Chapter C: W. Kinder, a Briton, of the Kaiping mines, built the first (7)

In 313 B. C. the state of Tsi (present Shangtung Province) broke up its half of a wooden tablet containing part of the agreement with the state of Tsu (present Hupeh Province). These halves fitted into each other, and beyond any possibility of substitution proved the genuineness of the record. An old book called the _Si Yuen_ (washing the pit), used in connection with the criminal code, prescribes the method of ascertaining whether death was caused by blows or was natural. A clay pit is heated white, the ashes are dug out, and wine is poured in. The body is then placed on a cradle in the pit, and a roof of tiles is placed over the pit’s mouth. If the fumes of the rice alcohol bring out the marks, even on a partly decayed body, the murderer is searched for. Other books relate that if a body is thrown into the water after death, it will not show distended stomach, hair stuck to head, or foam in mouth; the hands and feet will not be stiff, or the soles of the feet white. Their criminologists also write that if a body is thrown into a fire after death, there will be no burning or ashes in the throat and nostrils. The Chinese of the old time were rather clever investigators of crime.

This scene was presented outside the west gate of Tientsin one October day in 1870 after the massacre at the French convent. The French compelled Li Hung Chang to give them satisfaction. Li held the execution at dawn so that a mob might not gather. The criminals were flattered as martyrs. None of them was bound. New silk clothes, fine shoes and the ornaments of females were put upon them. Arriving at the execution ground, they were given opium. They shouted to the crowd, “Are we showing a shamed face?” And the answer came back: “No.” “Call us brave lads for being given to the foreigners as a sacrifice,” they cried again. A shout of approval came back. Then they sang a war song, and while their relatives cried, they knelt and stretched out their own necks before the blow of the heavy, short, mercury-loaded Taifo sword of the executioner. The shedding of a cock’s blood, even in the British courts of Hongkong, when an oath is taken, is a survival of the ancient Chinese custom, practised in Confucius’ day (550 B. C.), when the ministers of the various states of Lu, Wu, Tsin, etc., had a criminal killed, and wetting their lips with his blood, took oath to keep the treaty, which was inscribed on wood, each party taking a broken portion. The following incident will throw a flashlight on a section of Chinese legal practise, just previous to the revolution of 1911. It is well known that Wu Ting Fang, two and a half years before the revolution, had revised and modernized the Chinese code, but it was not even in part put in practise before the revolution. In Tungkadoo, a town of Kiangsu province, a bonze (priest) murdered a fellow-bonze and confessed under third-degree torture. The native authorities brought him to Shanghai to be strangled, but the chief bonze, with headquarters at Chingkiang, requested that the criminal should be turned over to him to be burned to death according to the code of the Order. Cremation of dead bodies was more common in China when Marco Polo visited the land than it is now, though it is practised in the Honan Island section of Canton.

It is probable that not for some years will the punishments of flogging, neck cangue and stocks be removed from the revised Chinese code. These punishments, involving public “loss of face,” are abhorred by the Chinese, and while they are somewhat barbaric, they are effective deterrents of crime in China. They were both revived by the British government of Hongkong in dealing with native offenders during the turbulent times of the 1911–12 revolution, when it was found that hard labor, jail sentences and fines were laughed at by the immense Chinese population of the island colony. Greece, as long ago as 330 B. C., had borrowed the cangue from China, and Demosthenes, in the _Oration On the Crown_, can think of no way so effective to damage his accuser, Aeschines, than to mention that the latter’s father had to wear a zulon (cangue) as a punishment for thievery. Chien Shao Cheng, of the Justice Department, Peking, has visited American prisons and studied foreign penal methods.

