Formerly it was the custom for the host to offer opium to his guests, but the Chinese have now quite a changed public sentiment. Because they recognize that opium is ruining the lives of many of their people, and lessening the efficiency of many others, because they regard it as a source of weakness to their country and danger to their sons, it has become a matter of shame for a man to be known as an opium-smoker, even "in moderation." To be free from such an enervating dissipation is regarded as the duty not only to one's self and one's family, but to the country as well: it is a patriotic duty. I saw a cartoon in a native Chinese paper the other day in which there were held up to especial scorn and humiliation the weakling officials who had lost their offices by reason of failure to shake off opium. In short, the opium-smoker, instead of being a sort of "good fellow with human weaknessess"—and with possibilities, of course, of going utterly to wreck—has become an object of contempt, a bad citizen.

The earnestness of the people has been strikingly illustrated in the great financial sacrifices made by farmers and landowners in sections where the opium poppy was formerly grown. The culture of the poppy in some sections was far more profitable than that of any other crop; it was, in fact, the "money crop" of the people. In fact, to stop growing the opium poppy has meant in some cases a decrease of 75 per cent, in the profit and value of the land. Farms mortgaged on the basis of old land values, therefore, had to be sold; peasants who had {96} been home-owners became homeless. And yet China has thought no price too great to pay in the effort to free herself from this form of intemperance. Well may her leading men proudly declare, as one did to me to-day: "While America dares not undertake the task of stopping the whiskey curse among less than a hundred million people, we are stopping the opium curse among over four hundred millions." It should also be observed that there is little drunkenness over here. At a dinner party Friday evening my hostess thought it worth while to mention as a matter of general interest to her guests (so rare is the occurrence) that she had seen a drunken Chinaman that day. I have not yet seen one.

China is waking up, and I am glad she is. She is going into industrial competition with all the world, and I am glad that she is. I believe that every strong and worthy nation is enriched by the proper development of every other nation. But in this coming struggle the people whom vice or dissipation has rendered weak sooner or later must go down before the men who, gaining the mastery over every vicious habit, keep their bodies strong and their minds clear. In thunder tones indeed does China's victory over opium speak to America. If we are to maintain our high place among the nations of the earth, if we are to keep our leadership in wealth and industry, we can do it only by freeing ourselves, as heroically as the yellow man of the Orient is doing in this respect, from every enervating influence that now weakens the physical stamina, blunts the moral sense, or befogs the brain.

The new China is devoting itself to a number of other reforms to which the people of America may well give attention. The curse of graft among her public officials ("squeeze" it is called over here) is one of the most deep-rooted cancers with which she has to contend. Officers have been paid small salaries and have been allowed to make up for the meagreness of their stipends by exacting all sorts of fees and tips. Before the coming parliament is very old, however, it will {97} doubtless undertake to do away with the fee and "squeeze" system, stop grafting, and put all the more important offices on a strict salary basis. Under the old fee system of paying county and city officials in the United States, as my readers know, we have often let enormous sums go into office-holders' pockets when they should have gone into improving our roads and schools. The Chinese system not only has this weakness, but by reason of the fact that the fees are not regularly fixed by law, as is the case with us, the way is opened for numberless other abuses.

Currency reform is in China a matter hardly second in importance to the abolition of "squeeze." There is no national currency here; each province (or state, as we would say) issues its own money when it pleases, just as the different American states did two generations ago. I remember hearing an old man tell of going from the Carolinas to Alabama about 1840 and having to pay heavy exchange to get his Carolina money changed into Alabama money. So it is in China to-day. You must get your bills of one bank or province changed whenever you go into another bank or province, paying an outrageous discount, and a banking corporation will even discount a bill issued by another branch of the same corporation. Thus a friend of mine with a five-dollar Russia-Asiatic banknote from the Peking branch on taking it to the Russia-Asiatic's branch at Hankow gets only $4.80 for it.

Nor is this all: All kinds of money are in circulation, the values constantly fluctuating, and hundreds and thousands of men make a living by "changing money," getting a percentage on each transfer. Take the so-called 20-cent pieces in circulation; they lack a little of weighing one fifth as much as the 100-cent dollar; consequently it takes sometimes 110 and again 112 cents "small coin" to equal one dollar! The whole system is absurd, of course, and yet when the government proposes to establish a uniform national currency it is {98} said that the influence of these money-changers is so great as to make any reform exceedingly slow and difficult.

And yet let not my readers at home with this statement before them proceed too hastily to laugh or sneer at China for unprogressiveness. For my part, as I have thought of this matter of money transfer over here, the whole question has seemed to me to be on all-fours with our question of land title transfers at home, and the more I have thought of it the firmer has the conviction become. In fact, China's failure to adopt a modern currency system is perhaps even less a sinning against light than our failure to adopt the Torrens system of registering land titles. The man who makes a living by changing money and investigating its value is no more a parasite than the man who makes a living changing titles or investigating their value; the hindrance of trade and easy transfer of property is no more excusable in one case than the other; and the 90 per cent, that China might save by a better system of money transfers is paralleled by the 90 per cent, that we might save by a better system of title transfers.

Mr. Money-Changing Banker, fattening needlessly at the expense of the people, prevents currency reform in China—yes, that is true. But before we assume superior airs let us see if Mr. Title-Changing Lawyer, also fattening needlessly at the expense of the people, does not go to our next legislature and stifle any measure for reforming land-title registration. And in saying this I am not to be understood as making any wholesale condemnation of either Chinese bankers or our American lawyers. The ablest advocates of the Torrens system I know are lawyers, men who say that lawyers ought to be content with the really useful ways of earning money and not insist on keeping up utterly useless and indefensible means of getting fees out of the people. Such lawyers, indeed, deserve honor; my criticism is aimed only at those who realize the wisdom of a changed system but are led by selfishness to oppose it.

{99}

After all, however, the most revolutionary and iconoclastic reform in the new China is the changed policy of the schools. For thousands of years the education has been exclusively literary. The aim has been to produce scholars. A thorough knowledge of the works of the sages and poets, and the ability to write learned essays or beautiful verses, this has been the test of merit. When Colonel Denby wrote his book on China five years ago he could say:

"The Chinese scholar knows nothing of ancient or modern history (outside of China), geography, astronomy, zoology or physics. He knows perfectly well the dynastic history of his own country and he composes beautiful poems, and these are his only accomplishments."

But now all this is changed. The ancient system of selecting public officials by examination as to classical scholarship was abolished the year after Colonel Denby's book was published, and the new ideal of the school is to train men and women for useful living, for practical things, and to combine culture with utility. Japanese education now has the same aim. There, in fact, even the study of the languages is made to subserve a practical end. Where the American boy studies Latin and soon forgets it, the Japanese boy studies English and continues to read English and speak it on occasion the rest of his life, increasing his efficiency and usefulness in no small measure as a result. In Japan, too, I found the keenest interest in the teaching of agriculture to boys and domestic science to girls; and in all these things China is also moving—blunderingly, perhaps, but yet making progress—toward the most modern educational ideas.

As a matter of fact, much as America has talked these last ten years of making the schools train for more useful living, China and Japan have actually moved relatively much farther away from old standards than we have done, and if they should continue the same rate of advance for the next thirty years we may find their schools doing more for the efficiency {100} of the people than our American schools are doing. And when I say this let not the cry go up that I am decrying culture. Already I anticipate the criticism from men who cling to old standards of education with even more tenacity than absurdly conservative China has done. I am not decrying culture, but I am among those who insist that culture may come from a study of useful things as well as from a study of useless things; that a knowledge of the chemistry of foods may develop a girl's mind as much as a knowledge of chemistry that is without practical use; and that a boy may get about as much cultural value from the knowledge of a language which does put him into touch with modern life as from the knowledge of a language which might put him into touch with ancient life but which he will probably forget as soon as he gets his diploma. Slow-moving and tradition-cursed China and Japan, as we thought them a generation ago, have already committed themselves to making education train for actual life. Has America given anything more than a half-hearted assent to the idea?

The practical value of this article, I am reminded just here, has to do almost entirely with legislation. You may wish to remind your member of the legislature of the parallel between the wasteful and antiquated money-transfer system in China and the equally wasteful and antiquated title-transfer system at home; you may wish to inform your member of the legislature and your school officials of the advance of practical education in the Orient; and you may wish to remind both your member of the legislature and your congressman of China's successful crusade against the opium evil as an incentive for more determined American effort against the drink evil. Let me conclude this letter, therefore, with two more facts with which you may prod your representatives in Washington. (Which reminds me to remark, parenthetically, that every reform the Chinese are getting to-day comes as a result of persistently bringing pressure on their officials; and this {101} parenthetical observation may be as full of suggestion as any idea I have elaborated at greater length.)

The two facts with which you may stir up your servants in Washington are just these:

First, in regard to the parcels post. Here in China the other day I mailed a package by parcels post to another country for about half what it would have cost me to mail it from one county-seat to another at home. How long are we going to be content to let so-called "heathen" countries like China have advantages which so-called enlightened, progressive America is too slow to adopt?

Secondly, the tariff. Here in the hotel where I write this article one of the foremost journalists in the Far East tells me that the average tariff-protected American industry sells goods to Asiatic buyers at 30 per cent. less than it will sell to the people at home. Thirty per cent., he says, is the usual discount for Oriental trade. An electric dynamo which is sold in America for $1000, for instance, is sold for Chinese trade at $550 or $600. Quite a number of times on this trip have men told me that they can get American goods cheaper over here, after paying the freight ten thousand miles, than we Americans can buy them at our own doors. For example, a man told me a few weeks ago of buying fleece-lined underwear at half what it costs at home; a missionary tells me that he saves 20 cents on each two-pound can of Royal baking powder as compared with American prices; Libby's meats are cheaper in London than in San Francisco; harvesting machinery made in Chicago is carried across land and sea, halfway around the world, and sold in far-away Siberia for less than the American farmer can buy it at the factory gates.

