Changing China Part 4

When the railway is made he finds at the railway inn the Chinese merchant ready to buy and sell anything that he on his part is ready to trade. At first, such things as sewing cotton and cigarettes are the things that are traded against silk or opium, and then comes Chinese medicine and mineral oil, and so trade begins, and soon the Chinese inn becomes a market-place, and the railways begin carrying goods.

Of course the full development of the railway system must depend on the feeding lines and in what {91} we had in Europe before the railway system, and what the Chinese have not got, the feeding roads. In Manchuria--for China, like England, is more go-ahead in the north than in the south--they are already moving in this direction. The Russian railways, possessed now by the j.a.panese, are very busy carrying beans to Dalny, and soon the j.a.panese lines from Mukden to Antung will be equally busy, and the line from Mukden to Tientsin also will carry this crop. What they are now considering at Mukden is how they can arrange a feeding system of light railways, by which a bigger area of ground can be brought within reach of the railway system. To give some idea of the energy and progressive character of the officials in those parts, I may mention that they are already making inquiries as to the mono-rail system for such railways.

The Chinese have made up their minds to welcome railways, and though they would far prefer railways to be built with Chinese capital, they are of necessity compelled to accept European capital, since their fellow-countrymen want very high interest for their money. The Germans have taken very full advantage of the Chinese desire for railways, and have linked Kiauchau with the railway system of China.

The effect of all this must be very far reaching. To begin with, it will alter the influence of foreign powers. As the railway service is completed, Kiauchau will become a very much more important centre than it is now. If a railway that links Peking to Nanking, {92} or, to be accurate, to a town on the Yangtsze opposite to Nanking, is cut by a railway from Kiauchau, the result will be that Kiauchau will become the nearest ice-free port for an enormous district of China. This cannot fail to strengthen the German influence, and the German influence is connected, as we have already explained, too much with that political side of missions which has caused them to be distrusted by peace-loving Chinese. The Chinese will ask themselves, will there not soon be a missionary incident which will justify a further aggression by Germany along the railway, which lies so handy for a military advance, and they will be suspicious of any German missionary effort in that quarter.

But the effect of the railways is much more far reaching than any casual advantage that it may give to various powers, whether it be to Germany in Shantung, or to Russia or j.a.pan in Manchuria, or to France in Yunnan, or to Russia in Szechuan. It will have two main effects.

First and foremost it must place the whole of China in the same position that Shanghai and Tientsin occupy at the present moment--that is, it must make the whole of China a mixture of Eastern and Western civilisation. It may be urged that the rivers of China have already been the means of bringing East and West into close contact with one another, and yet that China remains still a separate and different country to the treaty ports.

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The answer is, firstly, that it is comparatively only a short time since the river has been opened to foreign trade, and that a great advance has been made in the treaty ports, so much so that a man in the customs service living by the gorges of the Yangtsze described the difference between the treaty ports and the rest of China by saying, "A man who has only seen Shanghai and Hankow has never seen China."

Secondly, a railway has a great educational effect. When a railway is first opened the Chinese crowd to see it; they get in the way of the engine, they are run over, they accuse it of malign powers, and then they come to the conclusion that it is after all only a machine, and they take readily to travelling by rail.

For instance, the railway from Tientsin up to Manchuria has already completely altered the conditions of culture in the north. It has enabled a large number of labourers to migrate every year to cultivate the fertile but icy districts of Manchuria, so that it is quite a sight to see truck-load after truck-load of farm labourers travelling like cattle, going up from the south to the districts of the north at the rate of three dollars for a twenty-two hours' journey.

Not only does the railway carry the Tientsin labourer in a truck to the Manchurian beanfield, but it also carries first-cla.s.s the Chinese merchant who will buy the crop of beans to the advantage of the farmer and to his own greater advantage. The {94} Chinese are rich in traders, and such an opportunity would never be allowed to pa.s.s. Every year will produce a greater number of wealthy Chinese merchants, many of them very ignorant both of Western and Eastern knowledge, but probably some of them owning a respect for that knowledge whose lack they have felt in proportion to their own ignorance, for there is no man more inclined as a cla.s.s to endow educational inst.i.tutions than he who in his youth has felt the need of them.

