China Revolutionized

by John Stuart Thomson

Now Japan should obey the humanitarian sentiment of the world, and stamp out opium in her Formosan colony. The opium conferences at Shanghai in 1909 and the Hague in 1911, called by America and presided over by the American, Bishop Brent, have produced wonderful results. It now remains for the western nations to emulate China’s example and stamp out morphia. China could well come back at America and say: “What are you going to do about morphine and hypodermic syringes? You import yearly 500,000 pounds of opium, and you use only 70,000 pounds in medicine. As far as morphine goes you are more ‘doped’ than all the nations combined. You import 200,000 ounces of cocaine each year, of which only 15,000 ounces are used in medicine.” The exportation of India opium will cease in 1918, and China will have ceased to grow the poppy this year. In the heat of the debates in England, Eric Lewis, a Welsh supporter of Lloyd George’s, proposed that England should buy all the opium in India, like the famous Chinese Commissioner Lin of Canton, dump it in the sea, and indemnify by a loan of $40,000,000 the poppy growers of Bengal. Now let us cease to criticize Britain, for if she grossly sinned, she has repented and made amends, as could now be expected of a Britain which has recently established national pensions for her aged, and brought her educational extension, employers’ liability and land taxation up to the mark set by America.

So thoroughly successful was the Chinese government in restricting the planting of the poppy even in distant Yunnan province, that in 1911 the passenger earnings of the new French railway from Haiphong to Yunnan were greater, because men fed on maize, instead of diseased by opium, are both strong and wealthy enough to travel. Maize succeeded the poppy. When China was attacking the use of opium in the mandarinate, one official wrote to the Board of Constitutional Reform: “His Majesty can send me the silver cord (for suicide by strangulation) but I can not give up opium.” They did give it up, for an opium smoker was denied his right to plead in court, and his office was taken from him. At plowing time, revenue officers were sent into Yunnan, Szechuen and other poppy provinces, to see that poppy seed was not sown. The opium cure, which is either swallowed or administered hypodermically, is given the patient at the same time the drug is, and if his stomach only was concerned, he is so nauseated that in five days he will give up the indulgence. The cure contains fifteen per cent. tincture belladona, fluid extract of prickly ash (xanthoxylum), and fluid extract of hyoscyamus. Another cure includes iron, coffee, quinine, strychnine, gentian and capsicum, with temporary injections of morphine in cases of collapse. In a former book, The Chinese, I affirmed that China and India could soon economically recover from the prohibition of opium planting if the same attention were directed to other fields. I shall instance Yunnan alone. In the first year of the prohibition the province suffered. In 1910 and 1911 the increase in silver, copper and tin mining, and maize cultivation had alone reimbursed Yunnan for all her loss of opium revenues, and a sobered people realized that they were even then only beginning to find their energies for legitimate enrichment. The burning of pipes continues in China. In The Chinese I related some dramatic occurrences in Shanghai. In September, 1911, Chinese gathered on the athletic field of the Tientsin Y. M. C. A. and burned 100,000 opium pipes, and at Yunnan City, under the auspices of Governor Li Chin Hsi, a great burning was held on the parade ground of the arsenal; the new military, the police and bands attending to add éclat to the function.

