Chapter C: W. Kinder, a Briton, of the Kaiping mines, built the first (8)

A remarkable thing about China is the comparative absence of flies, because manure and refuse is so important as a fertilizer that it is immediately carried to the intensively farmed fields, which are expected to produce two to three harvests a year. Therefore typhoid and other diseases are not as prevalent as they otherwise would be. However, a whisper in your ear, reader: if China lacks in flies, she abounds in “bunkies,” which is the polite name for fleas! Nature abhors a vacuum and always provides for the deficiency in one field from the surplus in another! To have real safety in a Chinese inn, one needs to go to bed in a Peary suit, furnished with a diver’s helmet. This is never done, however, because of the heat. Cold weather only increases the torture, for the pauper “bunkie,” small as he is, successfully races to the heated kang faster than the paying guest! As the Chinese masses use no liquor, tobacco or drugs, and live an outdoor life on vegetable food mainly, their hearts are in splendid condition, and all the hospital surgeons report remarkable recoveries when an accident has made operations necessary. The race seems to have that old aboriginal fortitude of not fearing the knife or wincing under pain. They have no idea of the danger of infection by contact, the rich being as ill-informed as the poor. Wet towels, wrung out in the same hot water, are for refreshment rubbed over the hands, face and neck of every one at a feast. A governor’s pipe is first lighted and puffed for him by a miserable attendant, the governor merely wiping the mouthpiece dry with his hand or long sleeve, the custom being to cut out a soiled sleeve and substitute a new sleeve so as to save the splendid garment.

The Chinese are proving themselves to be adept in dental surgery. Many Chinese have graduated from the University of Pennsylvania dental school, and they have set up in business throughout the Chinese treaty ports. Others have graduated from Hongkong’s school, and still others, entering as apprentices under Chinese dentists, trained abroad, soon start out for themselves and pass the good work along. When customers are slow in coming, the Chinese dentist adds another shingle to his door. “Dentist and Photographer”; “Dentist and Printer”; “Dentist and Manufacturers’ Agent,” are common signs. A good many stories are printed that the old-fashioned Oriental dentist trained himself for tooth pulling by practising with his fingers on pulling pegs from soft and afterward from hardwood logs, but this is true only as far as loosened teeth are concerned. They always used forceps of some kind. Generals Roberts and Kitchener could not, by taking thought, add one cubit unto the stature of the British soldier, but they decreed that he must have as good teeth as he had a rifle when on foreign service, and so the dentists of Hongkong and other garrison ports flourish. The British call themselves “dental surgeons.” The Chinese put out a sign that they repair or extract molars “by best American methods.” The Philadelphia dentist, here as over the world, leads in his calling. One owns a leading newspaper of Hongkong. The prices of the American dentist are high, as the tourist and five-year indentured clerk discover. Apprentices are brought out under contract covering service, and it is rumored that some contracts prohibit independent practise in the same port at the end of the term; but common law has long ago exploded the legality of a man signing away his rights to make a living.

It is strongly hoped that a cure has now been found for incipient tubercular leprosy, hitherto supposed to be incurable. South China has more lepers than any country, and the necessary segregation is incomplete. Doctor J. T. Wayson, city physician of Honolulu, has used the “beauty pencil” (stick of carbon dioxide ice), which gives a temperature of one hundred degrees below zero, on the nodule sores, breaking down the affected tissues time after time, until no “bacilli leprae” are found in the tests of the cuttings from the surrounding parts. He has found that affected children of lepers seem to have been cured. The trial of this method will be made in the missionary and University of Pennsylvania hospitals at Canton, which is the center of the largest leprous district in the world, though it has had no Robert Louis Stevenson or Father Damien eloquently to make its wants known, as was done for the Molokai colony in Hawaii. If there is some unknown microbic diathesis or nervous tendency to it, this remedy, like quinine, strychnine, phosphate of iron, chaulmoogra oil, etc., may not be a permanent success. Long years of observation only can tell. I have gone through the leper camps and the leper boat colonies of the Heungshan Peninsula between Canton and Macao. The colonies do not seem to move up or down in numbers. There seems to be no danger of infection if the visitor does not eat or handle things among them.

As I have related in _The Chinese_, the scenes are piteous beyond words, and illustrate China’s old Spartan methods, that the sooner incompetents pass away the better for all. It is said that a fish diet encourages the diathesis, and certainly Heungshan is a remarkable fish center. Doctor G. A. Hansen, of Bergen, a Norwegian bacteriologist, and Doctors Brinckerhoff, Cumy and Hallman, of Honolulu, all discovered the leprosy bacillus, and Doctor Hansen broke down the belief that the disease was hereditary. By segregation, he reduced Norway’s cases from three thousand to four hundred. The American bacteriologists are experimenting on toxins. In 1902 an American named Conrardy established and lived in a model endowed lazaretto with five hundred lepers near Canton. He, of course, contracted the disease, which made slow headway because of his vitality, which was stronger than that of the vegetable-fed Chinese. He expected to live for fifteen years, but at the end of eight years he was slowly sinking. On beautiful Joao Island, which is in view from your hotel window at Macao, South China, Portugal long ago established a leper asylum.

