An Australian in China

by George Ernest Morrison

Unlike the Spaniard, the Chinese disapproves of blood-letting in fevers, "for a fever is like a pot boiling; it is requisite to reduce the fire and not diminish the liquid in the vessel, if we wish to cure the patient."

Unlike the Spaniard, too, the Chinese doctors would not venture to assert, as the medical faculty of Madrid in the middle of last century assured the inhabitants, that "if human excrement was no longer to be suffered to accumulate as usual in the streets, where it might attract the putrescent particles floating in the air, these noxious vapours would find their way into the human body and a pestilential sickness would be the inevitable consequence."

For boils there is a certain cure:—There is a God of Boils. If you have a boil you will plaster the offending excrescence without avail, if that be all you plaster; to get relief you must at the same time plaster the corresponding area on the image of the God. Go into his temple in Western China, and you will find this deity dripping with plasters, with scarcely an undesecrated space on his superficies.

At the yamen of the Brigadier-General in Chaotong, the entrance is guarded by the customary stone images of mythical shape and grotesque features. They are believed to represent lions, but their faces are not leonine—they are a reproduction, exaggerated, of the characteristic features of the bulldog of Western China. The images are of undoubted value to the city. One is male and the other female. On the sixteenth day of the first month they are visited by the townspeople, who rub them energetically with their hands, all over from end to end. Every spot so touched confers immunity from pain upon the corresponding region of their own bodies for the ensuing year. And so from year to year these images are visited. Pain accordingly is almost absent from the city, and only that man suffers pain who has the temerity to neglect the opportunity of insuring himself against it.

I was called to a case of opium-poisoning in Chaotong. A son came in casually to seek our aid in saving his father, who had attempted suicide with a large over-dose of opium. He had taken it at ten in the morning and it was now two. We were led to the house and found it a single small unlit room up a narrow alley. In the room two men were unconcernedly eating their rice, and in the darkness they seemed to be the only occupants; but, lying down behind them on a narrow bed, was the dim figure of the dying man, who was breathing stertorously. A crowd quickly gathered round the door and pent up the alley-way. Rousing the man, I caused him to swallow some pints of warm water, and then I gave him a hypodermic injection of apomorphia. The effect was admirable, and pleased the spectators even more than the patient.

Opium is almost exclusively the drug used by suicides. No Chinaman would kill himself by the mutilation of the razor or pistol-shot because awful is the future punishment of him who would so dare to disturb the integrity of the body bequeathed to him by his fathers.

China is the land of suicides. I suppose more people die from suicide in China in proportion to the population than in any other country. Where the struggle for existence is so keen, it is hardly to be wondered at that men are so willing to abandon the struggle. But poverty and misery are not the only causes. For the most trivial reason the Chinaman will take his own life. Suicide with a Chinaman is an act that is recorded in his honour rather than to his opprobrium.

Thus a widow, as we have seen, may obtain much merit by sacrificing herself on the death of her husband. But in a large proportion of cases the motive is revenge, for the spirit of the dead is believed to "haunt and injure the living person who has been the cause of the suicide." In China to ruin your adversary you injure or kill yourself. To vow to commit suicide is the most awful threat with which you can drive terror into the heart of your adversary. If your enemy do you wrong, there is no way in which you can cause him more bitterly to repent his misdeed than by slaying yourself at his doorstep. He will be charged with your murder, and may be executed for the crime; he will be utterly ruined in establishing, if he can establish, his innocence; and he will be haunted ever after by your avenging spirit.

Occasionally two men who have quarrelled will take poison together, and their spirits will fight it out in heaven. Opium is very cheap in Chaotong, costing only fivepence an ounce for the crude article. You see it exposed for sale everywhere, like thick treacle in dirty besmeared jars. It is largely adulterated with ground pigskin, the adulteration being detected by the craving being unsatisfied. Mohammedans have a holy loathing of the pig, and look with contempt on their countrymen whose chief meat-food is pork. But each one in his turn. It is, on the other hand, a source of infinite amusement to the Chinese to see his Mohammedan brother unwittingly smoking the unclean beast in his opium-pipe.

On our way to the opium case we passed a doorway from which pitiful screams were issuing. It was a mother thrashing her little boy with a heavy stick—she had tethered him by the leg and was using the stick with both hands. A Chinese proverb as old as the hills tells you, "if you love your son, give him plenty of the cudgel; if you hate him, cram him with delicacies." He was a young wretch, she said, and she could do nothing with him; and she raised her baton again to strike, but the missionary interposed, whereupon she consented to stay her wrath and did so—till we were round the corner.