And these are only a few instances. Hundreds of others might be given. How long the American people are going to find it amusing to be held up in such fashion remains to be seen.

Peking, China.

{102}

XI

THE NEW CHINA: AWAKE AND AT WORK

Within eighteen months China will have a parliament or a revolution (she may have both). Such at least is the prediction I am willing to risk, and it is one which I believe most foreigners in Peking would indorse.

And the coming of a parliament, popular government, to guide the destinies of the vast empire over which the Son of Heaven has reigned supreme for more than four thousand years—this is only one chapter in the whole marvelous story, not of China Awakening, but of China Awake. For the breaking with tradition, the acceptance of modern ideas, which but yesterday was a matter of question, is now a matter of history. "China Breaking Up" was the keynote of everything written about the Middle Kingdom ten years ago; "China Waking Up" has been the keynote of everything treating of it these last five years.

Sir John Jordan, British Minister to China, does not exaggerate when he declares that in a European sense China has made greater progress these last ten years than in the preceding ten centuries. The criticism one hears most often now is, not that the popular leaders are too conservative, but that they are if, anything, too radical; are moving, not too slowly, but too rapidly.

Instead of the old charge that China is unwilling to learn what the West has to teach, I now hear foreigners complain that a little contact with Europe and America gives a leader {103} undue influence. "Let an official take a trip abroad and for six months after his return he is the most respected authority in the empire." Instead of English missionaries worrying over China's slavery to the opium habit, we now have English officials embarrassed because China's too rapid breaking loose from opium threatens heavy deficits in Indian revenues. Instead of the old extreme "states' rights" attitude on the part of the provinces, as illustrated by the refusal of the others to aid Manchuria and Chihli in the war with Japan, the beginnings of an intense nationalism are now very clearly in evidence. Even Confucius no longer looks backward. A young friend of mine who is a descendant of the Sage (of the seventy-fifth generation) speaks English fluently and is getting a thoroughly modern education, while Duke Kung, who inherits the title in the Confucian line, is patron of a government school which gives especial attention to English and other modern branches—by his direction. Significant, too, is the fact that the ancient examination halls in Peking to which students have come from all parts of the empire, the most learned classical scholars among them rewarded with the highest offices, have now been torn down, and where these buildings once stood Chinese masons and carpenters are fashioning the building that is to house China's first national parliament—unless the parliament comes before this building can be made ready.

And so it goes. When a man wakes up, he does not wake up in a part of his body only, he wakes up all over. So it seems with Cathay. The more serious problem now is not to get her moving, but to keep her from moving too rapidly. In his Civic Forum address in New York three years ago, Wu Ting Fang quoted Wen Hsiang's saying, "When China wakes up, she will move like an avalanche." A movement with the power of an avalanche needs very careful guidance.

The one question about which every Chinese reformer's heart is now aflame is that of an early parliament. By the imperial decree of 1908 a parliament and a constitution were {104} promised within nine years. At that time there was little demand for a parliament, but with the organization of the Provincial Assemblies in the fall of 1909 the people were given an opportunity to confer together and were also given a taste of power. For the first time, too, they seem to have realized suddenly the serious plight of the empire and the fact that since the deaths of the late Emperor and Empress Dowager, and the dismissal of Yuan Shih-Kai by the Prince Regent acting for the infant Emperor, the Peking government is without a strong leader. Consequently the demand for a hastened parliament has grown too powerful to be resisted. True, when the delegates from all the Provincial Assemblies voiced this demand to the Prince Regent last spring his reply was the Edict of May 29, declaring that the programme outlined by their late Majesties, like the laws of the Medes and Persians, could not be changed. Furthermore, the Throne remarked significantly: "Let no more petitions or memorials upon this subject be presented to Us; Our mind is made up."

Unfortunately for the peace of the Regent, however, John Chinaman is absurdly and obnoxiously persistent on occasion. If you will not heed other appeals, he may commit suicide on your doorstep, and then you are bewitched for the rest of your days, to say nothing of your nights. The talk of an earlier parliament would not down even at the bidding of the Dragon Throne. Quietly unmanageable delegations waited upon viceroys and compelled these high officials to petition for a reopening of the question. Down in Kiang Su a scholar cut off his left arm and with the red blood wrote his appeal. In Union Medical Hospital, here in Peking, as I write this, a group of students are recovering from self-inflicted wounds made in the same cause. Going to the Prince Regent's, they were told that the Prince could not see them. "Very well," they declared, "we shall sit here till he does." At length the Prince sent word that, though he could not receive them, he would consider their petition, and the students then sliced the {107} living flesh from their arms and thighs as evidence of their earnestness, coloring their petition with their blood.

{105}

The baby sovereign of one of the vastest and oldest of empires is shown here in the lap of his father. Prince Chun, the Regent.

{106}

Burning a pile of pipes of reformed smokers at Hankow. The amazing success of China's crusade to free her people from the opium curse may be justly reckoned one of the greatest moral achievements in history—a challenge to our Western world.

{107 continued}

At this period of our drama there came upon the stage a new actor, at first little heeded, but quickly becoming the dominating figure—the Tzucheng Yuan, or National Assembly. This body, consisting of 100 nobles and men of wealth or scholarship appointed by the Throne, and 100 selected members of Provincial Assemblies approved by the viceroys, was expected to prove a mere echo of the royal wishes. "It is evident that the government is to have a docile and submissive assembly. Mediocrity is the chief characteristic of the members chosen." So wrote one of the best informed Americans in China, some weeks before it assembled, October 3. Reuter's press agent in Peking predicted through his papers that a few pious resolutions would represent the sum total of the Assembly's labors.

And yet the first day that these two gentlemen went with me to look in on the Assembly we found it coolly demanding that the Grand Council, or imperial cabinet, be summoned before it to explain an alleged breach of the rights of Provincial Assemblies!

From the very beginning the course of this National Assembly in steadily gathering unexpected power to itself has reminded me of the old States-General in France in the days just before the Revolution, and I could not help looking for Danton and Robespierre among the fiery orators in gown and queue on this occasion. Significantly, too, I now hear on the authority of an eminent scholar that Carlyle's great masterpiece is the most popular work of historical literature ever translated into Chinese. May it teach them some lessons of restraint as well as of aggressiveness!

Be that as it may, the Assembly has proved untamable in its demands for an early parliament, not even the hundred government members standing up against the imperious pressure of public opinion. In late October the Assembly {108} unanimously petitioned the Throne to hasten the programme of constitutional government. The day this petition was presented it was currently rumored in Peking that unless the Prince Regent should yield the people would refuse to pay taxes. But he yielded. The trouble now is that he did not yield enough to satisfy the public, and there is every indication that he will have to yield again, in spite of the alleged unalterableness of the present plan, which allows a parliament in 1913 instead of in 1916, as originally promised. A parliament within eighteen months seems a safe prediction as I write this.

It also seems safe to prophesy that the powers of the parliament will be wisely used. In local affairs the Chinese practically established the rule of the people centuries before any European nation adopted the idea. Nominally, the local magistrate has had almost arbitrary power, but practically the control has been in the hands of the village elders. When they have met and decided on a policy, the magistrate has not dared run counter to it. In much the same fashion, governors and viceroys of provinces have been controlled and kept in check. Thus centuries of practical self-government in local affairs have given the Chinese excellent preparation for the new departure in national affairs. What is proposed is not a new power for the people but only an enlargement or extension of powers they already exercise.

Parliamentary government is the one great accomplishment the Chinese people are now interested in, because they propose to make it the tool with which to work out the other Herculean tasks that await them. Happy are they in that they may set about these tasks inspired by the self-confidence begotten of one of the greatest moral achievements of modern times. I refer, of course, to the almost marvellous success of their anti-opium crusade which I have already discussed.

Mr. Frederick Ward, who has just returned from a visit to many provinces, finding in all the same surprising success {109} in enforcing anti-opium regulations, declares: "It is the miracle of the Middle Kingdom and a lesson for the world."'

China's next great task is the education of her people, and the remedy for pessimism here is to compare her present condition, not with that of other nations, but with her own condition ten years ago. A reported school attendance of less than one million (780,325 to be exact) in a population of 400,000,000 does not look encouraging, but when we compare these figures with the statistics of attendance a few years ago there is unmistakable evidence of progress. In the metropolitan province of Chihli, for example, I find that there are now more teachers in government schools than there were pupils six years ago, and the total attendance has grown from 8000 to 214,637!

Even if China had not established a single additional school, however, or increased the school attendance by even a percentage fraction, her educational progress these last ten years would yet be monumental. For as different as the East is from the West, so different, in literal fact, are her educational ideals at the present time as compared with her educational ideals a decade ago. At one fell blow (by the Edict of 1905) the old exclusively classical and literary system of education was swept away, made sacred though it was by the traditions of unnumbered centuries. Unfortunately the work of putting the new policies into effect was entrusted to the slow and bungling hands of the old literati; but this was a necessary stroke of policy, for without their support the new movement would have been hopelessly balked.

