Part 38
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.