A careful study of the newspapers for many years must lead one to the deduction that as the Chinese adopt foreign life in the treaty ports, suicides are increasing among married women and business men. Probably both religion and nerves are at fault, for they go somewhat together. As is well known, Chinese cities and dwelling-compounds are surrounded by walls. Unusual rains or quickly melting snows often undermine the walls of compounds, filling the street with débris. In August, 1911, at Mukden, Manchuria, particularly, the streets looked as though the Russians and Japanese had again just got through with bombarding the town! How differently everything is done in China and the Occident! The New Jersey cities are spending some $10,000,000 to take liquid sewage from their rivers and conduct it in a trunk sewer to New York Bay. In China so little sewage remains after the farmer is through with its manuring properties that British analysts concluded to take the water supply for the three cities of Hankau, Hanyang and Wuchang, in the center of populous China, directly from the Han River near the cities. The extensive plant consists of a deep intake protected from the heavy loess siltage; an air lift, which showers the water in rain into filter beds; reservoirs of five million gallons; three Worthington pumps of 300,000 gallons an hour and an electric plant to supply the cities. The company is Chinese, and Chinese did all the contracting by the favorite method of piecework. As the provincial parliament was not established when the company was chartered, the viceroy granted the franchise. American boilers were used.

Water gathering is easy in Hongkong, though it has no river. Many mountains of the island have been reserved and trenched at the bottom. The torrential rains strike these peaks, and a thousand trenches carry the water to dammed valleys at Taitam, Pokfulum and Wong Nei Chong, high enough up in the hills to give gravity pressure for the mains. The beautiful aqueducts on Bowen Road, far up on the mountain side, facing the famous harbor, are a sight no tourist approaching on his steamer will forget. When pianos are made for the humid south, loose keys and felt, fastened without gum, must be provided for, and even at that lamps are kept burning under the instrument to dry the atmosphere. A case of the Korean “earth disease,” or “tochil,” is rare in America, owing to the vigilance of our Marine Hospital Service, but one case got into Seattle from the Orient in September, 1910. The disease is incurable and infectious, and is much dreaded. Other races may have forgotten, but the Orient never forgets, and always can bring up something wonderful from the dispersion of Babel, and every camp gathering since, along the valley of the Tarim!

An account of the quarantine practise at Hongkong and other Oriental tropical ports may be of interest. Manila, Saigon, Singapore, Shanghai or Nagasaki may hear or believe that there is plague or cholera at Hongkong, and they quarantine vessels from the latter port. There is always certain feeling between the port doctors, and Hongkong retaliates. A vessel loaded with steerage and cabin passengers arrives at Hongkong from one of these other ports. The yellow flag is hoisted on the main topmast and no one is allowed to board the ship, which lies in the stream, until the port doctor and his assistants come off in a launch, which flies a yellow flag, and allows the ship’s yellow flag to be hauled down. Quartermasters man the gangway and rail until the doctor frees the vessel. He holds a conference with the ship’s doctor, and woe betide the latter’s vessel, or its future calls up and down the coast, if untruths are told or concealments made. The cabin passengers are carefully watched as they march by the cabin table, and the temperature of suspicious cases is taken. Any one who shows over ninety-nine degrees Fahrenheit is examined further for corroborative symptoms. The temperature of every one of the steerage is taken and the glass thermometer is not always cleaned as it is passed from mouth to mouth here in these crowded regions! A suspicious case is stripped of clothes then and there in the line. Despite satisfactory examinations, vessels are sometimes held up forty-eight hours, and every one in the steerage, as well as his baggage and quarters, is sulphur-smoked, steamed and washed. A fumigation hulk is used for this purpose, and it is the most hated vessel anchored in the harbor. I have known a ship’s white officers, afflicted with plague, cholera, etc., to be taken off to the plague hulk _Hygeia_, and their vessels to be detained fourteen days for observation and cleansing before being released by the British and American doctors of the port. The detention anchorage ranges on the northwest of the usual fairway, and though a beautiful spot under the heathen hills of old China, it is naturally considered by many as a most melancholy one.

There is always a smouldering fire of conflict burning in the hearts of ships’ agents, port doctors and United States Marine hospital surgeons on duty abroad. The agents are inclined to imperfect care and quicker despatch of vessels. The United States doctors who, abroad, splendidly and incorruptibly guard the health of America, are likely to injure competitive business for the sake of making safety doubly sure. The proper course is “_in medio tutissimus ibis_.” I have known these doctors to examine the earth around lily roots and prohibit their export to America during many months of the year. Ships’ captains, doctors and agents, ever pressed by the management for increased earnings, take every bit of risk they can, even in the case of west-bound Chinese suffering from phthisis, and the check of the United States Marine Hospital Service is salutary, and will continue to be necessary. When a vessel is homeward bound the United States Marine doctor at Hongkong will not give a clean bill of health for America until all steerage passengers and their effects have been washed and steamed in disinfecting waters. Often the emigrants are stripped and America thus saved from loathsome hidden diseases being imported. The scene is sometimes enough to make the doctors as sagacious as Solomon, or as compassionate as Florence Nightingale.

What a work is opening up in China for the labors of the medical missionary, first with the touch and then with the voice of the Angel of Salvation. The rigid medical examination of returning Chinese at Hongkong and San Francisco is disliked by Chinese consuls, firms and the steerage passengers themselves, but the best friend of China, if he is enlightened as to the unsanitary conditions yet obtaining there, could not ask America to lighten her severity, which is no more onerous than Japan’s, until China cleans up her land, sanitizes her houses, and supplies herself with a modern medical system. The inspection at San Francisco sometimes calls for lancing of the ear at night to see if the patient is suffering from filariasis, and at Hongkong and sometimes at San Francisco the immigrant is required to disrobe, bathe and have his effects fumigated. The Hongkong inspection can not obviate the wisdom of a new inspection at San Francisco to ward against hookworm, elephantiasis, plague, cholera and the unmentionable disease.

