Part 14
The upkeep of such a great establishment, under the conditions that exist in China, is no small matter, but the next to impossible has been achieved and the management is well-nigh beyond criticism. The long, light airy wards, with every cot filled, are visited each morning by a foreign-trained Chinese physician, who donates his services. On the second floor of the men’s hospital is a beautiful white-tiled operating room, with all the latest equipment. There are industries, indoors or out, for those able to work. Children study half a day. Incurables and old people without support are kept on for life, but the strong and middle-aged are sent away from the institution as soon as they are well to make room for others. It is a joy in this land, where the insane have been so long neglected and maltreated, to find a retreat prepared for them where they receive the kindest consideration. The consequence is that many after a few months go home cured. Every cement-lined cell is protected in front by iron bars, so that the door can be left wide open, admitting light and air. A door at the back of each cell opens into a narrow corridor which leads to bathrooms with large earthen tubs and running water. Several of the cells are neatly padded to accommodate violent patients. This place and the prisoners’ wards next to it, as clean and wholesome as heart could wish, are in charge of a Christian young man of tried character.
In addition to the Hospice, its two large-hearted founders have built, on a much frequented street, a three-story Evangelistic Hall. Said the elder one, “We want it to be a place where any passerby and especially strangers in the city, can stop a while and discuss the Christian doctrine.” There is a day school for boys in connection with it.
Out in the neighbourhood of the old pagoda, set in the midst of blooming peach orchards, is a large orphanage for both boys and girls. This also is a Christian institution, but Protestant, and was started eleven years ago by a group of men, several of whom had studied in mission schools. The boys and girls are in separate though connecting compounds, and a happier, merrier lot of young folks it would be hard to find. Much is made of Bible Study, and industrial work among the boys is strongly emphasized. The sale of their rattan furniture, painted scrolls, cloth and hot-house flowers, especially at the time of their annual chrysanthemum show, goes a long way toward meeting the current expenses of the work.
On the same road as the orphanage, but nearer town, is “The Shanghai Home for Poor Children.” This is not Christian, but it is one of the most interesting and best conducted institutions in the city. A few influential business men are its promoters, Chinese with high ideals and broad vision. There are in the Home about twenty girls and a hundred boys, many of them waifs picked up on the streets by the directors themselves. A peculiarity of this institution is that the children do not use beds but sleep on the floor in great breezy dormitories where there can be no question of well-inflated lungs. The school has a famous orchestra, and a picture that catches the eye at once, on the wall of the reception room, represents the band members, girls as well as boys, sitting with their instruments in their hands on the platform in the main hall. This Home is characterized by two unique features, one, that the old-time Chinese boxing and fencing are taught in the fine out-of-doors gymnasium, and the other, the prominence given to agriculture and horticulture as school branches. Indeed this seems to be the only school in Shanghai where agriculture is a study, with opportunity for practical work in the ample grounds around the institution. In connection with this charity it is worth recording that of the ten members on the Board of Directors five are women. However, they have not advanced quite far enough to join with the men in committee meetings but hold separate sessions. Or possibly it is the men, poor benighted creatures, who are to blame!
It is impossible to lay too much emphasis on the value of industrial schools, and social service can be turned into no more beneficent channels than in starting and maintaining such schools. Until very recently industrial training was wholly neglected in China. Even now, if a Chinese educator is asked, “Are there any industrial schools in Shanghai?” he will answer, “None,” and yet there are at least two and one more soon to be opened. But these, it seems, are not classed as schools, since they admit only poor boys unable to pay tuition, and because the study of books is made secondary. The best industrial school was opened four years ago. Work is carried on in a single large building that is not divided into rooms, but from whose centre apartments branch off in different directions like the spokes of a wheel, all well supplied with windows, thus insuring plenty of fresh air and good ventilation even in the hottest weather. “How many boys have you?” was asked of the head teacher. “One hundred, and I wish I had room for five hundred!” came the reply with surprising earnestness. The boys range in age from very little fellows to lads of sixteen and eighteen. There are industries enough to suit the bent of each one. They include carpet-weaving, wicker work, soap-making, pottery, portrait painting, the manufacture of kindergarten toys, clothing made on sewing machines, and stockings on knitting machines. The boys work during the day and study in the evening. Their pride is in their brass band and they earn quite a bit of money for the school by playing at weddings and funerals. The third of an acre covered by the school plant was originally a cemetery, and how characteristic it is of China, that in order to secure the land one hundred and thirty-nine graves had to be removed!
