Drugging a Nation: The Story of China and the Opium Curse. Merwin Samuel

said to me when I arrived at the capital, “You ought to talk with the missionaries.” I did talk with them, and among many different sources of information I found them worthy of the most serious consideration.

      The phrase, “opium province,” means, in China, that an entire province (which, in extent and in political outline, may be roughly compared to one of the United States) has been ravaged and desolated by opium. It means that all classes, all ages, both sexes, are sodden with the drug; that all the richer soil, which in such densely-populated regions, is absolutely needed for the production of food, is given over to the poppy; that the manufacture of opium, of pipes, of lamps, and of the various other accessories, has become a dominating industry; that families are wrecked, that merchants lose their acumen, and labourers their energy; that after a period of wide-spread debauchery and enervation, economic, as well as moral and physical disaster, settles down over the entire region. The population of these opium provinces ranges from fifteen or twenty million to eighty million.

      “In Shansi,” I have quoted an official as saying, “everybody smokes opium.” Another cynical observer has said that “eleven out of ten Shansi men are opium-smokers.” In one village an English traveller asked some natives how many of the inhabitants smoked opium, and one replied, indicating a twelve-year-old child, “That boy doesn’t.” Still another observer, an English scientist, who was born in Shansi, who speaks the dialect as well as he speaks English, and who travels widely through the remoter regions in search of rare birds and animals, puts the proportion of smokers as low as seventy-five per cent. of the total population. I had some talks with this man at T’ai Yuan-fu, and later at Tientsin, and I found his information so precise and so interesting that I asked him one day to dictate to a stenographer some random observations on the opium problem in Shansi. These few paragraphs make up a very small part of what I have heard him and others say, but they are so grimly picturesque, and they give so accurately the sense of the mass of notes and interviews which fill my journal of the Shansi trip, that it has seemed to me I could do no better than to print them just as he talked them off on that particular day at Tientsin.