Foreign Devils in the Flowery Kingdom

by Carl Crow

  In 1911 there was a small jail in Shanghai where local Americans served short terms on conviction of misdemeanors and big shots were held while waiting for an army transport to convey them to prisons at McNeil’s Island or Bilibid. Frequently the jail would be empty for weeks at a time and on occasions when there were many American ships in town every cell would be full. The only regular patrons comprised a small number of local beach-combers, each of whom would get drunk and disorderly as often as he had enough money to finance such an enterprise. This was usually raised by hard-luck stories told to newcomers, so that our local waves of petty crime almost inevitably followed the arrival of some boat and was financed by the injudicious charity of tourists.

  The sailors who got drunk and disorderly were usually rounded up and sent to jail in gangs, but frequently the local boys had to endure the unusual hardship of solitary confinement because there would be no one else in the jail. According to a local tradition these brethren of the water’ front finally arrived at an understanding that no one of them would be suffered to stay in jail alone, for one or more of his pals would commit some minor offense that would enable him to crash the bars. Whether or not that is true I do not know, but I do know that the jail was usually entirely empty or was housing three or four of the local alumni.

  On one occasion there were five or six of them, all of whom had especially long sentences to serve. It was springtime; the leaves were coming out and the flowers were blooming in The Bund Garden. The jailor had enjoyed a professional acquaintanceship with all of his charges for many years and was sorry to see them cooped up in a stuffy jail during the beautiful spring season. He finally arranged a daily parole. On their promise to keep out of trouble and out of the sight of policemen, the prisoners were released every morning and only came home for meals and to be locked up for the night. It was a very satisfactory arrangement and continued for a long time until it came to an end through the carelessness of the jailor. The prisoners came home at the usual time in the late afternoon only to find the doors locked against them. The jailor had gone to a cocktail party and had taken the keys with him and had stayed for dinner. The prisoners, denied the food and lodging that was due them, spent the night as guests of the Astor House which was just across the street and had the bill sent to the jailor. Some one printed the story of the prisoners who were hotel guests, and that was the end of that great penal reform.

  No matter how penniless he might be, the beachcomber always had his extraterritorial rights which were just as valuable to him as to the taipan who owned his own house and rode to the office in a motorcar. The mere fact that the white man could not be arrested and thrown into jail by the Chinese authorities gave him a certain value as an employee irrespective of whether or not he could actually do anything useful. If crews of Chinese were sent up country for any construction work it was the universal practice to send some foreigner with them. His title was that of superintendent but frequently all he did was to keep a careless eye on the Chinese crew while his presence overawed the local Chinese police and kept them from interfering or trying to collect local taxes, which may or may not have been due, or to enforce inconvenient building regulations. The Chinese did all the work.

  I once employed a number of beachcombers for work of this sort and greatly enjoyed my experience with them. One of the applicants I interviewed appeared to me to be just the sort of man I wanted, but he was so ragged and it was so obvious that he had not seen a bathtub or a barbershop for months, that I impulsively advanced him ten dollars with which to get cleaned up before he reported for work the following morning. When I thought about it that evening I concluded that I had thrown the ten dollars away. It seems to be human nature to be skeptical of one’s generous impulses. But the following morning he showed up and he had accomplished miracles on a very small amount of money. He had bought some clean secondhand clothing; a tailor had patched his coat and he had been shaved and shorn by a Chinese barber. He had even bought a second-hand suitcase with labels showing that a former owner had stopped at some of the best hotels in Europe.

  I felt sure that if this unfortunate could resist the temptation to have a riotous night on the Shanghai water front on the ten dollars I had given him, there would be no temptations he would meet up country that would be likely to influence him. I was not so sure about a few others I had already employed, so it occurred to me that it would be a good idea to give this acid test to the half dozen I had still to engage. The test worked surprisingly well. I interviewed fifteen men who qualified in other ways and gave each of them a ten-dollar bill with instructions to get cleaned up and report for work the following morning. The average was pretty good for six of them showed up clean and clear-eyed and I never had any trouble with them. And a few of the nine who fell by the wayside had alibis that were almost worth the ten dollars they had cost me.

  Chinese beggars have always provided a serious problem in areas where foreigners live and probably always will. The wealth of the settlement of Shanghai plus the fabulous stories about foreign devils who have been known to give away silver coins attract beggars for many miles around. Throwing them into jail would only add to the attractiveness of the place for it would give a large number of the unfortunates better food and more comfortable lodgings than they could otherwise procure. The system of mitigating the evil has been relatively unchanged for more than eighty years. As early as 1856 when beggars congregated in such numbers as to constitute a more than usually trouble-some nuisance they were rounded up, put in ferryboats and dumped across the Whangpoo River in the neighboring village of Pootung. Of course they came back but their return was always delayed until they could save enough money to pay the ferry fare and withstand the temptations to spend the money for food. With the coming of the motorcar and the opening of roads into the interior this procedure was greatly improved. During idle hours the prison vans are engaged in taking hordes of beggars on long excursions into the country, dropping them off a few at a time so that no village is menaced by a large number of them. At Chinese New Year, which is the one annual holiday of the country, the police are more lenient and thousands of beggars descend on Shanghai. That is one period when every rice pot is full and the beggars feast gloriously on the scraps. The holiday ended, the police vans are busy again.