One of the commonest crimes in Shanghai is kidnapping. Chinese children, if they are healthy and attractive, need to be carefully guarded. Most of the kidnappers are women, and the nefarious business is so lucrative that a large number are engaged in it. Kidnappers grow bold as well as wily, picking up children at play on the street, or off on errands, and even beguiling or snatching them away from their very doors. Both boys and girls are stolen, though boys are greater prizes, being always in demand as apprentices and adopted sons in families that have not been blessed with an heir, for the master of a house who has no son to burn incense before his ancestral tablet after his death, and to worship at his grave, is of all men most miserable. Still, pretty little girls are always easily disposed of, either in brothels or in private homes as slaves or future daughters-in-law.
Several years ago about thirty public-spirited Chinese gentlemen in Shanghai formed themselves into an Anti-Kidnapping Society and set to work in earnest to combat this evil. They hired skilled Chinese detectives to meet out-going and in-coming coast and river steamers and arrest all suspicious characters. Cunning as the kidnappers are, again and again they prove no match for the quickwitted detectives, who succeed in rescuing many children. The poor little victims are frequently concealed in baskets of clothing, or hidden away in boxes that ostensibly contain fruit or merchandise. Sometimes two or three will be found crouching together in a single box with only the tiniest holes for admitting air. The very young children are usually drugged, and older ones frightened into silence by the most terrible threats. Five miles out from Shanghai, convenient to the railroad yet in the midst of open country, has stood for years a large Buddhist temple. At the time of the revolution, when so many of the temples in China were abandoned, and put to other uses, this one was leased by the Anti-Kidnapping Society as a Home for rescued children. Stripped of its idols and incense burners, the smoke-blackened walls white-washed, the priests ejected, the old place that so long echoed the mumbled prayers of heathen devotees now resounds with the happy voices of between two and three hundred children. The girls, who are considerably in the minority, occupy the courts in the rear, large and pleasant however, and the boys those in front. The Worship Hall of the temple has been converted into a school and assembly room for the boys. Every day in the Chinese newspapers of Shanghai the Home is advertised, with a description and photographs of the children most recently rescued. In this way hundreds have been identified by their parents and returned to them. Unclaimed children are kept in the Home, being taught some kind of industrial work until they are able to go out and care for themselves. Ethics is a branch of the school curriculum, but the children are at liberty to accept whatever religious belief they will.
The Chinese gentry in Shanghai maintain several free dispensaries. The largest of these, fronting on a crowded street, has in Chinese characters over one door the motto, “Loving to Save,” and above another “Heaven Bestows Perfect Happiness.” This charity is said to be half a century old and the building itself bears evidence of having endured that long. Every second day the dispensary is open, when patients by the hundred visit it. The dozen or so Chinese trained doctors in attendance are divided into two classes, those treating internal diseases and the others dealing with external troubles. They are separated like sheep from goats, sitting each at his own table, under covered corridors on opposite sides of a court. In the rear of the dispensary is a large workshop where coffins are made and given to the poor.
Seven years ago, when plague raged, an isolation hospital was opened by a well-known Chinese philanthropist in the outskirts of the city. He succeeded in buying the house of a wealthy Chinaman, whose several wives and numerous offspring actually performed the unprecedented feat, for Chinese, of vacating the premises in two days. Wards have since been added to the main building, so that the hospital will now accommodate about a hundred. Through the efforts of this same philanthropist, aided by a distinguished foreigner, Dr. Timothy Richard, the China Branch of the Red Cross Society was established in 1904 with headquarters in Shanghai. Three Red Cross hospitals are operated in widely separated districts of the city, two of them intended to be used exclusively for cholera patients during the cholera season. One of these had its opening some months ago when the hospital was visited by many influential Chinese and a few foreign guests. Nothing could have illustrated more clearly the progress the people are making in the science of social service. The building is a thoroughly renovated old-fashioned Chinese mansion, with courts and rooms innumerable and the usual lovely carved woodwork, mural decorations and tiny squares of translucent glass set in quaint wooden screens, though most of these had been replaced by good-sized modern windows. The most fastidious Westerner could not have asked for cleaner wards, arranged for the various classes of patients, whiter examining and operating rooms for both men and women, or a more complete equipment, though the whole was on a somewhat diminutive scale. The question, it is true, would occasionally intrude itself, “How will this place look a month from now?” but it was followed by the reflection “What began best, can’t end worst,” and that a committee capable of initiating such a work could be trusted to supervise its upkeep. The corps of young men nurses wore a neat uniform of white with blue trimmings. The women nurses,--well, to be frank, there were none. “It is so difficult to find women nurses,” explained one of the doctors. “We must have them of course or we can’t open the women’s department.” The keen interest of the Chinese themselves in the hospital, evidenced by the numbers present and their painstaking inspection, was one of the most hopeful signs. An elderly gentleman, of a singularly refined and benevolent countenance, had come all the way from Nanking, half a day’s journey, to study the plant with a view to starting something similar in his own city.