Hongkong is ever increasing its hospital equipment, which is now the most extensive in the Far East. Some of the buildings erected on the mountain peaks are palatial. On the western slope of Victoria Mount there is the worldwide known Tung Wah Hospital, managed by Chinese educated in the medical schools of Britain, America and Hongkong. At this hospital Doctor Sun Yat Sen, the first president of China, was a student some years ago. Over Bowen Road, above the clouds of Mount Wanchai, is the sumptuous Military Hospital, and at the foot of the mountain is the no less splendid Naval Hospital. On Mount Kellett is Sharp’s Hospital, and on Victoria Peak is the Peak Hospital. There is the Civil Hospital, the Nethersole Hospital, hospitals over on the mainland at Kowloon, and there will be a railroad hospital at Kowloon. Canton has copied from Hongkong. The Chinese there are modernizing their ancient guild hospitals which lie outside of the eastern wall. Philanthropy in only the smallest of the Hongkong hospitals has been depended upon, most of them being municipal or service hospitals. At Canton is the immense Doctor Peter Parker Hospital, founded in 1835, for which the American Presbyterian women of Philadelphia furnish the medical missionaries. There are 300 beds, and 25,000 patients are treated annually. The Chinese do their part, having presented a building for a medical college. The Gregg Hospitals for Women at Canton is presided over by Doctors Mary Fulton and Mary Niles, and the Chinese have given $3,500 for a children’s ward. At Kowkiang, on the Yangtze, there is the model Danforth Memorial Hospital, erected with American money and presided over by a noted Chinese lady physician who has taken the name of Miss Mary Stone, and who graduated from the University of Michigan Medical School.

In remote large Hainan Island, in Suchow, at Paoting, Chingtu, Peking, etc., there are American Presbyterian hospitals. Where there are now hundreds there will soon be thousands of medical missionaries and more medical colleges to fit the Chinese to help themselves. It is the most important work in China,--more important even than foreign loans for railways and industrials, and far more important than loans for armies and navies. Doctor F. C. Yen, of Yale Medical College, Changsha, is a fine example of a native medical man, trained in the best that the West knows. Several American universities have opened medical schools in China, the University of Pennsylvania at Canton, Yale at Changsha in stern conservative Hunan province; and now Harvard proposes to open a medical school possibly at Shanghai, to be staffed by the Harvard Medical School, and the diseases which they will attack are China’s curses, the dangers of the world,--the skin diseases, tumors, the two plagues, cholera, dysentery, leprosy, malaria and consumption. One-third of the money for the Scotch Presbyterian Hospital and medical college at Mukden was contributed by the Chinese, who now warmly appreciate Western medicine.

The day is not distant when the Chinese, placed on their feet in finance, will pay half the expense of medical missions. The Chinese give liquorice to men and animals as a cure for wasting diseases. From the skin of a venomous toad their doctors derive a preparation which they call Sen-so. It is a far more powerful stimulus to heart action than our drug digitalis. It is well known that deer’s horns are ground to powder by the old-fashioned Chinese doctors. In the valley of the Wei River, just north of the Peling range in far western Kansu province, stags are raised in enclosures for this purpose. The soft prongs of the horn are cut off in summer time. The old-fashioned doctors of China never dissected, as abuse of the body is contrary to Confucianism. They knew nothing of circulation, and little of anatomy, physiology or chemistry. “Then Confucianism must go,” say the new Chinese scientists. Two of their medical proverbs are:

“A physician may cure every disease except the disease of Fate.”

“Send for the diagnostician before the druggist, for the cure must fit the disease.”

Four great tropical medicine colleges have been opened outside of the Orient. The first was the University of Liverpool School. Then followed the London School of Tropical Medicine, and the Hamburg School of the Germans. Now the New York Tropical Medical School has been opened at Twentieth Street and Second Avenue. The work will include the translation of text-books, and America will be able to do much for Southern China in the clinic on ships which the school will have as soon as the Panama Canal is open. Serums have yet to be found for the paralyzing dengue which every foreigner in China has suffered from at one time or another: typhus, anæmia, dum-dum, tze-tze, sleeping sickness, amoebic dysentery, malaria and pneumonic plague, though the indefatigable Doctor Kitasato found a temporary serum for the last named.

The medical works translated into Chinese by medical missionaries include the following: Doctor J. G. Kerr’s (first teacher of Doctor Sunyacius) translation of Bartholow’s _Practise of Medicine_, Doctor S. A. Hunter’s translation of a _Materia Medica and Pharmacopœia_, Doctor Dudgeon’s translation of Gray’s _Anatomy_, Doctor Porter’s translation of a physiology, Doctor Mary Fulton’s _Diseases of Children_; _Nursing in Surgery_, and _Gynecology_, etc.

When I think of the trials of the Orient in its heated, humid, equatorial region, where I lived for three years; and the hardships, dangers and life-remembered punishment of its unavoidable, various diseases, I am inclined to suggest in this book the formation of an “Equator Club,” eligibility for membership in which shall be at least two years’ uninterrupted residence between the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. Such an experience was certainly a unique and trying one, a tremendous test of physique, as a growing number, who have endured it, will confess, and a perpetuated remembrance of those days, and an interest in the successors who have followed one to take up the white man’s growing burdens in those realms of the imperious sun, would certainly do good.

