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Title: China
a geographical reader
Author: Harry Alverson Franck
Release date: June 26, 2026 [eBook #78953]
Language: English
Original publication: Dansville: F.A. Owen Pub. Co., 1927
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78953
Credits: Richard Tonsing and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CHINA ***
[Illustration: NORTHERN CHINA and SURROUNDINGS Scale Approximately 212
Miles to an inch]
[Illustration]
CHINA
TRAVELS IN MANY LANDS
CHINA
A Geographical Reader
BY
HARRY A. FRANCK
WITH MANY ILLUSTRATIONS, LARGELY FROM PHOTOGRAPHS BY THE AUTHOR
F.A. OWEN PUBLISHING COMPANY
DANSVILLE, NEW YORK
COPYRIGHT, 1927
F. A. OWEN PUBLISHING COMPANY
_Travels in Many Lands—China_
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
PUBLISHERS’ FOREWORD
The very best way to give boys and girls a clear idea of just what life
is to their brothers and sisters of other lands is to take them through
those lands. If they cannot go in person (and of course few can), a
well-written story of travel will be a valuable substitute for personal
experience.
To be of educational value to the reader, a book of travel must first of
all be authentic. It must have been written by one who knows at first
hand the things about which he writes. A superficial knowledge gained by
flitting through a country along its main traveled routes is not
sufficient to enable a writer to tell a complete story about it.
Among the notable travelers of our time, probably none has more
thoroughly covered many countries than Harry A. Franck, the author of
this book. His travels have not been mere sight-seeing tours. He has
gone into the out-of-the-way places and lived in the homes of the common
people, to study their habits and manner of living. He has visited their
temples and schools. He has learned something of their language and
talked with them on all manner of subjects so as to become familiar with
their views of life.
From boyhood, Harry Franck had a desire to know about the great outside
world. In 1900, during his first summer vacation while attending the
University of Michigan, he set out, with only $3.18 in his pocket, to
see something of Europe. He worked his way across the ocean on a
cattle-boat, visited the principal cities of England, then Paris and the
Exposition that was being held there. He signed as an able seaman for
the return trip and reached Ann Arbor for the fall term, only two weeks
late.
Mr. Franck worked his way through college and intended to make teaching
his profession, but that first European trip gave him an appetite for
more travel. When he was graduated, he started out, with only enough
money to buy supplies for his camera, to work his way around the
world—which he did in sixteen months. After this trip he wrote “A
Vagabond Journey Around the World,” which is regarded as one of the most
remarkable books of the kind ever published. Since then he has written
many other volumes telling of his experiences.
During more than twenty years of travel, Mr. Franck has covered half a
hundred countries. He has journeyed 50,000 miles on foot and at least an
equal distance by primitive native methods. In gathering material for
this volume and for “The Japanese Empire” (in the same series), he
traveled for two and a half years through the Far East. He often endured
hardship and faced danger to give the world the truth about the Oriental
lands.
This book may be given to children as supplementary geographical reading
with the assurance that it is based on actual facts verified by recent
travel. The world to-day is not what it was even a decade ago.
Conditions, customs, the very people themselves have changed; some
greatly, some slightly. A book of this kind, to be really helpful, must
reflect these changes. It is no less true, however, that a book of this
kind should be concerned chiefly with those characteristics and aspects
of a country and its people which have an element of permanence. For
this reason, the history and perplexing political problems of China are
merely touched upon by Mr. Franck. To do more would be outside the scope
of a geographical reader.
Mr. Franck carries equipment for obtaining the best possible pictures.
Most of the illustrations in this volume are from photographs taken by
him personally, often under conditions that involved difficulty and
sometimes peril.
As children read about the land of China, we feel confident that they
will be impressed with the fact that the people of the whole world are
one great family; that what affects one nation affects all nations to a
greater or less extent. They will realize that while certain lands may
seem “backward” to us who enjoy the conveniences of Western
civilization, we are indebted to them for many things that have made our
civilization possible. For example, the compass, which was essential to
the development of navigation and which, as improved by the Italians,
enabled Columbus to make his great voyage of discovery, was invented by
the Chinese nearly 4000 years ago. Children, like adults, must be led to
see that people everywhere have their virtues and ambitions, their
trials and hardships, and that the misfortune or the prosperity of one
country is reflected in other countries far away.
Knowledge of these facts should prompt us to work for the peace and
well-being of all peoples, particularly through the channel of our
schools. In this connection, Payson Smith, Commissioner of Education for
Massachusetts, has aptly said: “Education in all lands should lead the
youth to recognize those interests which are common to humankind, to
magnify the virtues which all men hold in common, to minimize those
differences and distinctions which divide, and to interpret the history
of race and nation in those terms that are helpful to world progress as
well as to national self-respect.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
To the Century Company, New York, publishers of Mr. Franck’s
“Wandering in Northern China” and “Roving Through Southern China,”
grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to use certain of the
author’s photographs which first appeared in one or the other of those
volumes. The illustrations referred to are on the following pages of
this book: 30, 36 (lower), 40, 46, 49, 53, 63, 66, 68, 72, 74, 78, 84,
85, 86, 90, 98, 108, 125, 127, 128, 137, 144, 156, 163, 164, 166, 181,
198, 201, 206, 209, 211, 216, 228, 232, 236, 238.
To the Chinese Consul-General, New York, who gave the proofs of
“China” a critical reading, both the author and the publishers are
indebted for suggestions and comments.
To Miss Lena M. Franck, the author’s sister, who, as an experienced
teacher, was able to give valuable advice, an expression of
appreciation is due.
[Illustration:
Area of “China proper” (east and south of heavy line) contrasted with
that of the ancient Chinese Empire which included also Manchuria,
Mongolia, Sinkiang, and Tibet.
]
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I CHINA’S PLACE IN THE WORLD 11
II MANCHURIA, THE EASTERN THREE PROVINCES 21
III THROUGH THE GREAT WALL TO PEKING 34
IV OUR HOME IN PEKING 45
V SOME QUEER CHINESE CUSTOMS 58
VI ACROSS MONGOLIA TO URGA 70
VII SHANTUNG, LAND OF CONFUCIUS 81
VIII THROUGH THE HEART OF OLD CHINA 93
IX THE GREAT MOHAMMEDAN PROVINCE 104
X WHERE THE FISH WAGGED ITS TAIL 116
XI CHINA HAS HER OWN WAYS 129
XII THE CHINESE LANGUAGE AND SCHOOLS 141
XIII FOREIGNERS IN CHINA 151
XIV ALONG THE GREAT YANG-TZE KIANG 159
XV DIFFICULT JOURNEYS 175
XVI DOWN THE SOUTHERN COAST 191
XVII IN THE PROVINCE OF KWANGTUNG 203
XVIII A SUMMER IN SOUTHWESTERN CHINA 215
XIX AMONG THE PRIMITIVE TRIBES 227
XX SZECHUAN, LARGEST OF PROVINCES 241
PRONUNCIATION LIST 253
MAPS
THE OLD CHINESE EMPIRE AND PRESENT-DAY CHINA 8
NORTHERN CHINA AND SURROUNDINGS Inside Front Cover
SOUTHERN CHINA AND SURROUNDINGS Inside Back Cover
[Illustration:
Keystone View Co., Inc., of N. Y.
The Chinese came very near inventing the skyscraper when they built
the first pagoda of this sort. One sees a great many of them in
China. They have either six or eight sides, and are always an odd
number of stories in height, up to thirteen. Often, as here, they
have graceful veranda roofs. Pagodas are religious structures, and
in form resemble somewhat the Christian spire and the Mohammedan
minaret.
]
CHINA
CHAPTER I
CHINA’S PLACE IN THE WORLD
China is the oldest living member of the family of nations. It is the
country in which conditions to-day are most nearly like what they were
thousands of years ago. The long journey we are about to make through
all parts of it will be like going to a great museum. But this museum,
instead of containing the relics of people long dead, will look, for the
most part, as if it were being lived in by an ancient race. Here and
there, however, we shall see things that make us think of our Western
civilization.
It seems hardly necessary to tell anyone where China is, or to say that
the Chinese make up nearly one-fifth of the whole human race. You
probably know that China occupies most of eastern Asia between Russian
Siberia and the Pacific Ocean, or the China Sea, and that its climate
ranges all the way from that of Canada to that of Florida.
Doubtless you know, also, that politically China is no longer an empire,
as it was for thousands of years. Since 1911 it has been a republic, in
name at least. This republic has not quite the same area as the empire
had, for after the revolution which changed the form of government,
several parts of the vast territory declared their independence. Even in
what we may call China proper, different war lords rule in different
regions and there is a great deal of confusion. Of course all the most
intelligent and patriotic Chinese hope that this condition is only
temporary.
Less than half the great territory that was once ruled over by the
Chinese Emperor (called the Son of Heaven by his people) is in China
proper. The rest of it consists of the great dependencies or colonies of
old China, almost all of which have now declared, or at least act as if
they had declared, their independence. Of them all Manchuria is the most
like China itself. The enormous lands of Mongolia, Sinkiang or Chinese
Turkestan, and Tibet are not Chinese any more than are the people who
inhabit them, but have very different soil and climate as well as
manners and customs. We shall find these former parts of the Chinese
Empire very thinly settled, some with hardly two persons to the square
mile, while in China proper there are as many as 675 people to the
square mile.
During our travels through the eighteen provinces of China proper and
most of its former dependencies, we shall see that the Chinese have
their own ways, which in many respects are quite different from our
ways. Yet if we pause to think as we read, we shall discover that they
(and all the rest of mankind for that matter) are at bottom much like
us. We shall find that every people’s outward peculiarities are mainly
the result of a particular environment, of climate, soil, opportunities,
and the like. We shall see how absurd it is to look down upon the
Chinese, who have adjusted themselves to their environment more
successfully than almost any of us. Is it not proof enough of this that
China is still a nation thousands of years after the disappearance of
its sister nations, Babylonia and Assyria?
Recent History in China
[Illustration:
Chinese ladies of wealth and position, showing examples of the
beautiful embroidery for which this people is famous.
]
Yet there are now many people who fear that China also is going to
disappear as a nation. In order to understand that point of view, we
shall have to look a little into recent Chinese history. For nearly
three hundred and fifty years China was under the rule of the Manchus,
who were really not Chinese at all, though gradually they came to seem
almost the same. It was against the Manchu emperor and the many less
powerful Manchu rulers under him that the Chinese revolted in 1911.
But though a republican form of government may seem natural to us, who
have been used to one for many generations, it was not a simple thing
for the Chinese suddenly to change so completely. Under their Manchu
emperors only a small proportion of the Chinese had ever learned to read
and write. They had never had the right to vote and had known little of
what their central government was doing. They had not had newspapers and
magazines to keep them informed. Millions of them, living far from
Peking, the capital, and without education, had gained no real idea of
what government means. They had had to pay taxes every year or oftener
to someone who said he was collecting them for the government, and each
one saw the elders of his own village attending to its affairs. Perhaps
they were sometimes taken before a mandarin sent out from Peking, to be
tried for some crime or misdemeanor. But that was all that the great
mass of Chinese knew about government.
We in America are great believers in education. In China there are
increasing numbers of men, many of whom have attended American colleges,
who realize that until the masses of the people learn to read and write,
at least, they cannot be expected to have intelligent ideas about
government. One Chinese, who is a graduate of Yale University, is a
leader in the movement for education of his countrymen, and he is
attempting to do away with illiteracy in one generation by means of a
simplified written language. Later on I shall tell more about language
difficulties in China, and more about the educational system in that
country. We can always be proud that the United States has done much to
bring educational advantages to the Chinese through the Boxer Indemnity
Fund. This fund consists of money which was due to the United States
from China because of lives lost and property damaged in the Boxer
Rebellion of 1900. Instead of using the money, our government turned it
back to China as a fund to establish Tsing-hwa University near Peking
and to bring promising Chinese students to America to be educated in our
colleges and universities.
[Illustration:
A screen in the palace of the late Empress Dowager in Peking is an
example of the wonderful artistic creations of the Chinese.
