But in the Hong Kong of the poor there is nothing much but a tragic struggle for human existence, and misery, misery almost unalleviated, and yet not quite unalleviated. The poorest, hardest pressed of the Chinese have—more than most peoples—the love of home, the joy in work, the affection for kith and kin that go far to alleviate any lot, however hard. And they have other blessings—the poverty-cursed Chinese—they have their festivals and their temples. The cobbler, who sits by the wayside and works for a few sen, smokes now and again his tiny pipe of opium; he burns his incense sticks and his red, paper prayers in the joss-house, and once in every four years he contributes some mite of work, of treasure, or of interest to the Söul festival.
Plagues fall upon China almost with a grim regularity; they crush into terrible graves countless thousands. But China goes on, and the Chinese go on; and, ignorant as they may often be of the laws of sanitation, they remain for ever steadfast to themselves and to their country, and to what they conceive to be for the best advantage of both. What nation does more?
We have made many conquests in the East. But we have not been altogether victorious over Asiatic disease. We have carried our flag in triumph into the Chinaman’s Mecca—into Pekin. And we have knocked open the doors of the emperor’s palace, knocked them open with the butts of our rifles. We have made Shamien our own. We have made it bloom like a fair English garden, and at the very gate of Canton; where it lies a mute but eloquent reproach to the filth of the Chinese city. We have gained the probably most beautifully situated city in the world—the city of Hong Kong—and there we have built for our soldiers an almost ideal barrack. But we have been powerless—we are powerless to-day against the relentless outbreak of a Chinese plague. And Shamien—that proud spot of our, perhaps, supremest Chinese triumph—reeks with the poisonous stench that comes from Canton.
Alas! alas! We have paid a high price for our occupancy of Asia. We have often sacrificed to her our children.
The history of China is spotted with plagues. And the sanitary condition of many of the Chinese cities and the density of their populations are such that we can scarcely hope for China a future much freer from such plagues than her past has been.
Go into the native market in Hong Kong; see the burning sun pour down upon the half putrid fish and a hundred unwholesome looking native foods; see the dense, sweating, seething human mass that is packed in among the stalls, and you will wonder that Hong Kong is ever free from pestilence. But the European residents of Hong Kong are not, as a rule, over familiar with the details of the native quarter. They live on the Peak, or on the outskirts of the beautiful public gardens, where no smells reach them coarser than the indescribable perfume of the wisteria.
Nothing could be lovelier, happier than Hong Kong the European. It is a place of charming bungalows, of superb verdure, a place of green hills and of fanning breezes, a place of shady streets and sweetly fragrant nooks.
Nothing could be more picturesque, nothing could be sadder than most of Hong Kong the Chinese. It is a crowded place of deepest poverty. When I have said that, I have said it all.
As I have said, the Chinese are not, I believe, greatly responsible for either the gravity or the frequency of their epidemics. Poverty, extreme poverty, commits most of the crimes against the Chinese health. People who are too poor to buy soap cannot wash themselves, and much less their clothes. People who can afford none of the necessities of health cannot be blamed for falling ill. And the Chinese government, which is at the fountain head the most paternal of all governments (but corrupt in many of its branches), is unable to cope with the unavoidable poverty of China’s overplus of humanity in those parts of the empire in which the population is densest and most congested. It is a common mistake to suppose that there are more people in China than China could support if those people were equally scattered over her vast territory. But in the great centres of Chinese life the people are overcrowded to starvation and to pestilence.
Yes; things seem to be going rather badly in Asia just now—Mahommedan and Hindoo strife, mysterious and ominous mango smearing, native regimental insubordination, and buried treasure that refuses to be dug up, are rife in India and Burmah. Siam is slowly, but I fear surely, disappearing within the insatiable maw of France. China has been smitten down by a dire plague. Japan has been torn with earthquake: and now a black war cloud has broken over the Far East, drenching with its deadly rain of bullets Korea, China, and Japan.