XXVII

CHINESE WOMANHOOD

On the last of our August the women of China celebrate the festival of the goddess of needlework. The interesting legend told to the daughters of the house is as follows: This goddess, because of her wonderful skill, was given by the great god Tien to a worthy farmer. After this life she incurred the wrath of the god and was removed from her husband’s star. Once a year, when her star comes round again, magpies conduct her back to her husband’s star home, across the carpet of the Milky Way, where she is welcome for a while, because she is as good a needleworker as he is a farmer and provider. The festival includes the exhibition on a table of the needlework of the women and the toy work of the girls. Wonderful toys of gummed sesame seeds, wax and paper are made, and toys worked by clockwork or heat, which exhibit all kinds of rural life,--some of it humorous. From behind screens the women listen to what the men callers have to say to the head of the family in praise of their handiwork. It is, however, principally a women’s festival and encourages the production of the gorgeous embroidery of the Chinese. A Chinese wit was asked the difference in the position of Chinese and Anglo-Saxon women, and she replied: “An Oriental man beats his wife in public to show that he is indeed the ruler, but he pets her in private, whereas a Western man pets his wife in public and beats her in private.” I do not know what the remote Tibet men do with their powerful women in private, but I do know that the women of Tibet who come down into Szechuen and Yunnan provinces with the trading trains are on an equal with man. They join him in work, play, in meeting strangers and in holding the “cash,” and therefore are the most independent of the Chinese women. They do not bind their feet, as they have too much work to do. They come next to the Tonquinoise as perhaps the best-looking of the Chinese. The best dressed women in China live in Kiangsu and Chekiang provinces. The dress of Korean women is not so gorgeous as the Chinese dress, the former wearing green or white, and hiding their heads in immense basket hats, “to keep them from flirting” the wits say! The Korean woman at home, instead of modestly screening her face with a fan, does so by lifting up her wide sleeve. Muffs and gloves are not worn in the cold north. Instead, the wide long sleeve is gathered round the hand.

Copyright, 1913, The Bobbs-Merrill Company.

Lighting China’s sea-ways by the National Customs Department. This
is the Guia Light. Note the winding rock path, cut to the summit;
Kwangtung province.
]

Copyright, 1913, The Bobbs-Merrill Company.

Modern buildings of brick. Nearly all have large verandas. Canton water-front, Pearl River.]

Copyright, 1913, The Bobbs-Merrill Company.

The Chinese type of girlhood, as contrasted with the Japanese type
shown in another photograph. In the New China the compressing of
feet is taboo.
]

The campaign of the Tien Tsu Hui (As-Heaven-Made-It Foot Society) against foot-binding is meeting with much success. Chinese women are rejoicing that they are not withheld from physical freedom and an education, by being longer crippled. The idea that a bound foot is the surest sign of a lady, and the best recommendation for marriage, is dying out. As prices increase with the material development of China, men will not be able to hire servants to carry and wait on these crippled women. Therefore economy will advance the reform also. The famous viceroy of Wuchang, Chang Chih Tung, who died in 1909, was the first prominent Chinese official to become converted to the reform. The late Empress Dowager Tse Hsi joined the movement. It is a pity that more Chinese girls from the Yangtze and southern provinces do not come to American and European schools, as their work, on returning to China, would do most for this reform. The snobbish idea, of course, was that a girl who never needed to work, and had never worked, made a very select wife, just as in America and Britain the “snobs” think that a girl who has never worked, and can not work, makes a finer wife than a woman who has been or is in business. The French have thought otherwise for a long time. One of the pioneer foreign women, outside of the missionaries, who worked and lectured in China for the unbinding of feet, was Mrs. Archibald Little, author of _The Land of the Blue Gown_, and wife of the intrepid Yangtze explorer and author.

The following love tale is the one oftenest painted on your teacup and saucer, and other Chinese pottery, and on fans, etc. Kung She is the sweet and lovely daughter of a rich man. She falls in love with her father’s bright and brave young secretary, who has more in rosy prospect and dreams than in lined pocket. The father proposes that the daughter shall, against her will, marry a rich old suitor. The lovers in desperation elope over a bamboo bridge to an island pavilion of willow wood, with beautiful up-curving eaves. The wrathful suitor follows and burns the pavilion and the bridge. The souls of the lovers take refuge in the bodies of two doves which are seen cooing from the branches of a banyan that grows above the pavilion. Thus we sit down to eat, and we fan ourselves each day over a beautiful love tale of romantic old China.

The queue is now going out as man’s head-dress in republican China. The general custom with Chinese women is to dress the hair out behind, sticking in large-headed gold pins; and the Manchu’s dress it over the ear, with the help of wide pins, and broad ribbons and flowers. The aboriginal tribes of Lolos in Szechuen province, and Miao Tszes in Kweichau province, dress the hair on top of the head over rats, in true Western cone-style. The Chinese women oil their hair and brush it out smooth on forms. The only departure from this is a straight bang allowed to girls. They wonder if we have brushes or combs in the West, and point to our curls (called “rough dog”) as a proof of our tonsorial carelessness.

Some of the proverbs of the women are:

“You can not tell a good husband that his wife has a defect.”

“Ugly and beautiful daughters all have one face to a true mother.”

“A man weds a wife for her goodness, but a concubine for her face.”

“Mother’s love is even in beasts, for the hungriest tiger will not eat its whelps.”

“Deeds are better than admiration.”

“A virtuous wife is like a loyal statesman; she knows only one king, her husband.”

“Mother and father first and wealth after.”

