Part 15

At present China has approximately forty cotton mills, nearly two-thirds of which are in and around Shanghai. Three in the city are owned and operated by the Japanese, several are the property of European companies, but the majority belong to the Chinese. The oldest cotton mill, started more than twenty-five years ago in Shanghai, was financed by China’s great statesman, Li Hung Chang. It is still running under Chinese management, though the original buildings were burned a few years ago. This mill is one of the largest, having sixty thousand spindles. The assistant superintendent is a bright young man who recently graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, where he specialized in sociology. He brings to his work high ideals which he hopes gradually to see realized. The next oldest mill is also Chinese. Its owner, Mr. C. C. Nieh, an unusual man, recently returned from a five months’ tour in the United States, where he made a careful and critical study of cotton growing and cotton mills. It is his purpose as quickly as possible to bring his mill up to the highest grade of efficiency. Indeed his American manager reports that his chief is anxious to advance more rapidly than the operatives can be trained to follow, and describes him as a “delightful man to work for.” The largest mill in Shanghai is under British management. It operates seventy thousand spindles and employs between five and six thousand hands. One of the newest mills, that represents the very latest thought in building and equipment, belongs to the Japanese. The brick walls are lined with cement, the floors are reinforced concrete, while the saw-tooth roofs, with glass on one side, admit an abundance of light. The machinery, the best made in England, is operated by electricity, all of the other mills in Shanghai, except Mr. Nieh’s, using steam. A peculiarity of this mill is that the majority of the employees are men and boys, female help being almost exclusively found in the other mills.

A few years ago the Japanese mill owners in Shanghai did a good thing for themselves and for the Chinese in sending to Japan a hundred Chinese men and women to take a course of nine months’ instruction in the mills. Since their return, these trained workers have been used to teach the raw Chinese mill hands in Japanese employ.

Wages in all the mills are about the same, and are good, as pay goes in China. Children receive from eleven to fifteen cents a day, women from fifteen to thirty-five according to their skill, and men fifteen to twenty dollars a month. This is reckoned in Mexican currency, which would yield less than one-half that amount in American money. Some of the mill people come from farms in the suburbs and are in comfortable circumstances. One or two members of a family may work in the mill, not so much from necessity as to be able to add a little to the general income. But others, and these far outnumber the more fortunate class, are the poorest of the poor, often unable to pay the “cash” or two required to ride in a wheelbarrow between the mill and their home which is frequently miles distant. A single instance may be given. A young girl supports a widowed mother and little brothers and sisters on two dollars and a half a month. She starts to the mill each morning at four o’clock, as it takes her two hours to walk there, and when her day’s work is over, at six in the evening, she is two hours more walking home. Many a time when the moon is shining the child mistakes its bright light for dawn and sets out at three or earlier. The walk is not so bad in pleasant weather, lonely only until she joins crowds of other mill folk moving in the same direction. But what of the chill days in winter, with a bleak wind blowing, rain falling, and roads treacherously slippery with mud? It is hardest for the women who have bound feet, women too poor to pay for a seat on a wheelbarrow with five or six others. Yonder comes a group uncertainly picking their way along in the blinding mist. One poor soul at last reaches the gate of the mill and drops all in a heap on the cold wet ground to wait for the blowing of the whistle. “Have you come far?” is asked of her pityingly. Half fearfully, half defiantly, as if braced for a reprimand, she struggles to her feet and answers, “From Honkew,” a distance of nearly three miles. A fleeting smile is by and by coaxed into her pale face, but she is tired, so very tired, and a long twelve hours of unremittent labour lies before her. Let us hope she is one who works at a loom, for then she can have a seat on a narrow bench. The women and children who watch the spindles must stand the long night through.

The employees carry their lunch in a small round basket, all of uniform size. The basket is half filled with cold boiled rice, and set in the midst of it is sure to be a little bowl containing a few mouthfuls of bean curd, salt fish or some other simple relish. Before eating, the food is warmed by pouring boiling water into the basket and allowing the water to filter through the rice and out at the bottom. Hot water is also furnished in the mills for tea. In the new Japanese mill tea itself is given the hands. “Not the best kind,” says the superintendent, “but nevertheless, tea.” This mill has rough dining halls for its employees, and allows a half hour at noon and the same at midnight for eating. Another mill gives fifteen minutes at noon and at midnight. An Englishwoman living in the neighbourhood says she always awakens at night when the great engines stop their throbbing and thinks with tender pity of the wan-faced women and wide-eyed little children toiling across the way while she rests in her comfortable bed. In most of the mills no intermission whatever is granted for rest or food, and the people eat whenever they are hungriest, snatching a morsel now and then as they tend their looms or watch their reels and spindles. Formerly mothers brought their nursing babies to the mills, and laid them at their feet while they worked, but this is no longer permitted in the large mills. Some relative, it may be a grandmother, carries the little one to the mother to nurse twice a day, in the middle of the morning and again in the afternoon. Mothers who work at night often draw from the breast before they leave home sufficient milk to last the baby until they return in the morning.