]
Naturally enough, the Chinese did not know how to elect a president and
a parliament and all the other officials that are needed to run a
republican form of government. It was natural also that men who wanted
to have important government offices found ways to get them without
being elected. One of the favorite ways was to collect a private army
and start ruling over a certain city or county or province, whether the
people liked it or not. A Chinese who had been one of the chief generals
of the Manchu emperor began to send out men of his own choosing to
govern the different parts of the country. Although he had been elected
president by a parliament or congress (which he had largely chosen
himself) even he had only a vague idea of what a republic is, and
finally he tried to make himself emperor and establish a new dynasty.
But there were too many other men who wished to obtain good positions
for themselves under this new Western form of government. Some of them
were subordinates of the president, and they knew that if he made
himself emperor their own chances of some day becoming president or
anything else of importance would be slight. So they opposed the
founding of a new dynasty, and the president who wished to be emperor
died in 1917 without having placed his family on the throne.
After he was gone, and there was no strong man left in the central
government at Peking, many of the military governors of provinces and
even local officials which this president had appointed, became
independent. They had their own soldiers, and the people could do
nothing against them. For thousands of years the Chinese have been used
to being ruled by force, without having anything to say in the matter,
so most of them cannot see why they should be expected to take any part
in governing their country.
How China Is Governed
This is what makes many people think that perhaps China as a nation, the
oldest nation on earth, is going to disappear. Since the revolution of
1911 nearly all its great dependencies have become practically
independent. Many men, under the name of _tuchun_, or marshal, or
general, and so on, have made themselves dictators over different parts
of China proper. Some of them are entirely independent of the central
government at Peking. Some only obey the orders of Peking when they wish
to do so. China no longer has a genuine central government. There is no
Chinese army, though there are millions of Chinese soldiers. Each
different ruler of different parts of the country has his own army,
which obeys him only. As we travel about this ancient country we shall
find that it seems like a collection of independent provinces or still
smaller divisions. Sometimes we shall find a single city divided between
two different generals.
Many of these rulers with their own armies are very selfish men, who
keep for themselves as much as possible of the money they gather in
taxes. Some of them are constantly fighting among themselves, trying to
drive one another out and take more territory for themselves. Things in
China to-day are much as they would be in the United States if each of
our generals and colonels took the division or the regiment he has under
him and ruled the part of the country he is stationed in, without paying
any attention to orders from Washington.
[Illustration:
Manchu women decorated for a holiday. Their headdresses are especially
elaborate, but they also use white and bright red paint (rouge) on
their faces when they dress up.
]
It will probably be some time before we know whether China is going to
break up into a number of small countries or remain the great nation it
has been for thousands of years. Some people think one of the marshals
or generals will finally conquer all the others and make himself
president or emperor of the whole country. Others fear that outside
nations may have to step in to establish order in China. Still other
people hope that the Chinese people themselves will be able sooner or
later to straighten out their own affairs, as they have done several
times before during their long existence.
While all this misgoverning goes on in China, the Chinese remain
hard-working and cheerful, as they have so long been. The civil wars
among the various generals in different parts of the country make life
very unpleasant for the people. Before our travels are finished, I am
sure you will decide that the Chinese deserve a much better government
than they now have. Almost all foreigners who live among them find them
very likable, though of course they have their faults, just as Americans
and all other peoples have.
[Illustration:
One reason why there is not a larger sale for American farm implements
in China is that in many parts of the country the farmers _raise_
their own pitchforks and other tools by binding small growing trees
into the desired shapes.
]
You may be surprised, as I was, that we can travel almost anywhere we
wish, in all the eighteen provinces, even while many civil wars are
going on. A few foreigners have been killed and a number have been
robbed in China during the past few years. But when I show you how I
traveled in all parts of the country, often entirely alone, and through
many out-of-the-way regions, without ever being hurt or robbed, you will
probably decide that the Chinese are pretty good people after all. When
I tell you also that my mother and my wife, with our two small children,
went anywhere they wished, even late at night, in many of the great
cities of China, while rival generals were fighting within or outside
the walls, you will certainly admit that the Chinese are our brothers
under their yellow skins.
[Illustration:
A soap factory in Mukden, Manchuria, where the cakes laid out to dry
are all bright yellow in color. It is hardly the sort of soap that
we would care to use on our skin.
]
CHAPTER II
MANCHURIA, THE EASTERN THREE PROVINCES
We approached China, not by a steamer landing at Shanghai or Tientsin or
Canton, as most travelers do, but in the more modern, interesting way,
through Japan and its great new continental dependency, Korea (Chosen).
The Eastern Three Provinces, as the Chinese call what we know as
Manchuria, are situated much like our northeastern states, with Siberia
and Mongolia taking the place of Canada. Yet the moment we crossed the
big railway bridge over the Yalu River, we realized that we were in
China, even though we were not yet in China proper. At the very edge of
the river we began to see women with bound feet, coolies in blouses and
blue cotton trousers drawing rickshaws and pushing wheelbarrows, and in
front of the stores and hotels long upright wooden signs with strange
characters on them.
[Illustration:
Fourth and first pages of our passport, signed by Charles E. Hughes,
Secretary of State.
]
In a way, however, Manchuria is partly Japanese and partly Russian.
After the war of 1904–5 between Japan and Russia the southern part of
the great railroad which the Russians had built there was turned over to
Japan. So the American-style trains that run through Korea not only go
on to Mukden, the capital of Manchuria, but there is a Japanese railway,
also with the kind of trains we have at home, 500 miles long from Dairen
and Port Arthur to Changchun, and many miles of Russian railway north of
that. The Japanese govern the land along their railway and certain parts
of all the large cities on its route. The rest of Manchuria is ruled by
a Chinese who is really independent of Peking and the rest of China.
[Illustration:
Second and third pages of our passport. The visas were stamped in many
different colors.
]
[Illustration:
A coolies’ tea shop in Mukden. The water is heated in these huge
teakettles. The woman in charge has bound feet.
]
Two or three miles beyond the Japanese part of Mukden (near the railway
station) is the old city of Mukden. More exactly this is Fengtien, for
Mukden is the name given it by the Russians. Like almost all the cities
of China, it has a great wall about it made of huge bricks like blocks
of stone and with gateways so built that the roads through them have to
make two sharp turns. All Chinese city gates have this double-elbow
form, because the people used to think (as many of them do still) that
the air is full of invisible evil spirits, which can move only in a
straight line. Such gates also help to protect the city against enemies.
[Illustration:
An interesting study in Manchu costumes and customs. The woman in
front wears the peculiar headdress of her race, but grandmother,
behind, is enjoying an unburdened head and a long pipe. Being Manchu
women, neither has bound feet. The man looks as if he might welcome
a style that demanded shorter skirts.
]
Queer Sights in Fengtien
Inside its walls Fengtien is a real Chinese city. Most of the streets
are rough and many of them are very narrow; that is the way the Chinese
have built their cities for thousands of years. Along the streets we saw
huge brass teakettles as large as nail-kegs. There was a charcoal fire
under each of them, and steam poured forth from the great spouts. The
Chinese are always drinking tea, and the little stands or stores behind
the great kettles are tea shops for the coolies and other poorer people.
Many of the women who tended these kettles wore the queer Manchu
headdress. This is something like a thin board nearly as wide as it is
long, set across the top of the head, with the jet-black hair wound
about it, and adorned with flowers and jewelry. Unlike their Chinese
sisters Manchu women do not have bound feet.
Before other shops hung big wooden signs shaped like the strings of
“cash”—little brass coins with a square hole in the center—which some
Chinese still use as money. Such a sign shows that the shop is that of a
money-changer. There are so many kinds of money in China that places
where one can exchange one sort for another are common in all its
cities.
[Illustration:
You might think that the queer contraption carried by this peddler was
a jumble of big jackstraws. Instead, it consists of bamboo cages,
and in each cage is—not a bird, or a squirrel—but a cricket, a
singing cricket! The Chinese like to have them around and are
willing to pay for the pleasure.
]
Among the peddlers of all manner of things who went up and down the
streets shouting their wares, were men with dozens of little cages made
of strips of bamboo as thin as straws. Inside each cage was a cricket or
two, or a katydid, or a grasshopper of the singing kind. The Chinese buy
these caged insects for their shops or their houses, just as we do
singing-birds. All along the streets we could hear the little creatures
contentedly chirping. I bought one for my little boy, who was then two
years old, thinking that it would be about the right size of bird for
him. But the cricket did not seem to like to belong to foreigners. It
would not sing for us at all. We had not intended to keep it a prisoner
long, for after all, birds and crickets and polar bears probably like
their freedom as well as the rest of us. So after a few hours we took
the cricket to the park and turned it loose. But I am afraid our
kindness did not do it much good; for two Chinese boys at once began
chasing it and probably they soon caught it and sold it back to the
cricket-seller again.
For nearly three hundred and fifty years, the Manchus, big men of the
Mongolian race who originally came from Manchuria, ruled all the Chinese
Empire. They had a throne at Mukden, which travelers still go to see. It
is as empty now as the great palace in which it stands. To-day we might
almost say that there are no Manchus. There are many thousands of people
in China who still call themselves by that name; but while ruling China
the Manchus became so much like the Chinese that it is hard to tell them
from the rest of the population. We shall find that the Chinese almost
always absorb the people who come to live with them, even their
conquerors.
One of the most amusing things in Mukden is its street-car system. The
cars are drawn by mules, and run from the Japanese railway station to
the old city of Fengtien. They are such miserable old cars that only the
poorer Chinese usually ride in them. Other people go by rickshaw or by
automobile or in what foreigners call a Peking cart, a sort of box set
on two wheels, covered by a rounded roof, and with no springs whatever.
Yet those same street cars once ran on Third Avenue in New York! When
electric cars took their place there they were sold to Tokyo, and when
the Japanese capital also adopted electric trolleys those old cars were
sent on to Mukden. The Chinese ruler of the Eastern Three Provinces
hopes soon to have electric street cars also, and then the old cars that
have traveled so far may go still farther, or perhaps be turned into
playhouses for rich Chinese children.
Up and Down Manchuria
As we traveled up and down Manchuria by the Japanese railway, we did not
wonder that China would like to get back these three eastern provinces.
Manchuria is not only a very fertile country, it has few inhabitants
compared to crowded China. Thousands of Chinese coolies come to
Manchuria every summer, to work in the harvest fields and elsewhere.
Some of them go back home each autumn; but quite a few remain, so that
the old home of the Manchus is not only ruled over by a Chinese but a
large proportion of its inhabitants are now Chinese.
[Illustration:
Horse cars such as this one make leisurely trips between the Japanese
railway station in Mukden, Manchuria, and the old walled town. These
cars once saw service on Third Avenue, New York.
]
The most important crop we saw along the way is what the Chinese call
_kaoliang_, very much like the Kaffir-corn or sorghum grown in our own
southern states. Great fields of this, so high that a man on horseback
can hide in it, stretched away over the horizon. Bandits sometimes
conceal themselves in the _kaoliang_-fields, so that the people of
Manchuria and of a part of northern China proper are always glad when
the grain is cut. Most Americans think that all Chinese eat rice. Up in
the north, however, where the winters are as cold as in Canada, there
are millions who almost never taste rice, but live on _kaoliang_, and
millet, and even corn and wheat, which also grow there.
[Illustration:
The grain of the _kaoliang_, one of the most important crops of
northern China and Manchuria, which often grows to a height of
fifteen feet. Incidentally, a field of _kaoliang_ makes a fine
hiding place for bandits.
]
Another very important crop in Manchuria is the soya-bean. The food part
of this is pressed out and made into a kind of curd, which the Chinese
everywhere eat. Some of it is made into a salty sauce into which the
people dip each chopstickful of their food. A Chinese would dislike
going without his soya-sauce as much as we would dislike being deprived
of salt. What is left of the soya-bean after the food value has been
pressed out of it is shipped, in great round blocks that look like
grindstones, to all parts of China, to be used as fertilizer.
