Foreign Devils in the Flowery Kingdom

by Carl Crow

  The result of all this was that the foreigner rarely carried any money and settled for everything by the very convenient method of signing a chit, a piece of paper with a notation as to the amount of the indebtedness. About the only Chinese who had to be paid for their service in cash were the ricksha pullers, and the small change one carried in his pocket was generally known as “ricksha money.” The coins were of such small value and the fare for a ricksha ride so low that one had no more hesitation about asking a friend to pay his ricksha fare for him than he would about asking for a light for his cigarette. During all the time I lived in China I seldom had as much as a dollar in my pocket, and that was true of all foreigners except the newcomers who had not yet learned the customs of the country.

  The rules of practically all clubs discouraged cash payments for anything the member might buy. As the cost of a meal or of a round of drinks was in excess of the amount of money a club servant would earn in a day’s work, it was rightly felt that the handling of cash would place too much temptation before them. Chits which could only be charged against the member’s account were of no value to the servants though they represented considerable sums of money, as the club member always realized when he got his surprisingly large bill at the end of the month. Since this business of signing chits was a daily occupation of most club habitues, one seldom wrote out his full name in a legible way as he would in signing a bank check but used initials or an abbreviation or some hieroglyphic which would be as unintelligible as a Chinese character to the uninitiated. We had a shroff who held on to his job in the American Club for years because he was the only employee who was familiar with the so-called signatures of the members. We finally got rid of him only after the introduction of a system which gave every member an identifying number - much to the disgust of the oldsters who denounced the regulation as an invasion of their liberties.

  The financial transactions of the club members who made bridge or mahjongg a daily ritual were also cared for by the club books. At the end of the game debits and credits were entered on cards, and in due course the items were debited and credited to members’ accounts. Small personal accounts between members were often settled in the same way. A substantial club revenue was secured by collecting a commission on the credit balance due to a member. This was in the nature of an income tax, and as the end of the month approached there was often an anxious search of the books by the serious gamblers to see how their accounts stood. Those who had substantial credits and so would be compelled to pay a big commission sometimes concealed their prosperity by methods familiar to the American income tax evader. These tactics were frowned upon by the club committee just as income-tax evasions are frowned upon by the Federal officials, and not a few members have been called upon to explain suspicious entries on bridge cards. The committee could always hold over the head of a suspect the threat of suspension or expulsion from the club, a punishment which on the China Coast was almost as serious as a jail sentence. The fact that one had been expelled from a club branded him for life and often marked the beginning of the end of his career.

  On the first of every month shroffs by the hundreds started on their rounds to collect the money owed by thousands of foreigners, in fact owed by every foreigner in the place except the beachcombers and those who had just arrived. Even the beach-combers might be on their lists, for when they had any money they were good patrons of the waterfront bars; and though their credit rating was well within the lower brackets, they did not have to suffer from hunger or thirst any more than any other foreign devil just because they happened to be out of cash at the moment. Only in the last extremity will a Chinese resort to the law in order to collect money due him; but a few of the cases that came to the attention of the British and American courts showed that many foreigners, who not only had no money but no visible prospects of ever getting any, were able to establish credit and run up bills of a sizable amount.

  Nearly every tea house in any large city in China derives its principal patronage from one particular class or occupation, and in one of them in Shanghai the shroffs gathered in large numbers daily. It was really a credit-rating bureau, for they brought with them all the accounts they held for collection and exchanged information as to the difficult ones. If some foreigner who had been behind in his payments for months should suddenly have a stroke of good luck, every shroff in town would know about it in twenty-four hours and they would all be at his office.

  The foreigner, however, seldom saw them. If he had a compradore, it was the duty of that functionary to pay all of these bills. Of recent years there has been a slow adoption of the American system of paying bills by personal checks, but twenty-five years ago this was practically unknown. The big foreign banks were primarily interested in foreign exchange-transactions that run from thousands of dollars upward. They would not cash checks for amounts of less than ten dollars; and the depositors who wrote many checks, even if they were above that amount, were likely to hear about it. The compradore paid in cash, and if he deducted a small discount for prompt payment he was well within his rights. A shopkeeper desperately in need of money to pay for a cargo of goods that was due to arrive might be willing to chop a generous slice off an account in return for prompt cash payment.

  While credits were carelessly given, customers were often equally careless in checking over their accounts and paying them. There is an old story - and a true one - of the saddle that Lane, Crawford & Co. sold. After the customer left with his purchase the clerk recalled that he had neglected to get his name. He thought that some of the other employees would know who he was, but all that could be definitely established in the way of identification was that the customer was a member of the Race Club. The problem of collecting for the saddle was laid before Mr. Crawford, the head of the firm, who adopted a very effective scheme. He checked through a list of members of the club, and by a process of elimination finally picked on the names of twenty-one who had accounts in his shop and might possibly have bought the saddle. He sent a bill to each of them expecting to get payment from one and indignant telephone calls from all the others. But only nine people telephoned and twelve paid for the saddle.