China now needs help to found a University teaching Western knowledge.

Once it is formed, there is every reason to believe that it will be endowed by the same cla.s.s that has endowed similar inst.i.tutions in our own country.

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CHAPTER VIII

THE CITIES Of CHINA

Nowhere is the transitional period through which China is pa.s.sing more obvious than in the cities of China; many towns are still completely Chinese, but as you approach the ports you find more and more Western development. The contrast between towns is extremely marked. Shanghai or Tientsin are Western towns and centres of civilisation; the difference between them and such towns as Hangchow or Ichang is very great. The true Chinese city is not without its beauty--in fact, in many ways it is a beautiful and wonderful place. But to appreciate it eyes only are wanted, and a nose is a misfortune. The streets are extremely narrow pa.s.sages, which are bordered on either side by most attractive shops, particularly in the main street. The stranger longs to stop and buy things as he goes along, but the difficulty is that it takes so much time; he must either be prepared to pay twice the value of the things he wants, or to spend hours in negotiation. There is one curious exception to this rule; the silk guild at Shanghai does not allow its members to bargain, and therefore in the silk shop the real price is told at once.

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The shopkeepers are charming, and there are numbers of salesmen--salesmen who do not mind taking any amount of trouble to please. It is delightful, if insidious, to go into those shops; and one can well believe that if a Chinese silk shop were opened in London, and silk sold at Chinese prices, the shop would have plenty of customers. The quality of Chinese silk far exceeds that of the silks of the West. A Chinese gentleman mentioned as an example of this superiority that one of his gowns was made of French silk, and that it was torn and spoilt after two or three years; but that he had had gowns of Chinese silk for twenty years or more which were quite as good as on the day he bought them, and that he had only put them on one side because the fashions in men's garments change in China as they do elsewhere for ladies. The same gentleman related many interesting things about the silk trade. The quality of the silk is determined by the silk guild. This is much more like the guilds in mediaeval Europe than anything that we have nowadays, and that is why China is not exporting more silk than she is at present. These silk guilds to a certain extent prevent the Chinese catering for European customers, as they will not allow or at any rate encourage the production of silks that would take on the European market. The West has many faults as well as many virtues, and one of its faults is that it no longer cares for articles of sterling value, which last long and for which a high price must be paid, {97} but it delights in attractive articles of poor quality at a low price. It is to be feared that the West may spoil some of China's great products as she has spoilt the great arts and productions of India.

But to return to Chinese streets. Next the silk shop will be the silver shop. Here again the work is admirable. At such a place as Kiukiang you can spend an hour or more bargaining, and watching the wonderful skill of the silversmiths as they turn out beautiful silver ornaments. It is pleasant to wander along and to look into the shops and see the strange things that are for sale--fish of many kinds in one shop, rice and grain in another, strange vegetables, little bits of pork, flattened ducks; or to glance at the clothes and the coats hung out, many of them of brilliant colours. The signs over the shops and the names of the merchants are a feature in themselves, illuminated as they are in vivid hues of red and gold, in those wonderful characters so full of mystery to the foreigner.

In a native city up-country the traveller is practically forced to go through the city in a chair. There are no wheel conveyances except wheelbarrows, and, except where there are Manchus, horses are quite unknown. Walking is profoundly unpleasant for a European, for as he walks along he is constantly jostled by porters carrying loads of goods on a bamboo across their shoulders; or cries are heard, and a Chinese Mandarin is carried past shoulder high, leaning forward looking out of his {98} chair perhaps with a smile, of contempt for the foreigner who can so demean himself as to go on foot like a common coolie; or perhaps it is a lady with her chair closely covered in and only a glimpse to be seen of a rouged and powdered face, for the Chinese women paint to excess, as part of their ordinary toilette. Next comes the water-carrier hurrying past with his two buckets of water; or perhaps it is some malodorous burden which makes a Western long to be deprived of the sense of smell. But in a chair a ride through a Chinese town is delightful; the chair-coolies push past foot-pa.s.sengers who accept their buffets with the greatest equanimity, and from a comparatively elevated position the traveller can look down on the crowd.