[Illustration:
Up in Harbin and the rest of northern Manchuria one often sees things
which remind him of Russia, for many of the people in that region
are Russians. Here is a droshky, such as might be hired for a ride
in Moscow.
]
Northern Manchuria is a kind of Russianized China. Beginning at
Changchun, where travelers change from the American style trains of the
Japanese railway to Russian trains that remind one of Europe, there are
more Russians at the stations and farmhouses along the way than there
are Chinese. Even some of the men in Chinese soldier uniforms are
Russians, big blond men who look so much like us that we are surprised
that they cannot understand us. But it is harder to get along here than
on the Japanese railway line. All Japanese stations have their names on
the signboards in English as well as in Japanese. On the signboards
north of Changchun, however, the names are in Chinese and Russian, but
not in English.
[Illustration:
In Harbin in July it is terribly hot, and flies are very numerous. The
people don’t understand that they ought to “swat” flies and kill
them off, but they use a sort of horse-tail fly scarer such as this
peddler has for sale.
]
Gaudy Russian churches, with queerly shaped steeples, and painted in
bright blue, green, and other strange colors, rise above all the larger
towns. Especially in Harbin, the traveler can almost imagine himself in
Russia. There, for instance, it is bad manners to go into an office
without leaving your hat and overcoat in the anteroom. You are expected,
on entering a store, to shake hands with the proprietor and the clerks,
and to do so again when you leave. We saw many Russian beggars, too, men
who had lost everything and been driven out of their native land when
Russia changed its government. At Manchuli, beyond which lies Bolshevik
Russia, we turned back toward Mukden and Peking.
CHAPTER III
THROUGH THE GREAT WALL TO PEKING
It was still another style of train that carried us from Mukden to
Shanhaikwan, the first town of China proper. The cars had rounded roofs
and were divided into compartments, like the cabins on a ship. The train
was packed full of Chinese soldiers, in very faded gray cotton uniforms.
They crowded some of the cars so that other passengers could not get on
at all, and they even slept on and under the tables in the dining-car.
Very few of them had tickets. We were to find this a common thing on all
Chinese railways. Many of the soldiers of the different marshals and
generals ruling China are not well trained or disciplined; some of them
are hardly real soldiers at all. But the trainmen, not being able to do
anything against their rifles and bayonets, have to let them ride
whether they have any real right to or not.
At Shanhaikwan the Great Wall of China reaches the sea at last, weary
from its more than 1500 miles of climbing over the mountains. I passed
through the Great Wall in half a dozen different places before I left
China, so that it came to be like an old acquaintance. As you perhaps
know, it was built nearly two thousand years ago, to keep the wild
Mongolian tribes living north and northwest of it from getting into
ancient China. Yet they did get in, in spite of this great barrier along
the frontier, conquering, and for quite a long time governing, all
China.
[Illustration:
In July and August, on the way from Mukden to Peking, one finds plenty
of fruit on sale at the railway stations. A springy hickory or
bamboo pole such as this peddler carries may be shifted from one
shoulder to the other and is not burdensome.
]
[Illustration:
Two views of the Great Wall of China, which clambers over the
mountains for more than 1,500 miles from the desert to the sea.
]
The Great Wall of China has often been called one of the seven wonders
of the world. Perhaps you would not think it so wonderful if you merely
hurried through one of its gates, or saw a short section of it. Much of
it is built of huge bricks or great blocks of cut stone, and it is from
twenty to thirty feet high and wide enough for two automobiles to pass
on its top. When you stop to think that the people who built the wall
had no modern machinery at all, that they had to cut all those stones
and make those great bricks by hand, then carry them and lift them to
where they were needed without even a wagon or a pulley, you will begin
to see that it is a remarkable job. Then if you ride or walk out along
the wall and see how it climbs and winds for mile after mile, up hill
and down dale, you will marvel still more. Finally, when you have passed
through it in half a dozen places, some of them hundreds of miles apart,
and found it still climbing on over high mountains, with a big tower for
its defenders rising above it every few hundred yards, you will
certainly admit that it is one of the greatest works of man.
If the Great Wall of China were laid down on the United States, it would
stretch from New York nearly to Omaha, even with all its twists and
curves; and if it were straightened out it would reach almost to Denver.
It is true that it is not a solid stone wall. When we rode out along it
on donkeys behind the round-roofed town of Shanhaikwan, we found that
there it is really two brick walls, each about three feet thick, the
space between filled with earth and broken stone and the top paved with
bricks. These slate colored bricks are huge compared to ours; one of
them weighs more than twenty pounds. It is true also that far out on the
borders of Tibet, where the Great Wall ends at Kaiyukwan, it becomes
merely a high ridge of baked mud. But I am sure no nation to-day would
care to build one like it, even with modern machinery. The Chinese, by
the way, call the wall the “Wan Li Chang Cheng,” or the
Ten-Thousand-Li-Long Wall. As a Chinese _li_ is about one third of our
mile, the Chinese exaggerate in calling it more than three thousand
miles long. It really is only half that length, but I am sure it seemed
even longer to the many thousands of drafted men who built it!
China a Vast Graveyard
There were many Chinese towns, with mobs of rickshaw-men struggling for
passengers at the stations, on the all-day ride from Shanhaikwan to
Tientsin. Some were large walled cities, where we could catch a glimpse
of very narrow streets as packed with people as our train was; and
everywhere we were made to realize how overcrowded a country China is.
If the living are many, the dead seem still more numerous. The country
is dotted with little cone-shaped mounds of earth, most of them about
four feet high. They are Chinese graves, very few of them marked by a
stone or in any other way.
The Chinese revere their ancestors so deeply that each family preserves
its graves for dozens, sometimes even hundreds, of generations. When a
man dies, his children go to a geomancer, a kind of wizard, and have him
decide where the body should be buried. The geomancer pretends to
consult the invisible spirits which most Chinese still believe in, and
finally chooses a spot where he claims the dead man can rest well. As
the places chosen by geomancers may be anywhere, there are no graveyards
in China. Rather one might say that the whole country is a graveyard. We
thought the unmarked mounds on the way to Peking were thick, but later I
saw millions of them, always thickest near the big cities.
[Illustration:
In dry northern China, after a field has been plowed, the clods of
earth are sometimes broken up by dragging a stone roller over them.
]
The graves are a great hardship to the people of China. With nearly half
a billion population, old China can hardly furnish any one man land
enough to grow food for his family. Yet almost every farmer’s little
patch of earth is made still smaller by the grave-mounds of his
ancestors. He has to plow around these graves every year, and must not
plant on them, so that they add to his work and decrease his crops. In
olden times the Chinese leveled their graves whenever a new dynasty
ascended the throne. But now that there are no more emperors, the graves
are left, and it begins to look as if some day there will be nothing
else left.
[Illustration:
The way to the Ming tombs is lined with figures of camels, elephants,
and other creatures. How large they are may be seen by comparing
with the small boy, who seems to be trying to find out “how the
camel got his hump.” Each figure is carved from a single block of
granite.
]
The rich Chinese have much more elaborate graves than the simple mounds
of earth. If a man leaves his descendants money enough, a temple is
built to his memory. Here members of his family come, often for hundreds
of years afterward, to burn incense and say prayers before his
spirit-tablet. The tombs of dead Chinese emperors are still more costly.
There are groups of them on the north, east, and west of Peking. Two of
the groups may be reached by train, but Tung-ling, or the Eastern Tombs,
just north of where we were now traveling, can be reached only on foot
or on donkey-back, and this group I found most interesting. There are
not a dozen emperors buried at Tung-ling, yet the tombs cover hundreds
of acres. Each tomb includes several large buildings, elaborately
decorated inside and out, and there is a walled village of caretakers
for each tomb.
Imperial Tombs
The people whose business it is to look after the tombs are all Manchus,
because only Manchu emperors are buried at Tung-ling. This is true also
of Hsi-ling, the Western Tombs, a hundred miles away on the other side
of Peking. So closely do the watchers guard the things belonging to the
dead rulers that three men with their keys are required to open one
tomb-temple. I got permission from the high-caste Manchu head man of one
of the villages to visit the tomb of the famous Empress Dowager, the
crafty old woman who ruled China for a long time up to the beginning of
the present century. One man knelt to unlock a padlock at the bottom of
the great door, another man climbed a stepladder to unlock one at the
top, while a third man attended to the ordinary lock in the middle.
Inside there were chairs covered with silk of bright yellow, the
imperial color. Yellow dragons, a symbol of the rulers, climbed the big
black pillars supporting the ceiling. The ceiling itself and the walls
were painted in colored squares. Food in silver and gold and lacquer
dishes had been set before the altar; for the Chinese believe that the
spirits of the dead become hungry just as living people do.
The approach to a Chinese imperial tomb is lined with stone images of
animals and men. They are nearly always in pairs: two elephants, two
camels, two mandarins, two warriors, two horses, two strange beasts that
never existed anywhere except in a Chinese imagination. Especially at
the tombs of the Mings (who preceded the Manchus) north of Peking, the
stone guardians or servants are remarkable. Even the camels and
elephants are fully life-size, though they are chiseled out of hard
granite. Some of the stone men are so huge that I came barely to their
knees. At the Manchu tombs the stone figures are not so large, but the
carving is finer.
Great pine forests surround all the imperial tombs, and people are
sternly forbidden to cut down a single tree. In fact until recently the
mountain range back of Tung-ling could not be touched by the ax or the
plow, because it was considered a “shield” against the evil influences
from the north that might disturb the dead emperors. But soon after the
revolution the government allowed the forests on the “shield” to be cut,
so that now the range supplies many fine logs for lumber, and colonists
have begun to cultivate the hillsides. It was a queer sight to see men
chopping and burning down the forests, and living and planting, here in
ancient China, very much as our pioneers and frontiersmen did when
America was first being settled.
A Manchu Summer Capital
Over the range behind Tung-ling and outside the Great Wall is a very
remarkable place called Jehol which few foreign travelers ever see. It
was a summer home of the Manchu emperors, and some of them built
magnificent palaces and surprising temples there. One called the Potala
is copied after the great temple of the Dalai Lama in Lhasa in Tibet,
which very few white men have seen. It clambers in building after
building up the hillside. Another temple has inside it a golden figure
of Buddha so large that I had to climb to the fourth story to see the
face, and many of its dozens of arms were much higher than that. Still
another temple has five hundred life-size golden Buddhas, varying in
features and attitudes, sitting on either side of long gloomy
passageways. These figures we shall find in most large Chinese cities.
They are supposed to represent Buddha in all of his moods and tempers.
The scenery of Jehol I found far from ordinary. Among other strange
forms in the great circle of mountains about it is a mammoth upright
rock shaped like a policeman’s night-stick. The Chinese call it the
“clothes-beater,” because to them it resembles the club which Chinese
women use in washing their clothes at the edge of a stream or mud-hole.
Nearly half a day distant from Jehol by donkey travel I could still see
this strange rock standing above the horizon.
Along the railway from Manchuria the territory grows very uninteresting.
When large mounds, almost as white as dirty snow, rose on the landscape,
we at first took these to be graves, but found that they were salt,
shoveled up in the great pans of earth in which sea water is evaporated.
Salt is a very important product in China, although there are almost no
mines of solid salt, such as we have in America. There are salt
“gardens,” owned by the government but managed by foreigners, from which
formerly Peking received large revenues. Now most of the money goes to
local dictators.
Tientsin, the port for Peking, and the leading port in northern China,
is seventy miles above the mouth of the Pei-ho and about the same
distance southeast of Peking. It was opened to foreign trade and
residence by treaty in 1860. In the foreign settlement, called
Tsuchulin, half a dozen European countries own land, and have their own
laws and police and government. Yet about the docks even of this foreign
part of town we saw many gaunt, hungry-looking coolies who haul wagons
of freight along the cobblestone wharves for wages of about six cents a
day. We soon left Tientsin behind and sped away toward Peking.
