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 unfortunate provinces and view the problem at short range. The nearest and most accessible was Shansi Province. It lies to the west and southwest of Peking, behind the blue mountains which one sees from the Hankow-Peking Railroad. There seemed to be no doubt that the opium curse could there be seen at its worst. Everybody said so--legation officials, attaches, merchants, missionaries. Dr. Piell, of the London Mission hospital at Peking, estimated that ninety per cent. of the men, women, and children in Shansi smoke opium. He called in one of his native medical assistants, who happened to be a Shansi man, and the assistant observed, with a smile, that ninety per cent. seemed pretty low as an estimate. Another point in Shansi's favour was that the railroads were pushing rapidly through to T'ai Tuan-fu, the capital (and one of the oldest cities in oldest China). So I picked up an interpreter at the _Grand Hotel des Wagon-lits_, and went out there. [Illustration: THE VILLAGES WERE LITTLE MORE THAN HEAPS OF RUINS These Holes in the Ground are Occupied by Formerly Well-to-do Opium Smokers] [Illustration: AT LAST HE CRAWLS OUT ON THE HIGHWAY, WHINING, CHATTERING AND PRAYING THAT A FEW COPPER CASH BE THROWN TO HIM] The new Shansi railroad was not completed through to Tai-Yuan-fu, the provincial capital, and it was necessary to journey for several days by cart and mule-litter. While this sort of travelling is not the most comfortable in the world, it has the advantage of bringing one close to the life that swarms along the highroad, and of making it easier to gather facts and impressions.