Back Aa

Drugging a Nation

<h2>III</h2> <h3>A GLIMPSE INTO AN OPIUM PROVINCE</h3> The opium provinces of China—that is, the provinces which have been most nearly completely ruined by opium—lie well back in the interior. They cover, roughly, an area 1,200 miles long by half as wide, say about one-third the area of the United States; and they support, after a fashion, a population of about 160,000,000. There had been plenty of evidence obtainable at Shanghai, Hankow, Peking, and Tientsin, of the terrible ravages of opium in these regions, but it seemed advisable to make a journey into one of these unfortunate provinces and view the problem at short range. The nearest and most accessible was Shansi Province. It lies to the west and southwest of Peking, behind the blue mountains which one sees from the Hankow-Peking Railroad. There seemed to be no doubt that the opium curse could there be seen at its worst. Everybody said so—legation officials, attachés,[Pg 54] merchants, missionaries. Dr. Piell, of the London Mission hospital at Peking, estimated that ninety per cent. of the men, women, and children in Shansi smoke opium. He called in one of his native medical assistants, who happened to be a Shansi man, and the assistant observed, with a smile, that ninety per cent. seemed pretty low as an estimate. Another point in Shansi’s favour was that the railroads were pushing rapidly through to T’ai Tuan-fu, the capital (and one of the oldest cities in oldest China). So I picked up an interpreter at the Grand Hotel des Wagon-lits, and went out there.   <div class="bbox" style="width: 500px; height: 377px;"><ANTIMG src="images/i063top.jpg" alt="" /></div> THE VILLAGES WERE LITTLE MORE THAN HEAPS OF RUINS These Holes in the Ground are Occupied by Formerly Well-to-do Opium Smokers   <div class="bbox" style="width: 500px; height: 383px;"><ANTIMG src="images/i063bottom.jpg" alt="" /></div> AT LAST HE CRAWLS OUT ON THE HIGHWAY, WHINING, CHATTERING AND PRAYING THAT A FEW COPPER CASH BE THROWN TO HIM   The new Shansi railroad was not completed through to Tai-Yuan-fu, the provincial capital, and it was necessary to journey for several days by cart and mule-litter. While this sort of travelling is not the most comfortable in the world, it has the advantage of bringing one close to the life that swarms along the highroad, and of making it easier to gather facts and impressions. Every hour or so, as the cart crawls slowly along, you come upon a dusty gray village nestling in a hollow or clinging to the hillside. And nearly every village is a little more than a heap[Pg 55] of ruins. I was prepared to find ruins, but not to such an extent. When I first drew John, the interpreter’s, attention to them, he said, “Too much years.” As an explanation this was not satisfactory, because many of the ruined buildings were comparatively new—certainly, too new to fall to pieces. At the second village John made another guess at the cause of such complete disaster. “Poor—too poor,” he said, and then traced it back to the last famine, about which, he found, the peasants were still talking. “Whole lot o’ mens die,” he explained. It was later on that I got at the main contributing cause of the wreck and ruin which one finds almost everywhere in Shansi Province, after I had picked up, through John and his cook, the roadside gossip of many days during two or three hundred miles of travel, after I had talked with missionaries of life-long experience, with physicians who are devoting their lives to work among these misery-ridden people, with merchants, travellers, and Chinese and Manchu officials. Before we take up in detail the ravages of opium throughout this and other provinces, I wish to say a word about one source of information, which every observer of conditions in[Pg 56] China finds, sooner or later, that he is forced to employ. Along the China coast one hears a good deal of talk about the “missionary question.” Many of the foreign merchants abuse the missionaries. I will confess that the “anti-missionary” side had been so often and so forcibly presented to me that before I got away from the coast I unconsciously shared the prejudice. But now, brushing aside the exceptional men on both sides of the controversy, and ignoring for the moment the deeper significance of it, let me give the situation as it presented itself to me before I left China. There are many foreign merchants who study the language, travel extensively, and speak with authority on things Chinese. But the typical merchant of the treaty port, that is, the merchant whom one hears so loudly abusing the missionaries, does not speak the language. He transacts most of his business through his Chinese “Compradore,” and apparently divides the chief of his time between the club, the race-track, and various other places of amusement. This sort of merchant is the kind most in evidence, and it is he who contributes most largely to the anti-missionary feeling “back home.” The [Pg 57]missionaries, on the other