true. The concession is wholly taken up with British shops and British
homes, and there is no room for Chinese residents. The German concession
had so few natives that it closed some of its dens and took what credit it
could. The Japanese quietly put on the lid. But all the other concessions
remained "wide open."
So ran the Peking gossip. It seemed to me worth while to follow it up; for
if it should prove true that the concessions were actually profiting, like
Shanghai, by the native prohibition, that fact would be significant. It
would leave little to say for the representatives of foreign civilization
in China.
There was a particular reason why the prohibition should be made
effective in and about Tientsin. The one official who stood before his
country and the world as the anti-opium leader, who personified, in fact,
the reform spirit which is leavening the Chinese mass, was Yuan Shi K'ai,
the Northern viceroy. Tientsin was his viceregal capital. Before he could
hope to convince the cynical observers of Britain and Europe that the
anti-opium crusade was really on, he had to make good in his own city.
Yuan Shi K'ai is a remarkable man. Unlike some of his colleagues who have
travelled and studied abroad, he has never, I believe, been over the sea;
yet no Chinese official shows a firmer grasp on his biggest and most
bewildering of the world's governmental problems. Practically a self-made
man (his father was a soldier), he worked up from rank to rank, himself a
part and a product of the antiquated absolutism of his country, until he
emerged at the top, a red-button mandarin, a viceroy, with a personality
towering above the superstitious, tradition-ridden court, and yet
sufficiently able and skillful to work with and through that court. We
have seen, in an earlier chapter, how Yuan, then a governor, kept Shantung
Province quiet during the Boxer outbreak. It is he who is building up the
"new army" with the aid of German and Japanese drill-masters. It is he who
succeeded in introducing the study of modern science into the education of
the official classes. He is committed to the abolition of the palace
eunuch system. He has, during the past year, made great headway with his
bold plan to remodel this land of fossilized ideas into a constitutional
monarchy, with a representative parliament. But first, and above all else,
he places the opium reforms. Unless this curse can be checked, and at
least partially removed, there is no hope of progress.
Throughout this magnificent struggle for a new China, Viceroy Yuan has
radically opposed the very spirit and genius of his race; but far from
ostracizing himself or splitting the government, he has grown steadily in
power and influence, until now, as a sort of prime minister, he appears to
hold the substance of imperial authority in his hands. Try to imagine a
self-made, reform politician outwitting and beating down the traditions of
Tammany Hall in New York City, multiply his difficulties by a thousand or
two, and you will perhaps have some notion of the sheer ability of this
great man, who has risen above the traditions, even above the age-old
prejudices of his own people. There are many Europeans in his
retinue--physicians, military men, engineers, educators--all of whom
apparently look up to him as a genuine superior. An _attache_ summed up
for me this feeling which Yuan inspires in those who know him: "You forget
to think of him as a Chinaman," said this _attache_, "as in any way
different from the rest of us."
The viceroy took a personal hand in the Tientsin situation. On December 2,
1906, he issues the following document to the North and South Police
Commissioners of Tientsin native city. Rather than altar the quaint
wording, I quote just as it was translated for me:
"I have just received instructions from the cabinet ministers enjoining me
to act according to the regulations which they presented to the throne,
and which received their Majesties' consent. The evil effects of opium are
known to all. It is the duty of us all to act according to the
regulations, and do our utmost to get rid of them.
"The North and South police commissioners are authorized to close the
opium dens, which have been the refuge of idle hands and young people who
are not allowed to smoke at home. The said dens are to be closed at the
end of the Tenth Moon (December 14th), at the same time notifying the
keepers of restaurants and wine shops not to have opium-smoking
instruments or opium prepared for their customers, nor are their customers
allowed to take opium and smoke there.
"As to the concessions, the Customs Taotai is authorized to open
conference with the different consuls, asking them to close the opium dens
within a limited time."