But when the Chinese city is near a port, all this begins to change.

The chair is replaced by the ricksha, and though in many ways it is less comfortable than a chair, the ricksha is after all the beginning of the rule of the West, being a labour-saving machine. One coolie or two at the most can drag a man quickly and easily where with a chair three or four bearers would be needed. Outside the old town will be built the new native town, and the new native town is built on European lines, with comparatively wide streets. In a treaty port the completed specimen of the transitional stage through which all China is pa.s.sing is to be seen. Shanghai is a most delightful town, although it seems commonplace to those who live there, but {99} to a stranger it is a place full of contradictions and eccentricities. The first thing that strikes one in Shanghai is that none of the natives know any of the names of the streets. It is true they are written up in large letters both in English and in Chinese; but as not one of the coolies can read, they have not the very slightest idea that that is the name of the street--they call it quite a different name; and as they speak a different language both to that of the educated Chinaman and to the Englishman, there is no reason why they should ever learn the names given by them. The habitual way of directing a ricksha coolie is by a sort of pantomime, and there is always a great element of uncertainty as to whether he will get to his destination even with the oldest resident unless he knows the way himself. I arrived at Tientsin and tried to go and see Dr. Lavington Hart, whose college is known all over China, I may say all over the world, but the Chinese porter was quite unable to make the coolie understand where it was, and so we wandered about for some time till the coolie got tired and put me down opposite what fortunately turned out to be the house of a j.a.panese gentleman. I entered the house, and was surprised that the Chinese servant who met me did not altogether seem to expect me; but as he could not speak English and I could not speak Chinese, it was impossible to inquire if anything was wrong. I was just wondering why Dr. Hart should live in a j.a.panese house, {100} when the door opened and a j.a.panese gentleman walked in. Fortunately for me he spoke both Chinese and English well; so after explanations I was again sent on my road, and found Dr.

Lavington Hart waiting dinner for me, and wondering how I had got lost.

He then told me that I should have asked not for his college but for the hospital opposite, and that I should have asked not for the street but for the Chinese name of the doctor of the hospital who had been dead ten or fifteen years.

There is a moral in all this: it shows the state of confusion that exists in small as well as in large things. I asked several Englishmen why they did not accept the native names of the streets; their answer was that the coolies could not read them; and when I suggested that common sense would expect that the coolies' names should be taken for the streets, for after all that is how most of the streets in England were originally named, the suggestion met with no approval. These small matters show what a great gulf there is between the thoughts of the two races. If the coolies had been Italians or Germans or Russians, their names would have been accepted, or they would have been compelled to learn the new names.

Another example of the difficulty of carrying on the details of city life is afforded by a common spectacle at Shanghai. In the crowded streets you see a little crowd of policemen. The group consists of three splendid men, typical of three different {101} civilisations.

First there is the English policeman; next to him is a black-bearded man, bigger than the first, a Sikh, every gesture and action revealing the martial characteristics of his race; then a Chinaman completes the group, blue-coated and wearing a queue and a round Chinese hat as a sign of office. The traveller wonders why this trio is needed till he sees them in action. A motor car rushes down one road, a ricksha comes down another, and a Chinese wheelbarrow with six women sitting on it slowly progresses down a third. All three conveyances are controlled by Chinamen, and when they meet, all shout and shriek at the top of their voices; no one keeps the rule of the road, with the probable result that the wheelbarrow is upset, the ricksha is forced against the wall, and the motor car pulled up dead. Then the police force comes into action. The Chinese policeman objurgates vociferously and makes signals indifferently to everybody; the Sikh policeman at once begins to thrash the Chinese coolie; meanwhile the English policeman at last gets the traffic on the right side of the road, quiets his subordinates, sees justice done, and restores order. Possibly if the matter had been left to the Chinese policeman, he would have arranged it in the end; the traffic in Peking was controlled entirely by Chinese policemen and was fairly well managed.