CHAPTER IV
OUR HOME IN PEKING
For nine months we lived in the Chinese capital, and found it a
delightful home. Our house was out on the eastern edge of the Tartar
City, so close under the great Tartar Wall that the sun was late in
reaching us every morning. It was a Chinese house. That is, it had no
cellar and no upstairs, not even a garret. Really it was four houses,
one on each side of a brick-paved court about thirty feet square, each
house having two rooms. Whenever we went from the bedrooms to the dining
room, or from the living room to the nursery, we had to go outdoors. But
as the sun is almost always bright in Peking, even on the coldest winter
day, we did not mind doing that. The courtyard of a Chinese house
insures plenty of light and air and makes up for the lack of certain
conveniences that Westerners are used to.
[Illustration:
Outside the Tartar Wall at Peking, showing the watch towers at its
corners. We lived on the eastern edge of the Tartar City, just
inside this wall, and we found that its height made a difference in
the time the sun rose for us. The top of the wall is a promenade
where foreigners and wealthy Chinese often go for an airing.
]
We had five servants, all of whom cost less than one servant does in
most parts of the United States. Four of them were men and one was a
woman, and none of them knew a word of English. So of course we had to
learn Chinese. By his third birthday my son spoke Chinese better than he
did English. One servant, called “boy,” though he was forty years old,
was a kind of butler and chambermaid. He made the beds, waited on table,
answered the doorbell, and bossed the other servants. The cook was also
a man, and he was an excellent cook, for he had once worked in the
kitchens of the Manchu court. The coolie was a tall, strong young man
who swept the floors and the court, kept the coal stoves burning, washed
the dishes, and did all the laundry. The rickshaw-man had nothing to do
but draw us about town in his shining rickshaw on its pneumatic-tired
wire wheels. This was kept just inside the street door which opened into
the court. Sometimes he ran five miles with me, as fast as a
cross-country runner, although I weigh about 170 pounds and might have
with me my son or some baggage. The woman servant was called the _ama_.
She took care of the children, besides doing all the sewing and other
work of that kind.
Peking servants do not get Thursday and Sunday afternoons off. They work
all day long, seven days a week, unless you tell them to go out and
enjoy themselves. Yet they are very cheerful and respectful and
kind-hearted. Some Americans and other foreigners living in Peking have
a dozen servants, and a whole collection of houses, one back of the
other, inside a great wall. China, you know, is the land of walls,
though it has no fences. There is a wall around the country, at least on
the north and northwest; almost every city is surrounded by a wall, and
most Chinese live inside a walled “compound.” Ours shut us off
completely from the sight of our neighbors, though not from the sound of
their voices or the noises of the streets. All day long and even late at
night peddlers selling food and all sorts of things wandered through our
street, each one making some peculiar sound to show what he was selling.
The man who sharpened knives and scissors blew a horn or clashed a dozen
pieces of iron fastened together with a cord. The barber twanged what
looked like a huge pair of tweezers. The china-riveter, who mends broken
dishes, carried bells. Blind beggars, tapping along the street with a
long cane, struck a little hammer on a big brass disk like a musician’s
cymbal.
Our Chinese neighbors seemed to eat frequently between meals. When a man
or a woman, a boy or a girl, felt hungry he stood in the doorway of his
house or compound with a few big copper pennies in his hand until the
cabbage man or the rice man or some other food seller came along. A few
of these peddlers had little carts on wheels, but nearly all of them
carried their wares at the ends of a springy pole balanced on one
shoulder. Even the barber carried his shop with him on a pole, and when
our “boy” or our coolie wanted his hair cut, or rather, his head
shaved—for that is the Chinese style now—he squatted out in the street
while the barber did the job.
Peking Streets and Alleys
The _hutung_, as the narrow side streets of Peking are called, are not
paved but are covered with black earth pounded hard by many feet. During
the rainy season, which usually comes in the summer, they are likely to
be deep in mud. But the most unpleasant feature about Peking is its dust
storms. Sometimes immense clouds of dust sweep through the city until
everything—even one’s eyes—is filled with it. One hot night, when we had
left all our windows open, such a storm blew up, and in the morning our
faces and our bedclothes were covered with yellowish brown dust. Some
people think this dust comes from the Gobi Desert, outside the Great
Wall, but actually it consists of particles of dry dirt from the streets
and from the cultivated fields all about Peking.
[Illustration:
This was one of the comparatively few peddlers in our Peking
neighborhood who owned a cart. Plenty of men with things to sell
went through the narrow street outside our house, but most of them
carried their wares on a shoulder pole.
]
Besides its many _hutung_ Peking now has some wide streets on which run
electric street cars. Until recently, however, there was not a street
car in China, except in the foreign concessions in some of the big
ports. The great majority of the Pekingese ride in rickshaws. The police
said that they had registered more than forty thousand of these grown-up
baby-carriages. Not only men but (in spite of a law forbidding it) young
boys draw them. It was a sad sight to see two small boys, who should
have been in school, running along the streets with a big fat man in
their carriage, one boy pulling and the other pushing. Sometimes
rickshaw boys are sent home, but the law is not always enforced. It is
interesting to remember that the rickshaw was brought over to China from
Japan. It is said to have been invented by an American missionary for
the comfort of his invalid wife.
It is said that rickshaw-pullers do not live long, because the running
gives them heart disease. Once during our nine months in Peking I saw a
rickshaw-man who had dropped dead between the shafts, letting the
carriage fall over backward with his passenger. But our own rickshaw-man
was more than forty years old, and he had been running ever since he was
a boy. Life is very hard for most of the poor rickshaw-runners of China,
especially those who do not have regular jobs with a foreigner or a
wealthy Chinese. They have to wander the streets or sit in their
carriages in all kinds of weather, and in the winter some of them freeze
and even starve to death.
Besides its more than forty thousand rickshaws Peking has queer horse
carriages, that look like piano boxes on four wheels; there are quite a
number of bicycles, and of course many automobiles. Some people come in
from the country on horseback, others ride in mule litters, which look
like little prairie schooners without wheels, slung on two poles that
are fastened at each end to a mule. Formerly many people rode in sedan
chairs, carried by men. But now such vehicles are seldom used except to
carry a bride to her wedding or mourners in a funeral procession. Then
they are covered with red cloth and are very gay looking affairs.
Foreigners usually ride in rickshaws, for it is easier to talk to your
“horse” and tell him where to go than to try to guide an automobile
through the narrow and often crowded _hutung_.
[Illustration:
One of the styles of mule-litter in northern China. In such a
conveyance rich men and officials come to Peking from the northeast
or from any region where there are no railroads.
]
Strange Sights in Peking
Peking is so filled with interesting things and places that we did not
see all even in nine months. First there are the shops, selling
everything you can imagine. Some are filled with canned and other goods
from our own land and from Europe. But most of them have only Chinese
wares. Here, for instance, is a toyshop, with all manner of playthings
to amuse the children. The Chinese, who are very fond of children, make
the most amusing toys you have ever seen, though often so flimsy that
they break easily. In some streets there are long lines of silk shops.
The Chinese produce great quantities of silk, and shops selling the same
article are more likely to be grouped than to be scattered about town.
This is so not only in China but almost everywhere in Asia. The clerks
in these shops often wear long silk gowns, like most of the wealthy men.
Perhaps the queerest shops in Peking are the drug stores. Some now have
the same wares as American drug stores, but the old-fashioned ones
display ground tiger bones, which the Chinese think will give a man a
brave heart, rat meat that is supposed to make the hair grow, and
snake-skins that are used for some malady or other.
Then there are the coffin shops. The Chinese who can afford it always
have themselves buried in great wooden coffins that look like big hollow
trees, with tops so heavy that a man cannot lift one of them. Rows of
these are kept in plain sight in the open shops along the streets, for
the Chinese think a coffin is a very pleasant piece of furniture.
Sometimes a Chinese son gives his father a beautiful coffin as a New
Year’s present, and the father keeps it in his parlor and brings in his
neighbors to see it. The Chinese have used so much wood in their coffins
that most of the country has no trees left, except about temples and
imperial tombs.
[Illustration:
A Chinese gentleman taking his pet birds out for a walk.
]
The Chinese are very fond of birds, and there are many bird stores in
Peking and all the other large cities. We often saw an old man walking
down our _hutung_ with two or three birds sitting on a stick, each with
a string tied about one leg. Now and then they flew out as far as the
string would let them, and then came back and perched on the stick
again. Even bankers and rich merchants take their birds out for an
airing in China. Sometimes we would see a man carrying a cage in either
hand, and if he could find a park he would go and hang the cages in a
tree and let the birds sing, while he sat underneath smoking his long
pipe. Another curious Chinese custom is to fasten a whistle to a pigeon
in such a way that when the bird flies the air rushes through the
whistle and blows it. Some of these whistling pigeons are always flying
about over Peking and other large Chinese cities, making a weird music
and surrounded by flocks of other pigeons just as the sheep or cow with
a bell is followed by the others of the flock or herd.
[Illustration:
The buildings inside the formerly “Forbidden City” of Peking contain
great art treasures, and people are now allowed to see these—but
they are not supposed to take pictures. Down near the big bronze
turtle is a policeman who is on his way to tell me that my camera
must not be used.
]
In Peking there are wonderful old palaces and temples such as the
temples of Confucius and the lamas from Mongolia. In the center of the
Tartar City are dozens of palaces with golden-yellow roofs, all
surrounded by an imperial-yellow wall. Once the emperors lived there,
and it was called the Forbidden City. But now travelers can visit it by
paying a small fee, and find inside museums of old Chinese things,
wonderful vases and paintings and lacquered screens. Around this old
home of the emperors is the Imperial City, once filled with Manchu
courtiers and surrounded by a great wall roofed with blue tiles. Then
outside that is the Tartar City, in which we lived, though formerly only
the soldiers of the Manchu rulers with their families could live there.
South of this is what foreigners call the Chinese City, bigger than all
the Tartar City and also surrounded by a great wall.
Walking on the City Wall
As the streets are not always pleasant, most foreigners and the richer
Chinese take their promenades on top of the Tartar Wall. Just outside
our house was a gate that opened on a ramp or inclined walk leading to
the top of this wall, and every afternoon our little boy would go up
there to play. It is even larger than the Great Wall of China, being as
high as a three-story house and so wide that four automobiles might run
abreast on it. It is made of great dull-blue bricks, filled in between
with earth and stones, and paved over with other bricks. A parapet on
either side, so high that only a grown person can see over it, keeps one
from falling off the wall. At each corner of the city, and over the two
gates in each side of the wall, are great roofed structures that look
like apartment houses, though only birds and bats live in them.
It is thirteen miles around the top of the Tartar Wall. One day I
started out after breakfast and walked the entire distance, returning
just in time for one o’clock dinner. As most of the wall is made of
earth, grass and shrubs grow on its top and sometimes on its sides. In
some places I had to make my way through what looked like a jungle. But
the Chinese find use for everything, and in the autumn men come and cut
the high grass for hay and the brush for firewood, and sometimes
soldiers who guard the gates make little gardens on top of the wall. In
one place, behind the home of the American Minister to China, our
Marines patrol the wall day and night and do not let anyone who might
make trouble pass. That is because in 1900 the Chinese rose against the
foreigners in their Legation Quarter at the foot of the southern wall
and tried to kill them all.
A queer thing about the Tartar Wall of Peking is that only foreigners
and the better class of Chinese are allowed on it. Even those of our
servants who had been born in Peking and had always lived there had
never been on top of the wall, until they worked for us. The Chinese say
that if the poor people were allowed on the wall they would crowd it and
make it very filthy; the foreigners say it is too easy a place to attack
them from, if the people get angry again as they were in 1900. So our
little boy was a kind of passport for our servants. If the _ama_ had him
with her, the Chinese soldiers at the ramp-gate let her go up and stay
without question. But if she tried to go up alone they would not open
for her. So our “boy” and our coolie and even our cook used to ask
permission to take our small son up on the wall, in order that they
might enjoy the wonderful view of Peking, green with tree-tops, and of
the Western Hills far off on the horizon where the sun sets.