The old education taught nothing of science, nothing of history or geography outside of China, nothing of mathematics in its higher branches. Its main object was to enable the scholar to write a learned essay or a faultless poem, its main use to enable him by these means to get office. Under the old system the Chinese boy learned a thousand characters before he learned their meaning; after this he took up a book {110} containing a list of all the surnames in the empire, and the "Trimetrical Classics," consisting of proverbs and historical statements with each sentence in three characters. Now he is taught in much the same way as the Western boy. The old training developed the powers of memory; the new training the powers of reasoning. The old education enabled the pupil to frame exquisite sentences; the new gives him a working knowledge of the world. The old looked inward to China and backward to her past; the new looks outward to other countries and forward to China's future. The old was meant to develop a few scholarly officials; the new, to develop many useful citizens. "Even our students who go abroad," as a Peking official said to me, "illustrate the new tendencies. Formerly they preferred to study law or politics; now they take up engineering or mining."

A consideration of Chinese education, however brief, would not be fair without mention of the crushing handicap under which her people labor and must always labor so long as the language remains as it is to-day—without an alphabet—separate and arbitrary characters to be learned for each and every word in the language. This means an absolute waste of at least five years in the pupil's school life, except in so far as memorizing the characters counts as memory-training, and five years make up the bulk of the average student's school days in any country. If it were not for this handicap and the serious difficulty of finding teachers enough for present needs, it would be impossible to set limits to the educational advance of the next twenty years.

The school and the teacher have always been held in the highest esteem in China. Her only aristocracy has been an aristocracy, not of wealth, but of scholarship; her romance has been, not that of the poor boy who became rich, but of the poor boy who found a way to get an education and became distinguished in public service. Under the old system, if the son of a hard-working family became noted for aptness in the {111} village school, if the schoolmaster marked him for a boy of unusual promise, the rest of the family, with a devotion beautiful to see, would sacrifice their own pleasure for his advancement. He would be put into long robes and allowed to give himself up wholly to learning, while parents, brothers, and sisters found inspiration for their own harder labors in the thought of the bright future that awaited him. The difficulty is that education has been regarded as the privilege of a gifted few, not as the right of all. In a land where scholarship has been held in such high favor, however, once let the school doors open to everybody and there is little doubt that China will eventually acquire the strength more essential than armies or battleships: the power which only an educated common people can give.

China's next great purpose is to develop an efficient army. "Might is right" is the English proverb that I have found more often on the tongues of the new school of Chinese than any other; and we must confess that other nations seem to have tried hard enough to make her accept the principle. In the old days there was a saying, "Better have no son than one who is a soldier." To-day its new foreign-drilled army of 150,000 to 200,000 men is the boast of the Middle Kingdom, and the army is said to be the most honestly administered department of the government. In sharp contrast to the old contempt for the soldier, I now find one of the ablest journals in the empire (the Shanghai National Review) protesting that interest in military training is now becoming too intense: "Scarce a school of any pretensions but has its military drill, extending in some instances as far as equipment with modern rifles and regular range practice, and we regret to notice that some of the mission schools have so far forgotten themselves as to pander to this militarist spirit."

It has often been said, of course, that the Chinese will not make good soldiers, but whether this has been proved is open to question. Certainly, in view of their wretchedly inferior {112} equipment, their failure to distinguish themselves in the war with Japan cannot be regarded as conclusive. Take, for example, this description by an eye-witness:

"Every tenth man [among the Chinese soldiers] had a great silk banner, but few were armed with modern weapons. Those who had rifles and modern weapons at all had them of all makes; so cartridges of twenty different sorts and sizes were huddled together without any attempt at classification, and in one open space all sorts were heaped on the ground, and the soldiers were fitting them to their arms, sometimes trying eight or ten before finding one to fit the weapon, throwing the rejected ones back into the heap."

No sort of efficiency on the part of the rank and file could have atoned for such criminal indifference to equipment on the part of the officers. It seems to be the opinion of the military authorities with whom I have talked that the Chinese army is now better manned than officered. "Wherever there has been a breach of discipline, I have found it the officers' fault," an American soldier told me.

The annexation of Korea, once China's vassal, by Japan, and that country's steadily tightening grip on Manchuria have doubtless quickened China's desire for military strength. Moreover, she wishes to grow strong enough to denounce the treaties by which opium is even now forced upon her against her will, and by which she is forced to keep her tariff duty on foreign goods averaging 5 per cent., alike on luxuries and necessities.

The fifth among China's Herculean labors is the cleansing of her Augean stables, and by this I can mean nothing else than the abolition of the system of "squeeze," or graft, on the part of her officials. In fact, no other reform can be complete until this is accomplished. The bulk of every officer's receipts comes not from his salary, which is as a rule absurdly small, but from "squeezes"—fees which every man who has dealings with him must pay. In most cases, of course, these fees have been determined in a general way by long usage, but their acceptance opens the way for innumerable abuses. High {113} offices are auctioned off. When I was in Manchuria it was currently reported that the Governor of Kirin had paid one hundred thousand taels for his office. When I was in New-chwang the Viceroy of Manchuria had just enriched himself to the extent of several thousand taels by a visit to that port. The men who had had favors from him or had favors to ask left "presents" of a rather substantial character when they called. I learn from an excellent authority that when an electric lighting contract was let for Hankow or its suburbs a short time ago the officials provided a squeeze for themselves of 10 per cent., but that the Nanking officials, in arranging for electric lights there, didn't even seem to care whether the plant worked at all or not: they were anxious only to make a contract which would net them 35 per cent, of the gross amount! Under such circumstances it is not surprising to learn that many an office involving the handling of government revenues has its price as definitely known as the price of stocks or bonds.

In private business the Chinese have a reputation for honesty which almost any other nation might envy. With their quickened spirit of patriotism they will doubtless see to it that their public business is relieved of the shameless disgrace that the "squeeze system" now attaches to it.

These are some of the big new tasks to which awakened China is addressing herself. Of course, the continued development of her railways is no less important than any other matter I have mentioned, but railway building cannot be regarded as one of China's really new tasks. For years she has been alive to the importance of uniting the people of the different provinces by means of more railways, more telegraph lines, and better postal service. The increase in number of pieces of mail handled from 20,000,000 pieces in 1902 to 306,000,000 in the last fiscal year bears eloquent testimony alike to the progress of the post office and to the growing intelligence of the people. By telegraph the people of remotest Cathay now make their wishes known to the Son of Heaven and the {114} Tzucheng Yuan; it was by telephone that this Tzucheng Yuan, or National Assembly, requested the Grand Council of the Dragon Empire to appear before it on the day of my first visit. The slow and stately camel caravans still come down from Mongolia to Peking—I have seen them wind their serpentine length through the gates of the Great Wall at Nankou as they have been doing for centuries past—but no longer do they bring the latest news from the tribes about Desert Gobi. Across 3500 miles of its barren wastes an undaunted telegraph line now "hums the songs of the glad parts of the earth."

It is no longer worth while to speculate upon the probability of a new China; the question now is as to how the new China is going to affect the United States and the rest of the world. From our Pacific Coast, China is our next-door neighbor, and vastly nearer in fact than any map has ever indicated. Even New York City is now nearer to Shanghai and Hong Kong, in point of ease of access, than she was to Chicago a century ago. How Japan's awakening has increased that country's foreign trade all the world knows—and China has eight times the population of Japan proper, and twenty-eight times the area, with almost fabulously valuable natural resources as yet untouched! Some one has said that to raise the Chinese standard of living to that of our own people would be (from the standpoint of markets) equivalent to the creation of four Americas. The importance of bringing about closer commercial relations between the United States and the Middle Kingdom can hardly be overestimated.

It is to be hoped, however, that in our desire to cultivate China's friendship we shall not go to the length of changing our policy of excluding Asiatic immigration. To the thoughtful student it must be plain that in the end such a change would lead only to disastrous reaction. At the same time we might well effect a change in our methods of enforcing that policy. There is nothing else on land or sea that the Celestial so much dreads as to "lose face," to be humiliated, and it {115} is the humiliation that attaches to the exclusion policy rather than the policy itself that is the great stumbling-block in the way of thorough cordial relations with America. You wouldn't so much object to having the servant at the door report his master not at home to visitors, but you would object to having the door slammed in your face; and John Chinaman is just about as human as the rest of us. Moreover, our own friendliness for John should lead us to adopt the more courteous of these two methods. Why should not our next exclusion law, therefore, be based upon the idea of reciprocity, and provide that there shall be admitted into America any year only so many Chinese laborers as there were American laborers admitted into China the preceding year?

Finally, it must always be remembered that the awakening of China is a matter far more profound than any statistics of exports or imports or railway lines or industrial development. The Dragon Empire cannot become (as she will) one of the mightiest Powers of the earth, her four hundred million people cannot be brought (as they will be brought) into the full current of the world's activities, without profoundly influencing all future civilization. For its own sake Christendom should seize quickly the opportunity offered by the present period of flux and change to help mold the new force that it must henceforth forever reckon with. "The remedy for the yellow peril, whatever that may be," as Mr. Roosevelt said while President, "is not the repression of life, but the cultivation and direction of life." The school, the mission, the newspaper—these are the agencies that should be used. Japan has thousands of teachers in China and scores of newspapers, but no other nation is adequately active. The present kindly feeling for America guarantees an especially cordial reception for American teachers, ministers, and writers, and those who feel the call to lands other than their own cannot find a more promising field than China.

Peking, China.



{116}

XII

A TRIP INTO RURAL CHINA

I can't get over (and I hope I never shall) my boyish interest in the great strange animals that walk along behind the steam piano in the circus parades. And the animals that I like to see most, I believe, are the elephants and the camels. The elephant has about him such quiet, titanic, unboasting strength, such ponderous and sleepy-eyed majesty, as to excite my admiration, but the camel has almost an equal place in my interest and esteem.

