d the Hongkong Bank--over the little
bridge that leads to Frenchtown--past a half mile of warehouses and
chanting coolies and big yellow Hankow steamers--until we turn out on the
French Bund? It is a raw, cloudy, March morning; the vendors of queer
edibles who line the curbing find it warmer to keep their hands inside
their quilted sleeves.

[Illustration: AN OPIUM RECEIVING SHIP OR "GODOWN" AT SHANGHAI The
Imported Indian Opium is Stored in These Ships Until it Passes the Chinese
Imperial Customs]

[Illustration: THE OPIUM HULKS OF SHANGHAI "They Symbolize China's
Degredation"]

It is a lively day on the river. Admiral Brownson's fleet of white
cruisers lie at anchor in midstream. A lead-gray British cruiser swings
below them, an anachronistic Chinese gunboat lower still. Big black
merchantmen fill in the view--a P. and O. ship is taking on coal--a
two-hundred-ton junk with red sails moves by. Nearer at hand, from the
stone quay outward, the river front is crowded close with sampans and
junks, rows on rows of them, each with its round little house of yellow
matting, each with its swarm of brown children, each with its own pungent
contribution to the all-pervasive odour. Gaze out through the forests of
masts, if you please, and you will see two old hulks, roofed with what
looks suspiciously like shingles, at anchor beyond. They might be ancient
men-of-war, pensioned off to honourable decay. You can see the square
outline of what once were portholes, boarded up now. The carved, wooden
figure-heads at the prow of each are chipped and blackened with age and
weather. What are they and why do they lie here in mid-channel, where
commerce surges about them?

These are the opium hulks of Shanghai. In them is stored the opium which
the government of British India has grown and manufactured for consumption
in China. They symbolize China's degradation.

III

A GLIMPSE INTO AN OPIUM PROVINCE

The opium provinces of China--that is, the provinces which have been most
nearly completely ruined by opium--lie well back in the interior. They
cover, roughly, an area 1,200 miles long by half as wide, say about
one-third the area of the United States; and they support, after a
fashion, a population of about 160,000,000. There had been plenty of
evidence obtainable at Shanghai, Hankow, Peking, and Tientsin, of the
terrible ravages of opium in these regions, but it seemed advisable to
make a journey into one of these unfor