  For a long time stray dogs were disposed of in the same way. The council took very seriously, perhaps too seriously, the protests of Chinese Buddhists against the taking of animal life. Stray dogs suffering from every conceivable canine disease have always roamed the streets. But according to strict Buddhist tenets an animal, no matter how badly crippled, how thoroughly diseased, may not be killed because in the course of numberless transmigrations of the soul, it might not only win a prize in a dog show but still later become a compradore or a taipan councilor. The Buddhist society which asked the council not to kill the dogs offered to provide a refuge to which the strays could be sent. The council accepted this proposal, cannily providing that the ears of the dogs be pierced so that those coming back to the settlement could be traced. The arrangement did not last long. An official visit to the refuge showed that dogs were increasing in number not only by the additions sent from the settlement but by natural processes that were even more rapid. The scheme collapsed through sheer weight of numbers.

  The council then started shipping dogs into the interior hoping that some natural calamity would befall them before their homing instinct brought them back. About the time this policy was adopted a new policeman who had recently arrived from England tried a method of his own. He had been assigned the unpleasant duty of rounding up the stray dogs with instructions to clear his district of them before he could expect to be given more dignified work. Acting on his own initiative he went out at night and placed poisoned meat in places where he thought it would do the most good. The ruse was satisfactory in a way for there were a lot of dead dogs, but there was also a number of dead beggars whose casualties were difficult to explain.

  After spending a
lot of time and money in an attempt to gratify Buddhist susceptibilities the police gave up and resorted to the sensible plan of killing stray dogs unless someone claimed them. It was at first done somewhat clandestinely and then openly and even the Buddhists finally accepted it as a part of the established order - just one of those things that couldn’t be helped.

  In going over some old reports I found that as far back as 1892 the police had defied the Buddhists only to fall afoul of the Christians for there were bitter complaints about the inhumane methods by which the dogs were sent on the next lap of their never-ending transmigrations. More than forty years later I took an active part for several years in the work of the Shanghai Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. The question of whether or not it was humane to end the earthly existence of lobsters by tossing them into boiling water was ardently pressed by one of our members. But another lady incessantly brought up complaints about the operation of the new lethal chamber which the police of the International Settlement had installed and also about the shooting of dogs as carried out by the French police. When I left Shanghai the controversy over the most humane methods of ending a dog’s earthly existence was still unsettled.

  XI

  American saints and Chinese sinners

  “Every sect has its truth and every truth its sect.”

  American foreign trade has never kept pace with the missionary who is to be found throughout the Orient in hundreds of towns and villages where no American salesman has ever been seen. Only the explorer has been more venturesome in searching out strange places in the world, and in a way the missionary is the more heroic of the two. After a brief visit to strange and perhaps dangerous countries the explorer comes back to enjoy comfortable living, goes on the lecture platform and gets his picture in the rotogravure sections of the Sunday papers. The missionary makes his home in strange places where the discomforts are not mitigated by the novelty of the life he leads. He is more heroic than the explorer, more aggressive and enterprising than the salesman. In the field of printed publicity the business men are timid amateurs. American manufactured articles are advertised in foreign countries in less than forty different languages but one American missionary society alone issues publications in more than 150 languages and its pastors and evangelists preach in 500.

  From the beginning of the country’s history up to the present time a thousand Americans have been interested in foreign countries as a field for mission work for every one who looked on it as providing opportunities for trade. In many places, and particularly in China, this has greatly complicated the work of our diplomats, imposing on them the duty of protecting two diverse and often conflicting interests. Every trade treaty made with China is also a religious treaty, for it is designed to protect the rights of the isolated missionary just as securely as those of the big oil companies. In a way the missionaries have greater rights than the traders for mission stations may own property and missionaries may live in any part of the country. For the trader these rights are confined to the treaty ports. The division of interest between trade and evangelism has given to America a broader and more greatly diversified interest in the affairs of China than would have been possible if that interest were confined to trade. Exporters who sell goods to China are mostly located in and around New York, but there are few churches in any part of the country that do not regularly contribute to the support of missions in China and feel that they have a spiritual investment in that country.

  While Great Britain has always had a larger investment in mills and factories and utilities, the American investment in medical missions, schools and hospitals is larger than that of all other nations combined. Long before Americans ever dreamed of playing more than a minor part in the trade of China, they had taken the lead in Protestant mission work and have never relinquished it. Robert Morrison, the first Protestant missionary in China was a Scot but Americans are justified in claiming a large part of the credit for the great work that he did. It was only with their aid that he was able to get to China. Owing to the opposition of the honorable East India Company which at that time controlled all British trade and shipping in China he could not secure passage on a British ship and so came to China under the American flag and with the support of American missionary societies.