The two police commissioners at once made the proclamation public; and, as
is evident from the following "Reply to a petition," met with difficulties
in enforcing it:
"It is impossible to change the date of closing dens. What is said in the
petition, that the keepers cannot square their accounts with their
customers, may be true, but the viceroy's order must be obeyed. The dens
shall be closed at the specified time."
These orders were carried out. It is one of the advantages of a
patriarchal form of government that orders can be carried out. There were
no injunctions, no writs to show cause, no technical appeals. The few den
keepers who dared to violate the prohibition were mildly punished on the
first offense--most of them receiving two full weeks at hard labour. The
real responsibility was placed upon the owners of the property rented out
to the den keepers. It was recognized that these owners were the ones who
really profited by the vice. They were given an opportunity to report any
violations occurring on their property; but if a violation occurred, and
the owner failed to report, his property was promptly confiscated. Here we
see successfully employed a method which we in this country have been
unable as yet to put into effect. The futility of punishing engineers and
switchmen for the sins of railroad corporations, of punishing clerks for
the offenses of bank directors, of punishing keepers of disorderly houses
in cases where we know that the real profit goes, in the form of a high
rental, to the respectable owner of the property, has long been recognized
among us. In China, while we see much that seems intolerable in the
enforcement of law, we must admit that it is refreshing to find laws
really enforced, and to see responsibility sometimes put where it belongs.
We of the United States are far ahead of the Chinese in all that goes to
make up what we call civilization. But we have, among others, a law
forbidding the sale of liquor on Sundays in New York City. We couldn't
enforce the law if we tried; and we haven't enough moral courage to strike
it off the books for the dead letter it is.
Yes, the Tientsin situation has its refreshing side. Yuan Shi K'ai--a
Chinaman,--set about it to close the opium dens that supplied this
swarming cityful of Chinamen, and succeeded. He solved that most difficult
problem which confronts human governments everywhere--in every climate,
under every sky--the problem of moral regulation. He drove the
manufacturers of opium and of opium accessories out of business. He cut
his way through a tangle of "interests," vested and otherwise, not so
different in their essence from the liquor interests of this country.
Thanks to his own character and resource, thanks to the cheerful
directness of Chinese methods of governing (when directness and not
indirectness is really wanted), he "got results." And not only in Tientsin
native city, but also in Peking, and Pao-ting-fu, and all Chili Province,
and throughout Shansi Province, and over large portions of Shantung,
Shansi, and Manchuria. It was not a case of Maine prohibition, or Kansas
prohibition, or New York excise regulation. He closed the dens!
While he was accomplishing this result, and while the native Chamber of
Commerce was appropriating a sum of money to found a hospital for the cure
of opium victims, the "Customs Taotai," obeying the viceroy's
instructions, courteously requested the consuls, as rulers of the foreign
city, to help along by closing the dens in their municipalities. It was
mainly to see whether or not the consuls were "helping" that I went down
to Tientsin. There was no need to ask questions or to burrow among
statistics. The opium dens of the concessions were either or they were
not. Accordingly, I set out from the Astor House at nine o'clock one
evening, by rickshaw. For interpreter I had Mr. Sung, the secretary of the
Native Young Men's Christian Association, and with us went a young
Englishman who spoke the language. This test seemed a fair one to apply,
for it was April 23d, nearly five months after Viceroy Yuan's
proclamation, and several weeks after the closing of the last dens in the
native city.
We began with the French concession; and our first glimpses of the
thriving opium business of the little municipality astonished us. The
Taiku Road, the main street, where one finds churches, mission compounds,
offices, and shops, displayed a row of red lights. Our three rickshaws
pulled up at the first and we went in.
An opium den usually takes up one floor of a building. Against the walls
is a continuous wooden platform, perhaps two feet high and extending over
seven or eight feet into the room. This platform is divided at intervals
of five or six feet by low partitions, sometimes but a few inches in
height, into compartments, each of which accommodates two smokers, with
one lamp between them. Sometimes a rug or a bit of matting is laid on this
hard couch, sometimes not; for the Chinaman, accustomed to sleeping on
bricks, prefers his couches hard. A man always lies down to smoke opium;
for the porous pill, which is pressed into the tiny orifice of the pipe,
cannot be ignited, but is held directly over the lamp and the flame drawn
up through it.
