AN OPIUM DEN IN SHANGHAI
THERE are two Shanghais. New Shanghai is under the control of three
Western powers. Over one section of it floats the French Tricolour; over
another part waves the Stars and Stripes of the United States; above the
third flies the Union Jack. The Chinese who live in New Shanghai are
more or less Europeanised; they speak “pidgen” English or a quaint
burlesque French. They adapt themselves to their pale neighbours—in
many ways, I have eaten in Shanghai with a Chinaman who was deft in his
use of knife and fork. The opium “joints” of New Shanghai are not
typical Chinese opium houses any more than if they were in “China-town”
in San Francisco or in Melbourne. They are so modified for the
convenience of their European habitués that, at the most, they are but
half Mongolian.
In Old Shanghai it is all very different. Drive a few miles—a very
few—from the luxurious European Club; leave your carriage when you come
to a bamboo bridge it may not cross; pass over that bridge; go through
the gate-way of the old city wall; and you are in China!—real
China!—old China, where ancient customs hold their own; where nothing
changes. You pass through that gate by sufferance. Don’t swagger down
those dirty narrow streets. The flag that tops your consulate casts no
protecting shadow here.
At night, Old Shanghai is shut to Europeans. But we went there one
night, armed with especial permission, and escorted by three
white-button mandarins; and, perhaps I ought to add, forbidden by our
Consul.
[Illustration: CITY WALL, OLD SHANGHAI. _Page 112._]
We saw several opium dens. They varied in their degrees of luxury, but
they were all alike in being vastly unlike anything we had seen in New
Shanghai or in Occidental “China-towns.”
In the humblest of the “joints” we visited in Old Shanghai, on trestles,
some made of wood, some made of bamboo, lay long boards; every alternate
trestle was higher than those next it; this made an incline. The smokers
lay on these inclined boards, their heads at the higher ends, their feet
at the lower; under their heads were hard, small, native pillows; and
between each two smokers was placed a small bamboo cabinet that held the
_impedimenta_ of their dissipation.
Is opium smoking a dissipation? Yes—if it is smoked to excess, and at
the wrong time. But I have lived too long in the East not to feel that
opium has a place—an essential place—in the economy of the Orient.
That we should wean Asia from the use of opium is impossible; that we
are trying, is preposterous; worst of all, we are making ourselves
ridiculous.
The opium den was quiet and decorous. The air was heavy with a peculiar,
pleasant sweetness. The smokers were in different stages of the opium
pleasure; but they were all well-behaved and inoffensive. Would they
have been so had whisky been the form of their indulgence? In a few
hours they would resume the heavy burdens of their poverty-stricken
lives, rested but not enervated. Gin would not have left them so
unharmed!
The outer room, through which we had passed, was of course devoted to
gambling. The Chinaman stimulates his intellect as much by his incessant
playing of intricate games of chance as he stupefies it by his frequent
use of opium.
I have been asked if Chinese women smoke. I believe that they do,—very
much as European women smoke. Their smoking of opium is by no means
universal, nor do they smoke it to excess, nor in its strength. When the
feet of the small-footed women are being bound, I believe that they use
opium rather more than at other times.
That the national use of opium has not dulled the national intellect
must be the testimony of every truthful European who has ever tried to
get the better, in a bargain, of a Chinese man, woman, or child. That
the national use of opium has undermined the national health surely will
be said by no one who has gone through China with eyes half open.
As we drove home, I felt that we had in no way been “slumming”; but
rather that we had been peeping at the interesting real life of a
wonderful people.
Our Consul gave us marrow-bones for supper, and said to me—“You will
burrow once too often into the bowels of the Orient”; but I never did.
I know nothing of the great international issues staked upon England’s
ultimate answer to the Opium Question. I am too lazy (or too wise) to
attempt the quick solving of a problem that has baffled many a wise man
throughout a lifetime. But I know something of the human interests at
stake; and humanitarianism is so much more than internationalism that I
venture to speak _re_ this well-worn subject.
Opium has been a great blessing to Asia, and is so now. True, it is
sometimes used to excess in the East. Here, I have known Englishmen to
make themselves very ill by over-consumption of roast beef and Yorkshire
pudding; Italian noblemen have grown gross from repeated over-feeds of
macaroni; Italian peasants have become disgustingly fat on black bread
and garlic.
Some Chinamen, some Indians, use too much opium; but (we must bear in
mind the enormous populations of both countries) they are the
exceptions, not the rule. The people of the East are naturally moderate.
They are languid, and languor does nothing to excess. In India, in the
Straits Settlements, or in China, a coolie goes bravely to work, after
an enormous meal of rice and curry. Curry is a positive stimulant, a
non-intoxicant stimulant! After some hours the coolie feels a little
less like work; but his work is not half done. He thrusts his hand into
one of the many mysterious recesses of his dirty loin cloth; he draws
forth a yellowish ball, about the size of a wickedly big pill. It is not
opium, but it contains opium. He thrusts it beneath his tongue. He does
not grow sleepy; he does not grow momentarily less intelligent; but his
work grows lighter. His evening-rice does not seem so sadly far off. The
opium ball (ball tinged with opium, to speak correctly rather than
colloquially)—the opium ball has made his flesh as strong temporarily
as his patient Oriental spirit is always willing. The effect of the
opium passes away. His work is over. His curry and rice is ready. He
goes home to it, and to his gentle, meek, contented womankind, no jot
the worse for his little indulgence. Had he worked on with tingling
nerves, and trembling limbs, and craving stomach, he would have been in
a miserable state physically.