hand, almost to a man, speak, read, and write one or more native dialects. They live among the Chinese, and, in order to carry on their work at all, they must be continually studying the traditions, customs, and prejudices of their neighbours. In almost every instance the missionaries who supplied me with information were more conservative than the British and American diplomatic, consular, military, and medical observers who have travelled in the opium provinces. I have since come to the conclusion that the missionaries are over-conservative on the opium question, probably because, being constantly under fire as “fanatics” and “enthusiasts,” they unconsciously lean too far towards the side of under-statement. The published estimates of Dr. Du Bose, of Soochow, president of the Anti-opium League, are much more conservative than those of Mr. Alex Hosie, the British commercial attaché and former consul-general. Dr. Parker, of Shanghai, the gentlemen of the London Mission, the American Board, and the American Presbyterian Missions at Peking, scores of other missionaries whom I saw in their homes in the interior or at the missionary conference at Shanghai, and Messrs.[Pg 58] Gaily, Robertson, and Lewis, of the International Young Men’s Christian Association, all impressed me as men whose opinions were based on information and not on prejudice. Dr. Morrison, the able Peking correspondent of the London Times, said to me when I arrived at the capital, “You ought to talk with the missionaries.” I did talk with them, and among many different sources of information I found them worthy of the most serious consideration. The phrase, “opium province,” means, in China, that an entire province (which, in extent and in political outline, may be roughly compared to one of the United States) has been ravaged and desolated by opium. It means that all classes, all ages, both sexes, are sodden with the drug; that all the richer soil, which in such densely-populated regions, is absolutely needed for the production of food, is given over to the poppy; that the manufacture of opium, of pipes, of lamps, and of the various other accessories, has become a dominating industry; that families are wrecked, that merchants lose their acumen, and labourers their energy; that after a period of wide-spread debauchery and enervation, economic, as well as moral and physical[Pg 59] disaster, settles down over the entire region. The population of these opium provinces ranges from fifteen or twenty million to eighty million. “In Shansi,” I have quoted an official as saying, “everybody smokes opium.” Another cynical observer has said that “eleven out of ten Shansi men are opium-smokers.” In one village an English traveller asked some natives how many of the inhabitants smoked opium, and one replied, indicating a twelve-year-old child, “That boy doesn’t.” Still another observer, an English scientist, who was born in Shansi, who speaks the dialect as well as he speaks English, and who travels widely through the remoter regions in search of rare birds and animals, puts the proportion of smokers as low as seventy-five per cent. of the total population. I had some talks with this man at T’ai Yuan-fu, and later at Tientsin, and I found his information so precise and so interesting that I asked him one day to dictate to a stenographer some random observations on the opium problem in Shansi. These few paragraphs make up a very small part of what I have heard him and others say, but they are so grimly picturesque, and they give so accurately the sense of the mass of notes and interviews[Pg 60] which fill my journal of the Shansi trip, that it has seemed to me I could do no better than to print them just as he talked them off on that particular day at Tientsin. “The opium-growers always take the best piece of land,” he said, “in their land—the best fertilized, and with the most water upon it. They find that it pays them a great deal better than growing wheat or anything else. Around Chao Cheng, especially, they grow opium to a large extent just beside the rivers, where they can get plenty of water. The seeds are sown about the beginning of May, and they have to be transplanted. It takes until about the middle of July before the opium ripens. Just before it is ripe men are employed to cut the seed pods, when a white sap exudes, and this dries upon the pod and turns brown, and in about a week after it has been cut they come around and scrape it off. The wages are from twenty to thirty cents (Mexican) per day. Men and women are employed in the work. The heads of the poppy are all cut off, when they are dried and stored away for the seed of the next year. “It is a very fragile crop, and until it gets to be nine inches high it is very easily broken. The[Pg 61] full-grown poppy plant is from three to four feet high. The Chao Cheng opium is considered the best. “In the Chao Cheng district the people have been more or less ruined by opium. I have heard of a family, a man and his