All of the mills run their spinning department through the twenty-four hours, but weaving can not be done as well at night, so the looms shut down. One mill makes its day fourteen hours long. “And these little children must stand and work all those hours?” asked a visitor of the manager. “Yes,” and with a slight shrug of the shoulder, “rather hard on them, isn’t it?” “But then you know how it is in the Chinese shops,” he added, “they keep their apprentices at work often eighteen and twenty hours on a stretch.”

The best mills no longer employ very young children, that is tots of five and six. This is not so much in the interest of the children as because the little ones are found to be more of a hindrance than a help. But parents try to smuggle them in past the keen-eyed Sikh policemen at the gate, who are kept busy at the times of shift driving them out.

The hiring of women and girls is generally committed to Chinese forewomen, who are responsible for keeping their full quota at work. These women are usually shrewd and business-like, with a full appreciation of the dignity of their position. One recently entered the first class compartment of a tramcar. She wore the loose blue gown, apron, and head cloth of the working people and when the Chinese conductor came by he addressed her gruffly. “Old woman, you belong in the third class. Get out of here.” “Why should I get out?” she responded with spirit, “I have money to pay for a seat in the first class.” The conductor changed his tone and manner at once, recognizing a dominant personality behind the coarse clothes. “Pardon me, Madame,” he said and meekly took the proffered coppers. The mills as a rule give four holidays a month, though they are not always Sundays. Some employees object to Sunday as a holiday as they say it brings bad luck.

The Chinese for so many centuries have been an agricultural race that they do not take as kindly to mechanical labour as the Japanese, who have long had industrial training in the schools and make at first steadier, more dependable mill hands. Yet these patient, plodding people, with almost unlimited endurance, are capable of being trained to do the highest grade of work. The improvement of their material condition is a crying need. Said the superintendent of one of the foreign-owned mills: “I have been in this work in Shanghai now for twenty years, and I hope I may not leave for home till I have seen the employees in the mills better housed, fed, clothed, and educated. But employers can not do this until the Chinese government enables them to compete on better terms than at present with others in the cotton market.” Mr. Nieh is making practical application of his philanthropic principles in an effort to divide the twenty-four hours into three shifts instead of two, and as fast as possible to dispense with child labour, so that the boys may be free to enter the public school which is being built on land donated by him near his mill. This same generous-hearted man, who recently accepted the Christian faith, is also planning for a girls’ school, a day nursery, and a hospital in the mill district. Several years ago he and his wife, also a Christian, threw open their beautiful private garden as a playground for street children. When remonstrated with by their friends they replied smilingly, “We feel it is selfish to enjoy it alone.” The recently organized “Mill Owners Association of Shanghai” it is expected will pave the way for concerted action in relation to needed reforms.

Although cotton is an exotic in China proper, silk is a native product. More than four thousand years ago, in the dim, semi-prehistoric days, China alone of all the countries in the world, understood the art of sericulture. Again it was a woman to whom she was indebted, for tradition has it that as early as 2600 B.C. the wife of the great emperor Hwang-ti experimented with silk-worms and finally discovered a way of unwinding the silk from the cocoons much in the same manner that it is done now. This was a precious secret and China guarded it jealously. But during the fifth century of the Christian era it leaked out, as secrets often will, and lo, it was a woman who divulged it, which is not as surprising a happening as might be. It fell out that the Prince of Khotan in Chinese Turkestan wedded a Chinese princess, and when the bride was being conducted to her new home, so the story goes, she managed to carry with her, concealed in her headgear and at the risk of her life, some seeds of the mulberry plant and eggs of the silk-worm. Thus sericulture became known in Central Asia and later in Europe. It is an interesting coincidence that while it was Khotan that learned the art of silk manufacture from China, it was also Khotan that furnished China with her first cotton seeds several centuries later. So the debt was paid back in part.

