Since there are no statistics in China, I can give the reader only the observations and impressions of a traveller. But Shansi Province is full of ruins. So are Szechuan and Yunnan and Kuei-chow, and half a dozen others. It is with the province as a whole much as it is with the individuals of that province. The raising of opium to supply this enormous demand crowds off the land the grains and vegetables that are absolutely needed for human food. The manufacture of opium and its accessories absorbs the energy and capital that should go into legitimate industry. The government of the province and the government of the empire have become so dependent on the immense revenue from the taxation of this “vicious article of luxury” that they dare not give it up. In the body politic an unhealthy condition not only exists, but also controls. Drifting into it half-consciously, the province has been sapped by a vicious economic habit. That is what is the matter with Shansi. That is what is the matter with China. All the way along my route in Shansi I photographed the ruins that typify the disaster which has overtaken this opium province. And a few of these photographs are reproduced here, all showing houses of men who were well-to-do only a few years ago. It will be plainly seen from the cuts, I think, that these ruins are not the result of age. The sun-dried bricks of the walls show few signs of crumbling. The walls themselves are not weather-beaten, and have evidently been destroyed by the hand of man, and not by time.

WRECK AND RUIN IN CHINA
These Houses were Torn Down by their Owners, the Woodwork and Bricks Sold, and the Money Used to Purchase Opium

IV

CHINA’S SINCERITY

China is the land of paradox. If it is an absolute, despotic monarchy, it is also a very democratic country, with its self-made men, its powerful public opinion, and a “states’ rights” question of its own. It is one of the most corrupt of nations; on the other hand, the standard of personal and commercial honesty is probably higher in China than in any other country in the world. Woman, in China, is made to serve; her status is so low that it would be a discourtesy even to ask a man if he has a daughter: yet the ablest ruler China has had in many centuries is a woman. It is a land where the women wear socks and trousers, and the men wear stockings and robes; where a man shakes his own hand, not yours; where white, not black, is a sign of mourning; where the compass points south, not north; where books are read backward, not forward; where names and titles are put in reverse order, as in our directories—Theodore Roosevelt would be Roosevelt Theodore in China, Uncle Sam would be Sam Uncle; where fractions are written upside down, as 8⁄5, not 5⁄8; where a bride wails bitterly as she is carried to her wedding, and a man laughs when he tells you of his mother’s death.

Chinese life, or the phases of it that you see along the highroads of the northwest, would appear to be a very simple, honest life, industrious, methodical, patient in poverty. The men, even of the lowest classes, are courteous to a degree that would shame a Frenchman. I have seen my two soldiers, who earned ten or twenty cents, Mexican, a day, greet my cook with such grace and charm of manner that I felt like a crude barbarian as I watched them. The simplicity and industry of this life, as it presented itself to me, seemed directly opposed to any violence or outrage. Yet only seven years ago Shansi Province was the scene of one of the most atrocious massacres in history, modern or ancient. During a few weeks, in the summer of 1900, one hundred and fifty-nine white foreigners, men, women, and children, were killed within the province, forty-six of them in the city of T’ai Yuan-fu. The massacre completely wiped out the mission churches and schools and the opium refuges, the only missionaries who escaped being those who happened to be away on leave at the time. The attack was not directed at the missionaries as such, but at the foreigners in general. It was widely believed among the peasantry that the foreign devils made a practice of cutting out the eyes, tongues, and various other organs of children and women and shipping them, for some diabolical purpose, out of the country. The slaughter was directed, from beginning to end, by the rabid Manchu governor, Yü Hsien, and some of the butchering was done by soldiers under his personal command. But the interesting fact is that the docile, long-suffering people of Shansi did some butchering on their own account, as soon as the word was passed around that no questions would be asked by the officials.

Apparently, the Shansi peasant can be at one time simple, industrious, loyal, and at another time a slaying, ravishing maniac. The Chinaman himself is the greatest paradox of all. He is the product of a civilization which sprang from a germ and has developed in a soil and environment different from anything within our Western range of experience. Naturally he does not see human relations as we see them. His habits and customs are enough different from ours to appear bizarre to us; but they are no more than surface evidences of the difference between his mind and ours. Thanks to our strong racial instinct, we can be fairly certain of what an Anglo-Saxon, or even a European, will think in certain deeply human circumstances—in the presence of death, for instance. We cannot hope to understand the mental processes of a Chinaman. There is too great a difference in the shape of our heads, as there is in the texture of our traditions.

But we can see quite clearly that the imperial government of China is, while it endures, a strong and effective government. It is significant that the Chinese people rarely indulge in massacres on their own account. Why not? The hatred of foreigners must be always there, under the placid surface, for these people rarely fail to turn into slaying demons once the officials let the word be passed around. There have been thirty-five serious anti-foreign riots and massacres in China within thirty-five years, besides the Boxer uprising of 1900; and among these there was probably not one which the mandarins could not have suppressed had they wished. The Boxer trouble was worked up by Yü Hsien while he was governor of Shantung Province. When the foreign powers protested he was transferred to Shansi, which had scarcely heard of the Boxer Society, and almost at once there was a “Boxer” outbreak and massacre in Shansi. The Peking government meanwhile carried on Yü Hsien’s horrible work at Peking and Tientsin. The siege of the legations at Peking was conducted by imperial soldiers, not by mobs. During all the trouble of that bloody summer, Yuan Shi K’ai, who succeeded to the governorship in Shantung, seemed to have no difficulty in keeping that province quiet, though it was the scene of the original trouble.