[Illustration:
The Temple of Heaven at Peking is out in the Chinese City. Here the
Emperor formerly came once a year to worship. Now the place is a
tourist picnic ground. In the foreground are the chairs of an
open-air restaurant.
]
CHAPTER V
SOME QUEER CHINESE CUSTOMS
Looking down from the great Tartar Wall of Peking we saw Chinese ways
quite different from our own. The great flat, tree-topped capital with
only artificial Mei-shan, or Coal Hill, rising above it, does not look
at all like an American city. The highest structures are the empty
defense towers over the city gates. The only buildings reminding one of
our own large cities are those built by foreigners—hotels, mission
schools, and American hospitals. The city stretches so far that
schoolbooks used to call Peking the largest city in the world. Now we
know that it has hardly a million inhabitants, and we realize that a
very extensive city with mostly one-story houses inside compounds
(walled enclosures) may have fewer people than a city smaller in area
but with buildings of many stories.
There are few sewers in Peking, and in most parts of it there is no
running water. Just outside our compound wall was a big well with a
windlass and some ancient buckets. All day long, men with loudly
squeaking wheelbarrows wheeled water in tall wooden tubs from this and
the many other public wells all about town, and sold it at the poorer
houses. The street sprinklers of Peking consist of two buckets of water
on the end of a pole, and a long-handled wooden dipper. A soldier or a
coolie moves slowly along the principal streets throwing water with this
dipper. As it is often bitterly cold in Peking (though a clear, dry cold
that is rather enjoyable) ice forms quickly, and sometimes even the man
with the dipper has hard work standing up. In midwinter I used to ride
about the city on a little red horse that I had brought from far western
China, and in some of the streets made icy by the dripping of
water-wheelbarrows or by the street-sprinkler, my mount acted as if he
were on skates.
[Illustration:
The part of Peking known as the “Forbidden City.” It is not forbidden
any more, because there are no more emperors to live there and keep
ordinary people out. One can look down upon its wonderful palaces,
as here, from Mei-shan (“Coal Hill”).
]
[Illustration:
In China prisoners are given useful work to do, as they are in
America. This man, in a prison yard, is spinning yarn. The
characters on his jacket give his number, which is 820.
]
Inside the corners of the city wall are dumping grounds. But dozens of
rag-pickers, mostly women and children, come to claw among the rubbish,
and they leave very little. Here the camels bringing freight from the
north and west sleep by night. Because the foreigners they see are never
ragged, as so many Orientals are, most Chinese think that all foreigners
are rich. We could hardly pass through the smaller streets, or peer over
the parapet of the Tartar Wall on which the common people are not
allowed, without hearing dozens of boys and girls shouting “E mao
ch’ien!” As nearly as we can translate so different a language as the
Chinese, this means “One dime money!” But any of these ragged urchins
would be glad even of a big copper, and they would remain friendly and
smiling even if we gave them nothing. One of the most remarkable things
about the Chinese is that they can be cheerful even when it seems as if
they must be miserable. The real beggars of Peking are professionals,
who do nothing else. They have a union, and many of them have much
better clothes than those they wear when wandering up and down the
streets. Begging is not looked upon as disgraceful by some Chinese. In
fact, they have a very gentle word for a beggar; they call him a
_yao-fan-ti_—that is, a “want-rice-man.”
Skating, Eating and Sleeping
[Illustration:
Women making silk thread by the crude process still used in most of
China. The thread is being unwound from a large reel onto smaller
ones.
]
For a few days we were able to skate on the broad moat outside the
Tartar Wall. But soon dust ruined the surface of the ice, and the only
fun that remained was to be pushed along in sleds by coolies. Then men
began to cut the ice and pack it away in hollows in the ground along the
moats, covering it with earth and reed mats. There are no ice-houses in
Peking, and the average Chinese prefers tea to any kind of cold drink,
even in summer. It is a real summer too, even in Peking, so hot that
about the first of June great reed-mat awnings and false roofs are put
up over most of the stores and the courtyards of all but the poorest
people. A big company rents these _peng_ and sets them up, but will not
sell them. In the fall the company sends men to take them away again.
Peking has thousands of public eating places. They range all the way
from the little stalls for coolies which we often passed in “Square
Handkerchief Alley” and other narrow streets on our way to the central
part of town, to great restaurants where rich Chinese come for their
feasts and banquets. Although Chinese food is different from our own,
most foreigners become fond of it, or at least of some of it. Such
things as old pickled eggs, sharks’ fins, bird’s-nest soup, and
silkworms may taste better to the Chinese than they do to us; but there
are also pork, and duck, and pheasants and partridges, vegetables and
fruits, and many other things quite like the food we eat. But the
cooking is different, and everything must be cut up into small pieces
before it is put on the table, for there are no knives and forks. The
Chinese eat with two chopsticks, made of bamboo or bone, or perhaps
ivory, and both held in one hand. After some practice we had no great
difficulty in picking up our food with chopsticks, but we never became
accustomed to eating out of the same bowls as other diners, and we did
not quite like having a kind Chinese host pick out a tidbit for us with
his own chopsticks.
[Illustration:
A Chinese kindly showing us the proper way to hold chopsticks. As a
matter of fact, if he had known that I was taking his picture he
would probably have run away. Some Chinese think that anyone by
harming the picture of a person can harm the person himself.
]
The Chinese do not kiss and they seldom put their arms around one
another. Nor do they shake hands as we do. When two men meet, each one
clasps his own hands together and shakes them, at the same time bowing
and smiling. Women do the same. Perhaps the Chinese and Japanese are
right when they say that kissing, or even hand-shaking, is not very
sanitary.
Chinese babies have no cribs or cradles; instead they learn to sleep
tied in a cloth on the mother’s back, or on the back of a servant or a
young brother or sister. No doubt it is because they are brought up in
this way that the Chinese can sleep anywhere at any time, undisturbed by
anything. When a Chinese baby is old enough to walk it is given gay
cloth shoes with a cat’s face on the toe of each. Small children’s caps
usually have the face of a demon on the front, because some Chinese
still think this will scare off evil spirits that might harm the child.
But many of the old customs no longer have a particular meaning.
Wedding and Funeral Processions
Often we met strange processions in the streets of Peking. We knew that
it was a wedding procession if somewhere in the middle there was a
closed sedan chair, covered with bright red silk. Most Chinese marriages
are still arranged between the families by matchmakers, and the new
husband and wife probably have never seen each other. The girl, at
least, may not want to be married at all. Sometimes people on the street
can hear her crying, inside her chair, though no one is able to see her.
When she is delivered at her husband’s house she becomes not only a wife
but also a kind of servant of her new mother-in-law. Some Chinese men
have several wives, but the first one always has the best position. Of
course the Christianized Chinese follow Western practice in having but
one wife, and before marrying, many of them court a young lady of their
own choice.
If the principal part of a procession is a longer, heavier burden than a
sedan chair, the onlooker knows that a funeral is passing. The heavy
wooden coffin, carried by a dozen or more men, is usually covered with
brightly colored silks, and generally there is a live rooster on top of
it. The rooster seems to represent the soul of the dead person, and is
sacrificed at the grave. These processions are often very long, and
whether a wedding or a funeral is being held there is a great variety of
the noises which the Chinese consider music.
[Illustration:
The principal part of a Chinese funeral passing through the streets of
Peking. Bright colors are used in the covering for the coffin, in
the hearse, and in the garments of the pallbearers, so that the
procession is not very sad looking to an American eye.
]
Dozens and sometimes hundreds of ragged men and boys, dressed in rather
dirty garments of strange designs and gay colors, march in a funeral
procession. They carry queer looking pieces of furniture and other
strange things. Some bear paper horses and automobiles, paper wives and
servants, bundles of silver or gold-colored paper to represent money.
All these are burned at the grave, because the Chinese think the dead
need such things in the next world. Centuries ago live horses and live
servants were killed at the grave, so that they could serve their
masters in the Chinese heaven.
In a Chinese Theater
[Illustration:
This automobile, which I saw in the _hutung_ (narrow street) leading
to our home in Peking, was made entirely of paper and cardboard,
including chauffeur and footman. It was to be carried in the funeral
procession of a rich man and burned at his grave so that, as his
relatives believed, he might use it in the next world.
]
Now and then we went to a Chinese theater, not only in Peking but in the
smaller cities and villages. Some of the theaters in the capital are
built much like ours, though the plays on the stage are quite different.
Many foreigners go to see Mei Lan-fang, China’s greatest actor. He is a
slender, ladylike youth, and always plays girls’ parts, as did his
father and his grandfather. In China acting is considered a very low
profession, but Mei Lan-fang now earns as much as our greatest actors. I
spent an afternoon at his home in the Chinese City of Peking, finding it
filled with very artistic things, and my actor host proved himself a
cultured gentleman.
[Illustration:
Mei Lan-fang, China’s greatest actor. He plays only women’s parts.
Here he is representing a girl who led troops to war after her
father was killed.
]
In the old-fashioned theaters of Peking things are much as they are in
the crude actors’ booths set up at the edges of villages or as they are
in American circus tents. The audience sits on rough wooden benches, and
the back of each bench has a shelf for those sitting behind. Men and
boys place cups of tea and little dishes of peanuts and squash-seeds and
other food before each spectator. There is always a great hubbub in the
audience, for everyone one talks, and even shouts whenever he likes. To
add to the confusion, hot towels are constantly being thrown back and
forth over the heads of the people. One man or several men stand at a
tub of hot water and wring out the towels, then throw them in bundles to
other men, who distribute them to the audience and gather them up again.
In Chinese restaurants also the guests use hot towels before and after
eating.
[Illustration:
A view inside a Chinese theater, showing a play in progress on the
high stage. For the moment, the “outside-country-man” who was taking
the picture interested the audience more than the drama did. That
would not bother Chinese actors, but imagine what some of our
American “stars” would do if they were to be interrupted in such a
way!
]
On a Chinese stage there is no curtain and almost no scenery. Or rather,
the curtain, such as it is, is at the back of the stage. The actors go
behind it to change their costumes, but they can always be seen by part
of the audience. Much of the acting is pantomime; that is, motions
without words. There is also a kind of dancing, and often the actors
shriek in terrible, unnatural voices. A man with a lot of flags sticking
out from his shoulders is supposed to be a general. A man who carries a
kind of whip is supposed to be on horseback, and there are other symbols
that mean something to the Chinese but nothing to foreign spectators.
Foreigners find the Chinese theater property man very amusing. He wears
black or coolie blue, and is supposed to be invisible to the audience.
So he wanders about freely among the actors, throwing down a cushion for
one of them to kneel on, piling a chair on a table to represent a
mountain, and so on. If an actor is “killed,” the property man helps him
to his feet and he walks off the stage. If the moon is supposed to be
shining, this “invisible” coolie holds up a crescent or a circle of
paper on the end of a stick.
Some of the audience wander about among the actors and stand or sit on
the stage. Bands of ragged boys may crowd so close as to be under the
actors’ feet. Musicians with strange instruments sit on one side of the
stage, and come and go whenever they like. The deafening noises they
call music are positively painful to foreign ears. At intervals a
servant of one of the actors, dressed in his everyday clothes (even if
the drama represents a time centuries ago), brings his master a cup of
tea. The actor holds a corner of his costume across his face and drinks,
and the audience pretends not to see him do anything that is not part of
the play.
CHAPTER VI
ACROSS MONGOLIA TO URGA
Often we saw long files of camels come marching into Peking with
dignified tread. Unlike the camels of Egypt and Arabia, which have one
hump, these had two. In the winter they were very shaggy with long hair.
This hair is so valuable, for making blankets and similar things, that
in spring the drivers tie networks of strings about the animals to keep
them from shedding it along the way. In olden days these camel caravans
carried all the freight between Mongolia and Peking, and even to-day
they are strong competitors of the railroads in many parts of northern
China.