Time fails to tell of the fine modern hospital of the little Chinese woman doctor who received her training at a mission medical school in Canton, and about whom a whole chapter could be written. Unselfish to a fault, serving devotedly under the Red Cross Society during the revolution, pouring her money and her life out in kindred charities, no personal sacrifice is too great for the betterment of her people whose spiritual as well as physical needs lie as a burden on her heart.
A minor charity but one by no means to be despised is that of furnishing on the street in summer free drinks, not of intoxicants, but of tea. The tea is poured hot into earthen jars which stand inside small booths. Beside the jar is a bamboo dipper, and any passerby may stop and quench his thirst. The tea stations are scattered at frequent intervals throughout the foreign settlements as well as the Chinese City, and are an inestimable boon, particularly to the hard-working coolies.
Another charity that well illustrates the poverty of China is the conservation of waste rice. Rice is China’s staff of life. The servant calls his master to eat not by saying “Dinner is ready,” but “Rice is ready.” To waste rice is a sin; to save it, meritorious. As junks laden with rice from the country around are poled down the river and creeks to Shanghai, a few handfuls of the precious grain inevitably sift out from the bags onto the bank. This is picked up by benevolently minded persons, along with the mud in which it has fallen, and afterward laboriously separated and washed. Some hundreds of pounds in the course of a year are collected in this way and distributed to the poor. A number of local Chinese guilds during the coldest winter weather, are in the habit of feeding daily large numbers of the suffering poor, who line up at specified hours for their allotted portion; also generous sums of money are contributed annually by the Chinese and sent to the districts devastated by flood and famine to relieve the destitute.
Perhaps the most significant event of the last year in Shanghai was the organization by young Chinese women of a Social Service League. The leaders are Christians, who in a tactful but persistent way, are sure to make their influence felt. Already as a beginning five free day-schools for the poor, with a total attendance of several hundred, have been started and others are expected to open soon. A Sunday School taught by volunteer workers is held in connection with each day-school. It is the plan to dot the city with these charity schools, which divide the day between the study of the Chinese language and manual training. The whole financial burden is met by the League members and their interested friends, while a few, ladies of high position, who heretofore have led self-centred lives, are giving several hours a week to teaching. The movement is attracting wide attention.
XIV
THE ROMANCE AND PATHOS OF THE MILLS
It was the close of a cold December afternoon, and a raw penetrating wind was blowing. In the mill district out Yangtsepoo way the road was alive with people. Women and little children, with a sprinkling of men, were hurrying along the dusky highway on foot and in wheelbarrows, for it was nearing six o’clock, the hour of the night shift. In front of one of the great cotton mills a crowd of shivering humanity had gathered waiting for the Sikh policemen to throw open the gates. Faces were blue and pinched, shoulders bent, and hands drawn up for warmth inside the padded cotton sleeves. Nearby, within a shallow niche in the brick wall stood a small, solemn-faced boy, perhaps seven years old. He looked like a young sentinel, straight as a ramrod, arms stretched down close to his body. When asked what he was doing he replied briefly, “Keeping warm,” and tried to hug a little closer the sheltering wall. Poor laddie, the whistle would soon blow calling him on duty to work without intermission amid pounding machinery and dizzily whirling spindles, until the welcome signal set him free at six o’clock in the morning.
