Читать книгу Drugging a Nation: The Story of China and the Opium Curse - Merwin Samuel, Webster Henry Kitchell - Страница 4

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, 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.

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 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 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 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. 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 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 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.