CHINA.                             
     271

                      THE RIOT IN THE FRENCH CONCESSION.

  In several of our issues last week, we gave in considerable detail an account
of a
riot which occurred in the French concession on Sunday, the 3d May, serious
in itself,
and yet more serious in view of its possible consequences. We have now an
oppor-
tunity of briefly sketching the circumstances that led up to that outbreak,
which will
throw needed light on the narrative and documents which we have already pub-
lished.
  To begin at the beginning: There is, and has long been, a native mortuary
chapel,
known as the "Ningpo Joss-house," near the southwestern extremity
of what is now
the French concession. It is used as a place where the coffins of natives
of Ningpo,
who die in Shanghai, are kept till the necessary means have been provided
or arrange-
ments made for their removal to be buried in the ancestral burying-grounds
of the
deceased in their native district. It would also appear that some uninclosed
land con-
tiguous to the Joss-house has been used as a place of burial for indigent
persons,
and is administered by the committee of the Joss-house, which, we believe,
is the
Ningpo Guild, or some of their number. When the vacant spaces around this
were
occupied by the allies, who assisted the Chinese against the Taipings in
1861-'62, the
grave-mounds, with which it abounded, were leveled, for military reasons.
On the
retirement of the troops it became a part of the French concession. In 1864
the an-
nual municipal report stated that the executive had at length overcome all
the diffi-
culties it had to contend with in settling with the proprietors of the ground
that had
been covered by graves, and had so arranged matters that only two grave-yards
re-
mained-the cemetery of the French marine, and.the Ningpo Joss-house. The
land-
renters' meeting to which this report was submitted was, if we mistake not,
presided
over by M. Godeaux, then acting consul, now consul-general. The vacant ground
was,
in 1865, laid out in oblong blocks separated by lines of road marked off
by shallow
drains, and in 1870 a plan of the concession was engraved, on which the roads
were
laid down and named. Running along the northeast face of the Joss-house was
"1Rue
de Ningpo," along its southeast face the "Rue de Saigon."
So things remained till
toward the end of last year, when the council 'proposed to raise and metal
the roads
in question, and others contiguous. In January last, a communication (which
we
have already published-issue of 9th May) was received from the Ningpo Guild,
which is the administrator of the Joss-house, and, as it would appear, of
some of the
lands adjoining. It will be seen that, in language which to those unacquainted
with
the history of the case must appear very temperate and considerate, they
state their
objections to the proposed roads being carried out, and offer to build, in
close parallelism
to them, roads in their stead. From that time to the present, negotiations
have been
going on; the Taotai, on the one hand, and the consul-general, on the other,
being called in
to argue the matter. The French council have been unwilling to agree to the
proposals
of the guild, because a very large part of the concession is built on ground
that once
was graveyards, and if they once admitted the principle on which the guild
base their
demand, it might seriously affect the titles of many existing foreign properties.
They
admitted that the two particular roads in question are of no great public
utility, but
so important did they feel the principle involved in the claim to be, that,
we believe,
toward the latter part of the discussion, some such expression as this was
used: that,
rather than agree to the proposal of the guild, the council would prefer
to have the
Joss-house removed, and provided with a site elsewhere. This was a very natural
ex-
pression, as only a year or two ago the cemetery of the French marine (referred
to above)
was moved to a new situation about a mile west of the cemetery; so that,
in suggest-
ing the possibility of the bodies of the deceased Chinese being removed,
the council
went no further, even in suggestion, than they had already proceeded in fact
with the
bodies of their own countrymen. It will be noticed that this view of the
case is very
adroitly ignored by the guild in their plausible document of January. Indeed,
it is
notorious that nothing has been more common in the history of the foreign
settlements
in China than the removal of graves by arrangement with the representatives
of the
deceased. How the present case should be rendered more difficult to deal
with, because
the ground in dispute outside the Joss-house is the burying-place of beggars,
whose
removal would lacerate no family ties-which is an argument used by the Daily
News-
is a kind of logic we fail to understand. But the expression about the removal
of the
Joss-house was so used by the representatives of the guild that a large amount
of popu-
lar excitement was at once evoked, it being represented among the people
that the council
had determined to pull down the Joss-house. About the beginning of last week
large
crowds began to assemble at and around the Joss-house, and the excitement
grew by the
mutual contact of suspicious multitudes. The consul-general appears to have
all along
shown himself strongly disposed to concede the wishes of the guild; which,
no doubt, to
a large extent accounts for their pertinacity with the council; and at last
it was arranged
that another meeting between the council and the representatives of the guild
should
take place on Monday, May 4. It is understood, also, that the council, finding
that by the
policy of the consul-generaithe whole odium of upholding what they regarded
as the rights