Chapter XVII: Chinese Charities31

As Moslems regard almsgiving as one of the “gates of heaven,” and practise it to a very remarkable extent, so the Chinese have placed benevolence foremost on the list of the “Five Constant Virtues.” The character which denotes it is said by the learned to be composed of the symbols for _man_ and _two_, by which is somewhat obscurely indicated, on the principle of the spark being the result of the contact of flint with steel, that benevolence should result from the contact of two human beings.

That this is so in China is not the impression which the facts of daily life produce, and the popular view taken of Chinese character in this country is that it is cruel, brutal, heartless, and absolutely selfish and unconcerned about human misery. Among supporters of foreign missions this opinion would be found nearly universal; and, indeed, I have heard the non-existence of benevolence in the vast non-Christian empire of China brought forward as an argument in favour of such missions. So saturated is our atmosphere with the belief that the only charitable institutions in China are those founded by Protestant and Catholic missionaries, that nothing surprised me more than to find that the reverse is the case. Among the many intelligent and frivolous questions which have been put to me since I returned, the one, “Have the Chinese any charities?” has not been among them. It has been reserved for missionaries, and specially the late Rev. D. Hill, of Hankow, and the Rev. W. Lawton, of Chinkiang, to bring this most interesting subject under the notice of readers. The Rev. Arthur Smith gives a chapter of his clever and attractive book, _Chinese Characteristics_, to the same subject, and Dr. Wells Williams glances at it very briefly in _The Middle Kingdom_; but few out of the many lay writers on China have touched upon it. On my first visit in 1878, Dr. Henry, of Canton, pointed out to me asylums or almshouses for the blind, and for aged persons without sons; and on my recent visits, following this lead, I made such inquiries as were practicable on this subject, and now venture to present my too scanty notes to my readers.

I have already remarked that the facts which lie on the surface of Chinese daily life do not give the impression of strong benevolent instincts. Wounded men are stripped of their uniforms and are left to perish on battlefields, because “wounded men are no use.” The ablest Chinese general in the late war wished to buy machine guns without the protective “mantle” at the consequently reduced price, and on being told by the German agent that this would risk a great sacrifice of life coolly replied, “We’ve plenty of men.” Yet this same man was most generous to the poor, established soup-kitchens in Mukden, his city, every winter, supplied the hospital with ice for the patients, and, even in the hurry of the last evening before he started with his brigade for the fatal field of Phyong-yang, arranged that the hospital should be supplied with ice during his absence.

I have known a number of coolies refuse to get water from a river a few yards off to assuage the burning thirst of an apparently dying man of their number, who had carried a burden by their side for a fortnight, and had shared their hardships, on the ground that he was “no more any good,” and several similar instances, and what they do not practise themselves they fail to understand in others. I have been jeered at as a fool for laying a wet cloth on the brow of a man who had served me for some time and fell out on the road seriously ill, and yet more for having him carried in my chair rather than leave him to die on a mountain-side. On another occasion in SZE CHUAN, when I left my chair and walked up a part of the colossal staircase by which the road is carried over the Pass of Shen Kia-chao, my bearers showed the construction they put on my doing so by asking, “Does the foreign woman think us not strong enough to carry her?” Men of the lower class interpret ordinary humanity and consideration as arising from dread of them, and the traveller is daily coming across instances which look very like brutality, and most foreign residents speak of the Chinese as cruel and brutal.

Some writers, especially the author of _Chinese Characteristics_, while admitting the existence of charities on a large scale, detract from the admiration which such works of benevolence would naturally command by pointing out that they are regarded as “practising virtue,” and are considered to be a means of “accumulating merit,” and in fact that the object generally in view is “not the benefit of the person on whom the ‘benevolence’ terminates, but the extraction from the benefit conferred of a return benefit for the giver.” The Chinese are perhaps the most practical people on earth, and a curious system of moral bookkeeping adopted by many shows this feature of the national character in a very curious light. There are books inculcating the practice of “virtue,” and in these a regular debtor and creditor account is opened, in which an individual charges himself with all his bad acts and credits himself with all his good ones, and the balance between the two exhibits his moral position at any given time.

Mr. A. Smith is a very acute observer, and has had lengthened opportunities of observation, and his conclusions as to the motives for benevolence must be received with respect. May it not, however, be hinted that an equally acute observer setting himself to dissect motives for largesse to charities after a residence of some years in England would consider himself warranted in referring a very considerable proportion of our benevolence to motives less worthy than the desire to “accumulate merit”?