An “Investigating and Arresting Department” is the name by which one of the Manchu courts at Canton went. It employed detectives, and the taotai (mayor) did not disguise the fact that the court resorted to “third degree” tortures. This was one of the many things which made followers for the reformers. Banishment cases are constantly coming up. The prisoner who will not or can not depart to another country or province is put in the stocks for four hours a day for a year, and the remainder of the day he spends at hard labor. Strangling in cages was in vogue at Canton in the last days of the Manchu reign, orders having come from Peking in September, 1911, that the coolie who attempted to assassinate Admiral Li should be suspended by the neck in a bottomless cage. In the yamen at Chingtu City stands a stone tablet bearing the word Sha (kill), erected by the Shansi marauder, Chang Hien Chung, who massacred the Szechuenese, who supported the native Ming emperors. The stone remained as a threat to be used by the Manchu mandarins on behalf of the Ta Ching dynasty. The Ministry of Justice under the Manchu régime ordered the viceroys and governors to prohibit foreigners from unnecessarily being present in court.

On account of the scarcity of foreign population, the Hongkong jury consists of seven and the Shanghai jury of five. There is constant argument between the Chinese press and the English press of the treaty ports in China on the subject of “mixed” courts in which foreigners sit. China is writing a reformed code in which Wu Ting Fang had a hand, and in which the new minister, Wong Chun Hui, is interested, and is pressing forward to the day when at least she will try all Chinese, including those who have injured foreigners in settlements. The newspaper argument will do good instead of harm. In 1899 Japan ceased to allow her citizens to be tried under foreign law, and even began to try foreigners under Japanese law. On the subject of trusts and directorial responsibility, I have seen in the Tientsin _Ching Wei Pao_ a plea that employés be not fined and imprisoned for corporate faults, but that those who make the money (directors and shareholders) bear the responsibility. China is, and has always been, a frank sociological thinker.

A police system on the French gendarmerie plan has been put in vogue at Peking, and photographs are being generally used for identification. The Chinese have been very averse to photographs. The custom was broken down by Hongkong insisting for twenty years that emigrants should be photographed in duplicate so that their certificates might be identified. This gradually got the Chinese used to the custom, the returned emigrants spreading word that there was no ill-luck in the operation. The old-fashioned policeman who went his rounds beating a gong is becoming obsolete, and the new policeman, like our own, is supposed to bait himself with silence and skill, so as to be sugar in leading the burglar to the trap. Not long ago, however, I heard the old-fashioned Chinese Lukong beating his wooden drum as he went his rounds in the Portuguese colony of Macao, China. When the police recover lost goods, half only is returned to the owner, and half often goes to public charity which is organized in a guild. This is an old regulation in many parts of China. One of their wits said that the difference between a lower and a higher court is that one has the first and the other has the last “guess” at a case! The Chinese point out the delays in the execution of murderers as a most serious defect in justice, and the sentimentalism expressed by part of our press and pulpit as a most serious defect in our mentality. They show headings in our newspapers reading as follows: “Ministers Strive with Murderer Blank”; “Four Pastors Prepare Murderer Blank for Death,” etc. The laconic Chinese ask: “How long a time did the murderer give his victim to prepare for death.” The Chinese say that our levity in this terrific matter has run the average of murders in America up to the highest point in any nation, and that their average, with England’s, is the lowest because of swift and sure justice in those two countries.

In our month of August occurs the festival of the goddess of needlework. It is customary for the women to exhibit the wealth and ornaments of the family during this festival. In 1911, at Fatshan, near Canton, where Sunyacius was born, robbers disguised as women arrived in closed chairs before the yamen (compound) of the Li family, and pretending to be relatives, they broke past the doormen. When inside the home, they drew weapons, and with the inmates intimidated, ransacked the house of jewels and valuables, escaping to the river, where the pirate boats took them on board and made off for the reaches and canals. Owing to the paucity of maritime police, because of a limited revenue, piracy has swept over China’s waters since her Captain Kidd, Koxinga, operated from Amoy in 1657. The West River of Kwangtung province has been notorious in recent years, and in my former book, _The Chinese_, I have related the attacks upon Europeans in the steamers _Sainam_ and _Shui On_.