The first den we entered was on the second floor of a rickety building. We
climbed the steep, infinitely dirty stairway, crossed a narrow hall, and
opened a door. At first I found it difficult to see distinctly in the dim
light and through the thick blue haze; and the overpowering, sickish fumes
of the drug got into my nose and throat and made breathing a noticeable
effort. There was a desk by the door, behind which sat the keeper of the
den, with a litter of pipes and thimble-like cups before him. In a corner
of the desk was a jar of opium, a thick, sticky substance, dark brown in
colour, in appearance not unlike molasses in January. There were twenty
smokers on the couches, some preparing the pellet of opium by kneading it
and pressing it on the pipe-bowl, some dozing off the fumes, and a few
smoking. An attendant moved about the room with fresh supplies of the
drug. For each thimbleful, enough for one or two smokes, the price was
fifteen cents (Mexican).
The smokers seemed to be mainly of the lower classes; though hardly so low
as coolies, who are lucky to earn as much as fifteen cents in a day. It
was evident to both of my companions, from the appearance of these men and
from their talk, that they could ill afford the luxury. The number of
smokes indulged in seemed to range from three or four up to an indefinite
number. The youngest and healthiest appearing man in the room told us that
after three pipes he could go home and go to sleep in comfort. He had been
at it less than a year, he said; and, judging from the expression of
peaceful content that came over his face as he held the pipe-bowl over the
lamp and drew the smoke deep into his lungs, he had not yet begun to feel
the ravages of the drug.
The next den we entered was small, crowded, and dirty. The price was only
ten cents. But the third den was the largest and decidedly the most
interesting of any that we saw. Like the others, it was situated in a
prosperous section of the Taiku Road, with its red light conspicuously
displayed over the door. From the facts that it was frankly open for
business and that not the slightest concern was shown at our entrance, it
seemed fair to believe that the keepers had no fear whatever of publicity
or of the law. Even when we announced ourselves to be investigators, our
questions were answered cheerfully and fully, and the man who escorted us
from room to room was apparently proud of the establishment. The couches
were not all occupied, but I counted thirty-five men sitting or reclining
on them. One man had a child with him, a girl of some six or eight years
of age, and when he had prepared his pipe and smoked it he permitted her
to take a whiff or two. In a rear room we saw four women smoking with the
men. The price of a smoke in this den was twenty-five cents.
I do not know how many opium dens were open for business in the French
concession on this particular April 23d, 1907, but of those that were open
I personally either entered or at least saw fifteen or sixteen, and that
without attempting anything in the nature of an exhaustive search. In the
Italian and Russian concessions I found about sixty dens open, mostly of a
very low grade. But the worst of the concessions, in this regard, was the
Austrian. Lying nearest to the native city, it had profited more largely
than any of the others by the native prohibition. It seemed also to have
the largest Chinese population; indeed, in appearance it was more like the
quaint old Chinese city than any of the other foreign municipalities.
We entered only three of the Austrian dens. But we saw the signs and
glanced in through the doorways of so many others that I was quite ready
to accept Mr. Sung's rough estimate of the total number within the narrow
confines of the concession: he put it at fifty to one hundred. It is
difficult to be exact in these estimates, because where laws are so
languidly enforced the official returns hardly begin to state the full
number of flourishing establishments. These three dens which we entered
were enough to make an ineffaceable impression on the mind of one
traveller. I have eaten and slept in native hostelries, in the interior,
so unspeakably dirty and insanitary that to describe them in these pages
would exceed all bounds of taste, but I have never been in a filthier
place than at least one of these Austrian dens. And the other two were
little better. It would require some means more adequate than pen, ink,
and paper, to convey to the reader an accurate notion of the mingled,
half-blended odours which seemed to underlie, or to form a background for,
the overpowering fumes of what passed here for opium. What this drug
compound was I really do not know; but it was sold at the rate of two
pipes for three cents, Mexican, equivalent to a cent and a half, gold. For
real opium, of fair or good quality, it is quite possible, in China, to
pay from ten to twenty times as much. Such dens as this, then, are not
only vicious resorts maintained for the purpose of catering to a
degrading habit; they are also breeding places of disease and pestilence.
