CO885-6 — Page 142

PUBLIC RECORD OFFICE

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Reference :-

C.O. 882

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PUBLIC RECORD OFFICE, LONDON

ALLY WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE BE REPRODUCED PHOTOGRAPHIC- COPYRIGHT PHOTOGRAPH-NOT TO

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The villagers are extremely fond of theatrical performances, and several of them have permanent stages erected. The village theatrical companies are usually financed by one of the wealthier landlords. The outfit of a company costs about 6,000 dollars. A performance in a village is a great occasion for the meeting of all the friends and relations of the villagers.

Nearly every village has its school, unless the village is too small or too poor to afford it. The density of the population in Shantung and the destitution of most of the literati there has led to the saying that the number of teachers is in excess of those who can read. Every educated man is a potential schoolmaster, and although the position of village domine is one of the most honourable of callings, it is one of the most ill-paid. Most teachers are allowed an allowance of grain for food, dried sorghum The stalks for fuel, and a sum in cash varying from ten to fifteen dollars a year.

private schoolhouses are usually some unused room in an ancestral or public temple or house. The parents of the scholars provide the table and benches, ink-slab, ink cake, brush, and paper for their sons. The school begins about February; there is a vaca- tion at the wheat harvest in June, and another at the autumnal harvest in September and October, and the school is closed for ten or twenty days before the new year. The boys study about nine hours or ten hours a day, both in summer and in winter. The course of study is. the usual Chinese classical education. There are several strolling schoolmasters in the district, who travel about from village to village, and earn a precarious living by selling paper and pens and by assisting in expounding the classics. There is no district college where the higher education for the Civil Service examination is conducted. These scholars are called Tung Sheng, and are candidates for the first degree. All candidates for entry at this college must pass a preliminary examination before the District Magistrate. Before entering for the examination held by the Literary Chancellor of the Province for the first degree of Hsiu Tsai, they have also to pass a qualifying examination before the Prefect of the Prefecture of Teng Chin Fu, of which Weihaiwci forms part of one of the districts. In the district in There are seven which Weihaiwei is situated there are about ten Tung Sheng. vacancies for the examination for the first degree allotted to the districts of Wen Ting and Yung Cheng. It is calculated that there are about twenty graduates of the first degree and ten graduates of the second degree in the districts of Wen Ting and Yung Cheng.

In nearly all the villages are religious temples. They are usually built by public subscription, calculated on the amount of land owned. The commonest temples are those to the local God, or Tu Ti, the God of War and Goddess of Mercy. The temples are managed by a board of trustees, and are usually endowed with Sufficient land to support priests. Some of the village temples are almost bricked up, to prevent beggars and thieves making use of the building as a resting place. Some temples are used for storing coffins ready for use. Temples to the God of Litera- ture are usually built by subscriptions, ordered to be collected by the District Magis- trates. The cost of enclosing all their temples and of continually repairing them is a very heavy burden on the narrow means of the poorer villagers. There are a few Muhammedans in the district, but they do not subscribe to any temples.

All the villagers depend for their lives on their crops. They have nothing to fall back upon if these fail, and if the crops are left unprotected for any time one-half of them will be stolen. There are no hedges or walls surrounding Chinese fields; every- thing is open, and anyone can go anywhere and steal. It is therefore necessary for the villagers to protect their orchards and grain crops night and day. The sorghum grows ten or fifteen feet high, and thieves can hide in the fields and steal with impunity if the villagers do not watch. The village crops are chiefly mullet, sorghum, beans, Indian corn, peanuts, melons, sweet potatoes, hemp, and cot.on, and the orchards produce apricots, plums, pears, cherries, and grapes, but there is very little fruit within the British area. Most of the Chinese village land lies in different places. Few landowners have their land all lying in one plot.

