Show wrom written for this paper THE HIGH BINDERS AT HOME copyrighted by frank Q G carpenter 1894 HE chinese Chines e government is is greatly alarmed over the rebellion that is or being fomented in nearly every state of the empire the peking ap gazette is full of the reports of the arrest of members of the coloa koloa hui society and executions are taking place in ih many of the cities cites it is now death to belong to this society and the heads of the members are hung up outside of the cities as a barnin warning to others notwithstanding this t the e organization steadily increases and it is being recruited from the disaffected soldiers and others of the empire it is said to have had its origin among the soldiers of the hunan province which is one of the most rebellious of the chinese states the hunan men are noted tor lor their bravery and hundreds of thousands of them were employed in putting down the kaiping rebellion after the war was over numbers of them were kept on in the retinues of the different viceroys vice roys and notably so by the viceroy of A few years ago an attempt was made to dispense with their services and some of the soldiers got together and organized this society by others it is said to have been founded about dikty years ago but it undoubtedly had its great im impetus etus through these men at and today its membership runs well up into the millions and it has its secret meetings in every city of china it is avowedly against the manchu gove te ment and its motto is china for the chinese its members swear to ibe be faithful to the society under penalty of death and each society has its executioner and any ny member is supposed toi commit murder at the commands af the 4 order members are initiated by the drinking of hot wine mixed with the smoking blood of a cock which is killed at the time and the ticket of membership is a small card of linen or calico stamped with a few characters two of which are china these cards are diligently looked for by the officials and the man who has one upon him is immediately arrested the society numbers among its members a large number of army officials and the great viceroy of who died not long ago was for a time an active member it may have been this that made his capital the center of their operations but howardl the latter part of his life he became lax in his support of the society and it is said finally disobeyed its orders with in a week of this time he died very suddenly ard and it is currently believed that he was poisoned the next viceroy played fast and loose with the society and it is said that his action was to a certain extent the cause of the riots against the missionaries in 1891 I 1 was told at that this secret society had threatened the viceroy that if more money was not paid to the soldiers they would cause him trouble by mobbing the foreigners shortly after this the devils picture gallery was issued this was made up of vile cartoons charging the missionaries andi foreigners with killing chinese babies with inveigling girls into their houses and cutting off their breasts for medicine and with stealing the eyes of dead and live and using them as photographic material millions of these cartoons were circulated and the people were urged to drive the foreigners fromi from the country this caused the viceroy of and thi the central government a great deal of trouble and they had to pay a heavy indemnity this spring an organized rebellion broke out near canton and the soldiers were fighting there at the time that the japanese came into corea the recent troubles in the shantung province where the peopled people refused to respond to the call for troops was backed up by the koloa coloa hua hui and there is a large branch of the organization in manchuria and it exists in great strength in north china it is so organ iced that in case of the fall of peking a simultaneous rebellion would be brought to the front in nearly every state in china and the government might fall at one blow it is hard to understand much about the present trouble without knowing something of the different chinese states the country is divided up into eighteen provinces and there may be said to be almost eighteen different peoples under eighteen dif different terent rulers more or less firmly bound together under the one peking government the common people of many of these states do not understand each other the coolie of hunan could haddly make his way in peking and the cantonese provinces hawe dialect from those inthe steni 9 teni parts of the ahe empire the pro mace V ce di cunnan is ir said said to have twenty different dialects and the people copl aej while care a g great reat deal tor their own homes awes and for 0 r their families have no ute irest st in in the government and support only yas y AS a necessary evil the family and the clan form the basis of chinese secle society ty A great number of the punishments of the empire are inflicted by the jamily and most disputes are settled without recourse to the courts family ties are closer in china than anywhere else is id the world if a man makes a fortune lor tune ahre forty second cousins from all parts of the empire swoop down upon bun bim and he has to support and help them it if a man iman gets a position he is supposed to take his own family