“She is dead indeed who walks around with a dead heart.”

“If you listen to every one’s advice, the picture will never be straight on the wall.”

“Let thy purse and not thine eyes tell thee what to buy.”

“You can’t expect the looking glass to reveal more than you put into it.”

Because of the worship of men ancestors, Confucianism has been called a man’s religion. Yet it recognizes woman’s work. A bronze brazier stands before the open white marble altar at Peking, in which once a year at the ancient Chou sacrifices to the God of Heaven, the emperor-pope burns silk. The Manchu emperor, in abdicating the throne, retained his sacerdotal offices, though strictly speaking, they should have fallen to the Ducal Kung Fut Tszes, of Shangtung province, who are the seventy-seventh in direct line from Confucius. A number of the Kungs, however, are Christians, and they exerted little insistence on their Confucian privileges. The care of the worms and the weaving of silk is distinctly woman’s work in China. This sacrifice is repeated by the governor at every capital, and heads of families sometimes, in their own office of patriarch priest, make the silk sacrifice. This is quite distinct from hiring a Taoist bonze to burn silvered and gilded imitations of money to appease a devil or “ying” spirit. A patriarch would have no influence there, the operation requiring a specialist more familiar with witches and demons! The Chinese women always sit on chairs and lounges (kangs); the Koreans and Japanese sit on the floor. This does not mean that the Koreans, whom the Japanese have conquered, are in sympathy with the latter, for they thoroughly hate each other. The Chinese never wear a feather, except to denote literary rank in men. Therefore the bucolic natives who see the fashion of western women, remark: “Only your women are educated, and very talented at that, some having a dozen literary degrees.” Millinery is for men, not for women in China, as only men wear a feathered cap. The gorgeous tail feathers of the Machi species of pheasant are particularly popular. Preserves of these birds are kept in the Wei valley, north of the Peling range of mountains in far western Kansu province, to provide the men milliners with supplies!

A well-known custom at Chinese weddings is the effort of the bride to sit upon part of the groom’s gown when they are drinking the betrothal tea together. The cups are tied with a red string, and the groom must not break the string in his effort to release his gown. If the bride succeeds it means that she will be his ruler. A partially similar custom prevails among the Miaotse aboriginal tribes of Yunnan province. The friends of the groom endeavor to prevent the bride’s brothers from throwing her veil on the roof of the house. If the latter are successful in the rush, the omen is that the bride will rule the groom, saying in any argument: “Remember that on June 15th my veil went on your roof!” The midwife is a well-filled calling, but she does not go by that name. She is called the “life-catcher” throughout the land. The “mother-in-law” joke does not obtain in China. Its place is taken by the son-in-law joke. It is the aim of the son-in-law and his wife to “go and live on mother” as long as possible. Mother resents it with the usual complaint: “Here comes my son-in-law, with his wife and six children, to live on us again for a month; dearie me,” etc.! When a family marries off a daughter, generally to save the expense of supporting her, they hope to see the last of her as far as that expense goes. Family courtesy, the Confucian “li” code, prescribes yearly entertainment, however, of the son-in-law’s family, which is not reciprocated, and hence the standing of the son-in-law joke as a mirth-provoker among those who perceive the code’s requirements obeyed, with exactness but not with cheerfulness!

Although the race has for centuries shaved the heads of the men almost to baldness, they have a great abhorrence of baldness in women, and this is frequently pleaded as a cause for divorce or breaking of an engagement (marriage contract). The women in general have luxuriant hair, though it is coarse, and its color and luster remain till late in life, owing to the use of oils, the absence of hats, and the out-of-door habits. If the lion-like chow dog (yellow or black) is the pet of the men, the Pekingese toy spaniel is the pet of the Manchu woman. She calls it her “sleeve dog.” The late Empress Dowager Tse Hsi enumerated its points as follows: “It shall learn to bite a stranger; its toy body shall be maned and fixed with the fierce eyes of the great lion seeking its prey. Its ears shall be set like the sails of a war junk; its nose shall be stubby like the monkey god of the Hindus; its forelegs shall be bowed so that it can walk over the foot of its mistress, but shall not be able to stray far from the yamen; its feet shall be tufted so that its step shall be as on turf; and its color shall suit every change of gown. It shall be fed on the breasts of quails, livers of curlews and sharks’ fins. Its drink shall be Hankau, first-budded tea and antelope’s milk. If ill, it shall be anointed with the fat of leopards, and drink a thrush-egg full of the juice of the custard apple and dissolved rhinoceros’ horn. If very ill, piebald leeches shall be applied to it.” Despite all this poetry which aptly goes with this fashionable dog, it thrives very well on Spratt’s dog biscuit in the salons of West End, London, and Fifth Avenue, New York. A number of ladies are mixing up Chinese and Japanese names for the pets at the bench shows (Peking Yen, for instance), but the dog answers very well to the names Jip, Tip, etc., which we used to call those old favorite toy dogs, the black-and-tans. The dog looks like a cross between a Pomeranian and a King Charles spaniel. The face is decidedly lion-like; the bushy tail sweeps well over the back as does that of his big brother, the Chinese chow dog. The legs are short and bowed, and the manner is very alert.