Thus one night's work made it plain that the foreign concessions were
taking no steps that would evidence a spirit of cooeperation with the
Chinese authorities in their vigorous attempt to check and control the
ravages of opium. Tientsin, like Shanghai, did not care. Tientsin, like
Shanghai, is sowing the wind in China.
Let us now turn aside for a moment to consider the third important point
of contact between the two kinds of civilization--Hongkong.
Hongkong is neither a "settlement" nor a "concession." It is a British
crown colony, with its own government and its own courts. The original
property, a mountainous island lying near the mouth of the Canton River,
was taken from the Chinese in 1842, as a part of the penalty which China
had to pay for losing the Opium War. Later, a strip of the mainland
opposite was added to the colony. Hongkong is one of the most important
seaports in the world. It is the meeting place for freight and passenger
ships from North America, South America, New Zealand and Australia, India,
Europe, Africa, and the Philippines and other Pacific islands. It
commands the trade of the Canton River Valley, which, though not
geographically so imposing as the wonderful valley of the Yangtse,
supports, nevertheless, the densely populated region reached by the
innumerable canal-like branches of the river. The city of Canton alone,
eighty or ninety miles inland from Hongkong, claims 2,500,000 inhabitants.
It is safe to say that fifty million Chinamen are constantly under the
influence of the civilizing example set by Hongkong.
What is the attitude of the Colonial government towards the opium
question? Simply that the opium habit is a legitimate source of revenue.
The British gentlemen who administer the government seem never to have
been disturbed by doubts as to the morality or humanity of their attitude.
Let me quote from the report of the Philippine Commission:
"Farming is the system adopted (renting out the monopoly control of the
drug to an individual or a corporation) and a considerable part of the
income of the colony is obtained from this source. The habit seems to be
spreading. No effort--except the increased price demanded by the farmer to
compensate for the increased price he has to pay to secure the
monopoly--is made to deter persons from using opium in the colony. Most of
the opium comes from India."
The attitude of the residents and merchants of the colony seems to be
expressed plainly enough by an editorial in a leading Hongkong paper which
lies before me, dated December 1, 1906: "It will take volumes of imperial
edicts to convince us that China ever honestly intends or is ever likely
to suppress the opium trade. It is up to China to take the initiative in
such a way as to leave no doubt that her intentions are honest and that
the native opium trade will be abandoned. Until that is done, it is idle
to discuss the question."
In other words, Hongkong refuses to consider giving up its opium revenue
until the Chinese take the market away from it.
I think we may consider the point established that Great Britain is
directly responsible for the introduction of opium into China, and,
through the ingenuity and persistence of her merchants and her diplomats,
for the growth of the habit in that country. To-day, in spite of an
unmistakable tendency on the part of the Home government (which we shall
consider in a later chapter) to yield to the pressure of the anti-opium
agitation in England, the government of India continues to grow and
manufacture vast quantities of the drug for the Chinese trade. To-day the
representatives of that government at Hongkong are profiting largely from
a monopoly control of the opium importation. To-day, at Shanghai, where
the British predominate in population, in trade, and in the city
government, the opium evil is mishandled in a scandalous manner, and--as
elsewhere--for profit. Small wonder, therefore, that other and less
scrupulous foreign nations, where they have an opportunity to profit by
this vicious traffic, as at Tientsin, hasten to do so.
These three great ports--Shanghai, Tientsin, and Hongkong--are in constant
touch commercially with a grand total of very nearly 200,000,000 Chinese.