  The fact that a foreigner who was well known could establish credit so easily, once enabled a party of us to travel in comfort from one end of the Yangtze to the other although we were, to all practical purposes, destitute. Five of us were making a trip through the Yangtze Gorges. We had round-trip tickets to Chungking and plenty of Shanghai bank notes for the incidental expenses of a brief holiday. But the day we left Shanghai things began to happen. The most important was the failure of an American bank, followed by a run on other banks so that the notes we carried were temporarily worthless, as no one at any Yangtze port would accept them. That at the moment was of small importance, for we were going to make the round trip on the same boat with no stopovers. But it developed that the American steamship company on whose line we were traveling had also been hit by the bank crash. Its credit was shaky and there were tedious waits at various points while the captain tried to get enough fuel oil to carry us on our way. The final blow came when we reached Chungking, found that our boat been sold to a Chinese company, and that both the old company and the new one disclaimed any responsibility for our return passage. The captain had been discharged but declined to give up his ship until he had collected the back pay that was due him.

  He agreed with our contention that as we had round-trip tickets, we were entitled to remain on the boat until it returned to Shanghai or some other arrangements were made for getting us home., We were in no particular hurry to get back, and the stay on the boat was very enjoyable. We were anchored just below the point where the Kialing River empties into the Yangtze, and the great river junks with their half-naked or completely naked crew swept by us all day long with the wild chants of the oarsmen. It was a lazy, enjoyable life with the pageant of the river floating by us, and we made the best of it. But at the end of a week food supplies began to run low. The captain warne
d us that there was no more butter, and bread enough for only two or three more meals. The credit of the shipping company was nil and our bank notes were still valueless, and it looked as if we would soon be on short rations. Then we had a break, for the cook spent a night in a mahjongg game in which he won $300 which the captain promptly borrowed and invested in food.

  We never tired of the river life, and the decks of our boat provided a grandstand seat; but as the days passed, it became increasingly important for us to get back to work. This involved providing transportation for five people over a distance of 1600 miles, incidental expenses, and with no money. With the bank failure in Shanghai we didn’t know whether or not it would be possible to telegraph any money from there. The Chinese bankers in Chungking were suspicious of all Shanghai banks. But when we laid the problem before the manager of a British shipping company whom neither of us had ever met, the problem proved to be surprisingly easy.

  “Of course, of course,” he said. “You can’t stay up here all summer. Be damnably uncomfortable in a few weeks when the hot season starts.” He fixed us up with tickets, and all we did was to sign chits for them. We had to change boats at Ichang and Hankow, and at each place we not only signed chits for our tickets but also for drinks and for tips to the boys. In due course the chits found their way to our offices in Shanghai and were paid.

  Since foreigners seldom carried any money with them, the famous “Wheel” which flourished in Shanghai for years was run on an easy credit basis. A very large proportion of the foreigners who crowded the roulette tables nightly went there with empty pockets and, to give the devil his due a great many of them went home in the early morning hours with pockets bulging with bank notes. All one had to do, if he had the usual infallible system, was to sign a chit for an original stake of $100 and let fate do the work. Just how much the proprietors would advance I don’t know, for I am a timid gambler and always contented myself with having as much fun as possible out of the hundred and then going home to reflect on the futility of trying to beat the other man’s game and be sanctimoniously thankful for the fact that I had had sense enough to quit before losing any more than I had.

  One of my friends suffered from the strange but surprisingly common delusion that money could be made at the players’ side of the roulette table. We had many academic arguments about that, for a very simple mathematical equation will show anyone that in the end the wheel is bound to win. I have never gambled at roulette, horse racing, or anything else except for the amusement of the thing and have tried to get my money’s worth of fun, just as I would at a circus or a night club.

  After trying a number of systems, none of which worked, Dave told me that he was about ready to agree that I was right and was going to give the game just one more fling. The next day he told me what had happened. He had lost his first hundred dollar stake and his second and then decided to quit. But when he got home and was undressing for bed he found a five dollar chip in his pocket. This seemed to him to be a sign of good luck, and so he went back to the wheel. He put the chip on number seventeen and won. He left the limit on that number, and it won again. He played black against red and odd against even and won and then changed about and continued to win. By the time he had to leave because the establishment was closing, he had more than $5000. If he had listened to the entreaties of his friends, that would have been the not unpleasant end of the story. But Dave went back to get another five thousand, lost steadily, and when auditors arrived unexpectedly to look over the books of the company of which he was manager, he was $25,000 short. The last I heard of him he had another year to serve at McNeil’s Island.