He is a funny-looking beast, is the camel, and he always reminds me of Henry Cates' story of the very little boy who started making a mud man in the spring branch, but before he got the second arm on, a storm came up, and when he came back his man had mysteriously disappeared. But when Johnny went to town next day and for the first time in his life saw a one-armed man, the whole mystery cleared, and rushing up, he demanded: "Why didn't you wait for me to finish you?" Somehow the camel, like Johnny's mud man, always looks to me as if he got away before he was finished. He is either a preliminary rough sketch accidentally turned loose on the world, or else he got warped somehow in the drying process—great, quiet, shaggy, awkward, serene, goose-necked, saddle-backed Old Slow and Steady!

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The destruction of China's mountain forests has made deserts of vast areas that were once fair and fruitful. The lower picture, showing Chinese pumping water by human treadmill, furnishes another illustration of the Orient's waste of labor.

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The camels that come down from Mongolia and wind their unhurried way from Chien Men Gate to the Gate of the Heavenly Peace form one of the most picturesque of the many picturesque sights in fascinating old Peking. The right-hand picture shows the author utilizing the most rapid means of transit in the mountains north of Peking.

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Let me confess, therefore, that hardly anything else on my entire tour has given me more pleasure than the sight of the camel trains about Peking and all the way to the end of the Nankou Pass in the mountains north of the ancient Chinese {119} capital. At the Pass this morning I saw three such camel trains coming down from Mongolia and the Desert of Gobi: long, slow-moving, romantic caravans that made me feel as if I had become a character in the Arabian Nights or a contemporary of Kublai-Khan. One of the trains was the longest I have yet seen—twenty-five or thirty camels, I should say, treading Indian-file with their usual unostentatious stateliness, a wooden pin through each camel's nostrils from which a cord bound him to the camel next ahead, a few strangely dressed drivers guiding the odd Oriental procession.

Nor were the camels the only strange travellers encountered by my party, a young Frenchman, the German, and myself, as we rode our little donkeys mile after mile of rocky way from Nankou village through the Pass. To begin with, we were ourselves funny-looking enough, for my donkey was so small that he could almost walk under the belly of my saddle-horse at home, and my feet almost touched the ground. The donkeys ridden by my friends were but little larger, and altogether we looked very much like three clowns riding trick mules— an effect somewhat heightened when the Frenchman's donkey dropped him twice in the mud! It was our clothing, however, our ordinary American and European trousers, coats, overcoats and hats, and the fact that we wore no queues down our backs, that made us objects of curiosity to the Mongolian and Manchurian camel-drivers, shepherds, horse-traders, and mule-pack drivers whom we met on the way, just as we were interested in the sheepskin overcoats, strange hats, etc., which we found them wearing along with the usual cotton-padded garments. These cotton-padded clothes are much like those heavily padded bed-quilts ineptly called "comforts," and as the poor Chinese in the colder sections of the empire cannot afford much fire in winter, they add one layer of cotton padding after another until it is difficult for them to waddle along.

On the whole, the life and travel we found on our donkey-ride over the rough roads of Nankou Pass were Biblical in their {120} very simplicity and primitiveness. Most of the men we meet come from away up in Mongolia, where no railroad has yet gone, and the camels and the donkeys (the donkeys in most cases larger than those we rode) bring down on their backs the Mongolian products—wool, hides, grain, etc.—and carry back coal, clothing, and the other simple supplies demanded by the rude peasantry of Mongolia. We met several pack trains of donkeys, sometimes twenty-five or forty, I suppose, each carrying a heavy load of sacks on his back, or perhaps big, well-packed baskets or goods-boxes carefully balanced. A horse over here will tote about as much as a horse at home would pull. Then there were several immense droves of sheep: in one drove two or three thousand, I estimated, and every sheep with a black face and a white body, so that the general effect was not unlike seeing a big bin of black-eyed peas. The Chinese raise immense numbers of long-eared black hogs, too, and drive them to market loose in the same way that they drive their sheep. We also met two or three droves of mountain horses, a hundred or more to the drove.

But it would have been well worth while to make the trip if we had gotten nothing else but the view of and from the Great Wall at the end of the journey. About two thousand miles of stone and brick, twenty-seven feet high, and wide enough on top for two carriages to drive abreast, this great structure, begun two thousand years ago to keep the wild barbarian Northern tribes out of China, is truly "the largest building on earth," and one of the world's greatest wonders. It would be amazing if it wound only over plains and lowlands, but where we saw it this morning it climbed one mountain height after another until the topmost point towered far above us, dizzy, stupendous, magnificent. By what means the thousands and thousands of tons of rock and brick were ever carried up the sheer steep mountainsides is a question that must excite every traveller's wonder. Certainly no one who has walked on top of the great wall, climbing among the clouds from one {121} misty eminence to another, as we did to-day, can ever forget the experience.

Perhaps it was well enough, too, that the weather was not clear. The mists that hung about the mountain-peaks below and around us; the roaring wind that shepherded the clouds, now driving them swiftly before it and leaving in clear view for a minute peak after peak and valley after valley, the next minute brushing great fog-masses over wall and landscape and concealing all from view—all this lent an element of mystery and majesty to the experience not out of keeping with our thought of the long centuries through which this strange guard has kept watch around earth's oldest empire. Dead, long dead and crumbled into dust, even when our Christian era began, were the hands that fashioned these earlier brick and laid them in the mortar, and for many generations thereafter watchmen armed with bows and arrows rode along the battlements and towers, straining their eyes for sight of whatever enemy might be bold enough to try to cross the mighty barrier.

However unwise the spirit in which the wall was built, we cannot but admire the almost matchless daring of the conception and the almost unparalleled industry of the execution. Beside it the digging of our Panama Canal with modern machinery, engines, steam power and electricity, considered simply as a feat of Herculean labor, is no longer a subject for boasting. To my mind, the very fact that the Chinese people had the courage to conceive and attempt so colossal an enterprise is proof enough of genuine greatness. No feeble folk could even have planned such an undertaking.

On this trip into the heart of China, however, I have noticed a number of things of decidedly practical value in addition to the merely curious things I have just reported. In the first place, I have been simply amazed to find that these Chinese farmers around Peking, Nankou, and Tien-tsin are far ahead of some of our farmers in the matter of horsepower help in plowing.

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Coming up from Peking to Nankou, I found farmers in almost every field busy with their fall plowing or late grain sowing, and while there were dozens and dozens of three-horsepower plows, I saw only one or two one-horsepower plows on the whole trip. This is all the more surprising in view of the fact that labor is so cheap over here—15 cents a day American money would be a good wage for farm hands—but evidently the farmers realize that although plow hands are cheap, they must have two or three horses in order to get the best results from the soil itself. One-horse plows do not put the land in good condition. With two, three, or four horses or donkeys (they use large donkeys for plowing, even if small ones for riding) they get the land in good condition in spite of the fact that they cannot get the good plows that any American farmer may buy. I rode donkey-back through some farming country yesterday and watched the work rather closely. The plows, like those in Korea, have only one handle, but are much better in workmanship. Here they are made by the village carpenter-blacksmith, and have a large steel moldboard in front, and below it a long, sharp, broad, almost horizontal point.

The Chinese farmers, it should also be observed in passing, fully realize the importance of land rolling and harrowing. It is no uncommon sight to see a man driving a three-horse harrow. It is also said that for hundreds of years the Chinese have practised a suitable rotation of crops and have known the value of leguminous plants.

Nankou Pass, China.



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XIII

FROM PEKING TO THE YANGTZE-KIANG

I shall have to go back to Peking some time. You must hurry out of the city, men tell you there, or else ere you know it the siren-like Lure of the East will grip you irresistibly; and I felt in some measure the soundness of the counsel. The knowledge that each day the long trains of awkward-moving camels are winding their unhurried way from Chien-Men Gate to the Gate of the Heavenly Peace, the yellow-tiled roofs of the Forbidden City gleaming ahead of them, while to the left are the faint gray-blue outlines of the Western Hills—all this will be to me a silent but perpetual invitation to go back.

The very life in the streets presents a panorama of never-failing interest. One can never forget the throngs of Chinese men in gowns and queues (the wives wear the trousers over here!), the nobles and officers in gorgeous silks and velvets; the fantastic head-dress of the Manchu ladies, and the hobbling movements of the Chinese women hampered by ruined feet; the ever-hurrying rickshaws with perspiring, pig-tailed coolies in the shafts; the heavy two-wheeled Peking carts like half-sized covered wagons; the face of some fashionable foreign or native woman glimpsed through the glass windows of her sedan chair, eight runners bearing on their shoulders their human burden; the long lines of shop fronts with such a pleasing variety of decorative color as to make one wonder why artists have not made them famous; the uniformed soldiers from every nation on the earth to guard the various legations, and {124} Chinese soldiers with cropped hair and foreign clothing. The strange street noises, too, will linger in one's memory ever after: the clattering hoofs of fleet Mongolian ponies, the jingling bells of the thousands of sturdy little saddle donkeys, the rattling of the big cowbells on the dusty camels, the clanging gong of a mandarin's carriage, outriders scurrying before and behind to bear testimony to his rank, and the sharp cries of peddlers of many kinds, their wares balanced in baskets borne from their shoulders.

Or perhaps there is a blaze in the street ahead of you. Some man has died and his friends are burning a life-sized, paper-covered horse in the belief that it will be changed into a real horse to serve him in the Beyond; and imitations of other things that might be useful to him are burned in the same way.