The story of cotton-growing in China is not a very old one. It began only a few hundred years back, some say in the eleventh, others in the thirteenth century, when the first cotton seeds were brought here from Chinese Turkestan. Strangely enough, it was a woman who gave the cultivation of cotton its initial impulse, for not until Lady Hwang, public-spirited and enterprising, took it upon herself to distribute cotton seeds among the farmers of the Yangtse Valley, was the plant grown to any extent. This valley is to-day the most flourishing cotton producing district in the country. Ninety per cent of China’s millions dress in cotton, a coarse, strong cloth, dyed blue. But what did the people wear in the long ago before the cotton plant had ever been heard of? Did peasant as well as prince array himself in silk and fine linen? What we do know is that the introduction of cotton was strenuously opposed by the silk and hemp growers. It is a curious fact that as early as 500 A.D. reference is found in Chinese books to “cotton robes,” though they were evidently regarded as rarities and were doubtless brought into the country by travellers, or as tribute for the august ruler of the Flowery Kingdom.
India gave China her first spinning wheel, and this same crude wheel, scarcely improved upon at all, is still seen, not only in the interior, but in many a home in and around metropolitan Shanghai. Multitudes of families too, as in the olden days, run their own simple hand loom. Time-honoured customs die slowly in China, but the southern provinces are the least conservative, and Canton is one of the most progressive of cities. So we are not surprised to find that about 1870 a Cantonese company started a factory for spinning cotton by steam-operated machinery. When all was in readiness would the farmers trust their cotton to this wizard concern? Not a man of them! It was their firm conviction that by some occult process their dearly grown product would vanish from sight never to reappear. Thus the enterprise launched so hopefully was doomed to failure. Twenty years later, however, the experiment was tried again, and this time with success. Foreign capital too was attracted to the venture, and at the close of the Chino-Japanese war, when the new treaty gave assurance of protection, a number of foreign-owned mills were built. At first they were operated without profit if not at a positive loss. This was mainly due to the fact that on account of the sudden and greatly increased number of spindles the supply of cotton was not equal to the demand, which caused a rise in price. That is no longer true, and dividends now are often very large. Cotton, to a greater or less extent, is grown in every province in China, but the quality is inferior and the staple short. This is not because of an unfavourable soil and climate, especially in the lower central provinces, but is wholly due to the carelessness and ignorance of the farmers. They cultivate the farms in a haphazard fashion, or strictly speaking, pay no attention whatever to cultivation, allowing nature to run riot at her own sweet will. There is no reason why, with the introduction of scientific methods in seed selection and planting, China in a few years should not see a complete transformation in the character of her crops. Foreigners are planning to start an experimental farm in the neighbourhood of Shanghai, and hope each year to induce a few farmers from the interior to spend several months working on it and receiving practical instruction. It is estimated that within the last ten years the acreage devoted to cotton growing in China has increased one hundred per cent.
Great as has been this advance, the end is not yet, and cotton fields will continue to multiply. “But where is the land to come from?” some one asks. “China’s millions must be fed, and surely the rice and wheat fields can not be sacrificed.” No, but the acres once aflame with the now prohibited poppy will be available, and then there are the burial lands. The amount of ground taken up by the mammoth mound-shaped and horse-shoe graves is enormous, but little by little it is yielding to the encroachments of Western civilization. At a recent medical conference in Shanghai, one of China’s most brilliant foreign-trained doctors, for sanitary and economic reasons dared advocate cremation, or at least confining the sepulchres of the dead to the hillsides and other untillable spots. Half of China’s cotton crop is exported annually to Japan. On the other hand she imports quantities of cotton from America. Foreign countries send many kinds of cotton cloth to China, where it is most popular, particularly the cotton prints. While Japan’s goods flood China’s markets, the Japanese markets are closed to the finished product from China. Yet it should be easily possible in the near future for China to supply her own needs, growing the best quality of cotton, and opening cotton mills all over the country. This would relieve the congested agricultural districts and furnish employment to many idle hands.
What the cotton industry in China requires above everything else is the fostering care of the government. Until this is given there will be little advance in either quality or quantity of production. The most the central government has done thus far has been to give its tardy recognition to “The Cotton Anti-Adulteration Association” of Shanghai, and to place the testing of cotton against adulteration under a Commissioner of the Customs, which has led to most beneficial results. It is a pity that thus far the Chinese-owned mills have declined to join the Association. The greatest handicap to the native industry is heavy taxation. In Japan the raw material is imported and the finished product exported free of duty. In China not only is no such encouragement given, but internal taxes are levied as well, so that the farmer must pay to send his cotton down the river to the manufacturer, the manufacturer to return it in yarn and cloth to the merchant, and the merchant to pass it on to the country buyer.