  The fact that a foreigner sometimes left Shanghai without paying his chits never meant that they were thrown away. No matter what circumstances surrounded his departure, the owners of the chits he signed always held on to them in the belief that any foreigner who has ever lived in China will sooner or later return. The only time that there was a wholesale destruction of chits was the time that Louis Ladow, the American octoroon who ran the best restaurant in town, made the dramatic gesture of tearing up a large parcel of chits and throwing them into the Whangpoo River. The occasion was the departure of the first of the hundreds of young Britons of Shanghai for service with the colors in 1914. There was a big crowd at the jetty, the band was playing, and everyone was trying to preserve the usual British calm.

  Then Louis came in and captured the show. There wasn’t a gay blade in town, either young or old, who didn’t owe him money from time to time, and as these young fellows had been celebrating their departure rather vigorously, they had spent many evenings in his establishment. Louis was carrying in his hand a huge stack of the chits so familiar to all of us; and for a moment everyone wondered if he was going to try to collect them at this inopportune moment. Instead he shook hands with all the boys and wished them luck then walked to the rail and tore up the chits and threw them in the river. That was the appropriate way in which Shanghai entered the World War.

  VII

  The table pounders

  “He has incense in one hand and a spear in the other.”

  Several generations of diplomats who were accredited to the Manchu Court of Peking carried on their duties with only one general object in view, which was to chisel as much as possible out of this great hulk of a country. “They surround us like wolves,” cried the old Empress Dowager, with feminine disdain for diplomatic restraint. Most of the wolves appeased though they may not have completely satisfied their hunger. When they got through, various parts of China had been alienated by Great Britain, Italy, France, Germany, Austria, Russia, and Japan. Portugal had secured the little colony of Macao several centuries earlier. An ambitious American consul demanded and received a suburb of Shanghai, now known as the Honkow section, as an American concession. Congress never got around to accepting it, and it was later merged with the British concession to form the International Settlement of Shanghai. During the period the concessions were being given away everyone felt the kind of proprietary interest in China that guests at a Christmas dinner feel about the turkey that is being carved. Even the ministers of the little nations, which wouldn’t have known what to do with a concession if they had one, did not hesitate to ask for them.

  The inventory of what China gave away in the form of concessions sounds very imposing, and it represents very valuable properties according to valuations at the present time. But the Shanghai of today is not the Shanghai of a hundred years ago, nor were any of the smaller concessions of any particular value until after they came into the possession of and were developed by the foreigner. Some of the concessions given to foreign countries were so valueless that nothing could be done with them, as at Soochow and Hangchow, and they were quietly forgotten. The Chinese gave away nothing that was at the time of any particular value to them; and in the end lost nothing but prestige, peace of mind, and security. How the balance sheet will finally stand is a problem of the future. Until Japan took Formosa, the richest prize was the smaller island of Hong Kong, now a British crown colony. But at the time the Union jack was hoisted there in 1840 it was a barren rock inhabited only by a band of pirates who had a difficult time making a living in that impoverished neighborhood. The British who went there to live found reason to sympathize with the pirates who had been booted out of their homes because they also found the going difficult. It was a wretched place where the pioneers lost health and money.

  In 1844 the colonial treasurer drew up a report in which he set forth the large number of deaths and gave it as his opinion that “it was a delusion to hope that Hong Kong could ever become a commercial emporium like Singapore.” There was a strong movement to give it back to China.

  This might have been done if it could have been accomplished without too much red tape. Conditions in all of the other concessions and in the ports thrown open to foreign trade were much the same. In no place did the foreigner step into prosperity or find a spot that was either comfortable or healthy. The lives of a great m
any British soldiers were lost in their China campaigns but these were as nothing compared to the deaths of early settlers because of unhealthy surroundings.

  Shanghai itself was an unimportant fishing village in 1842, no larger than hundreds of others and of less value to the fishermen than those farther south where the sea was not muddied by the light-brown stream of the Yangtze. The areas ceded to the British, French, and Americans consisted of mud flats which were submerged at high tide. It was some time before the foreign population amounted to a hundred souls, and all of them wished they were living somewhere else. The only available water supply came from the muddy Whangpoo. All water used for drinking or cooking had to be settled with alum. It was not considered shocking to talk about having the diarrhea or the itch, and so a social convention was established which continues to this day. The death rate was very high. Several generations suffered privations before the town became even a moderately comfortable place of residence.

  Both Hong Kong and Shanghai became places of great wealth and importance but only through the efforts of the foreigners who went there to live and carry on their business. The aggressions by which China was coerced into granting these concessions were quite different from those attempted by Japan and Germany in a later generation. The foreigners did not take over any established trade and secured no monopolies. They gained little more than the privilege of moving into an unoccupied area where they could set up housekeeping after the fashion of their forefathers. They developed the trade of China in a way she could not herself do, gave employment to thousands of Chinese, and added tremendously to the wealth of the country. The great Chinese population of these foreign areas was a later development, and the Chinese moved into them of their own volition, because of the greater safety or more promising opportunities for wealth.