Possibly overmuch has been written that the Chinese despise female children and worship male children. In the economic and religious structure of old China boys have been more valuable, but the human heart of the race has responded to love for its girls. Poverty, more than hardness of heart, has induced the race in instances to sell its girls; for China has been very poor because of flood and famine, resulting from inefficiency of government and the non-development of mines and manufacturing. The two greatest teachers of old China have for twenty-five centuries taught love of children in the following among other maxims. Confucius said: “Treat the young tenderly,” and Mencius wrote: “The great man is he who does not lose his child’s heart.” Where the parents can afford it, the Chinese dress their boys and girls expensively and gorgeously, and fondle them as lovingly as do the Hebrews, who are supposed to set the standard in love for children, as compared with us colder northern races. One of the first things that the new government will attempt to suppress will be the sale of girl slaves and concubinage. The population of China will fall or remain stationary, which will be a good thing for China. There is, therefore, no “Yellow Peril” for the West, as the Emperor William enunciated in 1898. The poorer a man, the more children he desires in China, so that sons may take care of him in old age, but he forgets that he is raising uneducated sons and neglected girls, who are often sold into slavery. Better a family of four well-cared-for children in the new hygienic Cathay than a family of ten in the old China. China’s population will fall under the new régime, but her efficiency, education and comfort will advance, and those who will benefit the most, as compared with their former condition, will be her women.

At the time of the revolution, October, 1911, to February, 1912, there were 400,000 starving girls and women in the Yangtze and Hwei River valleys alone who offered to sell themselves for food; China’s courts will no more defend the legality of such contracts under duress, as we in the West must revise our “freedom of contract” and “confession” laws where an uninformed or a restrained individual signs away rights. Every Chinese boy has till now married early in life, Shanghai being an exception in having a large demi-monde colony. The _Kuo Kuang Pao_, a native paper of Peking, complained in a late issue of courtesans (with modesty they call it rather the “custom of Shanghai”) coming to Peking, and soliciting students brazenly in the streets. Shanghai has a “slave refuge” for the protection of abandoned and abused girls. Intense poverty on account of famine is at the base of this curse. It is not as common in Hongkong and Canton as in the valleys of the Hoang, Han, Yangtze and Hwei Rivers.

The position of the Chinese woman, taken by the white man, who is mean enough to do it, as a common law wife, and of their Eurasian children, who are often not acknowledged, or are deserted, is a pathetic one in Hongkong, Shanghai and many treaty ports. It was more common in the old days than it is now, and men of high position often fell, when the Oriental ports were designated over an ill-informed world as the “white man’s grave,” to which no white woman would come. There are Eurasian schools and orphanages in Hongkong, Shanghai, Macao, etc., and the colonies of deserted Eurasians have a population of thousands. They are far from unintelligent. The best billiard player in Hongkong was of this mixed race. They have dark eyes and hair and dress in both foreign and Chinese style. They are taller and have larger heads than the pure Chinese. In the second and third generations the hair turns fairer. Naturally they partake of the characteristics of each race. A Eurasian is more sprightly than the Chinese, and he is inclined to the sporting and spendthrift proclivities of the foreigner. They are the clerks and second men of the ports. Few rise high, though many now attend colleges. They are the best penmen and linguists of the Far Fast, though not earnest enough to become scholars, or persistent enough to become the successful merchants which the men of their mother’s race are. Feeling sometimes acutely the opprobrium which is visited upon them by both races, they often claim a dark foreign nationality, generally Portuguese of Macao colony.

I want to relate the remarkable history of one Eurasian and his mother. I shall say no more of his father than that in blood and ability he was one of the noblest names that came for a long sojourn in the Far East. His position was such that the father could not own the son, especially as in time the former married a white woman. The boy, who from the beginning bore a Chinese name, was the picture of his father, and his dressing in Chinese clothes and wearing a queue shocked all of us who knew the history, for the boy was taller than the Chinese and had the face of a foreigner. Some laughed, for the youth seemed to be a foreigner on perpetual masquerade. He came into our hong as clerk, was easily the best penman and figurer in the office. His manners were those of fashionable West End, London, or genteel Upper Fifth Avenue; you felt when you heard him speak that you were talking to your superior. He often had business dealings with his father, yet he did not seem conscious of the relationship. The son, being even the abler man, the painful dramatic situation was pitiful. The tall Eurasian youth married a Chinese woman in time, and reverted to his mother’s race, and his deserted Chinese mother returned to her blood, married a Chinese, had many pure blood children, and publicly disowned her Eurasian boy. Privately, however, the boy and mother sometimes met, and the scene matched in dramatic pathos the meetings with the father. The youth seemed to be cheerful despite all these trials. I never saw him reveal pride or resentment; only in this way, when in later years for a time, he came into a position of power in a Chinese company which entered into international trade, he was merciless when the white competitor withstood him. I have often felt his mighty blows and been outwitted by his commercial strategy. He smiled in a complacent way as though to say: “Why might I not circumvent you; you know something, perhaps, about one race, but nothing about the other. I, being a Eurasian, know much about the two races.” He deserved all his conquests. He had something to avenge, and he did right in casting his life with China and not Europe. The remarkably dramatic setting of this boy’s, his mother’s and father’s life would have given Shakespeare material for a tragedy, and the foreigner concerned would have paid the price of his heartless audacity, despite the romantic poetry which Pierre Loti wove around such relationships in his book _Madame Chrysanthème_.