wife, who had only one suit of clothes between them. “In Taiku there is a large family by the name of Meng, perhaps the wealthiest family in the province of Shansi. For the past few years they have been steadily going down, simply from the fact that the heads of the family have become opium-smokers. In Taiku there is a large fair held each year, and all the old bronzes, porcelains, furniture, etc., that this family possesses are sold. Last year enough of their possessions were on sale to stock ten or twelve small shops at the fair. “Another man, a rich man in Jen Tsuen, possessed a fine summer residence previous to 1900. This residence contained several large houses and some fine trees and shrubs, but during the last seven years he has taken to opium and has been steadily going down. He has been selling out this residence, pulling down the houses and cutting down the trees, and selling the wood and[Pg 62] old bricks. He is now a beggar in the streets of Jen Tsuen. “All through the hills west of Tai Yuan-fu the peasants are addicted to the use of opium. About seventy per cent. of the population take opium in one form or another. I was speaking to a number of them who had come into an inn at which I was stopping. I asked them if they wanted to give up the use of opium. They said yes, but that they had not the means to do so. Everybody would like to give it up. The women smoke, as well as the men. “The smoker does not trouble himself to plant seeds, nor to go out. “The houses in Shansi are very good; in fact, they are better than in other provinces, but they are rapidly going to ruin owing to the excessive smoking of opium, and wherever one goes the ruins are seen on every side. On the roads the people can get a little money by selling things, but off the main roads the distress is worse than anywhere else. “Up in the hills I stopped at a village and inquired if they had any food for sale, and they told me that they had nothing but frozen potatoes. So I asked to be shown those, and I went[Pg 63] into one of the hovels and found little potatoes, perhaps one-half an inch across, frozen, and all strewn over the kang (the brick bed), where they were drying. As soon as they were dry, they were to be ground down into a meal of which dumplings were made, and these were steamed. That was their only diet, and had been for the past month. They had no money at all. What money they had possessed had been spent on opium, and they could not expect anything to make up the crop of potatoes the following autumn. I noticed in a basin a few dried sticks, and I asked what they were for, and the man told me they were the sticks taken from the sieve through which the opium was filtered for purification. These sticks are soaked in hot water, and the water, which contains a little opium, is drunk. They were using this in place of opium. I gave this man twenty cents, and the next day when I returned he was enjoying a pipe of opium. “While passing through an iron-smelting village I noticed that the blacksmiths who beat up the pig iron were regular living skeletons. They work from about five in the morning until about five in the evening, stopping twice during that time for meals. When they leave off in the[Pg 64] evening, after a hasty meal they start with their pipes and go on until they are asleep. I do not know how these men can work. I presume that it was the hard work that made them take to opium-smoking. “On asking people why they had taken to the drug, they invariably replied that it was for the cure of a pain of some sort—for relieving the suffering. The women often take to it after childbirth, and this is generally what starts them to smoking. “The wealthier men who smoke opium nearly all day cannot enter another room until this room has first been filled with the fumes of opium. Some one has to go into the room first and smoke a few pipes, so that the air of the room may be in proper condition. “There was an official in Shau-ying who used to keep six slave girls going all day filling his pipes. The slave girls and brides very often try to commit suicide by eating opium, owing to the harsh treatment they receive.” Everywhere along the highroad and in the cities and villages of Shansi you see the opium face. The opium-smoker, like the opium-eater, rapidly loses flesh when the habit has fixed itself[Pg 65] on him. The colour leaves his skin, and it becomes dry, like parchment. His eye loses whatever light and sparkle it may have had, and becomes dull and listless. The opium face has been best described as a “peculiarly withered and blasted countenance.” With this face is usually associated a thin body and a languid gait. Opium gets such a powerful grip on a confirmed smoker that it is usually unsafe for him to give up the habit without medical aid. His appetite is taken away, his digestion is impaired, there is congestion of the various internal organs, and congestion of the lungs. Constipation and diarrh&oelig;a result, with pain all over the