The camels I saw so strongly lured me to the desert that I decided to
follow them over one of the long caravan routes. Besides, I wanted to
see Urga, the strange capital of Mongolia, far away across the Gobi
Desert. If I had traveled with the camels, however, I should have been
six weeks or two months reaching my destination. So I took the train
from the northeastern corner of Peking and traveled all day to Kalgan,
passing through the Great Wall near the ancient tombs of the Ming
emperors. From Kalgan, an American automobile, belonging to a Russian
who buys furs and sends them to New York, carried me 700 miles across
the desert in three and a half days. Yet there was no road at all most
of the way. First we had to climb a sandy and rocky river valley, some
of it so steep that teams of mules helped to draw the automobile.
Mongolia is a high plateau, several thousand feet above sea level. Then
we sped away across the Gobi, sometimes along the tracks made by the
camel and ox-cart caravans and sometimes by no track at all.
[Illustration:
The red-clad Mongol lamas or priests gathered excitedly around our
automobile whenever they found us halted on the 700-mile trip across
the Gobi Desert to Urga. The car was loaded to the limit.
]
[Illustration:
All Mongols ride, though their horses usually look too small for them.
This man wears his queer-shaped hat (representing a sacred mountain
in Mongolia) to show that he, like most Mongol men, is a priest or
lama. He wears also red boots and he stands by the side of a yurt or
felt tent.
]
Much of the Gobi is hard gravel, with thin brown grass on it, not
shifting sand like the Sahara. There was even quite a lot of fertile
land on the first day’s ride, and thousands of Chinese colonists have
begun to cultivate this and build villages there. The Mongols themselves
are nomads, who do not plant but keep great herds of cattle, flocks of
sheep, and many horses, which they drive about wherever they can find
pasture. Their houses are movable, also, hardly more substantial than
tents. The Mongols call them _yurts_. They are round, with an almost
flat top, about six feet high in the center. Until they become dirty
they are white, for they are made of thick felt, fastened to a light
wooden framework. The Mongol women make this felt by laying sheep’s wool
on the ground, pouring water on it, and rolling it out into large
sheets. One of these houses can be taken down and packed on the backs of
animals in an hour, and set up somewhere else almost as quickly.
A Night in a Mongol Tent
We spent one night in a _yurt_. We had expected to sit out on the desert
all that night, until we caught sight of three or four weather-darkened
felt huts. Half a dozen camels were lying on the bare ground near them,
and some twenty Mongol men, women, and children came out of the huts
when they heard us coming. One of the men was a lama, or Mongolian
priest, and though he also was only a visitor he bossed everyone within
reach. More than half the men of Mongolia are lamas, who usually live in
great monasteries in various parts of the thinly populated country. They
have shaven heads and wear long dark-red cloaks and big red boots.
Such boots, as a matter of fact, are worn by all the Mongols, even women
and children. They are large enough to allow for half a dozen thick
woolen stockings, for the weather is very cold most of the time in high
Mongolia. It is so difficult to walk in these boots that Mongols on foot
move much as if they were wearing a ball-and-chain, like prisoners. But
this does not matter, for they travel almost entirely on horseback. Men,
women, and children are as much at home on a horse’s back as our cowboys
are. They all dress a good deal alike, in long coats usually made of
sheepskin with the wool on the inside. But the women, especially in the
region of Urga, the capital, and of the two or three other towns, wear
one of the strangest headdresses in the world. The photograph on page 78
will give you some idea of how peculiar it is.
[Illustration:
The nomad Mongols of the Gobi live in round tents or _yurts_. On a
light wooden framework they stretch thick felt made from the skins
of their own sheep. Sometimes they have a stovepipe but usually they
simply leave a flap of the tent open so that smoke may escape. The
Mongols can take a house down or set one up in about an hour.
]
[Illustration:
I was glad of the warmth of a great sheepskin coat when I traveled
across the Gobi Desert. With me are a Mongol and his wife.
]
When the lama invited us inside one of the _yurts_ we had to stoop to
get through the tiny doorway. The door was merely a flap of felt, and
when this was closed the _yurt_ became very hot. Yet the Mongols kept on
all their fur coats and other heavy garments, as if they were entirely
comfortable. A little iron cage in the center of the tent was filled
with fuel which made so quick and hot a fire that I think I should have
been roasted if I had not gone outside occasionally. No wonder nearly
all Mongols seem to have bad colds! Tea was prepared over this fire-cage
and served to us in brass bowls. The Mongols eat almost nothing but
meat. When I opened a can of cherries they hesitated to taste them, and
they were almost as much afraid of a bar of chocolate as if it had been
dynamite. I tried to give a bit of it to a young Mongol woman in the
_yurt_, but I found that this is very bad manners in Mongolia. Instead,
I should have handed it to one of the older women and let her pass it on
to the girl. Yet the women quarreled over the tin cans we threw away,
for such things are very valuable to people in a desert land.
[Illustration:
Two Mongols of the Gobi Desert riding their camels down a river valley
into Kalgan, a Chinese city. The camels have on their shaggy winter
coats.
]
By and by all the women went to other tents and we lay down to sleep
with the lama and two other Mongol men. The lama sent another man
outside to sleep on the ground, because there was not room enough for
him inside, and all night long we heard him coughing. The lama took off
all but his trousers, said his prayers in a loud voice, and lay down on
a bundle of sheepskin robes. One of these robes he pulled over himself.
When I set up my cot, the lama said he would not dare to sleep on such a
thing, for fear of falling off it in his sleep.
We might have lost our way during those three days if it had not been
for a row of telegraph poles carrying a single wire clear across the
Gobi. This is a part of the line from Peking to Paris. (When our first
little girl was born in Peking, the cablegram we sent to America was
flashed across Mongolia.) On the third night we slept in a lonely
telegraph station where two Russians live the year round. The last
half-day was among low hills. Along the way we saw thousands of marmots,
looking like gophers or prairie dogs as they sat on their hind legs
outside their holes. Many American women wear coats made of the skins of
the Gobi marmots. We also saw hundreds of antelope, sometimes long lines
of them racing across the horizon.
The Holy Capital of Mongolia
Urga is a holy city. In it lives Bogda-Khan, whom the Mongols call a
“living Buddha” and treat like a god. When he dies, his soul is supposed
to enter the body of a boy born about the same time, and this boy is
brought to the great cluster of palaces inside a wall on the outskirts
of Urga and becomes a new Bogda-Khan. Pilgrims come hundreds of miles to
worship him, throwing themselves down on their faces on boards placed
outside his palace walls. I found this “god” had a dozen kinds of
automobiles and spent many thousands of dollars every year for other
Western inventions that he hardly knew how to use. Whenever he went to
the golden-roofed palaces of Urga itself he rode in an automobile,
usually his Ford, though he had several much larger cars.
[Illustration:
Just where the driver will sit on this queer vehicle is a mystery, but
perhaps he prefers to stand. The cart is of a Russian-Mongol
variety, seen at Urga, and the passengers are Mongol ladies in their
amazing headdress.
]
Most of Urga is made up of temples and lamaseries, the monasteries of
the lamas. The most important ones have roofs covered with real gold
which gleams in the cold sunshine until it almost hurts the eyes.
Thousands of lamas in their dark-red robes live in Urga, and spend much
of their time squatting on cushions in long, closely packed rows inside
their religious buildings, studying their sacred texts by shouting them
at the top of their voices. In Urga there are hundreds of prayer wheels,
or rather, wooden cylinders, each under its own little roof. Inside each
“wheel” are thousands of prayers written on tissue paper, and the
Mongols think that every time they turn the cylinder around it is the
same as saying all those prayers aloud. So long lines of pilgrims march
about among the temples and stop to turn each prayer cylinder. Some of
the most pious throw themselves face down at every step, when making
this circuit, so that it takes them several days to make the rounds and
be ready to go home again.
The Mongols do not keep shops, though they sometimes sell things in the
open-air market on the bank of their dirty little river. Some Russians
have stores in Urga, but nearly all the traders are Chinese. All kinds
of furs can be bought there, but nearly everything else for sale comes
from China or the outside world. The streets are just muddy lanes, and
most of the houses are surrounded by walls of tree trunks set upright in
the ground close together and sharpened on top. They reminded me of the
stockades our ancestors built against the Indians.
China still claims that Mongolia belongs to her, but most of it is now
really independent—or rather, it is controlled by Bolshevik Russia.
Although the officials are Mongols, Russian “advisers” sent out from
Moscow tell them what to do. These advisers, like the lamas, seemed very
surly. Indeed, I have never been in a place where I felt less welcome.
For one thing, hardly had we reached Urga before my American companion
and I were arrested because someone said we had shot a Mongol on our way
across the desert. If we had been convicted we should probably have been
shot ourselves at sunrise next morning. But it took us only a few hours
to prove that we had been many miles away from where the Mongol was
shot, and that he was not hurt much anyway. It is not far from Urga to
Irkutsk, where the Trans-Siberian Railway would have carried us to
Europe. But of course I turned back toward Kalgan and Peking where I had
left my family, crossing the Gobi this time in two and a half days,
though even in September we found much snow and ice.
[Illustration:
A camel caravan making a slow journey across northern China. Usually
ten or twelve camels are held together by stout cords. One end of a
cord is fastened to the back of a camel and the other end to a stick
which runs through the nostrils of the camel behind.
]
CHAPTER VII
SHANTUNG, LAND OF CONFUCIUS
One day I took the train back to Tientsin and down to Tzinanfu, capital
of the province of Shantung, the land of Confucius. Grave-mounds of all
sizes were thick everywhere along the way, for this is one of the oldest
and most densely populated parts of crowded old China. Tzinanfu, with
its huge city wall surrounded by a moat in which many of the women wash
their clothes, is a mixture of very old Chinese ways and some quite
modern ones. Two railways come into it and automobiles may be seen in
the wide streets of a suburb outside its wall, yet most of the people
still travel as they did hundreds of years ago. Many ride on donkeys and
many more in “Peking carts.” As these have no springs, they are very
painful vehicles on the terrible roads of most of China. Every time a
Peking cart strikes a rut or a stone, the side of the box whacks the
passenger, so that unless he puts pillows or quilts all about him he
will be covered with bruises at the end of the trip. Only the front of
the box being open, the traveler by Peking cart can see little unless he
kneels and peers out above the mule’s tail. One boy I knew said these
strange carriages ought to be called “peek-out carts” instead of “Peking
carts.”
[Illustration:
A “Peking cart” of the kind used very generally in northern China. In
southern China the roads are seldom wide enough for a two-wheeled
vehicle. Being without springs or axle-grease, the Peking cart gives
one a rough ride, and most of the roads are not so smooth as this
one.
]
But the chief Shantung vehicles are wheelbarrows. Hundreds of them go
screeching back and forth between the stations and the walled city, some
with freight and some with passengers. They are much larger than our
wheelbarrows, with a big wooden wheel sometimes as high as a boy ten
years old. Different kinds are used in the city and country. The city
wheelbarrows have a long benchlike seat with a back on each side of the
wheel, and a rest for the feet. They reminded me of an Irish jaunting
car. Often I saw one coolie wheeling eight and sometimes ten Chinese
women, who, because of their bound feet, could not walk to the factories
where they worked. These city wheelbarrows, which are cheaper than
rickshaws because more than one person can ride on one, even carry many
men passengers.
A Wheelbarrow Journey
[Illustration:
Passenger wheelbarrow in Tzinanfu, capital of Shantung Province.
]
[Illustration:
Once I changed places with the middle coolie of the three who
furnished motive power for my country wheelbarrow in traveling
through Shantung Province. I found the job not so hard as it had
looked from my seat on the barrow.
]
I made a long trip on one of the country wheelbarrows. The American
missionary with whom I went weighed nearly two hundred pounds and I
weigh about one hundred and seventy. Moreover, we had at least one
hundred and fifty pounds of baggage. Yet both of us and all our things
rode on one wheelbarrow. The platforms along its sides were so long that
we could stretch out on top of our bedding and other baggage and chat as
comfortably as if we had been lying in the same bed. One man pushed and
steered at the handles behind and another pulled at a pair of handles in
front. Each of them had the stout strap fastened to the handles passing
over his shoulders. On the way back we had a third coolie, who walked
ahead pulling at a rope attached to our primitive vehicle. Sometimes a
donkey is hitched to the wheelbarrow in this way, and often the coolie’s
sons tug all day at these ropes, from the time they are old enough to be
of any use. Occasionally a coolie puts a sail on his wheelbarrow, so
that the wind will help him along. Once I changed places with the coolie
between the front handles, and found that his work was not quite so hard
as it looked. Yet I should hate to have to earn my living as a Shantung
wheelbarrow coolie, at about ten or fifteen cents a day.
