When I landed on the vast estuary from which rises up the important town of Shanghai, I really could hardly believe I was but forty days' voyage from Marseilles. Our world is no such big one after all, it is true, but how many centuries it has taken to learn much about it! "Did you ever hear of Napoleon?" I one day asked a Celestial, who had a shining glass button on his cap. "Don't know whom you mean," he answered, with a bewildered look, and there is not much doubt that if he had asked me about some great Chinese Emperor, I should have been just as puzzled as he was. All this will, however, ere long be changed, what with steam and electricity, especially with electricity, which puts a girdle round the earth in a very few minutes, fleet messenger that it is of peace, of war, of ruin, and of fortune. When the various races of the earth know each other better, we shall perhaps become more tolerant of each other, more interdependent, so to speak, and that cannot fail to be an advantage for all concerned. When a blow struck in the East is enough to shake the West to its foundations, we shall think twice before we give that blow. The more frequent the intercourse between the various races of the earth, the nearer we shall be, in spite of many a bitter disappointment, to that era of universal peace to which every nation has aspired in vain for so many centuries.
EXPORTS AND IMPORTS
Such were some of my reflections when I found myself for the first time in the midst of the busy scenes on the quays of Shanghai, surrounded by countless bales of silk and cases of tea waiting for embarkation for the West from whence I came. Shanghai, as is well known, is the port of entry of that great water highway of Western China, the Yang-tse, but it is more than that, it is the commercial capital of the Celestial Empire, for, as stated by Colquhoun in his China in Transformation, fifty-five per cent, of the total value of the foreign imports at all the treaty ports, and forty-eight per cent, of the exports to foreign countries pass through the port of Shanghai. "Four years ago the value of the trade, native and foreign, of this great emporium of the East was estimated at no less than £35,772,006, and it has increased rather than decreased since then. Several steamers have plied daily since 1860 between Shanghai and Hankow, and some three thousand vessels, one-half of which are British, enter the port every year. Silk and tea are the chief exports, after which come cotton, rice, sugar, paper, tobacco, various drugs used as medicines, cloth of native manufacture, wool, hemp, flower-seeds, fans, and other fancy articles." The chief imports from abroad are cotton goods, alcohol, opium, which is fortunately rapidly declining in amount, various metals, and woollen stuffs. In 1896, France, whose trade with China takes third rank amongst that of European nations, England coming first and then Germany, exported goods to the value of one hundred and eighty-four millions of francs, on which she paid one million five hundred thousand francs duty. To set against this, French imports to China, including woven materials, lace, wine, copper, and other goods, amounted to the value of twenty-eight millions only; that is to say, one hundred and fifty-six millions less than the exports. What an immense difference does this sum represent between what China gave and what she received, and what a price the Chinese paid for the privilege of dealing with the West! To this day the Celestials, whose ports have been opened against their will by the cannon of the British, aided by those of the French, give what they must give to foreigners grudgingly; to use an expressive saying, there is no love lost between them and those they trade with. They would like to take all and give nothing in return. Those who are unfortunate enough to die abroad will not allow their dust to aid in fructifying the soil of the land of their exile, for their bodies are brought by steamers from San Francisco, Peru, the Philippine Islands, Australia, and elsewhere, to be buried in their native land, in the same last resting-place as that of their ancestors, where their memory will be held sacred by their own descendants. There is indeed something very pathetic and touching in the intense devotion of the Chinese to their native land, in spite of their ignorant readiness to leave it. They will make any sacrifice to ensure burial at home, for they believe that there alone can the dead find true repose.
When I was at Shanghai, I noted with some surprise what immense quantities of bales of cotton were landed at the port. An Englishman with whom I had some conversation told me these bales came from the East Indies, and that the amount imported was continually on the increase. The Chinese aspire, he added, to manufacturing cotton goods themselves, and if they should succeed in overcoming their aversion to European methods of production, the trade in stuffs will receive a severe blow. It is, however, greatly in favour of British manufacturing interests that Western China is not suitable to the cultivation of the raw material, so that the cotton for making much of the clothing of the natives has all to be brought from abroad. "Every traveller in the Upper Yang-tse," says Little in his Through the Yang-tse Gorges, "is struck by the endless procession of cotton-laden junks struggling up the successive rapids."
YELLOW PERIL FOR THE FUTURE
A more significant sign of the times and of the emancipation of many of the Chinese from the trammels of tradition, even than the desire to produce their clothes at home, is the willingness of traders and merchants to settle in foreign towns. Not so very long ago the only Chinese met with in Europe or America were the coolies who had emigrated on the conditions described in a previous chapter. Now in London, in Paris, and in New York are extensive depôts of tea, silk, and other exports from the Celestial Empire kept by Chinese men of wealth, with a staff of their own yellow countrymen. This fact represents the true yellow peril for European and American merchants, for these merchants sell better goods at lower prices than their foreign rivals, and the employers of labour will presently have to contend in their own persons with a competition as keen and as unequal as that hampering their workmen. The fact that the Chinese will work for very much lower wages than those on which any white man can support life, has long been a problem for those responsible for municipal government in the States, but it is only lately that the monied classes have been, so to speak, threatened with a similar danger in their own strongholds of trade and commerce. If restrictions are not soon imposed upon the entry into Paris and other great cities of Europe of these formidable rivals, we may yet in our own life-time see the yellow-skins driven through the streets before the bayonet and the revolver in our capitals, in much the same fashion as they already have been in California and Australia. But when all is said and done, have not Asiatics just as much right to rejoice in the sunshine, such as it is, of the West as Europeans have to bask in that of the East? Is not the life of a Tartar, a Mongol, or a Mandarin really as sacred as that of a native of France or of England? It all depends on the point of view.
FIG. 40.—A CHINESE RESTAURANT. AFTER THE REPAST.