There is an extraordinary example of the want of consideration for the feelings of the Chinese to {102} be seen in the public gardens at Shanghai. There stands a notice which contains, among several regulations, first, that "no dogs or bicycles shall be admitted"; secondly, that "no Chinese shall be admitted except servants in attendance on foreigners." Considering that the land is Chinese soil, one cannot but wonder that any one who had dealings with the Chinese should allow so ill-mannered a notice to be put up. No Chinese gentleman would object for a moment if the notice had been to the effect that unclean persons and beggars should be excluded from the gardens; but to exclude the cultured Chinese merchant who is every whit as clean as his Western neighbour, or to exclude the respectable people of the middle cla.s.s whose orderly behaviour is beyond suspicion, is as unreasonable as it is regrettable.

Again, the Shanghai munic.i.p.ality has no Chinese representatives upon it, though the great bulk of the population is Chinese, with the result that from time to time they come across Chinese prejudices and quite unnecessarily irritate the population which they govern. The Chinese have a principle that a woman shall be publicly punished only for adultery and open shameless theft; her "face" or dignity must be preserved; and therefore she should never be made to answer for her offences in open court, her husband or her father being held responsible for her behaviour and for her punishment. The right way of dealing with any woman who is charged with an offence is to do as we do in England with regard to children, to summon {103} not her but those responsible for her behaviour. I was a.s.sured by a Chinese official that the trouble which culminated in the Shanghai riots originated from disregard of this principle. The refusal of the Shanghai munic.i.p.ality to have Chinese representatives upon it is the more remarkable, as I was informed at Hong-Kong that they have such representatives, and find them most useful in a.s.sisting in the government of the Chinese. It is not surprising that Shanghai is a town to which it is diplomatic to make no reference in conversation with a Chinese gentleman.

There is more to be said for the mistrust of the Chinese Post-office and for the continuation of the curious system by which each nation has its own post-office. Nothing is more annoying to the traveller in Shanghai than the trouble he has to get his letters. If it should so happen that he has correspondents in many countries, he has to go to every one of the many post-offices in Shanghai, and they are situated in different parts of the town and in places very difficult to find.

There is the Imperial Chinese Post-office, to which he first repairs, and where he will find letters from any correspondent in China; then with the greatest difficulty he reaches the English Post-office; after which he remembers that some of his friends may be on a holiday in France, therefore he must go to the French Post-office, and so on.

When he asks why the Chinese Post-office cannot be trusted, he is told that the Chinese themselves will not trust their {104} post-office unless there be a European official in control, and that the old Chinese system by which letters are forwarded by private companies still continues in many parts of China, although they possess branches of the Imperial Chinese Post-office. Still the traveller wearily thinks at the end of his day's journey that without undue trust in another nationality, or any loss of national prestige, an International Post-office might be arranged in a town like Shanghai, with its vast travelling population.

Shanghai with its mixture of races, with its national antipathies and jealousies, is indeed one of the most attractive but strangest towns in the whole world. Every race meets there; and as one wanders down the Nanking road, one never tires of watching the nationalities which throng that thoroughfare. There walks a tall bearded Russian, a fat German, jostling perhaps a tiny j.a.panese officer, whose whole air shows that he regards himself as a member of the conquering race that has checkmated the vast power of Europe; there are sleek Chinese in Western carriages, and there are thin Americans in Eastern rickshas; the motor cycle rushes past, nearly colliding with a closely-curtained chair bearing a Chinese lady of rank, or a splendid Indian in a yellow silk coat is struck in the face by the hat of a Frenchman, who finds the pavements of Shanghai too narrow for his sweeping salute; one hears guttural German alternating with c.o.c.kney slang; Parisian toilettes are seen next half-naked coolies; a couple of sailors on {105} a tandem cycle almost upset two j.a.panese beauties as they shuffle along with their toes turned in; a grey gowned Buddhist priest elbows a bearded Roman missionary; a Russian shop where patriotism rather than love of gain induces the owners to conceal the nature of their wares by employing the Russian alphabet overhead, stands opposite a j.a.panese shop which, in not too perfect English, a.s.sures the wide world that their heads can be cut cheaply; an English lady looks askance at the tightness of her Chinese sister's nether garments, while the Chinese sister wonders how the white race can tolerate the indecency that allows a woman to show her shape and wear transparent sleeves.