The problem of “the poor, and how to deal with them,” has received, and is receiving, various solutions in China, and probably there is not a city without one or more organisations for the relief of permanent and special needs. Foundlings, orphans, blind persons, the aged, strangers, drowning persons, the destitute, the dead, and various other classes are objects of organised benevolence. The methods are not our methods, but they are none the less praiseworthy.

The care of the dead is imperative on every Chinese, but poverty steps in, a coffin is an unattainable luxury, and without help a proper interment is impossible. Hence in all cities there are benevolent guilds which supply coffins for those whose relations are too poor to buy them, and bury such in free cemeteries, providing, according to Chinese notions, all the accessories of a respectable funeral, with suitable offerings and the attendance of priests. Human bones which have become exposed from any cause are collected and reburied with suitable dignity, and bodies which have remained for years in coffins above ground waiting for the geomancers to decide on an auspicious day for the funeral, until all the relations are dead and the coffins are falling into decay, are supplied with new ones, and are suitably interred.

A Chinese is all his life thinking of his burial and the ancestral rites. Among a people to whom a creditable interment means so much, the generous way in which these benevolent obsequies are conducted does more than we can understand to remove the bitterness of mourning. The accompanying illustration shows a neat “chapel” with a well-kept cemetery, where bones have been gathered, those of individuals being placed together, so far as indications allow of it, under neat coverings of concrete.

In the great city of Chinkiang there are an orphan asylum and benevolent institute for girls, with five receiving offices, and a boarding-out as well as an asylum system, a benevolent institute with eighty boys above six, who are apprenticed when old enough, with five teachers in charge, and twenty free day schools for about three hundred boys, whose harsh voices, pitched high, may be heard twanging at the wisdom of the Chinese classics.

Among the Chinkiang benevolent plans for adults there is one, well managed, of inestimable advantage to the struggling farmer or merchant—“The Bureau for Advancing Funds.” From it a poor man with security can borrow from 1000 to 5000 _cash_ ($1 to $5), which must be repaid in one hundred days by payments made every five days. He can borrow again up to a fourth time.

There are two free dispensaries, with nine doctors in charge. They are open without fees every day, treating about 200 patients, who are not required to pay for their medicines. The Life-saving Institution, with a head office and two or three minor offices, has six well-equipped, well-manned boats always on the river near the port, and ten others dodging about above and below. I was in the steamer _Cores de Vries_ when she cut down the s.s. _Hoi-how_ to the water’s edge abreast of Chinkiang, and I can answer for the trained alacrity with which several of these boats were at once on the spot, remaining by the _Cores de Vries_ even after she was run ashore. Their work is not only to save the drowning, but to remove dead bodies from the water, and these are afterwards buried with seemly rites by the Society in a well-kept private cemetery on the hill in which it has interred 175 rescued corpses within the last ten years. There is a free ferry, with thirteen big boats, for crossing the ofttimes stormy and dangerous Yangtze, which saves many lives of those who would otherwise be drowned by ferrying in cheap and unseaworthy craft. This is the richest of the benevolent institutions.

It is interesting to learn how the actual beggars, who trade upon sympathy by their filthiness, deformities, and sores, are treated. A _Beggars’ Refuge_ and a _Home for the Aged_ exist for the same class. The Beggars’ Refuge was begun by a former Taotai. Of its ninety inmates about nine are women. It is not to be expected that it should be clean or sweet. I have seen one in another city which receives five hundred. The beggars are required to bring their clothes and wadded quilts with them, but all else is furnished, and in winter outsiders also receive rice there. Most of the inmates, unless disqualified by age or disease, spend their days begging in the streets.

The rich merchants subscribe to keep up a winter “_soup kitchen_,” which feeds about a thousand people daily with rice, at a cost of thirty dollars a day, during the three coldest months. Besides this the General Benevolent Institution dispenses medicines during the summer, and rice tickets during the winter, and has charge of the “Invalid Home,” and also provides coffins for the dead poor. This society is richly endowed with land, owning 3000 _mow_.[32] The original 280 _mow_ came from the priests on Golden Island.

Widows are not forgotten. Two associations take them in charge: the _Widows’ Relief Society_ and the _Widows’ Home_. The former has only funds sufficient for 300 pensioners, the lists being filled up as deaths occur. The latter is connected with the _Boys’ Orphanage_, and provides a home, food, and clothes for 200 widows. After once entering they are not allowed to go out unless offered a respectable home by a friend, or unless a son has grown to man’s estate. Any results of the sale of plain or fancy needlework are returned to the worker. This care of widows marks a great advance in China on the practice in India and some other Eastern countries.