[Illustration:
A country wheelbarrow in Shantung Province, larger than those used in
the cities, on which an American missionary and I made a long
journey. In the background is one of the old towers which were used
for sending messages before the telegraph reached China. A fire was
built on top of such a tower and controlled in such a way that the
signal could be read by watchmen on the next tower. You have perhaps
read that the American Indians used puffs of smoke as signals in a
similar way.
]
One reason the wheelbarrow is used in Shantung and many other parts of
China is that the roads are often miserable trails too narrow for a
two-wheeled vehicle. China has had terrible roads for thousands of
years, because the rich men who rode or were carried or pushed did not
care how bad they were, and the poor coolies who were the sufferers had
nothing to say about it. Even to-day the roads run on private land and
the owner often plows them up every spring in order to plant the ground
they are on.
[Illustration:
Many a Chinese coolie gets his hair dressed once a month by a
wandering outdoor barber. In this case, a switch is just being
added. It is only in the more backward parts of China that men keep
their queues. Most sell the queue for a few cents and have their
heads shaved all over. Shears were not used even in the days when
the queue flourished.
]
We passed several big towers, built of bricks on the outside and filled
with stones and earth within, like China’s walls. These were used, for
hundreds if not thousands of years, to send messages across the empire,
by building fires on top of one after another. Now that China has a
modern telegraph system these towers are not used and are falling, or
being torn down for the materials in them.
In most parts of China the queue, or what we sometimes disrespectfully
call the “pigtail,” is no longer worn. Although many of the countrymen
of Shantung Province still have themselves barbered in that fashion, a
great many queues must have been cut off even there since the revolution
of 1911, to make millions of hair nets for American and European women.
I saw a whole jailful of prisoners making hair nets, but the demand has
decreased since bobbed hair became popular in the Western world. If
there are any Chinese women who bob their hair I did not see them. But
in some cities in China the police cut off and sell the queue of any man
caught wearing one. Probably the poor coolies and countrymen who cling
to the old custom do not know that the Chinese were ordered to wear
their hair in this way as a sign that they had been conquered by the
Manchus.
Ancient Shantung
Thousands of years ago what we now call China was divided into dozens of
little kingdoms. There were several of them in what is now Shantung. One
day, for instance, I traveled for hours among huge grave mounds of the
kings of Lao-an, buried long before the time of Christ. One of those
ancient kingdoms was called Lu, and in it was born the great Chinese
sage Confucius. This famous philosopher is to the Chinese what Mohammed
is to the Mohammedans or Moses to the Jews. There is a temple of
Confucius in every important city in China and he is worshipped by
millions every day in the year, especially during the spring and autumn
festivals in his honor.
In a Peking cart I jolted from the railroad to Chufu, where Confucius
lived five and a half centuries before the birth of Christ. The village
itself was rather a miserable place, with deep mud in the streets and
houses that few Americans would live in even for a day. But inside a
huge compound shaded by many venerable trees stood the finest temple of
Confucius in China, several temples in fact, one behind the other. It
would take pages to describe those mammoth and artistic old buildings.
In the main one there is a statue of Confucius, larger than life-size,
in the costume of those ancient days. All such Chinese statues have the
same pose. Huge brass and iron bowls standing before this image and the
altar it rests on were filled with the ashes of many thousands of
joss-sticks burned by pious pilgrims. In the room behind these is
another altar, on which stands an upright stick bearing the name of the
wife of Confucius. There is no statue of her, because the Chinese do not
think it proper to represent a woman in that way. The carved marble
pillars in front of the principal temple are famous all over the world.
An ancient road between two double rows of very aged trees leads from
the temple compound to the grave of Confucius. Knowing how fond the
Chinese are of colors and elaborate things, it seemed strange to find
this grave of their greatest man so simple, just a mound of earth among
some trees, with an upright slab of stone bearing his name in three
Chinese characters in gold. Long ago as Confucius lived, a direct
descendant of his occupies a kind of palace near the temple grounds. He
is little more than a boy, the seventy-seventh generation since the
sage. It is said that he wishes to go to college in the United States!
All over this part of Shantung I found people who bore the family name
of Confucius, Kung. Some of them were rich and some were peanut-sellers.
Climbing a Sacred Mountain
Of all the things I did in Shantung I think my climb up Tai-shan was the
most interesting. That sacred mountain is the greatest place of
pilgrimage in China. I am sure I passed at least ten thousand pilgrims
on my way. Rich Chinese and most foreigners who go up Tai-shan ride in
chairs, on the backs of coolies. They are queer-looking chairs, little
more than a seat on poles, and the coolies carry them up sidewise. The
carriers give inexperienced riders a great scare every time they change
shoulders, for the path follows the edge of a great precipice.
[Illustration:
The stairway to the top of Tai-shan, sacred mountain in the province
of Confucius. I climbed up it on the first of March when snow was
still on the ground. Hundreds of Chinese pilgrims were going up or
coming down. The stairs are really much steeper than they appear in
the picture. In the upper right-hand corner you can just see the
gate at the top of the long climb. It is several miles away.
]
I like to make such journeys on my own feet, however, even though, as in
this case, one must climb ten miles of stone stairway. Here and there,
especially during the first part of the climb, there were level spaces a
few yards or a few feet long. A temple and a tea-house under old
spreading trees stood beside most of these. But the last half of the
climb was like going up steep stairs in a house five miles high.
Thousands of beggars lived in holes in the rocks and in grass huts along
the sides of the stairway. Pilgrims carried newsboy sacks of brass
“cash” for these beggars. The pilgrims believe that anyone who climbs
Tai-shan without giving something to each of them will not have his
prayers answered when he reaches the top. There were baskets more or
less full of “cash” in the middle of almost every step on that ten-mile
climb. As the chair-carriers walk on the outside ends of the steps, the
passengers can easily drop a coin into each basket as they pass over
them. Some of the beggars of Tai-shan are poor cripples or the victims
of terrible diseases. But a great many of them looked healthier than the
Chinese who live in crowded cities, and some of the beggar children
fairly glowed with health.
From the temples (much like any other temples in China) on the cold
snowbound top of Tai-shan, I could make out “China’s Sorrow,” as the
Hoang Ho or Yellow River is called. It is a kind of vagabond river,
changing its course every few years, so that the poor people living
along it are constantly worried. Once it ran into the sea in southern
Shantung, then suddenly changed its mind and started northward to its
present mouth. This was much as if our Potomac were to move to Maine.
All the people in its new bed had their homes and farms washed away, and
now the old bed is a stretch of rice and wheat fields. The silt that
comes down with the Yellow River in its snakelike course across northern
China gives the stream its color and its name and clogs the channel
until the river is higher than the country about it. Then the Hoang Ho
breaks through its dikes again and goes on a new rampage.
Bandits overrun many of the hills and mountains in Shantung Province.
Once while I was traveling in what people considered a much more
dangerous region, just outside the Great Wall to the north, bandits
stopped an express train not far from the birthplace of Confucius and
carried off twenty or more foreigners, many of them Americans. Some of
the prisoners had to live for more than six weeks in a bandit camp on a
hilltop, part of the time under terrible conditions. Partly because
there are so many bandits, the Grand Canal from southern China to Peking
is now hardly used at all. In olden days this canal brought to the
emperors the tribute rice, a kind of tax in produce, from all the
country to the southeast. In places it Was dug through high rocky hills,
and the Shantung part of it has several locks to lift or lower the boats
from one level to another. However, the bandits alone are not
responsible for its being abandoned. Silt has been allowed to fill many
parts of the canal since the coming of railways.
CHAPTER VIII
THROUGH THE HEART OF OLD CHINA
In October I left my family in Peking and set off on a two months’
journey into the northwest. Yet the first part of this trip took me
hundreds of miles south, on the railway from the capital to the Yang-tze
River. Again I found the trains crowded with rowdy soldiers whose only
tickets were their rifles and bayonets. From the windows I saw, besides
millions of grave-mounds, thousands of smaller piles of earth of the
same shape. These consisted of rich top-soil that was to be spread over
the fields before they were planted again. Men and donkeys were plowing;
sometimes a man and a donkey, or a cow and a donkey, were hitched
together. Women who sat on tiny stools to spare their bound feet pulled
up peanuts and put them in funnel-mouthed baskets. Great quantities of
peanuts are grown in China. Some of them are miserably small, but
American missionaries introduced the Georgia goober some years ago, and
now those excellent peanuts are sold everywhere. I once heard of an
American lady who sent her son in China a big bag of peanuts for
Christmas. She did not know that peanuts are much more plentiful and far
cheaper there than at home, or she might have sent popcorn instead, for
there is none of that in China.
Not very far south of Peking I turned westward on a narrow-gauge railway
built by the French. On this, soldiers without tickets did not ride,
because the ticket-takers were Frenchmen or Belgians who were not afraid
of them. This railway runs through a very rocky, mountainous region into
the province of Shansi, which means “west of the mountains,” just as
Shantung means “east of the mountains.” Most Chinese names for places,
which look and sound so queer to us, are just as simple as that when
they are translated.
[Illustration:
This merchant is engaged in the very serious business of weighing out
a copper’s worth of peanuts. Probably you could buy up his whole
stock for ten cents.
]
The railway into Shansi ends at Taiyuanfu, meaning “great plain.” It is
properly named, for all about that provincial capital lies a flat, rich
country, growing rye and barley and other crops which we have at home.
The land is not well watered, however, for the Chinese have been so
foolish as to cut down almost all the trees that once covered northern
China; and ground without trees does not hold moisture long. I saw
hundreds of men drawing water from wells in the fields. Many of these
wells have four windlasses, so that four men, one standing on each side
of the well, can all draw up water at the same time.
A “Model Governor”
Shansi is often called the “model province” and the general who rules it
the “model governor.” Instead of putting into his own pocket (or into
his own account in the foreign banks in Hankow and Shanghai) all the
money he gathers in taxes, this governor spends much of it for the good
of the people. He has built some fairly good automobile roads, though
they are merely made of piled-up earth which sometimes washes away in
the rainy season. China still has no good stone or cement or macadam
roads; but perhaps those will come also some day, when there are more
model governors.
The governor of Shansi had driven almost all the bandits out of his
province, and had stopped the growing of poppies, from which opium is
made. He had forbidden the smoking of opium, and had provided a place in
Taiyuanfu where people could come and be cured of the opium habit. He
had forbidden foot binding also, but old customs die hard, and as a fine
of a few dollars is the only punishment for parents who bind their
daughters’ feet, there are still some, even in Shansi Province, who
cling to the practice.
Because it is forbidden in Peking and not much practiced in the coast
cities which most foreign travelers see, many people think that foot
binding is dying out. But I am sure that during my two years’ wandering
in all parts of China three fourths of the women and the girls over
eight or ten whom I saw had crippled feet. Many of them could hardly
walk at all. Both in the mud-floored houses and in the fields they often
knelt at their work, using for protection knee-pads that reminded me of
the shin-guards of our football players.
When a Chinese girl is six or seven years old, her mother or her
grandmother binds long strips of wet cloth about her feet. The cloth
shrinks in drying and squeezes the feet tightly. Every few days new
cloths are bound on, until the bones of the feet are broken and the toes
are bent back against the heels. By the end of two or three years, the
feet have often become so small that they look as if they had been cut
off at the ankle. Of course it hurts a great deal to walk on such feet,
and perhaps that is why Chinese women are seldom as cheerful and smiling
as most Chinese men.