Doctor Buchanan, of India, has discovered that cats are immune to China’s curse, bubonic plague, and that they can safely destroy the rats which carry the germs. But cats and dogs indulge in fleas, and the flea is as busy in transporting the plague germ as are the rats. Poison and traps are the things to use against rats, and cats and dogs should be asked to retire, too, until China cleans herself up a bit, when she can probably safely indulge in bench shows of her famous chow and Pekingese dogs! Even the fur marmot has been asked to go, since the pneumonic plague epidemic in Manchuria in the winter of 1910. That awful epidemic revealed a new scourge, even worse than bubonic, to the startled world. Bubonic thrives in dampness in the south in summer time. Pneumonic thrives in indoor winter conditions. America was represented on the field by Doctor R. P. Strong, of Manila, Doctors Aspland and Stenhouse, and the medical missionaries Sinclair, Gibb and Mary Ogden; Japan by Doctor Kitasato, who discovered the bubonic bacillus at Hongkong in 1894; Russia by Doctor Haffkine and Doctor Zabolothy; China by Doctor Wu Lien Teh; England by Doctor A. F. Jackson, who fell a martyr, to the great grief of all China; Scotland by Doctor Ross, of Mukden. Though no victim recovers, the germ can not live outside in dry air. The doctors and sanitary corps, inoculated with Yersin serum, or Haffkine’s or Kitasato’s prophylactic lymph, at once equipped themselves with masks and surtouts, and the scene was one which Manzoni might have novelized. Often dying men were seen to struggle up to the pile of bodies among which were their fathers, bow low in filial, Confucian ancestor worship, even to pour out libations and present sacrifice, and then join the heap in a delirious death agony. Such a tragic attitude could be possible only in a land of ancestor worship.

Kingslake, in Eothen, describes the quarantined city of Cairo in 1835, when a thousand deaths a day occurred until the terrorized population hated the name death, and called it with bated breath “another accident”. I have been through similar nerve-racking experiences in the plague centers of China, the mentioning of death and cemeteries being tabooed from polite conversation, though hundreds were falling. Kingslake’s description is graphic. He went to the only European physician in the city, and found him wrapped up, suffering from the plague. The heroic man prescribed for Kingslake. Later, thinking that he might have recovered, Kingslake sent his servant to ask the physician to call. “Did you meet him?” The servant replied: “Yes, I met him coming out of his house,—on his bier!” In the tenth chapter of Eothen, Kingslake recites how the plague in 1835 ruthlessly struck down the brave brothers of the Franciscan monastery in holy Jerusalem. One quarantined member went on his priestly duty to the stricken city. On his return to the pest-house, he rang a bell as a signal that he still lived, and was carrying on the martyr’s work over the paths that Christ himself trod. When the bell ceased ringing, a new brother went forth to bury the martyr, and take up his duties which could only also lead to death.

In 1720, Belsunce, the hero Bishop of Marseilles, seemed alone to breathe pure air and handle pure food as he moved among the infected who to the number of 50,000 dropped at his feet. Infection comes from indoor breathing, direct, or from sputum. Banish dirt, darkness and foul air, and both bubonics at once commit suicide or die of starvation. The pneumonic, it will be recalled, swept from Harbin to Newchwang, and held Europe in terror that it would take the Siberian goods train westward for St. Petersburg and Berlin. Thirty European doctors and nurses were martyrs, most of them Russians. The Chinese permitted what they have never permitted before, the cremation of the dead, and the segregation of suspects in detention camps. At Harbin alone there were 1,200 deaths, the dead being cremated in the brick kilns. If heroic members of any legation staff should be given honors for the Peking campaign against plague in 1911, there are 20,000 veterans of Hongkong and South China who should be clothed in a coat of medals for plague dangers they never thought of talking about, except to say with their guest Kipling that “it was all in the day’s work”. I have seen the foreign police, soldiers, sanitary corps and volunteers of Hongkong and Canton tackle multitudinous dangers in epidemics with all the éclat of a football game, and the men of Bombay regularly do the same thing. Because of the legations and press bureaus, the foreigner in North China, God bless him, is much better advertised than is the foreigner of South China and India. India had one Kipling; South China is looking for hers!

In a former volume I have instanced some surprising appearances of bubonic plague in Europe. In September, 1910, a girl, her father, mother and nurse, died successively under mysterious conditions at Preston, Suffolk, England. It was later noticed that the rats in the neighborhood were dying. Examination showed that the black plague was the cause, and the supposition is that the disease was imported in grain received from Odessa, Russia, and that the germs developed under conditions of damp, dirt and darkness. In 1902, Odessa, Russia, reported a plague case in the house of a baker. In August, 1910, plague was recrudescent there in the very same house, showing that the bubonic plague germs had lived eight years. The ineffective measures of the authorities to destroy the rats caused the spread of the last-mentioned epidemic. World campaigns against rats will doubtless now occur from time to time, as insurance companies have taken up the study of the subject.