The most startling attack in many years was upon the well-known Pacific Mail steamer _Asia_, in April, 1911. Known previously as the _Coptic_, this steamer sailed from San Francisco for twenty years in the trans-Pacific service, and she was therefore well known to many thousands of Americans. She was a graceful Belfast-built boat of low freeboard, and easily boarded. In a fog on April 23rd she ran against the precipitous Finger Rock Island, which rises off the coast of Chekiang province. Wireless was immediately sent out, and the Chinese Merchants’ S. S. Company’s vessel _Shoa Shing_ started for the rescue. Before she could arrive and after her departure with the sixty rescued passengers, Chekiang pirates, in swift snake boats and sanpans, put off to the attack, and despite revolver defense, boarded the _Asia_ and her boats. They even demanded under duress that passengers should sign “chits,” promising to pay sums of money for rescue. When the steamer was temporarily abandoned, they boarded and stripped her of almost everything except the smokestack paint. Fisherman and pirate are about as synonymous on some waters of China as Cornishman and farmer, Panamanian and placer miner are in some of our romantic novels! Thrilling engagements with pirates not infrequently occur almost under the windows of the fashionable Boa Vista and Hing Kee Hotels on romantic Macao’s Praya Granda.

On July 13, 1910, a party of Chinese students, women and children were kidnapped in Macao, by pirates led by the second of the swashbuckler Leungs, and by the leader Luk, and taken to Ko-Ho (Colowan) Island, where they were chained to the walls of caves and of a Portuguese fort, after the latter had been stormed, and the blue and white flag of the castles hauled down to be succeeded by the triangular red flag of the pirates. The governor of Macao sent the Portuguese gunboats _Patria_ and _Macao_, and an expedition of artillery and infantry of the “Legionaries Coloniale.” The possession of this island by the Portuguese has long been disputed by China, and the Chinese gunboats, which now drew up only watched the engagement. Two thousand pirates fought with modern weapons and smokeless powder, which had been smuggled from Japan. The Portuguese bombarded with four-inch guns, and dropped so many shells into so many compartments of two pirate junks, as with skull and sail they made for rocky Wung Kum Island, that they sank with all on board. In an armistice, Commander Wu, of the Chinese navy, a brave commander of whom we shall hear more, disguised as a coolie, courageously spied on the pirates’ stronghold and ascertained where most of the women were imprisoned, so as to save these retreats from being bombarded. The pirates were smoked out of these caves with sulphur and the women resuscitated.

Not only South China, but North China also has experienced piratical attacks in recent times. In September, 1910, a large band of Hung-Hutz pirates, disguised as bean merchants, sailed down the Liao River to Newchwang and captured for ransom fifteen wealthy Chinese merchants under the walls of the foreign settlements. They safely made retreat with captured arms to their mountain stronghold, one hundred miles up the river, near Liaoyang, and settled down for a siege. The Chinese desire to build more railways through this section, but the Japanese and Russians have opposed American backing of another road and have hoodwinked Britain and Europe into a disinterested attitude, which is the _status quo_, but not the permanent settlement of the question.

The Chinese have a saying regarding courts, retainers and the animals outside, as follows: “When the mandarin swears, the dogs bark, and when the mandarin laughs the dogs grin, and the terrible tsai ren (yamen court runners, corresponding to our detectives) stroke their rough fingers.” Some of their legal proverbs are:

“When two rascals differ, the truth is near; when they agree, the truth is hid.”

“Don’t jump to conclusions in evidence, for a grain of sand is not the seashore, nor a tree a forest.”

“It is hard to rise, but easy to fall.”

“No one would believe a blind man who tried to tell a ghost story.”

“It’s easier to twist the road than the mountain.”