Though China shared with the rest of the world the secret of sericulture, yet up to within fifty years she possessed half the world’s trade in silk. Then Japan outstripped her in the race and now leads in silk production and export. It is generally admitted that this would not have happened had the Chinese Government realized the value of the silk industry sufficiently to foster it, abolish undue taxation, and introduce scientific methods of sericulture. As it is, under favouring conditions she may regain what she has lost, for the finest cocoons are found in China, with a tenacity far beyond that of any others. While there is not a province where silk-worms are not raised, broadly speaking two-thirds of the silk produced in China comes from the Yangtse valley and the country north of it, and the other third from the south. Filature steam mills are of recent date. During long centuries it was on crude hand reels that the delicate thread was spun, and equally crude hand looms wove it into the exquisite fabrics so dear to the heart of womankind. Even now there are no silk looms in China run by machinery. All the weaving is done on hand looms. Their familiar thud, thud is heard everywhere. As the traveller stops to look into one of the small, smoke-blackened shops, where half a dozen people it may be are busy with their shuttles, he marvels that textiles so rare and beautiful can come forth from such an environment. Usually a city is celebrated for some one kind of silk, or a province perhaps for two or three hundred varieties.

It was not till 1882 that an unsuccessful attempt was made to start a steam silk filature mill. Ten years later a few were in operation, most of them under Chinese management. As in the case of cotton mills, foreign capital was not invested largely in silk filatures till the close of the war between China and Japan. By 1901 there were 28 mills in Shanghai, the number being about the same to-day. The largest mill in this early period employed 90 men, 630 women and 385 children. It requires considerably less capital to launch a silk filature mill than a cotton mill, but it is a more precarious venture. Cocoons must be ordered at the time the eggs are hatched and put in cold storage, but it is impossible to foretell what the market will be when they are delivered nearly a year afterward. It is most desirable that the filature mills be maintained, as their silk brings two or three times the price of that spun on hand-looms, and the greater part of the gain goes in wages to the employees.

Industrial conditions, in some respects, are rather better in the silk filatures than in the cotton mills. The mills close down at night, not for humanitarian reasons, however, but because the work can not be done well after dark. Sundays are usually holidays. In some of the mills work continues every other Sunday. Fifteen minutes are allowed in the morning for breakfast and an hour at noon for dinner and rest. In at least one of the Chinese mills mothers keep their nursing babies with them, the tiny things lying all day on the floor at the mother’s feet. They seldom cry. It seems as if they knew by instinct that they must not. The lesson of patient endurance is learned early in China.

The first work in a silk filature mill is sorting the cocoons, throwing out the worthless ones, and separating the perfect from the inferior. This is an easy but monotonous task and is given to women. Slipping the wound silk off the reels, testing, weighing, and twisting it into beautiful shapes for shipment requires more skill, and brings somewhat higher wages. Most of this, too, is woman’s work.

The pathos of a silk filature mill centres in the reeling room. Steam pipes for supplying boiling water keep it at a high temperature the year around, while in the fierce heat of July and August, the place, as one foreign manager expressed it, “is a veritable Gehenna.” Only when the breeze is not strong enough to break the silken, web-like threads can the windows be left open. Down the length of the long apartment sit rows of women, and in front of them, with a wire frame between, stand rows of little girls. Each child controls a stationary copper basin half filled with boiling water. It is her business to soften the cocoons by swashing them around in the water, using a small reed brush. After the threads are sufficiently loosened, the bunch of cocoons is handed over to the woman opposite, who also has in front of her a shallower copper basin filled with boiling water. Dexterously she picks up a thread from each cocoon and fastens it to the frame. Then by working a treadle it is spun out and out and finally passes above and back of her, where it is wound onto the reel, which is enclosed on three sides by a wooden case to keep it from the dust. Quickly and deftly the women splice the almost invisible threads when they break, keeping often as many as six spinning at the same time. When at night the silk is taken off the reel, any shortness in weight or imperfection in the thread means a fine for the one who has wound it. Women and children grow very skilful in keeping their hands out of the water, yet they are loose-skinned and parboiled, for fingers must of necessity be continually dipped in. Then, too, the Chinese women overseers, passing constantly up and down the lines, occasionally punish a child’s inefficiency, or supposed laziness, by thrusting the little hand into the bubbling caldron. The hours are long, from five thirty in the morning to five or six at night, and it is not strange if, as the day wanes, youthful senses are dulled and energy flags. The children, most of them, are such slips of girls and some scarcely more than babies. Faces are blanched by the continuous moist heat, and the little slim bodies, even in winter, are often wet with perspiration. Robbed of their birthright of schooling and play, not the youngest among them knows the sweet luxury of laying her tired head on mother’s breast in sleep. An American lady living in the vicinity of a silk filature mill was aroused morning after morning about half past four o’clock by the shrill cries of a child. One day she slipped out on her veranda to discover the cause of the trouble, and saw a little girl being dragged along the ground by one arm to the mill. Frightened perhaps by the sternness of the overseer, or half sick from the confinement, she was trying to escape from bondage. But her parents were inexorable, for in over-populated, underfed China,

“‘Children’ must work and women must weep, For there’s little to earn and many to keep.”