Perhaps the most significant sign of China’s reform is the new status of women. Never before have Chinese women traveled with their merchant husbands. In a few isolated instances Chinese ministers have taken their wives abroad, but there have never been mixed parties of men and women until the revolution. On November, 1911, a touring party of prominent members of Chinese trading guilds of several of the provinces met at Shanghai for a business tour of Japan. They were accompanied by their wives. The New China has its Mrs. Pankhurst in Miss Yik Yung Ying, of Canton, who is foreign trained and has admission to the Nanking Assembly as representing the women of her province of Kwangtung. She has obtained from the Nanking Assembly a promise of equal suffrage on equal property and educational conditions. Some of her suffragettes attacked the assembly police and broke windows in true Pankhurst style, the patient Chinese wits only remarking: “This froth will blow off the glass and leave the clear liquid!”

Many girls of the mission schools of Canton, Fuchau and the Yangtze cities of the rebellion could not be restrained from serving at the front in the republican revolution. Some of them tried to form bomb-throwing corps. Where they insisted on service the missionaries of Wuchang, Hankau, Shanghai and Nanking organized them in several uniformed Red Cross Corps, which performed effective and brave work. The large clans, or family villages, are sending to the missions for graduate teachers to take charge of their girls. The head man (hsiang lao) sets apart a bedroom, a schoolroom and a courtyard for the school, and the whole family clan contributes. The mothers of course continue their instruction in the Chinese classics, folk lore, religion and their inimitable needlework. Elsewhere I have spoken of the St. Hilda’s school at Wuchang, under American Episcopal auspices, which aims to become the Women’s College of Central China. A daughter of the original reformer, Kang Yu Wei, has studied in America. Miss Li Yu, the granddaughter of Li Hung Chang, took the course at Wells Female College, at Aurora, New York, where she was a prize scholar.

Cornell in particular, Hartford High, Leland Stanford, Columbia, University of Washington State, Wellesley, Vassar, Smith, University of Michigan, and all the women’s and co-ed colleges in America have enrolled more Chinese women than all the other women’s colleges of the world, but not so many as they might and will, now that the new régime has opened with rainbow promise. Forty young Chinese women are studying medicine in America through the work of China’s first woman doctor, Miss Ya Mi Kin, who is in charge of the Tientsin Woman’s Hospital and nurses’ school.

A remarkable Chinese woman doctor, going by the name of Doctor Mary Stone (educated at University of Michigan), manages the American hospital at Kiukiang, and Doctor Tsang Cho Kin, a Cantonese lady, is prominent in modern medical work at Canton, Fuchau and Shanghai. The American Presbyterian women (to instance only one denomination here) have seventeen girls’ schools open at Canton alone, and in addition the following exemplary development: a school for blind girls, in charge of Doctor Mary Niles; a boarding school for children of lepers; a hospital school for girls in charge of Mrs. Kerr; a training school for women teachers; the Hackett Medical College for women; and the Turner Nurses’ School, under the charge of the noted Doctor Mary Fulton. At Ningpo there is a girls’ school and a women’s industrial school. At Shanghai there is the well-known girls’ school at the south gate; and at Hangchow and Nanking there are girls’ boarding schools. At Nanking the wives of Chinese taotais (officials such as mayors) are encouraged to preside over mothers’ meetings. At Peking there is the Bridgman College for Women, a women’s medical college and nurses’ school, a girls’ day and industrial school. At Paoting, in Pechili, there is the Union School for Girls; at Tengchow, in Shangtung, a girls’ high school and industrial school; and at Tsinan a girls’ school. At many of these girls’ schools, presided over by foreign women, the Chinese pay much of the expense; and they are copying the schools to the best of their ability all over the land for their girls and women, and calling upon the mission women’s schools for graduates whom they may use as teachers. There is no greater proof that the New China has begun its march toward the sun than that its womanhood has at last been thus recognized in modern education and opportunity.

Womanhood over the world responds to the same chord of sympathy. One of the contributions to the Woman’s _Titanic_ Memorial came from a Chinese girl, Ying Low, with this message: “I send this for Captain Smith’s soul.” The word for woman in Chinese is “nu,” and the probability now is that she will be new indeed, and the foundation stone of the New China for her sons.

The first modern style Chinese marriage among those not Christian was solemnized in April, 1912, in the well-known Chang Su Ho Gardens, Shanghai. The families concerned were wealthy and the marriage was a civil one. A ring, music, flowers, witnesses, a public ceremony and certificate contract all came into use. There was nothing picturesquely old-style or secret, as the middleman, the closed chair, the ceremony at the groom’s house, the joined teacups, the contests between teams of both families, the worshiping of sticks and house coffins, the discordant orchestra, the chairs of food, the goose present and heckling of the bride by practical jokers.

XXVIII

AGRICULTURE AND FORESTRY IN CHINA

Agriculture has always been a leading calling in China. The farms are small and are intensively worked. They have been too small, and the immense population has been crowded into the river plains only of the vast country. Not one quarter of China and its territories is worked as it might be. The adopting of machinery and the application of the single tax to some of the unworked land by the new régime will make possible the enlargement of farms, and the consequent stocking with meat, milk, egg, wool and skin-producing animals on a vast scale. The decrease of population that will occur owing to the decadence of ancestor-worshiping Confucianism, and the system of early marriage and concubinage, will necessitate the introduction of agricultural machinery. An increased agriculture will bring about the exportation of food products from so fertile and sunny a land. The enhancement of hygiene with the new medical knowledge will confirm this increased production in agriculture, as there will be no waste of life through ignorance, and human surplus vitality will be directed to increasing the productivity of the land, and the reclamation of the waste spaces.