Again, I acknowledge that the people of the East sometimes take opium in
injurious and disgraceful quantities, but they are an infinitesimal
proportion. Here in Europe people occasionally select the pleasantest
means of committing suicide, and lull themselves into eternal slumber
with chloroform. For their silly sakes (I might say brave sakes, did I
care to deal with two controversies at once)—for their sakes shall we
do away with chloroform, and make the operating rooms of our hospitals
the hells of horrors they were sixty years ago?
It has often been in my heart to advocate the moderate use of opium for
our own working classes. I have not done so for three reasons. In the
first place I am an unknown woman with an unestablished pen. Who would
listen to me merely because I love Asia and wish Europe well? Secondly,
I am a moral coward; I shrink from the contumely of my own people. Last
of all, and most of all, I doubt if our poor could be so trusted, as can
the people of the Orient, with a drug which is blessing or curse as it
is wisely or unwisely used. Self-denial has become by long usage second
nature to the children of the East. Our Anglo-Saxon poor drain their
pewter mugs to the dregs.
The other day at the British Museum, when searching for exact and
reliable information on a nice point of Oriental law, I had the
misfortune to come across a maudlin book written by a missionary. I
condemn the book, not because of its author’s calling, but because it
was written in a narrow spirit, and in dense ignorance of the subject
embodied in its title. Among other things calculated to rather startle
one who knows the East and loves it, the writer gravely proposed that we
should subjugate “wicked China” by influencing the Chinese to a much
larger use of opium. In Europe the victims of nameless crimes are
sometimes drugged into drunken acquiescence; but I am sure that most
Christians would advocate a conversion of the heathen more intelligently
voluntary on the part of the converts.
Let us speak the truth about Asia or be silent; let us be just to India
at least. There are many subjects vitally important to Her Majesty’s
brown people, subjects intimately connected with their home lives and
their physical well-being, of which most of us know nothing. If we are
too indolent or too indifferent to inform ourselves on those subjects in
the only adequate way—I mean by a long, studious, and sympathetic
residence in India—why then, in the great name of humanity and the name
of Anglo-Saxon justice, let us leave bad enough alone.
There are two classes of men who should not be allowed to write, or at
all events to print. In our profession we always know that a company has
fallen upon very hard times indeed when His Majesty the stage manager is
cast for a part. There are analogous reasons and as strong why an editor
should never dip his pen into the ink-filled well save to write,
“Returned with thanks,” or “Please reduce this charming article from
three columns to one.”
_Re_ writing editors, I have said as much as I dare. “_Re_ writing”
missionaries, please let me speak. Why are they missionaries? What do
they as missionaries accomplish? I have not devoted enough time to
either question, nor have I asked those questions with enough sympathy,
to feel justified in answering. The nineteenth century must work out its
own salvation if it can, and the overplus of Anglo-Saxon population must
find relief and breathing room in many a foreign clime, and through the
channel of many a debatable occupation.
I am dumb before the mass of missionaries and the missionary question.
But against the missionaries who write, not narrow tracts, but
unnecessary and incorrect essays on Eastern peoples and customs, I now
and here wage war.
A missionary goes to Asia, perhaps to sacrifice his life, perhaps to
better his condition. In one thing at least he is sincere—in his
condemnation of the religions of the East. Of these religions he knows
nothing; but the missionary is not perhaps quite so unreasonable as he
appears, for he expects the “native” to accept Christianity as blindly
and as ignorantly as he himself condemns Buddhism, Confucianism, and a
hundred other creeds of which he does not even know the names. I do not
blame the missionary; we all think as keenly as we can, and our thought
is only limited by our circumstances and our capacity.
My quarrel with the missionary is a personal one. I protest against his
ignorance of modes Oriental being perpetuated in type.
I am reading now in the British Museum,—reading to increase my
knowledge of the hemisphere I love. I select from the catalogue thirteen
books. I go to my seat, the books are brought; twelve are written by
missionaries, and they abound in statements so preposterously inaccurate
that even my partial information balks at them.
The man who devotes his life to the study of microbes does not attempt,
when he retires from active practice, to crown his life’s work by
writing an exhaustive treatise on the Law of Evidence. A great Q.C.
rarely spends his old age in the authorship of a book on hip-disease. We
live in an age of specialists; but the missionary, at least the literary
missionary, is a man apart,—he deals in generalities, and they don’t
even glitter.
I came across a book the other day, or rather it came across me. It had
been written by a most estimable man, and it was a most wonderful and
ingenious jumble of lapidarian lore, of geological research, and of the
history of Christianity in Ceylon. It was a book supremely calculated to
exasperate an enthusiastic lapidarian who was indifferent to things
sacred; but then, of course, such a man requires exasperating. But it
occurred to me that it might be equally calculated to embarrass and
puzzle the devout reader who was more religiously minded than generally
well-informed.
I am not jibing at missionaries. Some of the most charming people that I
have met in India were missionaries; and though we radically differed in
much that was to them of the first importance, I found every cause to
respect their intelligence, their mentalities, and their lives.
I spent a good deal of time in the Leper Asylum at Subathu, and learned
a vast deal from the missionary in charge of it, and from his wife. What
a book of intense interest they could write!—for I am sure that they
have too much character to write about what they do not understand; I am
sure that they have too much literary good taste to make a heterogeneous
mixture of theology and irrelevant Orientalism. They both write well,
for I have had charming letters from them both.
But the literary missionary _per se_—the man who knows superficially
one thing and writes books about everything—he ought to be
extinguished.