  Officials in Canton soon found Morrison’s presence useful for he was the only foreigner who could read and speak Chinese and he was in universal demand as an interpreter and translator. It was not until many years later that British and American officials took the time to study Chinese and in the meantime official negotiations had to be carried on through the aid of Chinese-speaking missionaries. All of the early treaties between America and China and most of the treaties made by Great Britain were negotiated through them and they took full advantage of the opportunity to see that their rights were protected as effectively as the rights of the traders. Even if the protection of the rights of missionaries had not been a part of the policy of the American government it is difficult to see how their interests could have been ignored. A sit-down strike by the missionary interpreters could have halted diplomatic negotiations and put a stop to treaty making at any time. Almost all of the early American diplomats in China had missionary secretaries and two of them, Dr. Peter Parker and Dr. S. Wells Williams, were for many years pinch hitters for the American diplomatic service, serving in the place of the minister during the many periods when one had gone home and his successor had not yet taken office.

  Morrison was soon followed by a number of Americans, some of whom became famous merely because they were pioneers in a strange and very interesting field and others because of the work they did, not in evangelism but in education and medicine. The work of the early missionaries attracted a great deal of attention at home and soon many young Americans felt that they had a “call to mission fields.” Many had nothing to recommend them but a religious devotion and the call which they attributed to a divine source may have been somewhat complicated by a desire to go to strange places and see strange sights. A disproportionately large number of them came from the rural districts. They set themselves up as missionaries and were supported by the contributions of individual churches or small groups at home. Though the record as a whole was an honorable one, there were some blots. Baffled by the strange surroundings, the indifference and distrust of the Chinese, many of these missionaries accomplished nothing but to make work more difficult for their associates. The missionaries had counted themselves successful in Polynesia when they put the beautiful naked women into hideous Mother Hubbards and taught the natives to sing melancholy hymns, and boast about their past sins. The Polynesian was a simple soul who was easily influenced. The Chinese was stubborn and sophisticated. The methods which had been so highly successful in Polynesia did not succeed in China. The baffled missionary too often turned bitter and his tortured soul led to his becoming the most narrow-minded of bigots.

  In the very nature of things this type of missionary and the business man who were thrown together in China did not like each other. To the missionary the business man was a gin-guzzling inebriate whose every act was a denial of the Christian virtues. To the business man the missionary was a pious hypocrite who was too lazy to labor for a living. The fruit of his work was found in the mission-school convert who aped his pious master’s ways and had the audacity to think that his morals were superior to those of a white man’s. This pretension was exasperating for many reasons - more exasperating when justified than when false.

  The general contempt of the business man for missionaries was reflected in the practice of the British shipping companies regarding passenger lists. The names of business men were listed and published in the papers but the missionary passengers were treated like a cargo of livestock and at the bottom of the passenger list a note was made of their number. It is only in comparatively recent years that this has been changed - but missionaries who travel on the Chinese river and coast boats are generally given the cold shoulder by the ship’s officers a
nd their fellow passengers. Many of them asked for isolation which prevented their coming into contact with their worldly fellow passengers. Time did not mellow them and they grew more intolerant with age.

  Broad-minded supporters of the missions, after a number of sad experiences, finally came to the conclusion that youthful enthusiasts might be mistaken as to the interpretation of the call they had received and, before giving them support, began interpreting the call in the light of more mature experience. As religious enthusiasm was taken for granted it was no longer weighed and measured, but a great deal of attention was paid to health, education and characteristics which would make the would-be missionary a useful citizen in a strange land, or at any rate guard against his becoming a liability. He was, in fact, given the same appraisal he would later receive when he went to China and faced the critical eyes of the people with whom he would have to live.

  As a result of this policy missionaries sent out by the big mission boards such as the Baptist, Methodist and Presbyterian to mention only three of many - had to pass the most rigorous examination. The plain Bible thumpers and psalm singers were allowed to remain at home. It is, in fact, almost as difficult for a young theological graduate to secure an appointment from one of these boards as for a university graduate to obtain employment by the Standard Oil Company. The result is that the American missionaries in China sent out by the large mission boards represent a very high type - far superior in character, education and intelligence to the average pastor. There are a number of wealthy Americans who are missionaries in China - men who inherited wealth and chose mission work as a career just as other sons of wealthy men have chosen to be anthropologists or archaeologists, big game hunters or explorers. Many others who have no private incomes and exist on the small missionary salaries might instead be on the liberal pay roll of big business. Several American missionary doctors have international reputations and could gain fortunes by setting up a practice in any large city, but remain in China on salaries an American hospital intern would scorn.