CO129-471 - Public Offices - 1921 — Page 523

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personality of the Anshun magistrate, Mr. Wang, whom I found to be a superior type of magistrate.

From Anshun I took a devious route to Nan-lung (formerly called Hsing-yi); the distance was 141 miles, and took one week. I particularly wished to visit Nan- lung, in order to meet Mr. Jamieson, a Chinese inland missionary who had recently been writing letters to the Shanghai press on the subject of opium cultivation in the Nan-lung district.

For the first 70 miles from Anshun the country is high and covered with rugged hills. I was not keeping to any recognised route, and on one or two days the going was very difficult; on occasions we were obliged to find a track by keeping up or down the dry bed of a mountain torrent. There are many aboriginal tribes Miao and Lolo in this part of Kueichow, they live by agriculture. Their villages are invariably placed a little way off the path or track, no doubt owing to their suspicion of the Chinese, and possibly of each other. A fair amount of the hill land is under cultivation.

At Chen-ning, 20 miles from Anshun, I called on Père Roux, of the Roman Catholic Mission. Père Roux has been forty-eight years in Chen-ning, and is almost the oldest inhabitant of the town. He told me that strongly-worded proclamations for the suppression of the opium-poppy crops were posted in Chen-ning and district in January of this year, and that special deputies were despatched from the capital of the province to assist the local officials in seeing that the orders in the proclama- tions were carried out. Crops were accordingly uprooted and destroyed, and the fields were ploughed up so as to remove every trace of poppy. One man was shot because his ploughing was deemed insufficient. After the destruction of the poppy crops, the magistrate offered a reward of dollar a plant to anyone who could discover a poppy plant in the district; be ordered every man, woman and child to go out and search. Schools (including the Roman Catholic Mission school) were closed in order to permit the school children to go out and assist in the search. A few stray plants were found in this way, and the owner of the land on which they were found was fined in order to provide money for the promised rewards. The magistrate had shown himself almost too energetic in his measures of suppression; in cases where a poppy plant was found in a field of other plants, such as rape or barley, he had the whole field destroyed. He had prohibited all opium smoking, and had closed the opium shops. Such opium as was sold in Chen-ning was Kuang-hsi opium, and the price was excessive 4 taels per oz.

Nearing Nan-lung the country became more rough and not so fertile; there was scarcely any cultivation on the hill slopes at all; while the red sand and earth, which is a feature of the south-west corner of China, began to appear. Crops were poor, and consisted chiefly of peas and barley. Some rape, about 4 feet high, was well advanced, but the weather was by no means hot, and I was everywhere assured that the season was a late one.

At Nan-lung, Mr. Jamieson, of the China Inland Mission, gave me the same story that I had heard on other points of my journey; a considerable amount of poppy-seed had been sown in the autumn, but in January, following the instructions from Peking, proclamations were posted ordering the total eradication of the crop. According to Mr. Jamieson, the proclamation stated that the eradication was insisted on by Great Britain, and it conveyed the impression that the British inspecting officer would himself punish any person found with opium plants in his field. I tried to obtain a copy of this proclamation, but was informed that all had been destroyed, even the magistrate's own copy! The eradication had been carried out with official energy as great as that reported to me at other places. Punishments were freely inflicted on the recalcitrant. Fines, confiscations, imprisonment (in one case a sentence of ten years), and in some districts death by shooting.