in first in the choosing of the subordinates and d nepotism reigns supreme I 1 met while I 1 was in canton the jay gould of china his name is how qua and he aj is worth he was keeping relatives and his sisters and his cousins and his aunts to the third and fourth generation were sucking the life blood out of his big income he e was I 1 judge about forty years old and as an instance tance of how strong family authority in u he obeys his mother today in all matters of society obligations and upon being asked by consul seymour to dinner not long ago he replied 1 I dont know whether I 1 can go or not I 1 must go first and ask my mamma I 1 afterwards met his mamma she was an old lady whose eyes shone as brightly as the diamonds which decorated her cap and whose feet were no bigger than the fists 0 of f a baby she ruled the whole of H how ow relatives and she was pro probably b ably the head of the howqua clan these clans of china are very much like those of scotland every family keeps its pedigree and the reason why the chinese want to be carried to their own country is that they will be buried with their families the clans have th feuds in just sa s1 t like some of the mountain families of Xen kentucky tucky and they lay for each other with bows and guns every family has its ancestral hall in the town or village near where it lives where all the different members of the family meet and worship their ancestors the members of a clan combine together to punish unish those who have injured the family family and there are said to be families who make a business of blackmailing and stealing there are in all china about clans and the or which make up the chinese people belong to these the secret societies are run however independent of the clans and the koloa coloa hui is only one 0 of f a large a rg e number of them the oldest society in china is the triad society known as the sam hop wui this is said to have been the cause of the rebellion which lasted for years and cost china ten million lives it sprang up in the south and spread all over the empire and had it not been for chinese gordon and li hung chang the tartar dynasty would certainly have been overthrown the head of this rebellion was a chinaman who gave out that he was the younger P er brother of jesus christ and had teen been sent to this world to reform culna toe the triad society has its lodges and there are flap flags banners and umbrellas connected with it it tilds Us its regu lax Aee meeting tinoi and it forces to join its organization if tha they aie are biot not amenable to persuasion it hash has thi the power of life and death over its members and the members mix their own blood with wine and swear to uphold the order to the death among the punishments for treason to the or order der is the having the ears chopped off or the head cut off and the divulgence of the secrets of the order is death the members have their own signs and pass words you can tell it is said whether a man belongs to the order by the way he enters the house and I 1 am told that they stop a moment at the door and put the left foot first in sitting down they point their toes together and keep the heels apart and they have a way of of raising their trousers legs which is known only to the brethren they are bound to help any ot of the order who get into trouble and they have secret signs by which they can mark ther houses so that their families will escape in case of revolution at dinner the arrangement of the cups on the table allows their callers who belong to the order to know that they are members and there are a thousand little things which no one else would notice which enable them to recognize each kotlier oth er the triad society and koloa coloa hui are very much like the high binders of san francisco they swear to defend each other against the police to hide each others crimes and they are ready to kill for the sake of the order at the command of its leaders their main main grievance is against the government and they have published manifestos mani festos against it and are doing so now some of the chiefs of the order are said to be traveling around the country as doctors and they are carrying the news of the chinese defeats and are gathering in members wherever they go their motto is drive out the tartar and it is said that one branch of the traid braid society dates back to 1664 A D or twenty years after the conquest they have been working to overthrow the government ever since and they have a great hatred of anything which is not purely chinese it is safe to say of the hundreds of millions in china that outside of the government officials there are not a hundred thousand chinese who would fight for the emperor th they i keep him because they must have a r ruler uzer of some kind but they know he is a tartar and t they he y h hate a e h him M in every chinese state ca capital pita there is a manchu army as well a as s a C chinese inese army and the tartars are neither admired nor loved the emperor in fact is like humpty he sits on the wall and it he should fall all of his horses and all of his men can never put humpty up again it will not be surprising to many americans to know how cheaply the government 0 rement of china is run taxes are fa lower W vr perhaps than in any other country on the globe