One European mill has for its manager a kind-hearted Italian, who says he understands sericulture from A to Z, having learned to care for silk-worms when a little lad in his native land. He has introduced several humane features, one of them being stools for the children to sit on while at work, the only mill in the city that has them. Fines collected from the employees the management allows him to use in buying medicine for the sick, coffins for the dead, and in paying for beds in the hospital. “Do the people ever faint in this great heat?” a visitor asked. “Oh, yes.” “And drop dead?” “No, they have never done that. If we see they are getting too bad we send them home in a ricsha.”

None of the silk from the filature mills is kept in China. It is all exported, most of it to Lyons, France, and to New York. Waste silk, which is made principally from defective cocoons, is one of the paying by-products of the industry. The only waste silk filature mill in China is in Shanghai. The silk it turns out is coarse in quality and does not keep its lustre but can be utilized in many ways, as for sewing silk, and in making cords, tassels, Chinese caps, carpets, and portières.

XV

A PAGE FROM THE STORY OF PROTESTANT MISSIONS

Late in the autumn of 1842 as the setting sun was illumining the western sky, a vessel very different from the surrounding Chinese junks steamed slowly up the Woosung river toward Shanghai. On board were the new British Consul and his suite and the Consul’s interpreter, the Rev. Walter H. Medhurst, D.D. But the missionary had other and more important business, for with his colleague, William Lockhart, M.D., a younger man, he came as the first ambassador of the Great King to the Yangtse valley. Eight years before he had called at this port, when cruising up and down the coast, and distributed thousands of Testaments and tracts among the friendly natives. Indeed Dr. Medhurst was already a veteran of twenty-seven years’ service, while Dr. Lockhart had landed in Canton in 1839, being the second medical missionary sent to China. Both men were commissioned by the historic London Missionary Society, which gave to China its first Protestant Missionary, Robert Morrison, in 1807.

While the Consular party was proposing toasts to the greatness of the Shanghai to be, the missionaries were thinking hopefully and prayerfully of the task awaiting them in proclaiming the Kingdom of Christ to this people. For a while, on that memorable day, it was impossible to see the city because of the intervening masts on the numberless junks lying at anchor, but presently, as the little steamer approached the shore, it was found to be thronged with Chinese who had gathered to watch and ridicule the strange “fire-wheel ship” of the “foreign devils.”

The following weeks sped quickly by, and before the year closed, a little chapel and a small hospital had opened their doors inside the Chinese city. It is easy enough to state the bald fact, but what mountains of difficulty were climbed, what dangers faced and discouragements overcome before that much was accomplished, is told only in part in the sacredly guarded mission records, yellow and worn with age. Happily, ludicrous episodes were not lacking. Dr. Medhurst in particular was blessed with a saving sense of humour which eased many an otherwise hard jolt on the rough road he and his colleague were obliged to travel.

As time passed other missionaries were sent out from home to reinforce the pioneers, and women’s voices and children’s sweet laughter made homelike the mission premises. Then suddenly a war-cloud appeared in the sky, and almost before its presence was realized, it had burst and the T’aiping Rebellion was raging in all its fury. Grave dangers now threatened the little foreign community, officials and merchants as well as missionaries. It was during this period that a fair-haired, handsome youth made his appearance in Shanghai, and although not a member of the London Mission sought a home among their missionaries. He was Hudson Taylor, destined to become the founder of the China Inland Mission. The story of his early years in China, as told in his recently published biography, makes one of the most captivating chapters in the history of Shanghai. From it we are interested to learn that this sensitive, shrinking young man did not at first adopt from choice the Chinese dress and mode of living, afterward a distinguishing mark of China Inland Missionaries, but because he was driven to it through scarcity of funds.

The present headquarters of the China Inland Mission are conveniently located in the down-town district. They include business offices, a rest house for travelling missionaries, and a chapel where both Chinese and English services are held, although the Mission, as it has done from the beginning, confines its actual work to the interior. The buildings form a square around a spacious, secluded compound that seems as far apart from the turmoil of the street as if it were miles distant. In the spring of 1915, at the Jubilee celebration of the founding of the Mission, tea was served on the beautiful lawn, and following it a large company of friends gathered in the chapel to listen to the reading of reports and papers of thrilling interest relating to the experiences of the past fifty years.