body. By the time he has reached this stage, the smoker has become both physically and mentally weak and inactive. With his intellect deadened, his physical and moral sense impaired, he sinks into laziness, immorality, and debauchery. He has lost his power of resistance to disease, and becomes predisposed to colds, bronchitis, diarrh&oelig;a, dysentery, and dyspepsia. Brigade Surgeon J. H. Condon, M. D., M. R. C. S., speaking of opium-eaters before the Royal Commission on Opium, said: “They become emaciated and debilitated, miserable-looking wretches, and finally die, most[Pg 66] commonly of diarrh&oelig;a induced by the use of opium.” When a man has got himself into this condition, he must have opium, and must have it all the time. I have already pointed out that opium-smoking not only is perhaps the most expensive of the vices, but that, unlike opium-eating, it consumes an immense amount of time. Few smokers can keep slaves to fill their pipes for them, like that wealthy official at Shau-ying. It takes a seasoned smoker from fifteen minutes to half an hour to prepare a pipe to his satisfaction, smoke it, and rouse himself to begin the operation again. If he smokes ten or twenty pipes a day, which is common, and then sleeps off the effects, it is not hard to figure out the number of hours left for business each day. When he has slept, and the day is well started, his body at once begins to clamour for more opium. He must begin smoking again, or he will suffer an agony of physical and mental torture. His ten to twenty pipes a day will cost him from fifty cents or a dollar (if he is a poor man and smokes the scrapings from the rich man’s pipe), to ten or twenty dollars (or more, if he smokes a high grade of opium). I learned of[Pg 67] many wealthy merchants and officials who smoke from forty to sixty pipes a day. It is just at this period, when the smoker is so enslaved by the drug that he has lost his earning power, that his opium expenditure increases most rapidly. He is buying opium now, not so much to gratify his selfish vice, as to keep himself alive. He becomes frantic for opium. He will sell anything he has to buy the stuff. His moral sense is destroyed. A diseased, decrepit, insane being, he forgets even his family. He sells his bric-a-brac, his pictures, his furniture. He sells his daughters, even his wife, if she has attractions, as slaves to rich men. He tears his house to pieces, sells the tiles of his roof, the bricks of his walls, the woodwork about his doors and windows. He cuts down the trees in his yard and sells the wood. And at last he crawls out on the highway, digs himself a cave in the loess (if he has strength enough), and prostrates himself before the camel and donkey drivers, whining, chattering, praying that a few copper cash be thrown to him. Since there are no statistics in China, I can give the reader only the observations and impressions of a traveller. But Shansi Province is full of[Pg 68] ruins. So are Szechuan and Yunnan and Kuei-chow, and half a dozen others. It is with the province as a whole much as it is with the individuals of that province. The raising of opium to supply this enormous demand crowds off the land the grains and vegetables that are absolutely needed for human food. The manufacture of opium and its accessories absorbs the energy and capital that should go into legitimate industry. The government of the province and the government of the empire have become so dependent on the immense revenue from the taxation of this “vicious article of luxury” that they dare not give it up. In the body politic an unhealthy condition not only exists, but also controls. Drifting into it half-consciously, the province has been sapped by a vicious economic habit. That is what is the matter with Shansi. That is what is the matter with China. All the way along my route in Shansi I photographed the ruins that typify the disaster which has overtaken this opium province. And a few of these photographs are reproduced here, all showing houses of men who were well-to-do only a few years ago. It will be plainly seen from the cuts, I think, that these ruins are not the result of age. [Pg 69]The sun-dried bricks of the walls show few signs of crumbling. The walls themselves are not weather-beaten, and have evidently been destroyed by the hand of man, and not by time.   <table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table"> <tr><td align="center"><ANTIMG src="images/i079left.jpg" alt="" /></td> <td> </td> <td align="center"><ANTIMG src="images/i079right.jpg" alt="" /></td></tr> <tr><td colspan="3" align="center">WRECK AND RUIN IN CHINA These Houses were Torn Down by their Owners, the Woodwork and Bricks Sold, and the Money Used to Purchase Opium</td></tr></table>     <hr style="width: 50%;" /> [Pg 70] <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

1 of 2

2 of 2

Update Required To play the media you will need to either update your browser to a recent version or update your Flash plugin.