There are several free cemeteries outside the city, and one of recent origin for children, with a wall six feet high surrounding it, and a keeper in charge, in which 2000 children have been buried in the last four years. In Mukden I first became familiar with the custom, the growth of a superstitious belief, not of lack of maternal feeling, of rolling up the bodies of children in matting and “throwing them away,” _i.e._, putting the bundle where the dogs can devour the corpse, as a sort of offering to the “Heavenly Dog,” which is supposed to eat the sun at an eclipse. When foreigners began to settle in the Yangtze treaty ports it came to be currently believed that they asserted a claim against the dogs for these bodies, of which they “take out the eyes and the hearts to make medicine.” This was too much; hence this well-walled cemetery was provided. This accusation against foreigners, which is a frequent cause of anti-foreign riots, is current everywhere in the Yangtze Valley. I met with it in its worst form so far west as Kuan Hsien, on the Upper Min, and an angry cry of “Another child-eater!” was frequently raised against myself as I passed through the towns of SZE CHUAN. This goodly list does not exhaust the native charities of the first treaty port on the Yangtze.[33]

I have dwelt in detail on the charities of Chinkiang because they are typical of those of other great cities; but the variety throughout the country is infinite, and includes many associations merely for the relief of suffering. In Wuhu a _Life-saving Association_ was established in 1874, with which have been associated, under the same managing staff, a gratuitous _Coffin Association_, to help the very poor to inter their relatives decently, and a _Free Ferry Association_, with big, well-found boats, to prevent the poor from risking their lives by crossing the Yangtze in small _sampans_. Large and substantial offices indicate the generous support given to the _Lifeboat Association_, with which are united a _Humane Society_ for restoring life to persons rescued from the water, and other kindred benevolent associations. This society, which has societies affiliated to it, and apparently under the same rules, at many of the riverine towns, has four lifeboats at Wuhu, about fifty feet long, ten broad, and fourteen tons burden, well manned and handled, able to face any weather, with crews under strict discipline, and ready to sally forth at a signal. They cruise up and down the river aiding junks in distress, rescuing the drowning, and recovering bodies for burial.

If a rescued man is a stranger and destitute, he receives the loan of dry clothing, and shelter for three days; if he is ill, he has shelter and medical attendance so long as he requires them. Such destitute rescued persons are supplied with twenty cents for each thirty-three miles of their journey home. A recovered corpse is reported by the society to the authorities, who take charge of any property recovered with it until the relations are found. It is decently buried, and the usual ceremonial for the dead is provided at stated seasons.

This society publishes its rules and accounts annually for general information. Its offices were built by donations from merchants. It receives a subscription of fifty taels a month from the inland customs, and its other funds are subscriptions, rentals of donated lands, and contributions of rice. The society has always a good balance in hand. Besides wages, it pays at Wuhu and the different sub-stations to the boatmen a reward of 1000 _cash_, or about a dollar, for every life saved, and from 300 to 500 _cash_ for every corpse.

Another charity also provides coffins for destitute persons, and mat-shelters, often sadly needed, for burned-out families, and medical aid for the sick. This is supported chiefly by subscriptions from shopkeepers and gifts of coffin wood.

A few years ago the Taotai, with the leading “gentry” and merchants, established an asylum for foundlings and the children of destitute parents, which has gradually come to include a charity school, an almshouse for aged and invalid poor, and a free hospital.

Kukiang has several similar institutions, including a _Humane and Life-saving Institution_, established by the tea and opium merchants with the funds of their guilds. In Hankow there are more than twenty charities, supported at a cost of about 100,000 dollars annually. At Wan Hsien, above the gorges and the worst rapids, there are very noble charities, some of them carried on by the Scholars’ Guild and the head men of the city, and others by private individuals. Among these are soup kitchens and large donations of rice to the poor in the winter, and in the first month (February) allowances of rice and money to about fifty old people, and gifts of 1600 _cash_ each to about 100 poor widows. The Scholars’ Guild also supports a foundling hospital. I cannot overlook the noble benevolences of Hsing-fuh-sheo, a Wan merchant, not exceptionally wealthy, who, at a cost of over 8000 dollars a year, supports two dispensaries and a drug store, forty free schools, five preachers of the Sacred Edict, and besides, provides clothing and coffins for the dead poor, and wadded garments for the destitute in winter.[34]

Among many other ways of showing benevolence is the provision of free vaccination to all who will apply for it; drugs and plasters are given by some to all applicants, and books known as “Virtue Books” are given away by others, or are exposed for sale at less than cost price. There are small associations for providing the neat, canopied, stone furnaces which are seen in all cities and many country places, for the burning of paper on which are written characters. Originally no doubt this practice was established to prevent any defilement of the sacred names of Buddha and Confucius, but a sanctity has come to attach to all written paper owing to the great reverence of the Chinese for literature, and paper is no longer collected by the priests, but by men paid by these societies for the purpose, who go round with bamboo tongs and bottle-mouthed baskets, rescuing the characters from desecration. The benevolence is not apparent to me, although the societies which undertake this work bear the name _Mutual Charitable Institutions_.

