"A CHINAMAN'S HOME."

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 9526, 25 June 1909, Page 7

"A CHINAMAN'S HOME."

REMARKABLE ORIENTAL PLAY.

as you have in one of your London theatres "An Englishman's Home," showing the dangers of neglecting national defences, so China has developed a national play with a purpose," writes the Hongkong correspondent of the "Pall Mall Gazette. "It is designed to show how the Chinese home is attacked and ruined by excessive opium smoking, and it has attracted remarkably widespread interest wherever Chinese communities are established in the Far E-is 1 ", Probably it has done mere than half a dozen edicts to spread the antiopium cause.

"Produced originally in Cantor, under high official patronage, it has lately been played in scores of towns, not only in China, but in Malay, where the Chinese are extremely numerous. For the most part, the production has been in the hands of a wealthy body of Cantonese and Hokien amateurs, who saw in it a means of aiding the anti-opium cause. Incidentally, they have been able to contribute from the profits of the performances several hundred pounds in aid of tne Cantonese Flood Relief Fund.

The play introduces a Chinaman of great wealth amid all the luxuries that his money can buy and a happy family can enjoy. Gradually he is depicted giving way to opium and resultant' extravagance, till in the end he descends to the most squalid poverty. "His wife is an extremely pious lady, who prays daily at hill temples for the delivery of her husband from his vicious thraldom, but one dav as she is returning from her devotions a brigatid captures her and sells hereto a slave dealer.

" Knter the hero, a wise old philosopher. who, hearing of the lady's plight, seeks her out, effects a rescue, and sends her to Japan to study medicine. Time passes, and then - she returns to her native town to practise, armed with medical diplomas. There she recognises in a dirty beggar in the street her "ruined husband. Compassionately she takes him to her home and exerts upnon him the medical skill learned in Japan, in the hope of exercising the opium craving. As in the West so in the East a happy ending is required by the audience, so the medical wife is completely successful with her drugs*, the husband is reformed, the home is reestablished, and they live happily ever afterwards."