Or perhaps a marriage procession may pass. A dozen servants carry placards with emblems of the rank of the family represented by the bride or groom, numerous other servants bear presents, and the bride herself passes by concealed in a gorgeous sedan chair borne on the shoulders of six or eight coolies.

Fascinating as it is for its present-day interest, however, Peking is even richer in historic interest. And by historic in China is not meant any matter of the last half-hour, such as Columbus's discovery of America or the landing at Plymouth Rock; these things to the Chinaman are so modern as to belong rather in the category of recent daily newspaper sensations along with the Pinchot-Ballinger controversy or the Thaw trial. If he wishes something genuinely historic, he goes back three or four thousand years. For example, a friend of mine, at a little social gathering in New England some time ago, heard a young Chinese student make a talk on his country. Incidentally he was asked about a certain Chinese custom. "Yes,"' he answered, "that is our custom now, since we changed. But it has not always been so. We did the other way up to four or five centuries before Christ." Whereupon the audience, amazed at the utterly casual mention of an event two thousand {125} years old as if it were a happening of yesterday, was convulsed in merriment, which the young Chinaman was entirely unable to understand.

When Christ was born Peking (or what is now Peking, then bearing another name), having centuries before grown into eminence, had been destroyed, rebuilt, and was then entering upon its second youth. About the time of the last Caesars it fell into the hands of the Tartars, who gave place to the Mongols after 1215. It was during the reign of the Mongol Emperor, Kublai Khan, that Marco Polo visited his capital, then called Cambulac. Seventy-three years before Columbus discovered America the Emperor Yung-loh, whose tomb I saw near Nankou, built the great wall that surrounds the Tartar City to this day—forty feet high, wide enough on top for four or five carriages to drive abreast, and thirteen miles around.

Yet the history which the foreigner in Peking is likely to have most often in mind is really very recent. For it has been only ten years and a few months since the famous Boxer outbreak. The widely current idea is that this Boxer movement originated in anti-missionary sentiment, but this is not borne out by the facts. The late Col. Charles Denby, long American Minister to China, pointed out very clearly that the main cause was opposition to the land-grabbing policies of European nations. Once started, however, it took the form of opposition to everything foreign—missionaries and non-missionaries alike. I passed the old Roman Catholic Cathedral the other day in company with a friend who gave me reminiscences of the siege that sounded like echoes of the days of the martyrs; stories of Chinese Christian converts butchered like sheep by their infuriated fellow countrymen. When the Pei-tang, in another part of the city, was finally rescued by foreign troops, the surviving Christians and missionaries were dying of starvation; they had become mere wan, half-crazed skeletons, subsisting on roots and bark.

The heroism shown by many of the Chinese Christian converts {126} during this Boxer uprising has enriched the history not only of the church, but of mankind; for what man of us is not inspired to worthier things by every high deed of martyrdom which a fellowman anywhere has suffered? Into the Pei-tang the Boxers hurled arrow after arrow with letters attached offering immunity to the Chinese converts if they would abandon their Christian leaders, but not even starvation led one to desert. Colonel Denby estimated that in the whole empire 15,000 Chinese Christians were butchered and that only 2 per cent of them abandoned their faith. A missionary told me the other day of one family who took refuge in a cave, but when finally smoked out by suffocating flames, refused life at the cost of denying their Master, and went to death singing a hymn in Chinese, "Jesus Is Leading Me." At Taiyan-fu an especially touching incident occurred: Five or six young girls, just in their teens, were about to be killed, when a leader intervened, declaring: "It is a pity to slaughter mere children," and urged them to recant. Their only answer was: "Kill us quickly, since that is your purpose; we shall not change." And they paid for their faith with their lives.

I am writing this down on the Yangtze-Kiang (Kiang means river in Chinese), having boarded a steamer at Hankow, the famous Chinese industrial centre, about 600 miles south of Peking. About Hankow I found farming much more primitive than that around Peking, Nankou, and Tientsin. Instead of the three and four horse plows I found in North China, the plowmen about Hankow seem to rely chiefly on a single ox. The farms, too, are much smaller. No one here speaks of buying a "farm"; he buys a "field." In Kwang-tung there is a saying that one sixth of an acre "will support one mouth." As nearly as I can find out, the average wages paid farm laborers is about 10 cents (gold) a day. The average for all kinds of labor, a member of the Emperor's Grand Council tells me, is about 35 to 38 cents Mexican, or 15 to 18 cents gold a day.

In forming a mental picture of a rural scene anywhere in {127} China or Japan there are three or four things that must always be kept in mind. One is that there are no fences between fields; I haven't seen a wooden or wire farm-fence since I left America. A high row or ridge separates one field from another, and nothing else. In the next place, there are no isolated farm-houses. The people live in villages, from ten to fifty farmhouses grouped together, and the laborers go out from their homes to the fields each morning and return at evening. The same system, it will be remembered, prevails in Europe; and as population becomes denser and farms grow smaller in America, we shall doubtless attempt to group our farm homes also. Even now, much more—vastly more—might be done in this respect if our farmers only had the plan in mind in building new homes. Where three or four farms come near together, why should not the dwellings be grouped near a common centre? It would mean much for convenience and for a better social life. Another notable difference from our own country is the absence of wooden buildings or of two-story buildings of any kind. In this part of China the farmhouse is made of mud bricks, or mud and reeds, or else of a mixture of mud and stone, and is usually surrounded by a high wall of the same material.

Again, there are no chimneys. While my readers are basking in the joyous warmth of an open fire these wintry nights they may reflect that the Chinaman on this side of the earth enjoys no such comfort. Enough fire to cook the scanty meals is all that he can afford. To protect themselves against cold, as I have already pointed out, the poor put on many thicknesses of cotton-padded cloth. The rich wear furs and woolens. When a coolie has donned the maximum quantity of cotton padding he is about as nearly bomb-proof as an armor-plated cruiser. Certainly no ordinary beating would disturb him.

At this time of the year (the late fall) farmers are busy plowing and harrowing. On my last Sunday in Peking I went out to the Temple of Agriculture, where each spring the Emperor or Prince Regent comes and plows sixteen rows, the purpose {128} being to bear testimony to the high honorableness of agriculture and its fundamental importance to the empire. This happens, as I have said, in early spring, but it is in late fall that Chinese do most plowing. They are also busy now flailing grain on ancient threshing-floors of hard-baked earth, or grinding it in mills operated by a single donkey.

In this part of China the mound-like graves of the millions—possibly billions—of the Chinese dead are even more in evidence than in the northern provinces. Let China last a few more thousand years with its present customs and the country will be one vast cemetery, and the people will have to move away to find land to cultivate. As not one grave in a thousand is marked by a stone of any kind, it would seem as if they would not be kept up, but the explanation is that each Chinaman lives and dies hard by the bones of his ancestors. The care of their graves is one of life's most serious duties. Even when John goes to America, half his fortune, if need be, will be used to bring his body back to the ancestral burying ground.

In a land so given over to superstition I have no doubt that the most horrible disasters would also be expected as the penalty for interfering with any grave. It seems odd that a people who had a literature centuries before our Anglo-Saxon ancestors emerged from barbarism should now be the victims of superstitions almost as gross as those prevailing in Africa; but such are the facts. Chang Chih-tung, who died a few months ago, was one of the most progressive and enlightened Chinese statesmen of the last hundred years, but not even a man of his type could free himself from the great body of superstition handed down from generation to generation.

In Wuchang I crossed an amazingly steep, high hill known as "Dragon Hill," because of the Chinese belief that a dragon inhabits it. This long hill divides the city into two parts; every day hundreds and sometimes possibly thousands of people must climb up one side and down the other in getting from one part of the town to another. Therefore, when Chang {129} Chih-tung was Viceroy in Hankow he decided that he would make a cut in this hill and save the people all this trouble. And he did. Very shortly thereafter, however, he sickened of a painful abscess in his ear, and the Chinese doctors whom he consulted were quick in pointing out the trouble. By making the cut in the hill, they told him, he had offended the earth dragon which inhabits it, and unless the cut were filled up Chang might die and disaster might come upon the city. Of course, there was nothing for him to do but to restore the ancient obstruction to travel, and so it remains to this day.

In sight from Dragon Hill is another hill known as Tortoise Hill, supposed to be inhabited by a tortoise spirit or devil, and at its foot are some lakes in which it has long been said that the tortoise washes its feet. Now these lakes are on property owned by the Hanyang Steel & Iron Works and they decided a few years ago that they would either drain off the water or else fill up the lakes so as to get more land. But before they got started the Chinese civil authorities heard of it and notified the Hanyang Company that such a proceeding could not be tolerated. The tortoise would have nowhere to wash his feet, and would straightway bring down the wrath of Heaven on all the community!

It is from superstitions such as these that the schools must free the Chinese before the way can be really cleared for the introduction of Christianity. The teacher is as necessary as the preacher. And the task of getting the masses even to the point where they can read and write is supremely difficult. The language, it must be remembered, has no alphabet. Each word is made not by joining several letters together, as with us, but by making a distinct character—each character an intricate and difficult combination of lines, marks, and dots. Or perhaps the word may be formed by joining two distinct characters together. For example, to write "obedience" in Chinese you write together the characters for "leaf" and "river," the significance being that true obedience is as trusting {130} and unresisting as the fallen leaf on the river's current. My point is, however, that for each word a distinct group of marks (like mixed-up chicken tracks) must be piled together, and the task of remembering how to recognize and write the five thousand or more characters in the language would make an average American boy turn gray at the very thought. My friend Doctor Tenney, of the American Legation in Peking, asserts that at least five years of the average Chinese pupil's school life might be saved if the language were based on an alphabet like ours instead of on such arbitrary word-signs.

