Sessional_Paper_1894 — Page 397

C

393

As was expected I found my Sanitary Inspectors as ignorant of their duties as were the Inspectors of Brothels. They had received no definite instructions from any one, they knew enough to summons a householder for throwing garbage into the street and that was about all. Pigs, sheep, goats and cows were kept in ordinary Chinese dwelling houses. The cows were only to be found in the base- ments, but pigs, sheep and goats were to be found on any floor, pigs and sheep were kept till they were wanted for slaughter, goals and cows for dairy purposes. The goats were led round from house to house and milked at the house doors. Cows the same way sometimes; one dairy supplying most of the houses in Caine Road was in the basements of the houses in Mosque Junction between Shelley Street and Peel Street, a small gully leading out of Shelley Street led to these basements which were no better than cellars and the only light and air that came into them were from the doors and windows in the gully. Lamps had to be used when the cows were milked or attended to. These cows had never been out of these dens since the time they were led in as young. When a cow died she was taken out piece meal. To get the cows out I had to have the walls broken down. In Aberdeen Street, from Caine Road to Bridges Street, the houses were full of goats. These formed the principal dairies for the in- habitants of the best quarter of the City. Beef and mutton principally used for food by Europeans was killed over night and whole sheep, halves and quarters of cattle hung in Chinese houses during the night in cold weather to be ready for the morning market. In one case I found a quarter of beef hanging over the bed of a man who was in the last, stage of small-pox. The markets, Central, West- ern, and Taipingshan, were filthy in the extreme. Coolies slept on the stalls at night where meat, fish and vegetables were exposed for sale during the day and their lousy bedding hung over the provisions in the day time. In the Central market the thirteen scavenging coolies employed slept in a room over the latrines, through the apertures between the boards of the floor the proceedings in the latrines could be seen, and it did not occur to any one that it was anything out of the way that eleven out of the thirteen had died within the year. The drainage in the markets was as bad as anywhere else. I sent in a full report of the state of the Chinese houses, drains, water supply, &c., in May 1874. In my Annual Report for that year I dwelt on matters relating to Chinese only omitting any comment on the food supply for the Foreign population, but my remarks on sanitation were considered too alarming and unfit for publication and were struck out.

In 1879 the existing Government published this report in full and it has since been continually referred to in the Public Press. In the winter of 1874, a commission consisting of the Surveyor General, Mr. R. G. ALFORD, a private architect in practice in the Colony, and the Colonial Surgeon were appointed to verify the truth of the Colonial Surgeon's report sent in in May. We began our labours in October, 1874, and spent every week-day afternoon from 2 P.M. till dark in these investigations till the end of April, 1875. Mr. ALFORD spoke Cantonese fluently so we were not dependent on the interpreters. At the end of March the Surveyor General was too much out of sorts to go on with the work. This was not to be wondered at, as we all nearly every day vomited our tiffins before we had been at work an hour and when he got home he could eat no dinner. Mr. ALFORD and the Colonial Surgeon continued the investigation till completed.

At the end of April the joint report was sent in more than verifying the Colonial Surgeon's report, and the beginning of May the Colonial Surgeon having spent the best hours of the day for two winters in slumming helped to prove his case by going down with typhoid fever and occupying a private ward in the Hospital. Six medical men on the 5th of June having given their opinion that he could not live through the night, the Surveyor General did him the honour of having a special grave dug for him which happily proved unnecessary. In this survey it was found that few house- drains were connected with any main-drain of any kind but ended under the pavement of the street and the drainage soaked into the sub-soil. That very few public drains existed and that most of them were old water courses composed of rough cut-granite blocks with wide interstices between them working well enough during the rainy season when fully flushed but in the dry season allowing the liquid portion of the sewage to soak into the sub-soil. Many of them it was found had been cut-off owing to the streams having been diverted and had since developed into cesspools, allowing the liquid portion of the sewage to sink into the sub-soil and becoming filled with thick black putrid matter, some of these were of gigantic proportions containing many hundred tons of putrid filth. Whole streets had been built without any preparation, the roadway filled with the rough granite blocks sticking out of the ground as nature had made it, no roadway or sidepaths made, no surface channels and no sewers laid down, the house-drains running into the sub-soil. High Street, First, Second and Third Streets each about a quarter of a mile long running between Bonham Road and Queen's Road were in this condition till five years ago when the streets were laid out and the main-drains laid down, but to this day most of the house-drains remain unconnected draining into the sub-soil, the New Building Ordinance not being retrospective except in the case of old drains being found a public nuisance, and so not ten per cent. of the existing houses are connected with the new drainage system.

The next great want was the water supply, no supply existed West of the Hospital or East of the Barracks, even then few but European houses were supplied with water and not all of them. The rest depended on coolies who brought water in buckets from the public hydrants at 5 cents a bucket. The poorer population could not afford this and had to wait until the stalwart coolies who thronged the hydrants and often fought for their turn had been supplied, often before this had been