XXV

CHINESE DAILY LIFE

The happy Leigh Hunt, who was half American by blood, in one of his incomparable Addisonian essays, _Tea Drinking_, wrote as follows of the daily life and surroundings of the Chinese: “The very word tea, so petty, so infantine, so winking-eyed, so expressive, somehow or other, of something inexpressibly minute and satisfied with a little (tee!) resembles the idea one has (perhaps a very mistaken one) of that extraordinary people of whom Europeans know little or nothing, except that they sell us this preparation, bow back again our ambassadors, have a language consisting of only a few hundred words, gave us chinaware and the strange pictures on our teacups, made a certain progress in civilization long before we did, mysteriously stopped at it and would go no further, and if numbers and the customs of venerable ancestors are to carry the day, are at once the most populous and the most respectable nation on the face of the earth. As a population they certainly are a most enormous and wonderful body, but as individuals, their ceremonies, their trifling edicts, their jealousy of foreigners, and their teacup representations of themselves impress us irresistibly with a fancy that they are a people all toddling, little-eyed, little-footed, little-bearded, little-minded, quaint, overweening, pig-tailed, bald-headed, cone-capped or pagoda-hatted, having childish houses and temples with bells at every corner and story, and shuffling about in blue landscapes, over nine-inch bridges, with little mysteries of bell-hung whips in their hands,--a boat or a house or a tree, made of a pattern, being over their heads or underneath them, and a bird as large as the boat, always having a circular white space to fly in! Such are the Chinese of the teacups and the grocers’ windows, and partly of their own novels, too, in which everything seems as little as their eyes, little odes, little wine parties and a series of little satisfactions. However, it must be owned that from these novels one gradually acquires a notion that there is a great deal more good sense and even good poetry among them than one had fancied from the accounts of embassies and the autobiographical paintings on the chinaware, and this is the most probable supposition. An ancient and great nation as civilized as they is not likely to be so much behind hand with us in the art of living as our self-complacency leads us to imagine. If their contempt of us amounts to the barbarous, perhaps there is a greater share of barbarism than we suspect in our scorn of them.”

Copyright, 1913, The Bobbs-Merrill Company.

Buddhist temples, now used as schools. Fine type of architecture; ornamented ridge, curving eaves; unique medallions.]

Copyright, 1913, The Bobbs-Merrill Company.

Actors, in characters of general, emperor and prime minister. Note use of modern scenery. The old stage did not use scenery.]

Copyright, 1913, The Bobbs-Merrill Company.

The new woman in the New China, borne to market on a wheelbarrow
along a modern tree-lined road; modern umbrellas in background
used as a protection from the sun. A beggar crouches at the
roadside.
]

In August the Chinese resort to the graveyards and burn paper money and tin- and gold-foil models at the graves of their ancestors. It is a pretty sight at night to see thousands of these little fires lighting up the vast fields of the dead like a plain of stars through which the living spirits move. The ceremonies sometimes include the Greek custom of pouring out a libation of wine, and as this is the custom especially in the western provinces, it may indicate a former communion with old Greece. Long before the Christian era Greece had possibly acquired veneration for graves from older China. Demosthenes cried out to the Athenians in B. C. 354 as a climax to his arguments: “Will ye sacrifice your sepulchres to the Persian?” A mortuary custom in the southwest provinces, also similar to the Greek, is to place a coin in the mouth, to pay for ferriage of the spirit. The round coin, made of jade, and sometimes banded with pure gold, is an exact copy of the copper cash, with a square hole in the center. These tomb jades acquire a stained appearance as compared with the delightful glisten of jades kept in the light.

Foreigners with cinematograph lanterns are now going into the interior of China with interpreters to manage part of their shows, and are doing well, as the Chinese delight in the moving pictures. It is necessary to apply to the provincial governor for a passport, and to register at the consulate at the nearest treaty port. Both French and American films are used.

The purpose of the long nails, dwarfed feet and heavy hairdressing is the snobbish one of showing that such a person does not need to work, but can afford to keep servants. These devotees of fashion, rapidly becoming fewer, suffer so much torture that their conceit can be forgiven them. “Don’t say a word, you Westerners; remember your suffocating waists and your high-heeled compressed shoes,” retort some of the Chinese! At Ningpo boys wear boots made of human hair. Over these they draw straw sandals. For waterproof material an oiled cotton is used. The very poor classes use a picturesque cape and kilt made of rush leaves, and one sees sights on the mountain roads of Hongkong that remind one of Robinson Crusoe and Friday. The Chinese are great bird fanciers. Crows, magpies, hawks, larks, ducks, finches, etc., are exposed for sale in the fairs. The singing birds are taught to sing in competition, and also to catch seeds thrown into the air. Fortune-tellers take up their location at the street corner in Hongkong, Canton, and other ports, with their trained Kwangtung sparrows. When you pay your coin, the owner places a package of cards in envelopes before the door of the cage. The bird selects one and is rewarded with a grain of rice. You identify the card by the picture that it bears. The owner puts the card, together with a tiny slip of sandalwood, back in the envelope, shuffles the envelopes and calls the bird out again. The bird will select the same envelope, which proves that Kwangtung sparrows at least have a fine sense of smell! On another corner stands a bird trainer with a grossbeak-weaver perched upon his finger. He throws coins into the air, toward which the bird darts, catching the coins in its bill and returning to the finger of the master.

