Changing China

by William Gascoyne-Cecil; Lady Florence Mary Cecil

As we went up to Canton crowds of people were smoking opium on the Chinese deck, and when we wandered round they had no objection to our standing watching the lazy process of dipping the needle into the treacle-like mixture, turning it round till a bead was formed, then putting it into the lamp to light and thence transferring it to the opium pipe, when after three whiffs or so the process had to be begun again.

The first effect of opium-smoking is to make a man intelligent and amiable. It is for this reason that opium-smoking—so the Chinese explained to us—is used largely in business. When business is difficult, and you cannot get three or four men to agree, the opium pipe is brought out, and after two or three whiffs the cantankerous people are reasonable, and the people whose dignity is hurt are forgiving, and business is easily and rapidly transacted. The next stage of smoking is stupidity. As you watch an opium-smoker in that condition he nods amiably at you with a rather imbecile look. The last stage is one of heavy senseless sleep. The habitual opium-smoker rarely passes the first stage, and its apparently beneficial influence constitutes its danger. Each man says to himself: "I will never take it to excess; I will merely use it and not abuse it; it makes life sweet to me and business easy."

I have always thought that those who condemn opium have a tendency to prove too much in their argument. If it could be shown that the effects of opium-taking were invariably pernicious, it would be very hard to see how the vice could take such a hold as it has taken on the Chinese race; if the young men regularly saw that the older men were brought to inanity and death by the use of opium, they would themselves be terrified of contracting the vice, and it would not have spread as rapidly as it has done. The vice is essentially modern. Opium has only been grown in China for about seventy or eighty years, and it has only been imported in large quantities for a scarcely longer period of time. An inhabitant of Shansi told us that though every one smoked opium, and it was a terrible curse, his father remembered its introduction. Opium is certainly deleterious to the moral fibre of a race, and in many cases it produces death and misery; but there are a certain number of cases where no obvious evil effects follow from its consumption—cases when as a rule a man is well-nourished, for it acts most deleteriously on a man's powers of digestion. Men who have good food can better tolerate the effects of the drug, so a mission doctor explained, and their comparative immunity tempts others to follow their example. Men do not see at once the evil that will result, and so its use has spread by leaps and bounds. The Chinese Government have always theoretically resisted it, but their action has been hampered by their not being permitted to prohibit its importation. For many years the pro-opium party in China used those treaty obligations by which China was bound to permit the importation of opium as a reason for stopping any efforts to extirpate the vice in the country. Not only were there always a great number of people in high places addicted to the vice, who were naturally unwilling to remove from themselves the opportunity of its gratification, but also there was a vast number of people who rapidly acquired a great pecuniary interest both in the maintenance and extension of this trade.

Unfortunately for humanity, opium was not only very injurious but extremely portable, and it therefore formed in a country where means of communication are bad a very useful article of exchange. The peasant farmer will grow most things on his little farm which he and his family consume—in most respects they will be a self-supporting community—but there must be a certain number of things which they will need to buy, and for which they must give something in exchange; that something must be portable. In many cases the only way of bringing your goods to the market is by carrying them on your own back. Opium, alas, forms, in soils which it suits, a most remunerative crop. The whole product of several fields can be carried quite easily on a man's back and can be sent down to the market, where it will find a ready sale, and the result of that sale will be invested in articles of which the farmer and his family have need.

Not only the farmer, but the trader, both Chinese and European, find it a most profitable source of trade. It was hard, and it is hard, to persuade the European trader that it is injurious to China, and to understand the reason we must turn back to the thought which was suggested at the beginning of the chapter, namely, that it is very doubtful whether the English race has any natural desire for the vice, while it is most patent that the Chinese have a peculiar national tendency towards this form of dissipation. When people have no desire for an intoxicant themselves, it is hard to persuade them that others may have a desire which may be beyond all power of restraint. The trading class mixes but little socially with the Chinese, and the people with whom they are brought in contact are very generally pecuniarily interested in the opium trade, and therefore they have neither the evidence of the Chinese nor of their own temptation to convince them of the insidious and dangerous character of this vice to the Chinese race.

The English race has long been conversant with opium. In the form of laudanum it used to be sold freely in the eastern counties. I have heard people describe years ago how the old women from the fen round Lowestoffe, or the marshes as they are there called, would call on market day at the chemist for their regular supply of laudanum, which they would take in quantities sufficient to make any ordinary person go fast asleep. It was used there, as it is used in many countries, as a prophylactic against ague. The doctors now deny that it has any beneficial effect, but the people in the eastern counties used to think differently. But when I was a curate at Yarmouth I could find no traces of this vice; it had apparently been exterminated not by any social reform or moral movement, but by the superior attraction of alcohol; and in my day Yarmouth and the district round was terribly addicted to the national vice of intemperance. I noticed the same thing in Shanghai. The English know opium; most of them have out of curiosity tried a pipe; and they describe the effects as trifling or very unpleasant. One man said that he felt as if all his bones were a jelly; another that he felt as if he was floating between heaven and earth; a third that he found no pleasure in it at all, but that he had a "filthy headache" next day. On the other hand, if you go into the Shanghai Club you can see at once what is the attractive vice to the European at Shanghai; the whole of one side of the entrance hall was nothing more than the bar of an overgrown public-house. You will hear story after story which tells the same old tale that alcohol, especially in its strongest form, is the greatest pleasure and the worst danger to the Englishman abroad as at home.

If opium is unattractive to the white man, on the other hand alcohol is equally unattractive to the yellow man; in fact, their relative position is much the same. The yellow man has known of alcohol from the very earliest ages. Dr. Ross quotes the second ode of the Book of Poetry as showing how well known drunkenness was to the Chinese: "Before they drank too much, they were dignified and grave; but with too much drink their dignity changed to indecency, their gravity to rudeness; the fact is, that when they have become drunk they lose all sense of order. When the guests have drunk too much, they shout, they brawl, they upset the orderly arrangement of the dishes, they dance about unsteadily, their caps are set awry and threaten to fall off, they dance about and do not know when to stop. Had they gone out before drinking so deeply, both host and guest would have been happier. Drinking gives real happiness only when it is taken in moderation according to propriety."

Drunkenness seems to have been extirpated from China by the same process that laudanum-taking was from the eastern counties, namely, it has given way before the more entrancing vice of opium-smoking. I was assured that the Tibetans do not share with the Chinese this preference for opium, and this is all the more remarkable because from their geographical position they have always been in close contact with India, which is apparently the home of the opium vice, but they have adhered steadily to the vice of drunkenness. The Chinese have free trade in drink; they have no licensing laws; any one may sell alcohol at any time of the day, in any place they like; and yet alcohol has so few votaries that you will scarcely see a drunken man from one end of China to another.