There is one thing that must be said in favor of the Chinese system of education, however, and that is the emphasis it has always laid on moral or ethical training. The teaching, too, seems to have been remarkably effective. Take so basic a matter as paying one's debts, for example: it is a part of the Chinaman's religion to get even with the world on every Chinese New Year, which comes in February. If he fails to "square up" at this time he "loses face," as his expressive phrase has it. He is a bad citizen and unpopular. Consequently all sorts of things may be bought cheaper just before the New Year than any other time. Every man is willing to make any reasonable sacrifice, selling his possessions at a great discount if necessary, rather than have a debt against him run over into the new period—an excellent idea for America!

I do not know whether Confucianism is responsible for this particular policy, but at any rate the fact remains that outside the Bible the world has never known a more sublime moral philosophy than that of Confucius. It means much, therefore, that every Chinese pupil must know the maxims and principles of the great sage by heart. Moreover, as Confucius did not profess to teach spiritual truth, the missionaries in China are fast coming to realize that it is both unnecessary and foolish to urge the people to abandon Confucianism. The proper policy is to tell the Chinese, "Hold on to all that is good and true in Confucius. There is very little in his teachings that is {131} in conflict with religion, and Christian leaders now recognize him as one of the greatest moral forces the world has known. But to the high moral teaching of the Chinese master you must add now the moral teachings of Christianity and, more essential still, the great body of spiritual truth which Confucianism lacks." The grand old man among Chinese missionaries, Dr. W. A. P. Martin, who has been in the work since 1850, said to me in Peking, "Some of the best Christians are now the best Confucianists."

Confucianism, as any one can see by reading the books, is no more a substitute for Christianity than Proverbs is for St. John's Gospel. As Doctor Brewster, another missionary, says, "We do not ask an American scholar to renounce Plato to become a Christian; why should we ask a Chinaman to renounce Confucius?"

Confucius lived five centuries before Christ, and at his old home in Shantung are the graves alike of his descendants and his ancestors—the oldest family burying ground in the world. "No monarch on earth can trace back his lineage by an unbroken chain through so many centuries." In Peking I was so fortunate as to form a friendship with a descendant of Confucius of the seventy-fifth generation—Mr. Kung Hsiang Koh—a promising and gifted senior in the Imperial College of Languages. At my request he inscribed a scroll for me in beautiful Chinese characters, representing one of my favorite quotations from his world-famous ancestor. I give an English translation herewith:

"Szema-New asked about the Superior Man. The Master said, 'The superior man is without anxiety or fear.'

"'Being without anxiety or fear,' said New, 'does this constitute what we should call the superior man?'

"The Master replied, 'When a man looks inward and finds no guilt there, why should he grieve? or what should he fear?'"

On board S. S. Kutwo, Yangtze River, China.



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XIV

SIDELIGHTS ON CHINESE CHARACTER AND INDUSTRY

Having mentioned some of the good points of John Chinaman (and he has many excellent points), it is also necessary to point out some of his shortcomings. The trouble with John is that he had some tiptop ancestors, but he fell into the habit of looking backward at them so continuously that he has failed, in recent centuries, to make any further progress. He had a civilization and a literature when our white ancestors were wearing skins; but there he stopped, so that we have not only caught up with him, but have passed him almost immeasurably. The result is that now China is waking up to find that a great number of ancient abuses, both in public and private life, must be sloughed off if she is to become a genuinely healthy modern nation.

Of what has been accomplished with reference to opium I have already written at length. But this is only a beginning.

With the opium evil under foot, China will still have other dragons to slay—if I may use the term dragon in an evil sense in a country whose national emblem is the dragon. For one thing, slavery still exists in China. A friend of mine in Peking told me of an acquaintance, an educated Chinaman, who bought a young girl two years ago for two hundred taels (about $120 gold), and says now he would not take one thousand two hundred (about $720 gold). Already, however, a vigorous sentiment for the complete abolition of slavery has {133} developed over the empire. About six months ago an imperial edict was issued prohibiting slave trading, decreeing that child-slaves should become free on reaching the age of twenty-five, and opening ways for older slaves to buy their freedom. The peons or slaves of the Manchu princes were, however, excepted from the terms of this edict.

Foot-binding also continues a grievous and widespread evil. Formerly every respectable Chinese father bound the feet of all his girls. Fathers who did not were either degraded men, reckless of public opinion, or so bitterly poor as to require the services of their daughters in unremitting manual labor. Consequently, a natural foot on a woman became a badge of social inferiority: a Chinaman of prominence wouldn't marry her. Now, however, many of the wealthier upper-class Chinamen in the cities are letting their girls grow up with unbound feet, and this custom will gradually spread until the middle and lower classes generally, seeing that fashion no longer decrees such a barbaric practice, will also abandon it.

The progress of the reform, however, is by no means so rapid as could be wished. A father with wealth may risk getting a husband for his daughter even though she has natural feet, but ambitious fathers among the common people fear to take such risks. An American lady whose home I visited has a servant who asked for two or three weeks' leave of absence last summer, explaining that he wished to bind the feet of his baby daughter. My friend, knowing all the cruelty of the practice, and having a heart touched by memories of the heart-rending cries with which the poor little creatures protest for weeks against their suffering, pleaded with the servant to let the child's feet alone. But to no effect. "Big feet no b'long pretty," he said, and went home unconvinced.

"The feet," according to the brief statement of ex-Minister Charles Denby, "are bandaged at an age varying from three to five years. The toes are bent back until they penetrate the sole of the foot, and are tightly bound in that position. The {134} parts fester and the toes grow into the foot." The result is that women grow up with feet the same size as when they were children, and the flesh withers away on the feet and below the knees. Throughout life the fashion-cursed girl and woman must hobble around on mere stumps. When you first see a Chinese woman with bound feet you are reminded of the old pictures of Pan, the imaginary Greek god with the body of a man and the feet of a goat. The resemblance to goat's feet is remarkably striking. As the women are unable to take proper exercise—except with great pain—there is little doubt that their physical strength has been seriously impaired by this custom, and that the stamina of the whole race as well has suffered in consequence.

Whenever a foreigner—it is the white man who is "the foreigner" over here—begins a comparison or contrast between the Chinese and the Japanese, he is sure to mention among the first two or three things the vast difference in moral standards with regard to family life. The cleanness of the family life in China, he will tell you, is one of the great moral assets of the race, while the contrary conditions largely prevailing in Japan would seem to threaten ultimate disaster to the people.

As in most Asiatic countries, however, there is in China no very definite moral sentiment against a man's marrying more than one wife. In fact, it is regarded not as a question of morals but of expense. It is one of the privileges of the Chinaman who can afford it, and the No. 1 wife is often glad for her husband to take a No. 2 and a No. 3 wife, because the secondary wives are somewhat under her authority and relieve her of much work and worry. A few months ago a Chinaman in Hankow had a very capable No. 2 wife who was about to quit him to work for some missionaries, whereupon Wife No. 1, Wife No. 3, and the much-worried husband all joined in a protest against the household's losing so capable a woman.

All these three wives were in subjection to the husband's mother, however, until the old lady took cholera last year, and {135} in a day or so was dead. The prevalence of awful scourges, such as cholera and bubonic plague, is another evil which the new China must conquer. These diseases are due mainly, of course, to unsanitary ways of living, and when you have been through a typical Chinese city you wonder that anybody escapes. The streets are so narrow that with outstretched arms you can almost reach from side to side, and the unmentionable foulness of them often smells to heaven.

Moreover, if you have the idea that the typical Chinaman is content to live only on rice, prepare to abandon it. Hogs are more common in a village of Chinamen than dogs in a village of negroes; and, in some cases, almost equally at home in the houses. I saw a Chinese woman in Kiukiang feeding a fat porker in the front room, while, in the narrow streets around, hogs and dogs were wandering together or lying contentedly asleep in the sunshine by the canal bank. In fact, the ancient Chinese character for "home" is composed of two characters—"pig" and "shelter"—a home being thus represented as a pig under a shelter!

Small wonder that cholera is frequent, smallpox a scourge, and leprosy in evidence here and there. Quite recently a couple of mission teachers of my denomination have died of smallpox: they "didn't believe in vaccination." Shanghai, as I write this, is just recovering from a bubonic plague scare. There were one or two deaths from the plague among the Chinese, whereupon the foreigners put into force such drastic quarantine regulations that the Chinese rebelled with riots. The whites then put their cannon into position, the volunteer soldiers were called out, and it looked at one time as if I should find the city in a state of bloody civil war, but fortunately the trouble seems now to have blown over.

Unfortunately the ignorant Chinese put a great deal more faith in patent medicines and patent medicine fakirs than they do in approved sanitary measures. It is interesting to find that American patent medicines discredited at home by {136} the growing intelligence of our people have now taken refuge in the Orient, and are coining the poor Chinaman's ignorance into substantial shekels. Worst of all, some of the religious papers over here are helping them to delude the unintelligent, just as too many of our church papers at home are doing.

In Shanghai I picked up a weekly publication printed in Chinese and issued by the Christian Literature Society, and asked what was the advertisement on the back. "Dr. Williams's Pink Pills for Pale People," was the answer.

One of the most peculiar things about China is the existence of almost unlimited official corruption side by side with high standards of honesty and morality in ordinary business or private life. I have already referred to the system of "squeeze" or graft by which almost every official gets the bulk of his earnings. In Shanghai it is said that the Taotai, or chief official there, paid $50,000 (gold) for an office for which the salary is only $1500 (gold) a year.

