Across China on Foot, Edwin John Dingle [ebook pc reader TXT] 📗

but, instead of feeling miserable, I tried to see the humor of the situation. One can get humor from the most embarrassing circumstances, and my chief amusement arose from a small business deal between one of my coolies, who had sublet his contract to a poor fellow returning in the rain, who had arranged to carry the ninety catties ninety li for a fourth of the original price arranged between my coolie and myself. For one full hour they argued at a terrible speed as to the rate of exchange in the Szech'wan large and the Yün-nan small cash, and this was only interrupted when a poor man, deaf and dumb, and of hideous appearance, seeing the foreigner in his contemptible town, rushed in with a carrying pole and felled his grumbling townsman at my feet.

My intervention probably averted murder—at any rate, it seemed as though murder would have taken place very soon but for my interference. The whole populace gathered, of course, and the fight waged fiercely until well on into the night. But wrapping myself in my mackintosh, and putting my paper umbrella at the right angle, I went to sleep with the rain dripping on me as they were indulging in final pleasantries regarding each other's ancestry.

The first thing I saw at Chao-t'ong the next day was the foreign cigarette, sold at a wayside stall by a vendor of monkey nuts and marrow seeds. No trade has prospered in Yün-nan during the past two years more than the foreign cigarette trade, and the growing evil among the children of the common people, both male and female, is viewed with alarm. From Tachien-lu to Mengtsz, from Chung-king to Bhamo, one is rarely out of sight of the well-known flaring posters in the Chinese characters advertising the British cigarette. Some months ago a couple of Europeans were sent out to advertise, and they stuck their poster decorations on the walls of temples, on private houses and official residences, with the result that the people were piqued so much as to tear down the bills immediately. In Yün-nan, especially since the exit of opium, this common cigarette is smoked by high and low, rich and poor. I have been offered them at small feasts, and when calling upon high officials at the capital have been offered a packet of cigarettes instead of a whiff of opium, as would have been done formerly. One is not, of course, prepared to say whether such a trade is desirable or not, but it merely needs to be made known that towards the middle of the present year (1910) a proclamation was issued from the Viceroy's yamen at Yün-nan-fu speaking in strongest terms against the increasing habit of smoking foreign cigarettes, to show the trend of official opinion on the subject. After having referred to the enormous advances made in the imports of cigarettes, the proclamation deplored the general tendency of the people to support such an undesirable trade, and exhorted the citizens to turn from their evil ways. We cannot stop the importation of cigarettes, it read, but there is no need for our people to buy.

At Chao-t'ong I stayed with the Rev. Dr. Savin, and spent a very pleasant two days' rest here in his hospitable hands. It was in this district I first came across goitre, the first time I had seen it in my life. It is a terrible disfigurement.

Poor indeed is the whole of this neighborhood. Poverty, thin and wanting food to eat, stalks abroad dressed in a rag or two, armed with a staff to keep away the snarling dogs, and a broken bowl to gather garbage.

Even the better class, who manage to afford their maize and bean curds, are to be praised for the extreme simplicity which everywhere vividly marks their monotonous lives. Indeed, this is true of the whole area through which I have traveled. No furniture brings confusion to their rooms, no machinery distresses the ear with its groaning or the eye with its unsightliness, no factories belch out smoke and blacken the beauty of the sky, no trains screech to disturb sleepers and frighten babies. The simplest of simple beds—in most cases merely a few boards with a straw mattress placed thereon—the straw sandal on the foot, wooden chopsticks in place of knives and forks, the small variety of foods and of cooking utensils, the simple homespun cotton clothing—much of this finds favor in the eye of the English traveler. The Chinese, of all Orientals, teach us how to live without furniture, without impedimenta, with the least possible amount of clothing in the case of the poorer classes, and I could not fail to be impressed by the advantage thus held by this great nation in the struggle of life. It may serve them in good stead in the struggle of the Yellow Man against the White Man, to which I refer at a later period in this book; also does it incidentally show up the real character of some of the weaknesses of our own civilization, and when one is in China, living near the people, one is forced to reflect upon the useless multiplicity of our daily wants. We must have our daily stock of bread and butter and meats, glass windows and fires, hats, white shirts and woolen underwear, boots and shoes, trunks, bags and boxes, bedsteads, mattresses, sheets and blankets—most of which a Chinese can do without, and indeed is actually better off without.[J]

This is not true in every class, however; for whilst there is no denying the charm of the simpler civilization, many of the Chinese of Szech'wan and Yün-nan glory in goods of foreign manufacture, no matter if to them is not disclosed the proper purpose of any particular article adopted.