In agricultural wisdom little can be taught the Chinese. In love of and assiduity in agriculture no one equals him. Professors King and Ross, of Wisconsin University, have dealt in an exhaustive way with the subject, and other books recommended to the inquirer are Ball’s _Things Chinese_, Williams’s _Middle Kingdom_, Fielde’s _Corner of Cathay_, the journals of the Royal Asiatic Society, Lay’s _Chinese As They Are_, and Douglas’s _Society in China_. The list of products is exceedingly long. Here are just a few as we run down the gamut from the north to the south: wheat, all millets, maize, buckwheat, sugar beet, tobacco, pulse, hay, straw braid, soy and other beans, barley, sorghum, rhubarb and drugs, hemp, all berries and tree fruits, cotton, sesamum, indigo, persimmons, melons, walnuts, almonds, olives, peanuts, tea, bamboo, rice, sweet and white potatoes, grass-cloth plant, oranges, sugar, coffee, rubber, cocoa, pumeloes, lichee, quince, ginger, loquat, mulberry, mustard, tallow trees, flowers for perfumery, lily roots for food and candy, colza nuts for oil, rhus nuts for varnish, camphor, all hardwoods, insect wax, matting and opium. Their truck farms are unequaled. They seem to lose not one lettuce or cabbage leaf. Every bug is nipped in the chrysalis by hand; everybody works from dewy dawn to twilight’s star! Where China exports $40,000,000 of agricultural products to-day to the manufacturing nations that border the Pacific and Atlantic, to-morrow she will export $400,000,000, besides becoming herself richer in pantry and bank.

The farmers are always searching for soil enrichers, with such success that you seldom see the nitrogen-starved yellow instead of green field. Not a handful of ashes is wasted; not an herb or branch but is gathered for the compost heap to make humus. Water is brought over the land, that it may deposit its nitrogenous wealth, and the mud of canals is dredged for the valuable rotted slime. Three times a year a part of China, 1,200 miles long and 1,200 miles wide, is one vast flooded field. By placing mud walls around his fields, a farmer does not need to raise all his irrigation water by power. Rather, he directs gravity, for he saves the rapid surface draining of the land, especially in the higher terraces. In the lower terraces he digs wells to store the surface water against drought. The water showered upon the higher fields he lets down to the lower during dry periods. They believe in a rotation of soils as well as in a rotation of crops, and will exchange bodily a rice field’s and an orchard’s top soil. By intensive farming a Chinese gets as much from a ten-acre farm as we get from a hundred-acre one, and he never permits a soil to be impoverished by its crop. You never see his implements, rude as they are, left uncovered over night. He carries home even his straw fork, which is made three-pronged by training nature instead of fashioning by hand. When the farmer’s wife and girls are not in the field they are working up straw braid for America’s and Europe’s hats and weaving silk and making embroidery for western gowns.

South of the Yangtze River human nightsoil is mixed with water and applied to the farms in liquid form. North of the Yangtze the drier climate permits of mixing the manure with earth and drying the slabs for transport. A farmer in South China willingly builds a toilet on the public road and requests the public, including the humorously shocked foreigner, with a sign which is much shorter than my words, to remember how China must be fertilized in order to support more inhabitants to the acre than any other land! The result is that China’s streams, outside of the suspended mud and silt that they carry, alone of all countries, are nearly pure, and foreign sanitary engineers take potable water directly from the rivers, as at Hankau, Canton, etc. The loss to the land of fertilizers by burning them as fuel, in the absence of forests and worked coal mines, is nowhere better illustrated than in Mongolia and the province of Fukien. In Mongolia the camel dung is dried and used as fuel. In Fukien, railway development has been retarded, and the coal of the Ankoi and other mines does not reach the hut in the field. Straw, therefore, instead of returning to the land, is of necessity used as fuel. For instance, take the tanning industry. The hides are thrown in a pond, in which there is a solution of alum. After peeling, the leather is stretched on springy frames of strong bamboo, and placed over an earthen furnace for smoking and drying. The fuel is _straw_, which gives the hide a yellow color, at a lamentable cost. In their opening era of manufacturing, the Chinese do not intend to permit dyes, chemicals, refuse or sewage to be drained into their streams and rivers, which from their source to the sea are used over and over for irrigation and for drinking.

Chinese matting comes mainly from the West River (Si Kiang) ports west of Canton. The fresh water reed is in some cases fertilized, as at Tung Kun and Lintan, so as to produce size and sheen. The reed is split when cut in the green and the sun rounds the strands. German aniline dyes are used, which produce a sorry product as compared with the famous natural dyes of old China. In producing red, however, the dye is obtained by boiling a Philippine redwood. The looms are simple hand looms, worked in the humble homes of the people. The mats are dried and set over a charcoal fire. The shipping season is in the fall. Vast quantities, baled in reeds, come by junk and steamer from the riverine ports to Hongkong, where they are put in godowns until the arrival of a trans-Pacific or Suez steamer, or a Standard Oil Company freighter and sailing vessel. The very low rate is controlled by the sailing ship, and quantity is of the first essence of importance in making the business pay any one concerned, except the middleman in America or Europe. Better dyes might be furnished to the reed farmers and better looms and designs will now probably be distributed among them. It is a floor covering which should grow more popular from an economic, and especially a sanitary point of view, as it does not harbor moths or germs, and is easy to handle; and from a conservation point of view, its wider use would reserve carpet wool for clothing. The clean Japanese despise us for our use of the fixed, unsanitary woolen carpet. The seed of the reed is planted, just as rice is, in a sheltered spot in the fall. Transplanting occurs early in the year and the fields are irrigated. It takes two men or women four days to weave a roll on a very crude loom.