Against this concrete evidence of official corruption place this evidence of a high sense of honor in private life. A young Chinaman, employed in a position of trust in Hankow, embezzled some money. The company, knowing that his family was one of some standing, notified the father. He and his sons, brothers of the thief, went after the young fellow and killed him with an ax. The community as a whole approved the action, because in no other way could the father free his family from the disgrace and ostracism it would have incurred by having an embezzler in it.

{137}



{138}

This is the upper part of a scroll kindly written for the author by Mr. Kung Hsiang Koh (or Alfred E. Kung as he signs himself in English). Mr. Kung is a descendant of Confucius (Kung Fut-zu) of the seventy-fifth generation, and the complete quotation of which the scroll is a reproduction in Chinese characters reads as follows:

"Ssu-ma Niu asked for a definition of the princely man."

"The Master said: 'The princely man is one who knows neither grief nor fear.' 'Absence of grief and fear?' said Niu, 'Is this the mark of a princely man?' The Master said, 'If a man look into his heart and find no guilt there, why should he grieve? Or of what should he be afraid?'"

{136 continued}

The Yangtze River trip from Hankow to Shanghai, mentioned in my last letter, I found very interesting. We were three days going the 600 miles. The Yangtze is the third largest river in the world and navigable 400 miles beyond Hankow, or 1000 miles in all. It would be navigable much farther but for a series of waterfalls. Nearly thirty miles wide toward the mouth, its muddy current discolors the ocean's blue forty miles out in the Pacific, I am told. In fact, I think {139} it must have been that distance that I last saw the great turgid stream off the Shanghai harbor. Even as far up as Hankow the river becomes very rough on windy days. Consequently, when I wished to go across to Wuchang, I found that the motor boat couldn't go, so tempestuous were the waves, but a rather rickety looking little native canoe called a "sampan," with tattered sails, bobbing up and down like a cork, finally landed me safely across the three or four miles of sea-like waves. All the way from Hankow to Peking one encounters all sorts of Chinese junks and other odd river-craft. In many cases they look like the primitive Greek and Roman boats of which one sees pictures in the ancient histories. The Chinese are excellent sailors and manage their boats very skilfully. The greatest canal that the world knows was begun by them in the time of Nebuchadnezzar and finished thirteen centuries ago.

Until very recently, however, the Chinese have not wanted railways. Coming from Hankow to Shanghai I passed in sight of the site of the old Woosung-Shanghai Railway, the first one built in China; but before it got well started the people tore it up and threw it into the river.

In Shanghai I met his Excellency Wu Ting Fang, formerly Minister to the United States, and he told me of his troubles in building, under Li Hung Chang's directions, what turned out to be the first permanent railway in China. This was less than twenty-five years ago. Li Hung Chang said to Mr. Wu: "If we ask the authorities to let us build a railway, they'll refuse, so I am going to take the responsibility myself. The only way to overcome the prejudice against railways is to let the people see that a railroad isn't the evil they think it is." Accordingly, Mr. Wu set to work on the Tongshan Railway. He built first ten miles, then twenty more. Then as the road was working well, and its usefulness demonstrated, he and Li Hung Chang thought they might get permission from the Throne to construct a line from Tientsin to Peking. Successful in this effort, they went ahead with the survey and {140} imported from America the materials for building the line—and then came a new edict forbidding them to proceed! The matter had been taken up by the viceroys and governors, and 80 per cent, of them had opposed building the line!

Now, less than twenty-five years later, John Chinaman is calling for railroads in almost every non-railroad section, and the railroads already built are paying handsome dividends. Everybody seems to travel. Besides the first-class and second-class coaches, most trains carry box-cars, very much like cattle-cars and without seats of any kind, for third-class passengers. And I don't recall having seen one yet that wasn't chock full of Chinamen, happy as a similar group of Americans would be in new automobiles. A missionary along the line between Hankow and Peking says that he now makes a 200-mile trip in five hours which formerly took him nineteen days. Before the railway came he had to go by wheelbarrow, ten miles a day, his luggage on one side the wheel, and himself on the other. Thousands of these wheelbarrows, doing freight and passenger business, are in use in Shanghai and the regions roundabout. A frame about three feet wide and four feet long is built over and around the wheel, and a coolie will carry as much as half a ton on one of them.

Along the Yangtze a considerable quantity of cotton is grown, and I went out into some of the fields in the neighborhood of Shanghai. The stalks were dead, of course, and in some cases women were pulling them up for fuel, but I could see that the Chinese is a poorer variety than our American cotton, and is cultivated more poorly. Instead of planting in rows as we do, the peasants about Shanghai broadcast in "lands" eight or ten feet wide, as we sow wheat and oats. About Shanghai they do not use the heavier two and three horse plows I found about Peking; consequently the land is poorly broken to begin with, and the cultivation while the crop is growing amounts to very little. No sort of seed selection or variety breeding has ever been attempted. No wonder that {141} the stalks are small, the bolls small and few in number, and the staple also very short.

From my observation I should say that with better varieties and better cultivation China could easily double her yields without increasing her acreage. There is likely to be some increase in acreage, too, however, because farmers who have had to give up poppy culture are in search of a new money crop, and in most cases will take up cotton.

As I have said before, the coolie class wear padded clothes all winter, and as they have no fire in their houses, they naturally have to wear several suits even of the padded sort. I remember a speech Congressman Richmond P. Hobson made several years ago in which he spoke of having seen Chinamen with clothes piled on, one suit on top of another, until they looked like walking cotton bales. Some of his hearers may have thought this an exaggeration, but if so, I wish to give him the support of my own observation and that of a preacher. As a Chinaman came in the street-car in Shanghai Friday my missionary host remarked: "That fellow has on four or five suits already, and he'll put on more as the weather gets colder."

Mr. Currie, the English superintendent of the International Cotton Mills at Shanghai, told me as I went through his factory that the Chinese men and women he employs average about 12 cents a day (American money), but that from his experience in England he would say that English labor at 80 cents or a dollar a day is cheaper. "You'd have more for your money at the week's end. One white girl will look after four sides of a ring spinning frame; it takes six Chinese, as you see. Then, again, the one white girl would oil her own machine; the Chinese will not. In the third place, in England two overseers would be enough for this room, while here we must have seven."

Hong Kong.



{142}

XV

FAREWELL TO CHINA

With this letter we bid farewell to China. When I see it again it will doubtless be greatly changed. Already I have come too late to see poppy fields or opium dens; too late to see the old-time cells in which candidates for office were kept during their examination periods; too late, I am told, to find the flesh of cats or dogs for sale in the markets. If I had waited five years longer, it is likely that I should not have found the men wearing their picturesque queues and half-shaven heads; before five years, too, a parliament and a cabinet will have a voice in the government in which until now the one potent voice has been that of the Emperor, the "Son of Heaven" divinely appointed to rule over the Middle Kingdom. All over the country the people are athrill with a new life. Unless present signs fail, the century will not be old before the Dragon Empire, instead of being a country hardly consulted by the Powers about matters affecting its own interests, will itself become one of the Powers and will have to be consulted about affairs in other nations.

Be it said, to begin with, that I am just back from Canton, the most populous city in China and supposedly one of the half dozen most populous in the whole world. As no census has ever been taken, it is impossible to say how many people it really does contain. The estimates vary all the way from a million and a half to three millions. Half a million people, it is said, live on boats in the river. Some of them are born, marry, grow old, and die without ever having known a home {143} on land. And these boats, it should be remembered, are no larger than a small bedroom at home. I saw many of them yesterday afternoon, and I also saw many of the women managing them. The women boatmen—or boat-women—of Canton are famous.

Think of a city of two or three million people without a vehicle of any kind—wagon, buggy, carriage, street-car, automobile, or even a rickshaw! And yet this is what Canton appears to be. I didn't see even a wheelbarrow. The streets are too narrow for any travel except that of pedestrians, and the only men not walking are those borne on the shoulders of men who are walking. My guide (who rejoices in the name of Ah Cum John) and I went through in sedan chairs—a sort of chair with light, narrow shafts before and behind. These shafts fit over the heads and bare shoulders of three coolies, or Chinese laborers, and it is these human burden-bearers who showed us the sights of Canton.

To get an idea of what the city is like, fancy an area of about thirty square miles crowded with houses as thick as they can stand, every house jam up against its neighbors, with only walls between—no room for yards or parks or driveways—and these houses dense with people! Then punch into these square miles of houses a thousand winding alleys, no one wide enough to be called a street, and fill up these alleys also with hurrying, perspiring, pig-tailed Chinamen. There are no stores, shops or offices such as would look familiar to an American, but countless thousands of Chinese shops wide open to the streets, with practically no doors in evidence.

Such is Canton: a human hive of industry: a maze of labyrinthine alleys crowded with people, the alleys or streets too narrow to get the full light of day!

Outside this crowded city of Canton's living masses is the even larger and more crowded city of Canton's dead. From the highest point on the city wall my guide pointed out an unbroken cemetery extending for ten miles: the hills dotted {144} with mounds until they have the appearance of faces pitted by smallpox.

For the Chinaman, however unimportant in actual life, becomes a man of importance as soon as he dies, and his grave must be carefully looked after. The finest place I saw in Canton was the mortuary where the dead bodies of wealthy Chinamen are kept until burial. The handsome coffins I saw ranged in value from $1400 to $2700 Mexican, or half these amounts American money. The lacquered surfacing accounts for the high cost.

