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 should become 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.
Cloisonne 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 the medicines 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 he sells, 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
Yamen, or official residence, of His Excellency.
Every Yamen 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 you to 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 Yamen 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 Excellency appeared 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 at it. 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 you would 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 Yamen 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!
V
SOWING THE WIND IN CHINA--SHANGHAI
In her 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 is whether 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 not do 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 and American. 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 and the 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 the quiet, 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
steamer leaves 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.
In the foreign settlement of Shanghai, and apart from the population of
the native city which adjoins it, there are, roughly, 450,000 Chinese who
have chosen to dwell in the territory and under the laws of the white men.
This population is not fixed, but fluctuates as the floating element comes
and goes; and everywhere that this floating element travels when out of
the city it leaves an impression--a story, a bit of gossip, an example of
the sharp dealing learned from the foreigner--of the manners, business
methods, and morals of Shanghai. The native newspapers comment frankly on
life and conditions in the great seaport, and their comments are reprinted
in the papers of the interior. Shanghai exerts a direct and
result-breeding influence on fifty to seventy-five million native minds,
and an indirect influence on all China. How many scores of fair-minded,
straightforward merchants, how many thousands of scattered missionaries
and teachers will it take, think you, to counteract that influence?
China, grappling with the problem of decay, fighting desperately against
an evil which the most nearly Christian of the Christian nations has
fastened on her, looks westward for enlightenment, and sees--Shanghai. And
Shanghai--well Shanghai plays the races and the roulette wheel, and
drinks, and forgets the sacred significance of marriage and the economic
importance of the home, and goes to the club, and except in casting up
profits gives never a thought to that vast, muttering populace that
waits--waits--for the day of the under-dog to come.