This happened some twenty years ago.  The unfortunate victims had for their food a rice porridge, mixed with which was a subtance alleged to have been lime, the common belief being that the majority of those who perished died from the effect of poisoning.  Outside the city boundary hundreds of the dead were flung into huge pits, and even now the inhabitants refer to the time when children were exchanged ad libitum for a handful of rice or even less.

During my stay in this city, I heard on all hands some of the most blood-curdling stories of the dire distress which, like a dark cloud, still menaces the people, some of which are too dreadful for public print.

But I suppose these poor people are content.  If they are, they possess a virtue which produces, in some measure at all events, all those effects which the alchemist usually ascribes to what he calls the philosopher’s stone; and if their content does not bring riches, it banishes the desire for them.  Years ago the people could entertain some small hope of prosperity now and again.  If the opium crop were good, money was plentiful.  But now no opium is grown, and the misery-stricken people have lost all hope of better times, and seem to have sunk in many instances to the lowest pangs of distressful poverty.[K]

Reader, alarm not yourself!  I am not here to lead you into a long harangue on opium—­it presents too thorny a subject for me to handle.  I am not a partisan in the opium traffic; my mission is not essentially to denounce it; I am not impelled by an irresistible desire to investigate facts and put them before you.  There is practically no opium in Yuen-nan to talk about.

This is absolute fact—­not a Chinese fact, but good old British truth (although British truth when it touches upon opium has been very, very perverted since we first commenced to transact opium trade with this great country).  With the exception of one small patch, some ten miles away from the main road between Yuen-nan-fu and Tali-fu, I saw no poppy whatever in the province.  This does not mean, however, that no opium is to be had.

During the past three weeks[L] no less than five cases of attempted suicide by opium poisoning have come under my personal notice in the town in which I am residing, and there have doubtless been fifty more which have not.  If there is no opium, where do the people so easily secure it in endeavors to take their lives upon the slightest provocation?  Last year the price of opium here on the streets, although its sale was “illegal,” was over three tsien (about nine-pence) the Chinese ounce of prepared opium.  At the present time, in the same city, many men would be willing to do a deal for any quantity you like for less than two tsien.  Cases of smuggling are frequent.  One gets accustomed to hear of large quantities being smuggled through in most cunning ways, and it all goes to show that the people of Yuen-nan are not, as some of China’s enlightened statesmen and some of the ranting faddists of England and America would have us believe, falling over one another in their zeal to free the province from the drug.