Rice will not grow here in great quantities, owing to the scarcity of water; therefore the people feed on maize, and are thankful to get it.

Chao-t'ong is the centre of a large district devastated by recurring seasons of plague, rebellion and famine, when thousands die annually from starvation in the town and on the level uplands surrounding it. The beggars on one occasion, becoming so numerous, were driven from the streets, confined within the walls of the temple and grounds beyond the South Gate, and there fed by common charity. Huddled together in disease and rags and unspeakable misery, they died in thousands, and the Chinese say that of five thousand who crossed the temple threshold two thousand never came out alive.

This happened some twenty years ago. The unfortunate victims had for their food a rice porridge, mixed with which was a subtance alleged to have been lime, the common belief being that the majority of those who perished died from the effect of poisoning. Outside the city boundary hundreds of the dead were flung into huge pits, and even now the inhabitants refer to the time when children were exchanged ad libitum for a handful of rice or even less.

During my stay in this city, I heard on all hands some of the most blood-curdling stories of the dire distress which, like a dark cloud, still menaces the people, some of which are too dreadful for public print.

But I suppose these poor people are content. If they are, they possess a virtue which produces, in some measure at all events, all those effects which the alchemist usually ascribes to what he calls the philosopher's stone; and if their content does not bring riches, it banishes the desire for them. Years ago the people could entertain some small hope of prosperity now and again. If the opium crop were good, money was plentiful. But now no opium is grown, and the misery-stricken people have lost all hope of better times, and seem to have sunk in many instances to the lowest pangs of distressful poverty.[K]

Reader, alarm not yourself! I am not here to lead you into a long harangue on opium—it presents too thorny a subject for me to handle. I am not a partisan in the opium traffic; my mission is not essentially to denounce it; I am not impelled by an irresistible desire to investigate facts and put them before you. There is practically no opium in Yün-nan to talk about.

This is absolute fact—not a Chinese fact, but good old British truth (although British truth when it touches upon opium has been very, very perverted since we first commenced to transact opium trade with this great country). With the exception of one small patch, some ten miles away from the main road between Yün-nan-fu and Tali-fu, I saw no poppy whatever in the province. This does not mean, however, that no opium is to be had.

During the past three weeks[L] no less than five cases of attempted suicide by opium poisoning have come under my personal notice in the town in which I am residing, and there have doubtless been fifty more which have not. If there is no opium, where do the people so easily secure it in endeavors to take their lives upon the slightest provocation? Last year the price of opium here on the streets, although its sale was "illegal," was over three tsien (about nine-pence) the Chinese ounce of prepared opium. At the present time, in the same city, many men would be willing to do a deal for any quantity you like for less than two tsien. Cases of smuggling are frequent. One gets accustomed to hear of large quantities being smuggled through in most cunning ways, and it all goes to show that the people of Yün-nan are not, as some of China's enlightened statesmen and some of the ranting faddists of England and America would have us believe, falling over one another in their zeal to free the province from the drug.

The other day some men passed through several towns, on the way to the capital, carrying three coffins. In the first was a corpse, the other two were packed with opium. Being suspected at Yün-nan-fu, the first coffin was opened, and the carriers, making as much row as they could because their coffin had been burst open, secured a fair "squeeze" to hold their tongues, and the second and third coffins were passed unexamined. Quite common is it for men to travel in armed bands from the province of Kwei-chow, traveling by night over the mountains by lantern-light, and hiding by day from any possible official searchers.

Opium, which is and always has been so heavily taxed, does not in general follow the ordinary trade routes on which likin stations are numerous, but is carried by these armed bands over roads where the native Customs stations are few, and so poorly equipped as to yield readily to superior force, where the men are compelled to accept a composition much below the official rate.

Opium smoking is still common in Western China among people who can afford it. At the time of the crusade against it, wealthy people laid in stocks enough to last them for years; and, so long as there is smuggling from other provinces, which do grow it, into those which do not, there will be no danger of the absolute extermination being carried successfully into effect. Kwei-chow, in common with the western provinces, has undeservedly secured the credit for having practically abolished the poppy; but at the present moment (December, 1909) she is at a loss to know what to do with her supply, and that is the reason why people of Yün-nan are making bargains in opium smuggled over the border. Much has yet to be done. To prevent the growth of a plant which has been in China for at least twelve centuries, which has had medicinal uses for nine, and whose medicinal properties have been put in the capsule for six, is not an easy matter, far more difficult, in fact, than the average Englishman and even those who rant so