The importance of protecting their crops has led the villagers to form associations amongst themselves to watch and protect the fields. Usually several villages unite to do this, and levy a tax, graded according to the amount of land held, for the purpose of engaging villagers to watch the fields. When a thief is arrested, he is taken before the If the fines village elders, who have formed the crop protecting league, and is fined. imposed are not paid, the culprit is accused at the District Magistracy. Some of the villagers have no association to watch the crops, but turn out at night time en masse, and take light mat beds with them and sleep in the fields in rough lodges made of

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sorghum stalks, watching the crops in turn through the night. The Chinese in the villages are all very poor, much poorer than the Chinese in the south, and there are thousands of villagers who have no land, and live from hand to mouth, and one of the great resources of this class of destitute labourers is the opportunity of stealing. Över-population is the great sorrow of China, and nowhere is this to be better realized than in the Chinese villages. The tenets and laws of Chinese society and religion compel Chinese to raise up a posterity to worship the family ancestors, who are believed to be dependent, when dead, for their happiness upon the living descendant. Nothing but a redistribution of the surplus population or systematic emigration will cure the interminable poverty of the Chinese villages. The southern villages in China are far better off than those in Weihaiwei, and the poorest of them would be considered wealthy by comparison. In the Weihaiwei village districts and in the small towns one very rarely hears of any Chinese having more than one wife. The fact is that nobody can afford to keep more than one. In the southern and more well-to-do provinces most Chinese, even farmers and petty shopkeepers, have at least one concubine. In the Weihaiwei district, if the wife is childless, the husband usually adopts a child as his own son, as being less expensive than taking a second wife. The northern villagers are so poor as to scarcely be able to indulge in vices such as gambling or opium smoking. The children are as hard worked as the grown-up people. They spend their days in collecting fuel in the fields for fires and in picking up manure for the fields. The women have practically no leisure. They are married young solely to get an extra "hand" in the house, and are aged and wrinkled soon after they are thirty. The Chinese women and girls are worked much harder in the north of China than in most other provinces. The Hak-ka women are the only people in the south who do so much work. The little girls are sent out in the fields to collect fuel. The elder ones have to look after the house and children, and do all the sewing of the family. The care of the silkworms, of the picking, spinning, and weaving of cotton, the gathering of the wheat harvest, is all largely in their hands, and until a girl is betrothed she works about out of doors, and helps in guarding the orchards and vegetables like a boy.

In time nothing would do more good to the over-stocked villages than to arrange for a system of State-directed emigration of the surplus population to the Federated Malay States, Borneo, and other British possessions in the Tropics, where labour is so dear and hard to obtain, and Chinese family life is almost unknown. The life of a northern villager must be one of great monotony and vacuity. Even the intellectual life of the educated runs in one groove only, and nobody takes any interest in any- thing outside the village. The social morality of the Chinese villagers is high, and fully equal to that in western lands. Infanticide of female children is not un- common, and is due to destitution.

The village folk make much use of loan associations as a means of raising capital. It takes the form of the contribution of a certain sum by each member of the associa- tion in rotation to some other member of the union.

According to the Chinese system, land and houses should be held as family property in common for all time. As a matter of fact, much more than one-half of the family property in the villages here has been divided between the different members of the family. This is another example of the stress and struggle for existence in this district. In other Provinces better off the Chinese keep the family property undivided as long as possible.

The cost of labour in the villages is very little. An adult field labourer will get about ten dollars a year and his food under ordinary circumstances. In hard times, however, labour can be obtained for nominal pay and food. A farmer's boy is engaged for about four dollars a year, with food.

In all the villages there are the remains of an organised system of trained bands or kinds of militia. These bands were formerly kept up and armed by the Provincial Government as a means of raising troops for suppressing disturbances, but as the district officials have appropriated all the funds for expenditure on this force, it no longer exists as a working organization.

Enclosure G.

Chinese families are grouped into chia and then into pao, ten chia making one pao or one li. This corresponds to the old Anglo-Saxon tithings and hundreds. Similarly the terms used, pao chang and chia chang, correspond to the Anglo-Saxon elders of