CO129-522-4 China inland water- river and coastal trade- smuggling by British ships 12-12-1929 - 24-3-1930 — Page 38

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The rate of transit duty on opium seems to vary

with a change of military units in the port and, also

with the exigences of the trade. Quite recently it was

as high as $900; but, since, this has been reduced to

$750 per picul and, at the time of writing, there is talk

of another yet more severe reduction. ere tael ounces

or catties of opium are not quoted in Ichang. Such high

rates, together with the talent for smuggling seemingly

inherent in most Chinese, lead to all sorts of ingenious

schemes to avoid the payment of duty altogether. But the

Bureau's information from Szechuen and up-river points is,

seem to apparently, very comprehensive and little would slip past.

them. On the transhipment side of the account, cases do

seem to occur where the Bureau loses out. In one vessel,

where the boatswain had been left in hospital down river, a

member of the crew, representing himself to be the new

boatswain, secured $2,000 worth of opium for carriage down

river. When the vessel returned to Ichang, the would-be

smuggler had disappeared and, after much discussion and many

musterings of the crew in an attempt to discover if the

culprit were still aboard, the $2,000 had to be written off,

apparently, as a bad debt. This C.O.D. type of doing

business seems to be a g eneral one with Opium Bureaux on

the river. A somewhat similar case came to the writer's

notice only this month

August. A civilian official

and an unarmed soldier, supported by an armed officer and four armed privates at the foot of the gangway, attempted to

arrest the steward aboard a British vessel in Hankow.

Enquiry revealed that these gentlemen were from the Hankow

Opium Bureau and the trouble was that, on the vessel's last

visit to Hankow, the ship's cook had been entrusted with

some opium for delivery down river. The cook had been

dismissed the ship in Shanghai and had quite neglected to