s with this man at T'ai Yuan-fu, and later at Tientsin, and I
found his information so precise and so interesting that I asked him one
day to dictate to a stenographer some random observations on the opium
problem in Shansi. These few paragraphs make up a very small part of what
I have heard him and others say, but they are so grimly picturesque, and
they give so accurately the sense of the mass of notes and interviews
which fill my journal of the Shansi trip, that it has seemed to me I could
do no better than to print them just as he talked them off on that
particular day at Tientsin.

"The opium-growers always take the best piece of land," he said, "in their
land--the best fertilized, and with the most water upon it. They find that
it pays them a great deal better than growing wheat or anything else.
Around Chao Cheng, especially, they grow opium to a large extent just
beside the rivers, where they can get plenty of water. The seeds are sown
about the beginning of May, and they have to be transplanted. It takes
until about the middle of July before the opium ripens. Just before it is
ripe men are employed to cut the seed pods, when a white sap exudes, and
this dries upon the pod and turns brown, and in about a week after it has
been cut they come around and scrape it off. The wages are from twenty to
thirty cents (Mexican) per day. Men and women are employed in the work.
The heads of the poppy are all cut off, when they are dried and stored
away for the seed of the next year.

"It is a very fragile crop, and until it gets to be nine inches high it is
very easily broken. The full-grown poppy plant is from three to four feet
high. The Chao Cheng opium is considered the best.

"In the Chao Cheng district the people have been more or less ruined by
opium. I have heard of a family, a man and his wife, who had only one suit
of clothes between them.

"In Taiku there is a large family by the name of Meng, perhaps the
wealthiest family in the province of Shansi. For the past few years they
have been steadily going down, simply from the fact that the heads of the
family have become opium-smokers. In Taiku there is a large fair held each
year, and all the old bronzes, porcelains, furniture, etc., that this
family possesses are sold. Last year enough of their possessions were on
sale to stock ten or twelve small shops at the fair.

"Another man, a rich man in Jen Tsuen, possessed a fine summer residence
previous to 1900. This