estimates--official, missionary, consular; and they disagree by thousands
and tens of thousands of tons. But it is known that where the delicate
poppy is reared, it demands and receives the best land. It thrives in the
rich river-bottoms. It has crowded out grain and vegetables wherever it
has spread, and has thus become a contributing factor to famines. Its
product, opium, has run over China like a black wave, leaving behind it a
misery, a darkness, a desolation that has struck even the Chinese, even
its victims, with horror. China has passed from misery to disaster. And as
if the laws of trade had chosen to turn capriciously from their inexorable
business and wreak a grim joke on a prostrate race, the solution, the
great step, has failed in its purpose. The trade in Indian opium has been
hurt, to be sure, but not supplanted. It will never be supplanted until
the British government deliberately puts it down. For the Chinese cannot
raise opium which competes in quality with the Indian drug. Indian opium
is in steady demand for the purpose of mixing with Chinese opium. No
duties can keep it out; duties simply increase the cost to the Chinese
consumer, simply ruin him a bit more rapidly. So authoritative an expert
as Sir Robert Hart, director of the Chinese imperial customs, had hoped
that the great step would prove effective. In "These from the Land of
Sinim" he has expressed his hope:
"Your legalized opium has been a cure in every province it penetrates, and
your refusal to limit or decrease the import has forced us to attempt a
dangerous remedy--legalized native opium--not because we approve of it,
but to compete with and drive out the foreign drug; and it is expelling
it, and when we have only the native production to deal with, and thus
have the business in our own hands, we hope to stop the habit in our own
way."
The great step has failed. Indian opium has not been expelled. For the
Chinese to put down the native drug without stopping the import is
impossible as well as useless. The Chinese seem determined, in one way or
another, to put down both. Once, again, after a weary century of struggle,
they have approached the British government. Once again the British
government has been driven from the Scylla of healthy Anglo-Saxon moral
indignation to the Charybdis behind that illuminating phrase--"India needs
the money." Twenty million dollars is a good deal of money. The balance
sheet reigns; and the balance sheet is an exacting ruler, even if it has
triumphed over common decency, over common morality, over common humanity.
* * * * *
Will you ride with me (by rickshaw) along the International Bund at
Shanghai--beyond the German Club and the Hongkong Bank--over the little
bridge that leads to Frenchtown--past a half mile of warehouses and
chanting coolies and big yellow Hankow steamers--until we turn out on the
French Bund? It is a raw, cloudy, March morning; the vendors of queer
edibles who line the curbing find it warmer to keep their hands inside
their quilted sleeves.
[Illustration: AN OPIUM RECEIVING SHIP OR "GODOWN" AT SHANGHAI The
Imported Indian Opium is Stored in These Ships Until it Passes the Chinese
Imperial Customs]
[Illustration: 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.
III
A GLIMPSE INTO AN OPIUM PROVINCE
The opium 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, attaches, 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 the _Grand Hotel des Wagon-lits_, and went out there.
[Illustration: THE VILLAGES WERE LITTLE MORE THAN HEAPS OF RUINS These
Holes in the Ground are Occupied by Formerly Well-to-do Opium Smokers]
[Illustration: AT LAST HE CRAWLS OUT ON THE HIGHWAY, WHINING, CHATTERING
AND 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 heap of 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 in China 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." The missionaries, 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 commercial _attache_ and 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 London
_Times_, 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 physical disaster, 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 interviews
which 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. The full-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 and old 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 went into one of the hovels and found
little potatoes, perhaps one-half an inch across, frozen, and all strewn
over the _kang_ (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 the
evening, 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 itself on 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 diarrhoea
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, diarrhoea, 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, most commonly of diarrhoea
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 of many 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
of ruins. 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.
[Illustration: WRECK AND RUIN IN CHINA These Houses were Torn Down by
their Owners, the Woodwork and Bricks Sold, and the Money Used to Purchase
Opium]
IV
CHINA'S SINCERITY
China is 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 our directories--Theodore Roosevelt would be
Roosevelt Theodore in China, Uncle Sam would be Sam Uncle; where fractions
are written upside down, as 8/5, not 5/8; 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.