Page:Brinkley - China - Volume 2.djvu/134

bargain he can effect with the officials of the station, supplementing the agreement with a douceur (called "tea-money"). Regular traders, or guilds of traders, often commute for a lump sum which covers a whole voyage or a whole season. Apparently - it is necessary to avoid positive assertions, for the Chinese withhold all definite information-apparently goods have to pay alternately three and two per cent at successive barriers until four are passed, by which time ten per cent has been defrayed, and thereafter free passage is granted for the rest of the province. But if the goods are transported into another province, the exactions begin again. In actual practice, however, things are not so bad as these figures indicate. Merchants save themselves by bargaining. The likin stations will often underbid each other to secure business, and where more than one route is available owners of goods obtain easier terms. A hundred bales or piculs are thus passed as eighty, sixty, or, it may be, fifty. Nevertheless the tax is a grievous check to business, and there is evidence that the Chinese authorities originally imposed it reluctantly. They called it an "unfortunate necessity," and they warned the local officials not to allow any " undue harassing" of traders.^[1] In such an obnoxious light is likin viewed by foreign merchants engaged in Chinese commerce that they often speak of it as an illegal "squeeze" exacted by the local official