On the narrow streets, in constant danger of being jostled into, the letter-writer sits at a table, painting the beautiful characters for whomsoever wishes to buy a letter. His customers are many,--fruiterers, laborers, fishermen, cooks, gunny-lifters, hotel-runners, lantern sellers, rice bird hawkers, etc. The Buddhist or Taoist priest, too, is not averse to writing a letter for a wife buyer for an added fee after his customer has bought a written prayer to Buddha or his own dead father, which prayer the priest burns in presenting it to the spirit.

There are many Mohammedan Chinese in the western and southwestern provinces, and scattered throughout the empire are Mohammedan companies. They are generally butchers and bakers by occupation. Among these Mohammedans are doubtless the lost colonies of Chinese Jews.

It is found that the Miao aborigines of Szechuen and Yunnan are a more impulsive, vivacious, and by turns a more sulky race than the staid, trim, mannerly Chinese. Missionaries, therefore, report that when they Christianize the aborigines they find them delightfully frank and vivacious companions, who grow to be liked heartily, as the cultured Chinese is in comparison deeply respected. The Miaos (Now Su tribe) show Burmese influence, too, for they burn their dead, a custom which is abhorred by the Chinese masses, though some Buddhist priests do it. The Miaos often worship a hill, and far to the east, even at Hongkong, I have seen members of the aboriginal Hakka tribes worshiping a hill, or a rock, or the seashore. On the hillsides of Hongkong jars will be found on stones among the woods. These contain the bones of Hongkong Chinese who have died in America and whose bones lie out in the woods, waiting till the Taoist calendar reports that it is a lucky day for burial. If you make the fee large enough the priest can grant you absolution any day and you may bury with full assurance of good luck. It then becomes a struggle between the priest’s determination and the mourner’s stubbornness in the matter of securing possession of the coins of the dead one! The body lies in an American graveyard until the large bones only remain. These are manifested across the Pacific as “fish bones” and are received at Hongkong by the Tung Wah Hospital for the guild of which deceased was a member. The hospital turns the bones over to the chief mourner, who places them in a jar, as already related. While the Chinese abhor sickness, and will sometimes desert a fever patient after loading his blanket with stones so that he can not leave the bed, they have no abhorrence of coffins or bones. For long periods they keep the coffin in the best room of the house, or the jar of bones in the garden.

In selling goods by auction at the pawnshops, or inns, the auctioneer does not permit audible bidding. The goods are passed through an opening for inspection. Then the bidders walk to the window, and by whisper, card, or squeeze of the hand, indicate the bid. This encourages high instead of low bidding at the beginning, for it is known that the first bidder who offers a fair price secures the article.

The Chinese, on account of their localization, and lack of experience, while usually placid, can be worked up into uncontrollable excitement. This explains the murders of missionaries by mobs in the long years up to 1901. Many suicides among officials and widows and daughters of soldiers followed the excitement and distress of the October, 1911, revolution. The camaraderie of American clubs which has evolved the greeting, “old fellow,” equal to the “old chap” of British clubs, was copied from China, where you must call every one “old man” (lao jen). It is the highest term of respect, is in diplomatic use, and even bonzes and teachers are addressed in that way. A captain of a sanpan is called the “great old one” (lao ta). The mayor is called “old man of the village” (hsiang lao). The following incident will illustrate how the clan dominates Chinese life. San Wui is a city lying near Canton. The Kwan family is one of the largest and wealthiest clans living there. It maintained near the district burial ground a fine, large ancestral hall filled with family tablets and effigies. Against the votes of the clan, in the middle of August, 1911, Kwan Ta, one of the most powerful members, rented the building to the police, who used it as headquarters in collecting unpopular taxes and pressing the people to accept the nationalization of railways scheme. The people led by the Kwan clan, burned the ancestral temple. The members of the clan then rebuilt the hall and ordered the sculptors to make an image of the unpopular Kwan Ta, who had died in the meantime. The granite image represents the man with his hands behind his back in a kneeling posture. On his back is carved the history of his defection. As each member of the Kwan clan comes into the temple on the great days to worship the ancestral tablets which have been restored, it is obligatory that he shall give Kwan Ta’s image three strokes of the bamboo!