the principal source of revenue is the land tax and this varies from io 10 to 66 cents an acre the emperor nominally owns all the land but in reality the people have as much of a right to their farms as we have and they buy and sell their real estate giving deeds lor the same I 1 took a photograph of a chinese deed by which a miss nary had bought some land rt at Nanki ag aad thich he was cat r bogh to hang hai td bi be tha ame ricahrd consulate colowit 4 06 daring rih my lib with hini him down wn the yingtse mieng kiang i I 1 was as bi bite as four pages of t this is newsy paper e and was cov covered erect with stamps api china ia pays no tax on liquors and it ai said that the taxes do not amount to tb 7 cents per head of the population A large part of the revenue re is collected from the taxing of salt and there are import and export taxes collected on goods passing up and down the rivers I 1 saw customs boats everywhere antt the river police is quite extensive the people understand very well just how ho much taxes they ought to pay they are thoroughly organized and an any radical increase such as must come frob from the present war with japan which ii probably costing them a million dollars a day is is almost certain to create a revolution I 1 have seen different estimates ot of the revenues gotten by the empire of china and in no case have the amounts turned into the genera government been greater than iao 11 a year this would be a aman small amount in comparison with the indria indemnity that japan will probably demand if she is victorious in this war and the chinese emperor has indeed a thorny road before him the greatest danger arises in the character of the chinese as regards social and labor combinations the government is ia perhaps the only disorganized part of the country every city every state and almost every province is packed full of different unions and all branches of industry are banded to gether our our labor unions are nothing in comparison with those of china and the government has to bow down to them the barbers united some years ago and made the emperor come to terms in in regard to the public examinations for their children they had before this belonged to a rather despised class they stand now as high as any other people in the empire one of the features of barbering in china is ear cleaning each barber has tweezers with which he pulls palls little hairs out of your ears or trims them to suit spit the chinese like to have the backs of their shoulders and necks kneaded after they are shaved this takes a good deal of time and the barbers concluded that it kept them too busy during the holidays the union called its members together all over the empire they passed a law which makes make s it impossible im possible for you to get your ears cleaned during six certain days of the year li hung chang is great enough to slap the cheeks of ther the chinese officials who call upon him he R makes his generals get down on their knees and if the emperor does not take away his big cloth boots he will continue to kick them out of the room ht har would not dare however to do anything against the union of the wheelbarrow coolies and he has stopped some of his greatest improvements after they have haac cost him hundreds of thousands ot dollars because certain of the trades unions objected these wheelbarrow men are in fact one of the strong organizations of china and they are one of the great obstacles in the way of railroad building the bankers of china havea have a guild and it depends very much upon thenn thel whether the government is is supplied lieA ridi money for the war there are nearly 1000 banks in the two cities of shanghai and tien tsin and their mem bers all work together they have their connections with other banks of the empire and they fix the rates of interest and regulate exchange the tea merchants have a guild and there are silk and all sorts of manufacturers bunions xin Jun ions these guilds have magnificent halls in the great cities and the bankow tea men imen may have a club house in shanghai and cannop canton and some of the finest buildings in in china today are those possessed by the trades unions I 1 have visited many of these buildings through the courtesy of chinese friends you lind them full of well dressed who are chatting together drinking tea or playing cards they are in fact much like the big club houses of america in their social aspects and many of them have beautiful gardens connected with them these unions are very rigid as to their own iown men and they have waged war against modern machinery in some instances they have killed employers who have acted contrary to their wishes sand band a horrible case occurred at shanghai a few years ago where an employer tried to defy the union he was warned but he refused to accede to the demands demand q of the men and they concluded to make an example of him he had more than loo men in his shop these were Vi present resent when he ente entered redone one morning and at a concerted signal they sprang upon him and commenced biting him they had a leader and this leader would not let one of the men go go away from the place without showing his teeth it his teeth and gums were bloody he was permitted to go out otherwise he was sent back and told to take a bite |