They are, therefore, constantly exerting a direct influence on that number
of Chinese minds. As I have pointed out, this influence, because it is
concentrated and tangible, is much stronger than the admittedly potent
influence of the widely scattered missionaries, physicians, and teachers.
From the life and example of the Western nations, as they exist at these
ports, the Chinaman is drawing most of his ideas of progress and
enlightenment.
In a word, the new China that we shall sooner or later have to deal with
among the nations of the world is the new China that the ports are helping
to make--for this new China is to-day in process of development. She is
struggling heroically to digest and assimilate the Western ideas which
alone can bring life and vigour to the sluggish Chinese mass. And yet,
turning westward for aid, China is confronted with--Shanghai, Tientsin,
and Hongkong. Turning to Britain for a helping hand in her effort to check
the inroads of opium, she hears this cheerful doctrine from the one
British colony which China can really see and partly understand,
Hongkong--"It is up to China." Dr. Morrison has stated in one of his
letters to the _Times_ that Britain's attitude towards China is one of
sympathy, tempered by a lack of information. One very eminent British
diplomat with whom I discussed the opium question assured me that that
attitude of his government was "most sympathetic." Later, in London, I
found that this same government was quieting an aroused public opinion
with assurances that steps were being taken towards an agreement with
China in the matter of opium. All this was in the spring and summer of
1907. Six months later, the one British colony in China, and the two great
international ports, were cheerfully continuing their cynical policy of
sneering at or ignoring the attempts of the Chinese to overcome their
master-vice, and were cheerfully profiting by the situation.
It would perhaps seem fanciful to suggest that the great nations should
unite to regulate the coast ports. It would appear obvious that such
regulation, in so far as it might create a better understanding between
the Chinese and the representatives of foreign civilizations with whom
they must come in contact, would work to the advantage of commercial
interests. Anti-foreign riots are in progress to-day in China which have
their roots partly in racial misconception, partly in a long tradition of
injustice and bad faith; and it is hardly necessary to suggest that an
atmosphere of injustice, bad faith, and rioting is not the best atmosphere
in which to carry on trade. But, nevertheless, the inevitable difficulties
in the way of drawing the great nations together in the interests of a
better understanding with the Chinese people would seem to make such a
solution academic rather than practical.
But, still hoping that something may be done about it, something that may
lessen the likelihood of the reaping of a whirlwind in China, suppose that
we alter the phrase of that Hongkong editorial and state that instead of
the problem being up to China, it is distinctly up to Great Britain? Great
Britain brought the opium into China. Great Britain kept it there until it
took root and spread over the native soil. Great Britain has admitted her
guilt, and had pledged herself by a majority vote in Parliament, and by
the promises of her governing ministers, to do something about it. Suppose
that Great Britain be called upon to make good her pledge? It would be an
interesting experiment. All that is necessary is to cut down the
production of opium in India, year by year, until it ceases altogether,
and with it the exportation into China. This course would solve
automatically the opium problem at Hongkong; and it would put it up to the
municipal authorities at Shanghai and Tientsin in an interesting fashion.
It would in no way jeopardize Britain's interest in the diplomatic balance
of the Far East. It would work for the good rather than the harm of the
trade with China. And it would be the first necessary step in the arduous
matter of cleaning up the treaty ports and setting a higher example to
China.
To this course Great Britain would appear to be committed by the
utterances for her government. But the world, like the man from Missouri,
has yet to be "shown." In a later chapter we shall consider this question
of promise and performance in the light of Britain's peculiar governmental
problem.
VII
HOW BRITISH CHICKENS CAME HOME TO ROOST
We have seen, in the preceding chapters, that the Anglo-Indian government
controls absolutely the production of opium in India, prepares the drug
for the market in government-owned and government-operated factories, and
sells it at monthly auctions. Let me also recall to the reader that
four-fifths of this opium is prepared to suit the known taste of Chinese
consumers. The annual value to the Anglo-Indian government of this curious
industry, it will be recalled, is well over $20,000,000.