Abattoir and market laws calling for foreign supervision and veterinary inspection were first instituted by Hongkong, and Singapore, Shanghai, Tientsin, Saigon, Manila, and Tsingtau followed in about the order named. Partial inspection is exercised at Canton, Hankau, Newchwang, Peking and other cities. It is one of the things China must and will soon take hold of, for Sun Yat Sen (Sunyacius) who has done so much for Chinese reform, is himself a modern physician and has always lived in foreign or treaty ports. In connection with this, China will improve her cattle, which are of the wild, buffalo-humped variety, with an excess of bone. Her Hankau and Manchurian black, as well as the Kwangtung white, pigs are now going to Liverpool, London, Glasgow and Bremen. It is wonderful that populous China can be an exporter of meat to Europe. It shows two things: that living in America and Europe is too high, and that return freights are too low. China centuries ago instituted pure food laws, preceding Germany, Britain and America. They did not go far of course, but they showed the germinative idea. The guild or manufacturer was glad to stamp biscuit or ink-stick, and the food purveyor placed a red stamp on his dried duck, fish, or vermicelli package, the stamp standing for purity or inferiority according to the reputation of the packer.

Every reader has sympathized with the heroic General Roberts who in his book, Forty-One Years in India, tells of a sunstroke which he suffered in the heat of the tropics. The great heat and humidity are likely to produce, certainly in those who use stimulants, drugs or much meat, anaemia or acidulation of the blood, with persistent auto-intoxication, and the resulting torture of constantly reeling under the heat can be imagined. The Chinese are up at daylight, and most active in the cooler part of the day. The Chinese skull, because of the lifelong habit of shaving the head under the Manchu régime, grows thicker than the European’s skull, and the former, therefore, are better able to resist the equatorial sun. Herodotus pointed out that the ancient Egyptians, for the same reason, resisted the sun better than the Persians, who accustomed themselves to head-coverings from childhood. The Chinese emperor and the mandarins gave their audiences at dawn. It will be recalled that Cicero, when governor of Asiatic Cicilia, admitted the crowds of complainants to his popular court at daylight, so as to use the hot midday for retirement from the heat. At Hongkong, where, hot as it is, exercise is imperative, we used to rise at daylight and rush to the golf, tennis and riding courses for an hour’s play, and this unusual sight would induce you to say that it was not so luxurious a colony as the sumptuous club life of the later day would possibly make it appear to be.

The bar in an Oriental club is eloquent of the fact that you are in the malarial East, for among the popular bottles is the one containing quinine-sulphate powder, and the veterans seem able to judge what is a proper dose to take out with a spoon to mix with their sherry as they salute and say: “Here’s how,” or “The king.”

South China is kind to the man who suffers from heat. Knowing that he is coolest who can throw away his flesh and move in his bare bones, she provides a damp hot climate that reduces men to the appearance of trained thoroughbreds! There they walk, the thinnest foreigners of the Far East, the Hongkong, Manila, Saigon, Shanghai and Canton men! They have been boiled down almost to their backbones and skulls from March until November, and there being no tissue to feed, the blood can all go to building up the gray matter! Although black focuses the actinic rays of the overhead equatorial sun, and a body feels twenty degrees more of heat than when covered with white, the British courts of Hongkong insist on the formal garb of Lincoln’s Inn, a black coat and gown. Pity the barristers and judges of Hongkong who delve into the law and weigh out justice in the stifling atmosphere of the magnificent courts of the illustrious Crown colony. The almost naked, or duck-covered criminal, bracing up for his sentence, shows fewer beads on his perspiring brow than do his learned accusers! “Inflexible” is not a more famous name in the British navy than in the British legal and colonial service.