Although the streets of Nan-lung were beflagged and decorated in honour of the visit of inspection, the symbols of joy scarcely reflected popular opinion. Opium- growers had lost a considerable amount of capital by the destruction of the crop, and their indignation was greater in that the local officials had permitted them to sow in the autumn, without any suggestion of possible interference. In fact, in order to test the magisterial view, a small plot near the magistrate's yamên was tentatively sown, and, no objection being raised by the authorities, it was taken for granted that opium cultivation was to be permitted in that locality. It was owing to this, no doubt, that the magistrate decided to throw the onus of responsibility for the destruction of the crop on Great Britain, in his proclamation, Destruction of poppy-crop had been carried on from January right into March, the last fields to go

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being at Mutsu, a village some 5 miles west of the Nan-lung-Hsing-yi main road, near the Kuanghsi border. There was very little opium grown in the Nan-lung district in the 1915-16 season, and the bulk of the seed for the 1916 autumn sowing was brought from Kuaughsi province. Kuanghsi opium was being sold in Nan-lung at 3 dollars per oz.; it was all being smuggled over the provincial border.

Many opium-smokers had fed from Nan-lung a day or two before my arrival, fearing that I might detect them by their visages and inflict summary punishment.

I received proof of the unpopularity of my visit the day after my departure from Nan-lung, when a letter which had been left for me at the China Inland Mission compound was sent after me It was an abusive and threatening letter, accusing me of coming thither in order to spy out the wealth of the country, and stating that if I had really been in search of opium I should have stayed some days in Nan-lung and thoroughly searched the China Inland Mission premises and the magistrate's yamên; it ended with an impolite request to me to get out of China. I handed the letter to the Nan-lung magistrate, who was travelling with us through his jurisdiction and requested him to return at once to discover the writers of the letter and to punish them adequately. I heard later from Mr. Jamieson that the magistrate did so most-if not too adequately.

some of our escort.

Between Nan-lung (former name Hsing-vi) and Hsing-yi (former name Huang- tsao-pa)-50 miles-I had some altercation with the Chinese delegates regarding the route. They were very anxious to keep to the main road, while I wished to take a less frequented route of which I had learnt through overhearing a conversation among I had my way, but only after considerable objection and opposition, of which I soon discovered the cause. The military official at Hsing-yi was General Liu, the elder brother of the Governor of the province, and the Chinese were expectant that he would come ont to meet us. Their fear of the Governor made them anxious to do nothing at which the military brother might take umbrage, and the possibility of missing the General on the road, if my proposed route were followed, made the delegates very nervous. However, all went happily; the General, a rough and bluff person of the old Chinese school, had not come very far out of his town to meet us, and we converged to his temporary encampment without difficulty. Père Julien, of the Roman Catholic Mission at Hsing-yi, told me that in the Hsing-yi district, as I had heard in other parts of the province, opium crops had been sown, and had been stringently uprooted and destroyed in the early part of the year, in obedience to instructions from Peking through the provincial capital- instructions issued in consequence of the pending visit of inspection.

From Hsing-yi to Chiang-ti, the small village on the river forming the frontier line between the provinces of Kucichow and Yunnan, was 23 miles of very rough country, with little cultivation. We reached Chiang-ti in the evening of the 1st May, and the Kueichow portion of my journey was ended. During the evening I received a message from Mr. Jamieson at San Lung (75 miles distant) warning me that he had reliable information that certain influential opium dealers of Nan-lung had arranged for my assassination: I was to be stabbed in the back with a long dagger. I carried this cheerful information with me across the province of Yunnan, and at Hokow received a further letter of explanation that my demise had been included in the programme by the authors in order to score off certain of their enemies, whom they hoped to implicate as the real plotters against me, and thereby to obtain their severe punishment.

My

I append a map and an itinerary of my journey across Kueichow province.* caravan mileage through the province was 517 miles, but I myself covered much more ground than this. My methods of progression were three: "walking, where the road was very rough or dangerous; riding, where the road was convenient and sitting in a chair, carried by four coolies, in bad or very hot weather. On arriving at our destination for the night there was usually an hour or two of daylight left, if not more, during which I travelled on foot or on pony in the surrounding country, selecting high points from which I could cover a large expanse with my field-glass.

I did not see a single opium poppy plant in my journey through the province-of Kueichow. The letter of the opium agreement of 1911 has therefore been observed by the province.

• Not reproduced.

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