The method of carrying water in India and China is conspicuously different. In India the drawers go from the well with the jar of water balanced on their heads. In China the water is put into two large buckets, which are slung from the two ends of a bamboo, which is balanced on the shoulder. Chinese markets in the villages and smaller cities are managed on the fair system, as in Russia. You can not buy barrow wheels at the bridge fair every day in the week, because the wheelwright only comes to your village fair every second Friday, his tour taking him through ten villages perhaps. You can not buy feather dusters or shoes every day, as the pedler is off on a tour of six villages, and only visits your fair, held at the temple, every Saturday. But food and coins you can buy every morning at your two village fairs, and the hucksters there will tell you just what days the barber, the druggist, the potter, the copper hammerer, etc., will be around again, unless thieves waylay them, or gamblers entice them, or Taoist astrologers, looking for a bribe, deceive them into belief that it is their unlucky day by their birth star on the almanac!

That the Chinese civilization in general had little communication with Egypt or Babylonia, after once being separated, may be inferred partly from the fact that the early Chinese forgot the secret of embalming the body. The _Bamboo Books_, tenth century B. C. recite how the Emperor Muh, whose concubine died while traveling with him in the Tartary desert, had to bury her there at once, and other records recite that when tombs were opened they stank so badly that dogs had first to be sent in to ascertain when human beings could safely enter. It was not until long centuries after this that the Chinese learned to use lime to destroy the flesh.

Conjuring has been popular from the earliest times. The famous _Bamboo Books_ recite that the Emperor Muh, on his travels into Tartary in the tenth century B. C., was infatuated by an unusually clever conjurer there. Lieh Tsz, a patriotic chronicler of the fifth century B. C., complains that the emperor of disintegrating China had more time to study the tricks of a conjurer than for state affairs.

An interesting means of transportation over the mountains of the north is the pony-litter, which is swung between two animals in tandem. The trip is exciting enough, especially when one of the animals falls to its knees. Chinese gang laborers do all their pulling, pushing and lifting, accompanied by a chantey song. The famous trackers of the Yangtze gorges and the Grand Canal; the gunny lifters of Hongkong; the wood sawers and teak pilers; the coal passers of Hankau, all sing at the top of their splendid voices as they work.

When a native moves he is supposed to carry fire from his old kitchen to the new one, so as not to rekindle the misfortunes of the last lessee. He desires to burn up his old predecessor’s past, which may have been all bad (or he would not have moved), and to continue his own fortune, which is all good, or ought to be! When moving into a new house, the tenant replaces a threshold, lintel or rafter so that he may not inherit the bad fortune of the former tenant. He starts all things anew, as the new piece of lumber or stone typifies. The old-fashioned Chinese hotel buildings in the northern provinces are not unlike those in Palestine, low buildings with few windows in the walls being built around a court. In the court are troughs for the donkeys, mules, Mongolian ponies and especially camels of the pack trains. The roofs of the buildings, with their up-curling eaves and pagoda pinnacles, are the most beautiful in the world. It seems uncanny to see a crowd passing your house on a holiday without a sound, because the Chinese shoe is all felt. In contrast with this, compare the noisy shuffling of the wooden shoes of Japan, where one man makes more noise than a thousand Chinese, or a dozen Occidentals.

The happiness of a Chinese home is measured by the degree in which 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.