FAN TAN AND OPIUM IN WALES.

Oamaru Mail, Volume XXXIX, Issue 10760, 6 May 1911, Page 2

FAN TAN AND OPIUM IN WALES.

(By Basil Clarke.)

I noticed about the Chinese of Cardiff a greater cheeriness than was to be found among the Chinese of Liverpool—a kind of boyish miscliievousness of eye and bearing which was infinitely more likeable than the saturnine dourness of the Liverpool Chinee; This ' may be due in part to the more wholesome nature of their calling; for though Cardiff has always many Chinese, the great majority of them are sailors ashore for a period, lone or short, as compared with Liverpool's really settled population of laundrymeh and shopkeepers. It may be due also to the absence,of apprehension which their more wholesome relations with the surrounding popula-. tion earns for them. In fact, few English people come into touch with them. Bute-road and "Tiger Bay" generally, the district in which live all Cardiff's Chinese except fifty laundrymen scattered about the city and suburbs, is ahome for sailors of all the world but England. All nations are there. Eastern and Western. The negroes have one quarter, the Arabs another, there is a. German lodging-house here, a. Russian or Scandinavian there, and so on; and' the Chinese, though in a majority, are but part of a large community, all of which is away from home. A band of universal toleration binds the many mixed units of Tiger Bay into one community—an almost happy band of harum-scarums who add a keen zest to life ashore by getting, as sailors will, into the maximum of mischief in a minimum of time.

The Chinese of Tiger Bay have so far set a merry pace in this matter. But their graver vices have not taken so serious a form as those of the Liverpool Chinese. They supply their quota to the colossal sum total of wickedness that exists in Tiger Bay, but no more than their quota ; there is not much ■sign yet of the English youth of the city coming under their influence. And. in the minor sins, among which as Chinese offences go may be ranked gambling and opium smoking; they have displayed so cool an audacity as to make them almost the heroes of that mischiefloving community that has Tiger Bay for a biding place. There -was certainly a likeable waggishness about the Liverpool Chinama,n who, having had a window broken in one of those silly "religion" riots there, displayed' over his launcH-y. a ■ not ice, "Me no religion. Me washee clothes." But a more daring Chinese humorist thrived till not long ago in Cardiff by reason of the notice that he hung outside his shop every morning at twelve sharp. The police marvelled at the popularity of his wares, so great was the daily flocking into his house, till they discovered that the notice simply meant "Gambling now on." A raid, a large haul of money from the fan-tan table upstairs, and Wing Sang—for that was this archhumorist's name—paid a large fine and left to take up residence —in London, it is said.

But Wing Sang has his successors in Cardiff, though they advertise less daringly. I entered one Chinese tipper room to find some fifteen Chinamen all standing round a table on which there was just nothing at all. The shrill warning whistle upstairs from the doorkeeper below as I entered may have been pure accident, of course; the presence of all these men at symmetrical distances round a table may have been pure coincidences too. _ Perhaps they were really interested in the grain of the wood or in the yellow plaster of the ceiling overhead, as they seemed to he. When they saw I was no one to be afraid of, the mischievous winks that passed from one to, the other were, quite amusing to see. The police took some £350, by the way, in a raid on a fantan house only a week or two back. Four Chinamen paid fines of £IOO each. The prevalence of opium smoking seems to me a more serious matter. There passed me in Liverpool one day while I was there a poor wreck of a Chinaman, whom I noticed with something akin to a shudder. His yellow face had slipped, as it were, till the lower half seemed to hang down as a thing on a flaccid hinge. His eyes were glazed and dead. His feet trailed springlessly along the pavement. He hud in his hand a. little kettle. He was going for "opium oil" from the lampshop. I went too, and bought something I did not want. The shopman by accident overturned a zinc bucket with a deafening clang. The China 111,' in never blinked. He simply stared at nothing across the shop, with soulless, horrible eyes. 1 The man. was at that moment still under opium. "He smokes and sleeps for days together," I heard later.

I saw those dead eyes again ill Cardiff in a. young Chinese lad lying, with others older than he, on an opium couch. Most of the Chinese houses have their opium couches. There is no law to stop it whatever; there may be in China. He seemed to have hardly energy enough to "toast" his little spot of opium over the flame of the lamp. The opium ready at last, he placed it over the tiny cavity in the bow! of the pipe, held the pipe, in-j verted, in the apex of the lamp's still flame, and then drew in a deep breath of opium smoke, which, lie exhaled again in time in great twin jets from his nostrils, without taking the pip© from his mouth. He must have been thus busied for some time for as I watched' his eyes closed his head fell gently over on to the cushion of the couch, and he slept. His neighbor took the pipe from his hands and began the business of "toasting" _ over again for himself. Opium, looking like black treacle in a little tin, seemed to be there for the general use, but there were not many pipes. These cost a sovereign apiece, I was told. They are as elaborately and carefully made as flutes, which they resemble both in size and in shape but for the little metal bowl attachment at one end. A word as to the personal and domestic habits of the Chinese. They have been described as dirty in both respects. This, I think, is untrue. Of the houses I visited both in Liverpool and Cardiff, lodgingliouses and private bouses, every one was clean. The furniture was often scanty, and the Chinese mode of cooking is what an English housewife might describe as "messy," for the Chinese are fond of odd mixtures of things. Some of their recipes, too, would no doubt revolt an English taste very violently, and some, I should think, are dangerously unwholesome. But their arrangements, their pots and pans, their linen, their floors, and so on, are quite faultless. In several houses not provided with baths I noticed baths fitted np in sheds in the back yard. The water used was cold, but the Chinese braved it rather than go unwashed. The bedrooms again—and I must have been in forty or more —were aH wonderfully tid.v. Four or five beds to a room, each with its white blankets and the night clothes of its occupant laid across, the quilt. Oil the. wall here would be a sacred lily of China in 'a pot of water, there a stuffed bird or lisli, and everywhere about the place, on walls, mantelpieces, and shelves, innumerable clocks. I have refrained purposely from touching upon the laundries and other Chinese establishments in districts of Cardiff other than Tiger Bay. The medical officer,and t-lio police report well of them. I made other inquiries and could get no indication that there existed any of the crimes against children which make the Chinese of Liverpool (and other English towns) so much to be feared. It seemed odd things should be so different here, but I was assured on every hand they were so, and I was beginning to think it must) be true when, on the last day of my stay, there came into Cardiff courts a case with some of-the well-known Liverpool factors. Scene, a laundry; accused, a Chinaman; prosecutor, public, on behalt of a young girl; charge, unnameable. "Was this, then, the cloven hoof in Cardiff. too?