Among other good works are the charitably aided provincial clubs for the care of those who become destitute at a distance from home, and who without such aid could not return, or who, having died afar from relatives, could not otherwise be taken home for burial. Among temporary charities partly Government-aided, but very much supported by private liberality, are the vast soup kitchens, very completely organised, which, on occasions of flood or famine, extend their benevolent and often judicious work over the whole afflicted region, and save thousands of lives. Then there are large donations of wadded winter clothing and wadded sleeping quilts made every year to the destitute; and societies, something in the nature of charitably aided savings banks, for the twin objects of enabling men to marry and to bury their parents creditably.

Much kindness of a kind is shown to the streams of refugees who in bad years swarm all over parts of China in allowing them to camp with their families in barns and sheds, often giving them an evening meal. Enormous gifts are made to beggars, who, in all the large cities, are organised into such powerful guilds that they can coerce rather than plead, and can ensure that a steady stream of charity shall flow in their direction. In the case of both refugees and beggars, a prudent dread of the consequences of refusal is doubtless answerable for much of what poses as charity, and in this the Chinese and the Englishman are probably near of kin.

In concluding this chapter, which brings additional evidence of the strong tendency to organise which exists among the Chinese, I will mention a few of the methods in which individuals carry out benevolent instincts or seek to “accumulate merit.” A Buddhist on a river bank pays a fisherman for the whole of the contents of his plunge-net, and returns the silver heap to the water; another buys a number of caged birds, and lets them fly. Some build sheds over roads, and provide them with seats for weary travellers; others make a road over a difficult pass, or build a bridge, or provide a free ferry for the poor and their cattle. A few men club together to provide free soup or tea for travellers, and erect a shed, putting in an old widow to keep the water boiling; or two or three priests, with the avowed object of securing merit, do the same thing at a temple; others provide seats for wayfarers on a steep hill. Some provide lamps glazed with thin layers of oyster shells fitted into a wooden framework, and either hang them from posts or fit them into recesses in pillars to warn travellers by night of dangerous places on the roads.

I put forward my opinion on the subject of Chinese benevolence with much diffidence, laying the motive of the accumulation of merit on one side. The Chinese obviously fail in acts of unselfishness and of _personal_ kindliness and goodwill. Their works of merit are very much on a large scale, for the benefit of human beings in masses, the individual being lost sight of. They involve little personal, wholesome contact between the giver and receiver, out of which love and gratitude may grow, and no personal self-denial, and in these respects place themselves on a par with much of our easy charity by proxy at home.

It was a great surprise to me, as it will be to the more thoughtful among my readers, to find that organised charity on so large a scale exists in China. Among its defects, in addition to the lack, before mentioned, of kindly individual contact, are the neglect to foster independence by painstaking methods, and the system of peculation from which even benevolent funds do not escape, though it must be added that many Chinese gentlemen give much valuable time to securing their honest and efficient management.

I have not been able to learn whether the benevolent instincts of Chinese women find any outlet. I have been asked by one to give some straw plaiting to a poor widow to do, and by another lady to employ an indigent woman in embroidering satin shoes. I have heard of ladies inviting old and poor women to tea once a week, and even oftener; and Mr. A. Smith narrates one such instance.

It must be remarked that in China certain serious consequences may befall a man who performs an act of kindness individually, and that a dread of such a mishap renders men exceedingly reluctant to give aid and to save life under some circumstances. This possibility is apt to make the Chinese wary as to doing kindnesses personally. A missionary tells how a medical missionary living in one of the central provinces was asked by some native gentlemen to restore the sight of a beggar who was totally blind from cataract. The operation was successfully performed, but when the man regained his sight the same gentlemen came to the operator and told him that, as by the cure he had destroyed the beggar’s sole means of livelihood, it was then his duty to compensate him by taking him into his service!

In conclusion, the Chinese classics teach benevolence: charity is required as a proof of sincere goodness; the Buddhist religious writings inculcate relief of sick persons and compassion to the poor, and the worship of the Goddess of Mercy, an increasingly popular cult in China, tends in the same humane direction. It must be remembered also that the divinities worshipped in China are not monsters of cruelty and incarnations of evil, but, on the contrary, that they may be credited with some of the virtues, and among them that of benevolence.