Sidelights on Chinese Life

by J. Macgowan

The lawless classes in China form a considerable percentage of the whole population. They are ruthless and cruel, and in the carrying out of their fell purposes they show but little consideration for the lives or property of those whom they may select to be their victims. There is a general impression in Western lands that the idolatrous races of people living in the East are a simple-minded folk, with but few passions and generous and tender-hearted to each other. They are supposed to lead a sunny life, and imitating the luxuriance of nature that the great sun continually spurs into action by his fiery heat, to have the widest sympathies with everything human. This is an ideal picture that could only have been drawn by the vivid forces of imagination. China is no Eden of this kind, and it may be accepted as a general truth that where men have lost the knowledge of God, and are not drawn into a noble life by an impression of His purity and tenderness which He wishes reproduced in the lives of the world, men’s own conceptions of what a noble life ought to be will always fall far short of the Divine.

The best days for China were in the ancient past, according to the sacred books of the nation, when God and Heaven were the prominent words in the religious life of the people, and when the idols had not yet come from India to lower the conceptions of the Divine. With the gradual disappearance of God, as a personal Power, from the thinking of the people there came the lower standard of morality that has its legitimate successor in the types we see in modern life.

We are told that three centuries after Confucius wrote his lofty system of ethics, though even he began to give evidence that he was losing touch with a personal God that the illustrious sages whose writings he professed to be editing undoubtedly had, the nation had practically adopted the worship of nature, and made their offerings to the spirits of the mountains and of the streams that flowed through the land and brought fertility in their train. Morality, however, had in the meanwhile degenerated, and one has but to read the history of China[7] to see how the baser passions that influence men in the present day were very much in evidence in those primitive times.

An incident in the life of one of the most famous Emperors that lived two centuries before Christ will confirm my statement on this head. Some time before his death he had a tomb built for himself that was constructed on a royal and a magnificent scale. It was really an underground palace and furnished in a style that suited the exalted ideas of the man who was designing it. It was furnished with every necessary for a luxurious life, and vast stores of gold and silver and precious jewels were deposited in strong rooms that no robber bands could break into.

Magnificent suites of apartments were constructed that were fit to entertain a kingly company, for the Emperor when he died and was buried in this great sepulchre did not mean to be the only occupant of it. He had planned that some of his favourites from his harem should accompany him, and that men-servants and maid-servants and hosts of attendants should be shut up with him in the gloomy underground mansion. He could not bear the thought of being alone. He desired that life in some mysterious way should be continued in “The Land of Shadows” very much as it had been in the one he was forced to relinquish.

His one concern in the midst of all this preparation for another life was the feeling that the great wealth that he had stored in the new palace would excite the cupidity of the thieves and the gamblers and blackmailers that had begun to exist in that early stage of the nation’s history. He accordingly called in the cleverest and the most cunning artificers in brass and iron and asked them to make locks of such ingenious and subtle designs that no housebreaker would ever be able to open them. They were also to construct full-sized figures of men in metal, standing with bow and arrow in hand in front of the door by which the palace was to be entered. A touch of the intruder’s foot on a secret spring would cause the mechanism of these dumb sentinels to work, and in a moment the deadly arrows would be shot into his body and he would fall lifeless on the very threshold. The safeguards against invasion of the tomb after the Emperor was laid to rest in it were complete, for none knew the secret of the locks or of the silent figures that stood ready with their arrows to slay the robber but the artificer that designed them, and in order to secure that none should ever learn it from him, he was quietly put to death one morning after he had fully explained to the Emperor the details of his wonderful invention.

Another feature about Chinese life that is sadly illustrative of its seamy character is the prevalence of the opium habit, and the saddest feature about this is the fact that it is not a native vice, one indigenous to the soil, that has grown up as the result of some peculiarity of temperament of the Chinese, but is an import that was first brought into the country and made an article of trade by an English company of merchants, viz. the East India Company.

One of the most unfortunate days for this old Empire was that on which the ships of that famous Company sailed up the Pearl river with their consignment of a drug that was to prove more disastrous and more fatal to its people than all the revolutions that during the past centuries have deluged this land with blood, or all the epidemics that have at various times swept like destroying angels through the ranks of society.

People who have been jealous of English honour have tried to prove that the opium was in common use amongst the Chinese before the ships of England appeared before Canton with their deadly cargoes, but this is an absolute mistake. Isolated travellers from India may have brought some for their own individual consumption, but the drug was unknown and unused by the Chinese people. That this statement is true is proved by the fact that there is no word in the language of this people for opium, for the only one that has ever existed is the one that attempts to give the sound of the foreign name that those who produced it in other lands gave it. If the thing had been an indigenous product, the Chinese would have had a name for it that would have had no flavour of a foreign land.

It has been a most disastrous thing for China that the one nation that has championed opium and has made treaties for its sale in this land, and that in the interests of its merchants and for the sake of its Indian revenue, insisted upon these treaties being carried out, should be England. If it had been a smaller Power the Chinese Government might have successfully resisted the attempt to force upon it a trade that was inevitably bound to degrade and demoralize its people. But England, the mighty power of the West, whose guns had thundered over Canton, and had waked the echoes of the Yangtze, and had even sounded through the capital of the Empire, was one that China dared not contend with, and so it has come to pass that the country that has always professed to be the refuge of the oppressed and the freer of the slave, has been the one to bind the shackles of opium on a people that, whilst they have fallen under its spell, yet feel the profoundest indignation against the Power whose legislation has helped to enslave them.