Yes, Shanghai on a spring afternoon is a most interesting place; and yet as you turn your eyes to the river and catch sight of the dark grey warship, you realise that beneath all this peace and busy commerce lies the fear of the grim realities of war. China may a.s.similate the adjuncts of Western life, but she will never welcome the Western. The racial gulf that divides them is far too deep. It may be temporarily bridged by the heroism of a missionary; the enthusiasm of Christianity may make those who embrace it brothers; but the feeling of love will not extend one inch beyond the influence of religion; and those who ponder on the future as they watch the many-hued crowd that pa.s.ses must grow more and more sure that the future of China lies with the Chinese alone; and however much as a race they may {106} be willing to learn from the West, they will as a race be led only by their own people.

The Westerner may be employed; Western teaching may be learnt; Western garments may be worn; but, as a Chinese professor said, "The wearer will be a Chinaman all the same."

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CHAPTER IX

OPIUM

There was one marked difference in the cities of China as we saw them in our two visits, and this was the change that had taken place in the matter of opium-smoking. Opium-smoking in 1907 was such a common vice that you could see men smoking it at the doors of their houses. In 1909 opium-smoking hid itself, and those that smoked, smoked secretly, or at any rate less ostentatiously. I doubt whether so great an alteration has taken place in any country, certainly not of late years.

Each race has its peculiar vice; in fact, we may go further than that, we may say that it is a remarkable fact that the great bulk of mankind insists on taking some form of poison; in fact, it is only a minute minority which wholly abstains from this practice. The poisons used by mankind have different effects and have a different degree of toxic power, but the reason they are used is because in some way they stimulate or soothe the nervous system. Opium, alcohol, tobacco, tea, coffee, hashish, are examples of this widespread habit of humanity; but these different drugs have the most different effects on the welfare of man. Some seem to be wholly {108} innocuous if not beneficial, and others seem to be absolutely pernicious and to do nothing but evil; and further than that, one may say that a different preparation of the same drug or a different way of taking it produces differing results. A still more curious thing is that though all mankind is agreed in taking some poison, there is a marked, racial tendency to accept one particular poison and to detest others, and at times it seems as if the habit of taking one was sufficient to prevent another having any attraction.

As we went to China we pa.s.sed through the Suez Ca.n.a.l, and heard what a curse hashish was in Egypt, and how the Egyptian Government had endeavoured to secure total prohibition of the use of this obnoxious drug, a course which was impossible owing to the great amount of smuggling that was facilitated by the wide deserts that surround Egypt.

When we arrived at Saigon (we were travelling by the French mail) we first came in contact with the terrible vice of the Chinese. A French lady was pointed out to us by a doctor, and he asked us to observe the odd gla.s.sy look of her eyes, the intense suavity of her manner and the contempt which she evinced for truth, and he told us that these were all symptoms of the vice of opium-smoking that she had contracted from a.s.sociation with the Annamites. The French for some mysterious reason seem more p.r.o.ne to acquire this vice than do our own countrymen, for though in 1907 it was rife in South China, {109} no one ever suggested that any English smoked opium at Hong-Kong.

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 pa.s.ses the first stage, and its apparently beneficial influence const.i.tutes 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 {110} 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 quant.i.ties 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 {111} 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.

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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 cla.s.s 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 quant.i.ties sufficient to make any ordinary person go fast asleep. It was used there, as it is used in many {113} 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 {114} 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 a.s.sured 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.