Nor are these departed Celestials kept here for a few days only. Sometimes it is a matter of several years, my guide told me, the geomancers or fortune-tellers being employed all this time in finding a suitable site for a grave. These miserable scoundrels pretend that the soul of the dead man will not rest unless he is buried in just the right spot and in just the right kind of soil. Perhaps no professional man in China earns as much as these fakirs. Sometimes it happens that after a man has been dead two or three years his family suffers a series of misfortunes. A frequent explanation in such cases is that the wrong site has been chosen for the dead man's burial place. Another geomancer is then hired and told to find a new grave where the soul will rest in peace. Of course, he charges a heavy fee.

In one $1400 coffin I saw was the body of a wealthy young Chinaman who died last spring. Three times a day a new cup of tea is placed on the table for his spirit, and on the walls of the room were scores of silk scrolls, fifteen feet long, expressing the sympathy of friends and relatives. Around the coffin, too, were almost life-size images of servants, and above it a heap of gilded paper to represent gold. When the geomancers finally find a suitable grave for the poor fellow he will be buried, and these paper servants and this paper gold will be burned, in the belief that they will be converted into real servants and real gold for his use in the spirit world.

{145}

A friend of mine in Peking who saw the funeral of the late Emperor and Empress Dowager told me some interesting stories of the truly Oriental ceremonies then celebrated. Tons of clothes and furs were burned, and vast quantities of imitation money. A gorgeous imitation boat, natural size and complete in every detail from cabins to anchors, steamer chairs, and ample decks, was fitted up at a cost of $36,000 American money, and burned. Furthermore, as my friend was coming home one evening, he was surprised to see in an unexpected place, some distance ahead, a full regiment of soldiers, gorgeous in new uniforms, and hundreds of handsome cavalry horses. Getting closer, what was his amazement to find that these natural-size soldiers and steeds were only make-believe affairs to be burned for the dead monarchs! To maintain their rank in the Beyond they must have at least one full regiment at their command!

Since we are on such gruesome subjects we might as well finish with them now by considering the punishments in China. I went out to the execution grounds in Canton, but it happened to be an off-day when nobody was due to suffer the death sentence. I did see the cross, though, on which the worst criminals are stretched and strangled before they are beheaded. The bodies of these malefactors are not allowed ordinary burial, but quick-limed, I believe. There were human bones beside the old stone wall where I walked, and when a Chinese brat lifted for a moment a sort of jute-bagging cover from a barrel the topmost skull of the heap grinned ghastly in the sunlight.

The cruelty of Chinese punishments is a blot upon her civilization. When I was in Shanghai a friend of mine told me of having been to a little town where two men had just been executed for salt-smuggling. Salt is a government monopoly in China, or at least is subject to a special revenue duty, so that salt smuggling is about equivalent to blockading whiskey in America.

{146}

Recognized forms of punishment are death by starvation and "death by the seventy-two cuts"—gradually chopping a man to pieces as if he were a piece of wood. This latter punishment is for treason. To let a bad criminal be hanged instead of beheaded is regarded as a favor, the explanation being that the man who has his head cut off is supposed to be without a head in the hereafter.

The worst feature of the whole system is the treatment of prisoners to make them confess. The Chinese theory is that no one should be punished unless he confesses with his own mouth. Consequently the most brutal, sickening tortures are practised to extort confession, and, in the end, thousands and thousands of innocent men, no doubt, rather than live longer in miseries far worse than death, have professed crimes of which they were innocent.

But let us turn now to happier topics—say to an illustration of Chinese humor. Very well; here is the sort of story that tickles a Chinaman: it is one they tell themselves:

A Chinaman had a magic jar. And when you think of a jar here don't think of one of the tiny affairs such as Americans use for preserves and jams. The jar here means a big affair about half the size of a hogshead: I bathed in one this morning. It was in such jars that Ali Baba's Forty Thieves concealed themselves. Well, this magic jar had the power of multiplying whatever was put into it. If you put in a suit of clothes, behold, you could pull out perhaps two or three dozen suits! If you put in a silver dollar, you might get out a hundred silver dollars. There doesn't seem to have been any regularity about the jar's multiplying properties. Sometimes it might multiply by two, while again it might multiply by a hundred.

At any rate, the owner of the magic receptacle was getting rich fairly fast, when a greedy judge got word of the strange affair somehow. Accordingly he made some kind of false charge against the man and made him bring the jar into court. {149} Then the judge pretended that he couldn't decide about the case, or else pretended that the man needed punishment for something, and so wrongly refused to give the citizen's property back. Instead the magistrate took the jar into his own home and himself began to get rich on its labors.

{147}

The building of the Great Wail, considered simply as a feat of Herculean labor, leaves us no room to boast over the Panama Canal.



The lower picture shows the terrible deformity produced by foot-binding.

{148}

The upper picture suggests a word about the amazing fertility of the Oriental races—the Japanese, for example, increasing from their birth-rate alone as fast as the United States from its birth-rate plus its enormous immigration.



A great need of America in the East is better consular buildings. Witness this one at Antung.

{149 continued}

Now, when this happened, the friends of the mistreated man began to murmur. Failing to do anything with the magistrate, they appealed to the magistrate's father—for though you may be fifty or seventy years old in China, if your father is living you are as much subject to his orders as if you were only ten; this is the case just as long as you both live. But when the father spoke about the complaints of the people the magistrate lied about the jar somehow, but not in a way entirely to deceive the old fellow. He decided to do some investigating, and went blundering around into a dark room in search of the jar, and before he saw what he was doing came upon it and fell into it. Whereupon he cried to his son to pull him out.

The son did come, but when he pulled out one father, behold there was another still in the jar—and then another and another and another. He pulled out one father after another till the whole room was full of fathers, and then he filled up the yard with fathers, and had six or eight standing like chickens on the stone wall before the accursed old jar would quit! And to have left one father in there would naturally have been equivalent to murder.

So this was the punishment of the unjust magistrate. He had, of course, to support all the dozens of aged fathers he pulled out of the jar (a Chinaman must support his father though he starve himself), and it is to be supposed that he used up all the wealth he had unjustly piled up, and had to work night and day as well all the rest of his life. Of course the jar, too, had to be returned to its owner, and in this way the whole community learned of the magistrate's unfairly withholding it.

This story is interesting not only for its own sake, but for {150} the light it sheds on Chinese life—the relations of father and son; the unjust oppression of the people by the officials in a land where the citizen is without the legal rights fundamental in American government; and, lastly, the "Arabian Nights" like flavor of this typically Chinese piece of fiction.

One of the funny things among the many funny things I have encountered in China is the peculiar way of buying or selling land, as reported to me by Rev. Dr. R. T. Bryan. If you buy land from a Chinaman, about Shanghai at least, without knowing the custom of the country, you may have to make him three additional payments before you get through with him. For, according to the custom, after the first payment he will give you a deed, but after a little while will come around sighing, regretting that he sold the land and complaining that you didn't pay enough. Accordingly, you will pay him a little more, and he will give you what is called a "sighing paper," certifying that the "sighing money" has been paid. A few days or weeks pass and he turns up again. You didn't pay him quite enough before. Therefore, you make another small payment and he gives you the "add-a-little-more" paper showing that the "add-a-little-more" money has been paid. Last of all, you make what is called the "pull-up-root" payment, and the land is safely yours.

Of course, the impatient foreigner hasn't time for this sort of thing, consequently he pays enough more in the beginning to cancel these various dramatic performances. Doctor Bryan's deed certifies that the "sighing money," "add-a-little-more money," and "pull-up-root money" have all been settled to start with.

"Pidgin English," or the corruptions of English words and phrases by means of which foreigners and Chinese exchange ideas, is also very amusing. "Pidgin English" means "business English," "pidgin" representing the Chinaman's attempt to say "business." Some of the Chinese phrases are very useful, such as "maskee" for our "never mind." Other good phrases {151} are "chop-chop" for "hurry up," "chin-chin" for "greeting," and "chow-chow" for "food."

"Have you had plenty chow-chow?" my good-natured Chinese elevator-boy in Shanghai used to say to me after dinner; and the bright-eyed little brats at the temples in Peking used to explain their failure to do anything forbidden by saying they should get "plenty bamboo chow-chow"! Bamboos are used for switches (as well as for ten thousand other things), and "bamboo chow-chow" means the same thing to the Chinese boy as "hickory tea" to an American boy!

A Scotch fellow-passenger was telling me the other day of the saying that "The Scotchman keeps the Sabbath day, and every other good thing he can lay his hands on." Now, the Chinaman, unlike the Scotchman, doesn't keep the Sabbath, but he does live up to all the requirements of the second clause of the proverb. Nothing goes to waste in China except human labor, of which enough is wasted every year to make a whole nation rich, simply because it is not aided by effective implements and machinery. The bottles, the tin cans, the wooden boxes, the rags, the orange peels—everything we throw away—is saved. And the coolies work from early morn till late at night and every day in the week. Their own religion does not teach them to observe the seventh day, and this requirement of Christianity, in China as well as in Japan, is regarded as a great hardship upon its converts.

Buddhism in China, as in Japan, it may also be observed just here, is now only a hideous mixture of superstition and fraud. As I found believers in the Japanese temples rubbing images of men and bulls to cure their own pains, so in the great Buddhist temple at Canton I found the fat Buddha's body rubbed slick in order to bring flesh to thin supplicants, while one of the chief treasures of the temple is a pair of "fortune sticks." If the Chinese Buddhist wishes to undertake any new task or project, he first comes to the priest and tries out its advisability with these "fortune sticks." If, when dropped to the {152} floor, they lie in such a position as to indicate good luck, he goes ahead; otherwise he is likely to abandon the project.