is wonderful that populous China can be an exporter of
meat to Europe. It shows two things: that living in America and Europe
is too high, and that return freights are too low. China centuries ago
instituted pure food laws, preceding Germany, Britain and America. They
did not go far of course, but they showed the germinative idea. The
guild or manufacturer was glad to stamp biscuit or ink-stick, and the
food purveyor placed a red stamp on his dried duck, fish, or vermicelli
package, the stamp standing for purity or inferiority according to the
reputation of the packer.
Every reader has sympathized with the heroic General Roberts who in
his book, _Forty-One Years in India_, tells of a sunstroke which he
suffered in the heat of the tropics. The great heat and humidity
are likely to produce, certainly in those who use stimulants, drugs
or much meat, anaemia or acidulation of the blood, with persistent
auto-intoxication, and the resulting torture of constantly reeling
under the heat can be imagined. The Chinese are up at daylight, and
most active in the cooler part of the day. The Chinese skull, because
of the lifelong habit of shaving the head under the Manchu régime,
grows thicker than the European’s skull, and the former, therefore, are
better able to resist the equatorial sun. Herodotus pointed out that
the ancient Egyptians, for the same reason, resisted the sun better
than the Persians, who accustomed themselves to head-coverings from
childhood. The Chinese emperor and the mandarins gave their audiences
at dawn. It will be recalled that Cicero, when governor of Asiatic
Cicilia, admitted the crowds of complainants to his popular court at
daylight, so as to use the hot midday for retirement from the heat.
At Hongkong, where, hot as it is, exercise is imperative, we used to
rise at daylight and rush to the golf, tennis and riding courses for an
hour’s play, and this unusual sight would induce you to say that it was
not so luxurious a colony as the sumptuous club life of the later day
would possibly make it appear to be.
The bar in an Oriental club is eloquent of the fact that you are in
the malarial East, for among the popular bottles is the one containing
quinine-sulphate powder, and the veterans seem able to judge what is a
proper dose to take out with a spoon to mix with their sherry as they
salute and say: “Here’s how,” or “The king.”
South China is kind to the man who suffers from heat. Knowing that he
is coolest who can throw away his flesh and move in his bare bones,
she provides a damp hot climate that reduces men to the appearance of
trained thoroughbreds! There they walk, the thinnest foreigners of the
Far East, the Hongkong, Manila, Saigon, Shanghai and Canton men! They
have been boiled down almost to their backbones and skulls from March
until November, and there being no tissue to feed, the blood can all go
to building up the gray matter! Although black focuses the actinic rays
of the overhead equatorial sun, and a body feels twenty degrees more
of heat than when covered with white, the British courts of Hongkong
insist on the formal garb of Lincoln’s Inn, a black coat and gown. Pity
the barristers and judges of Hongkong who delve into the law and weigh
out justice in the stifling atmosphere of the magnificent courts of the
illustrious Crown colony. The almost naked, or duck-covered criminal,
bracing up for his sentence, shows fewer beads on his perspiring brow
than do his learned accusers! “Inflexible” is not a more famous name in
the British navy than in the British legal and colonial service.
The Americans in Manila, the French in Saigon, and the republican
Chinese, however, are listening to the dictates of hygiene rather than
to the long sonorous trump of tradition. In the American cavalry in
the tropics it is found that the imported white animals are immune to
the heat, whereas the darker breeds soon die. Southern Tibet is coming
nearer to the railhead with its wonderful climate for the enervated
of the whole East. India, Tonquin and China are sending on their
construction gangs, and the day is not so far off when the veil at the
8,000 feet passes, which has hid the last withheld land, will be rent
in twain. The two men who have done the most to break down the forts
of exclusion are Sir Francis, Colonel Younghusband, for the Indian
government, and the Chinese general, Chao Ehr Feng, who in 1910 also
broke up the Buddhist superstitious system by driving the Dalai Lama
(their pope) for the first time into unholy foreign soil at Darjeeling.
Twenty miles south of Chungking, in the sublime valley of Wen Tang, is
a famous hot sulphur bath cut in the rock. The flow is generous, and
the Buddhist priests have divided the bath so that men and women may
use it. They make no charge for the use of the water, but they charge
for inn service. Before many years many foreigners will resort here, as
the bathing is beautifully clean.
A remarkable thing about China is the comparative absence of flies,
because manure and refuse is so important as a fertilizer that it
is immediately carried to the intensively farmed fields, which are
expected to produce two to three harvests a year. Therefore typhoid
and other diseases are not as prevalent as they otherwise would be.
However, a whisper in your ear, reader: if China lacks in flies, she
abounds in “bunkies,” which is the polite name for fleas! Nature abhors
a vacuum and always provides for the deficiency in one field from the
surplus in another! To have real safety in a Chinese inn, one needs to
go to bed in a Peary suit, furnished with a diver’s helmet. This is
never done, however, because of the heat. Cold weather only increases
the torture, for the pauper “bunkie,” small as he is, successfully
races to the heated kang faster than the paying guest! As the Chinese
masses use no liquor, tobacco or drugs, and live an outdoor life on
vegetable food mainly, their hearts are in splendid condition, and all
the hospital surgeons report remarkable recoveries when an accident has
made operations necessary. The race seems to have that old aboriginal
fortitude of not fearing the knife or wincing under pain. They have
no idea of the danger of infection by contact, the rich being as
ill-informed as the poor. Wet towels, wrung out in the same hot water,
are for refreshment rubbed over the hands, face and neck of every one
at a feast. A governor’s pipe is first lighted and puffed for him by a
miserable attendant, the governor merely wiping the mouthpiece dry with
his hand or long sleeve, the custom being to cut out a soiled sleeve
and substitute a new sleeve so as to save the splendid garment.