Often girls have to sleep in an outbuilding while their feet are being
bound, so that they will not disturb the family with their crying. Yet
if their feet are not bound they cry too, for they think that they will
never get husbands unless they have “lily feet.” It is said that this
custom grew up hundreds of years ago because one of the wives of an
emperor had very small feet and the other women copied her style. It
should be said, however, that nowadays among the more modern Chinese,
girls with bound feet are not desired as wives.
A Dangerous Journey
Much farther south along the main railway line I took another
narrow-gauge railroad westward again, this time in the province of
Honan. This district was so full of bandits that when we set out from
the end of the rails the general who governs that part of China sent a
dozen soldiers with us. At one town the heads of two bandits lay in
little wooden cages fastened at the upper corners of each city gate. But
China is gradually becoming more modern in her forms of punishment, and
now criminals are generally executed by being shot. The _cangue_, a
great wooden platform fastened about the necks of prisoners, with the
story of their crimes written on it, used to be common, but during my
two years in China I saw only two prisoners wearing it.
We rode for four days in mule litters, along the strangest roads in the
world. In my litter—a kind of cot with a rounded mat roof—I had all my
baggage, including even a trunk. It is not hard to read or even to sleep
in such a litter, swung between two mules, but it often tips until one
expects to fall out. Once, just as we arrived at an inn for the night,
my litter did turn over, and spilled everything, even the trunk, upon
me.
[Illustration:
It is dusty work riding through the loess country in a mule litter
unless you are the first one in a procession, as I was here. Two of
my soldier guard stand at the side of the litter.
]
The roads in this part of China are great ditches, a hundred, sometimes
two hundred, feet deep. As the sandy gravel soil, which geologists call
loess, washes out easily beneath the rains and blows away in great
clouds of dust when it is dry, the travel of many millions along these
roads for thousands of years has worn them down into canyons, with walls
on either side as perpendicular as those of a skyscraper. If the Chinese
had not cut down their forests, the roots of the trees would have held
the soil together. Sometimes when mule or camel caravans meet in these
deep roads they cannot pass, and one or the other has to turn back until
they can find a wider place in the canyon.
[Illustration:
Roads grow old in China. This one in the western part of the country
has been worn down, to the depth shown, in solid rock.
]
Beyond the great walled city of Sianfu, capital of Shensi Province and
once called the “second capital” of China, we rode on mule back and had
two-wheeled carts to carry our baggage, beds, and food, and also our
cook and “boy.” There also the road was worn deep into the earth in many
places, and to escape the heat and dust we often walked or rode along
the edge of the chasm. It was more pleasant to walk, for if you have
ever ridden a mule in a mountainous country you know how fond that
animal is of the very brink of precipices. Perhaps he thinks he has nine
lives, like a cat, or it may be that he likes thrills and danger, as
some people do. Once the hind legs of the mule just in front of me,
ridden by an American major, went clear over the side of the cliff, with
a hundred-foot drop to the road below. Yet nothing serious happened. The
animal scrambled like mad for a moment to regain its footing, and then
went calmly on again, still just as close as possible to the edge, as if
it could learn nothing by experience.
Cave Dwellers
[Illustration:
In some places the loess soil of western China is worn to a depth of
one hundred feet or more, where a road has been used for centuries.
]
Often we came upon great square holes in the ground, twenty or thirty
feet across and as deep. Ladders went down into them, and showed us that
they were the courtyards of houses. Each side of the hole was dug out to
form a house, where not only the people but their dogs and chickens and
pigs live. On top of the earth above these sunken dwellings, the people
thresh their wheat by driving mules or other animals round and round
over it as it lies on the hard threshing-floor. They winnow the grain by
throwing it up in the wind with a wooden scoop much like a snow-shovel,
and what wheat they do not need for themselves they send to market,
sometimes many days away, in long brown bags carried on wheelbarrows. We
passed trains of as many as fifty of these wheelbarrows loaded with
wheat. The faces of the men pushing them were often as twisted and
strained as are those of champion runners at the end of a hard race.
Still farther westward there were large towns without a single house in
them! The people all live in caves dug in the loess hillsides, a
mud-brick wall with a small door in it across the front. This is another
punishment for cutting down the forests generations ago, so that there
is no wood left either to build with or to burn. Children go out and
pick up every straw or twig that can be used as fuel, and even then
there is so little to burn that they dare not make a fire to warm
themselves, but must keep the precious fuel only for cooking. As it
grows colder and colder during winter in the high altitude of western
China, the people put on more and more garments padded with cotton. Is
it not strange that the Chinese worship ancestors who made them so
miserable by cutting down all their forests?
[Illustration:
A Chinese girl and her younger brother, in their bright-colored,
cotton-padded winter clothing. You will see that the girl’s feet are
bound.
]
We stopped every night in a Chinese inn, which is very different from
our hotels. It consists simply of mud-brick buildings around a yard
filled with braying mules and crowing roosters. The only furniture is
the _k’ang_, a mud-brick platform covered with a thin reed mat and
having a fireplace beneath it. An inn servant would build us a fire
under this strange bed if we told him to; but as the only fuel available
was straw or small brush, we found that it made more smoke than fire.
[Illustration:
The governor of Shensi Province sent his car of state to bring me to a
banquet in honor of my traveling companion and myself. Although
quite handsome, it was after all a “Peking cart” and no more
comfortable than that queer vehicle is when not decorated. On this
cart the tires were made of sharp iron points to prevent skidding.
They hardly improved the surface of a road! An ordinary Peking cart
is shown on page 82.
]
Most Chinese still prefer stone-hard beds and would not sleep in a soft
one if they had it. But we carried cots, as all wise foreigners do who
go beyond the railways and steamship lines in China. During the last six
weeks of that trip into the far northwest it was bitterly cold at night,
though the sun blazed all day long. After sunset, as soon as we could
set up our cots on top of the _k’ang_, we crawled into our thick
sleeping-bags, lined with sheepskin with the wool inside, and did not
get out until morning. When the cook had coaxed a dinner for us out of a
miserable little mud stove in the inn, the “boy” would set it out on top
of our bedclothes, where we could eat by merely putting our arms
outside. Then he would roll up inside his own _puk’ai_, the great cotton
quilt all Chinese travelers carry with them in winter. At four in the
morning he would come to wake us, bringing a hot breakfast. We started
every day two hours before daylight and jogged steadily on until dark,
seven days a week. This we did in order to finish the long journey in
time to spend Christmas with our families in Peking.
In spite of all the hard work our “boy” had to do, he never complained.
Nor did we find the people along the way grumbling because of their
miserable lot in life. Even small children in this region often wore
nothing but a cotton-padded shirt or blouse, as if their parents wished
to harden them for the rough life they would always have to lead. The
bitter winter weather had chapped many of them with deep cracks from
head to foot.
CHAPTER IX
THE GREAT MOHAMMEDAN PROVINCE
One morning nearly two weeks after we had left the end of the railroad
we entered the province of Kansu. This forms the far northwest of China
proper, much like Washington and Oregon combined into one state, except
that instead of being bordered on the west by the ocean it runs up into
the lofty mountain ranges of Tibet. The great road, which is really not
much more than a very wide trail, to Lanchow, capital of the province,
was lined with double rows of huge old willow trees from the very
boundary of the province. A viceroy who once ruled Kansu for the Manchu
emperors planted those trees, and if a man was caught cutting one of
them down his head was cut off. Yet quite a few of them were missing! In
certain places the loess soil had blown or washed away until a tree had
fallen. But it was plain that some of the willows had been cut down. The
Chinese are so eager for wood that they will risk a great deal to get
it.
That day, after a great wind-storm, we saw women and children and a few
men sweeping up fallen twigs and leaves. Except for that avenue of huge
willows along the ancient route to its capital, Kansu is just as bare
and treeless as the rest of northern China, and any kind of fuel is very
precious.
We still had a soldier guard in some places, because the Chinese
officials were afraid bandits or robbers might attack us. Often the
keepers of the inns where we spent the nights told us of people being
held up and robbed along this road. But for some reason we were never
troubled in this way during the journey.
[Illustration:
This is not a “Texas hots” stand, though it looks a little like that
American institution. It is a traveling restaurant, by the side of
the great willow-lined highway leading to the capital of Kansu. When
he lacks customers, the proprietor picks up his restaurant and trots
on in search of business. In the background is a camel caravan.
]
Now and then we passed long soldier trains, whole regiments of soldiers
traveling eastward, perhaps to take part in a civil war in some other
part of China. They traveled in mule-carts or horse-carts, on foot, on
long strings of camels, and in even stranger ways, and did not at all
look like our well organized armies of the West when moving from one
place to another. At the head of each soldier train was a huge homemade
flag with the name of the general on it in enormous Chinese characters;
and at the top a very tiny Chinese flag. This was so symbolical of
present conditions in China that it always made us smile.
“Ships of the Desert”
We passed long camel trains, though none of them quite so long as the
one of thirty-six dozen camels I had seen in crossing Mongolia. Every
ten or a dozen of these stately two-humped animals were fastened
together by ropes running from the tail of one camel to a stick through
the nose of the one behind. The camels usually traveled at night and
grazed or lay down in the daytime. The drivers were swarthy, rough
looking men, with Mongolian features, and dressed in long dirty
sheepskin coats, much like those of the Gobi. Therefore it looked
strange to see many of them spinning yarn and some knitting socks and
other garments as they plodded along behind their beasts. Later some one
told us that American and British missionaries had taught the people of
Kansu to spin and knit. They must have forgotten to mention that to
Western eyes only women and girls look well doing such work.
Though they were perhaps the first to make silk, and have used cotton
for a great many centuries, the Chinese formerly had few if any woven
wool garments. They have long used wool clothing, especially up on this
cold plateau of Kansu, but made it of sheepskins with the wool still on
them. Some authorities claim that the Chinese never wove wool until
taught by Westerners; but I have been informed that “sheep’s hair
blankets” were known in very early times. The art of weaving such
blankets may have been brought into China from Turkestan by the Huns.
Queer Winter Clothing
Even here, where there are so many sheep, the great majority of the
people dress in the thickly cotton-padded garments, much like our
quilts, that are used in China wherever it becomes cold. Many of the men
and boys along the way in this cold province wore earlaps embroidered
with flowers or birds or other things in very gay colors. These are made
by the women, who, because they all have long hair, do not need earlaps
themselves. Most of the men, however, had the same kind of Chinese
knitted wool caps as we wore. If it is warm enough, these can be rolled
up about the top of the head; when it is very cold they can be pulled
clear down to the shoulders, a hole being left for the eyes.
Chinese winter garments are so much warmer than ours that most of the
few foreigners we met in Kansu wore Chinese clothing. They were nearly
all British missionaries. Formerly they, and many Americans doing
mission work, let their hair grow long and braided it in queues, like
the Chinese. Now there are no foreign men in China with long hair. Yet
most of the countrymen in this province still wore “pigtails.” We saw
many peasants and coolies squatting on the ground, or on the little
narrow sawhorses the country people of China use as chairs, while the
village barbers attended to them.
[Illustration:
An outdoor blacksmith shop in a village of northwest China. The owner
can pick up his entire equipment when he is ready, and trot away
with it on a shoulder pole.
]
Many of these barbers carried their shops on the ends of a
shoulder-pole, and went about looking for customers. They used no shears
but only big awkward razors. With one of these they shaved the face
(sometimes even the eyebrows) and clear around the head, leaving the
hair long on top. Then they braided the queue, which often reached to
the man’s thighs. Once I saw a barber adding a hair-switch to a coolie’s
queue, so perhaps many of them wore more hair than grew on their heads,
just as some American women do. Chinese barbers always carry long sticks
like slender pencils, because customers expect to have their ears
cleaned out. Their work is crude, but they do not charge one tenth as
much as our barbers do for a hair-cut.
Walled Towns
We passed through one big city, named Pingliang, and many smaller towns.
All of them were surrounded by great walls. There was always a road
around the city close to the wall, so that travelers who preferred not
to go inside need not do so. We usually went inside, for we wished to
see all the cities, and it was likely to be time to eat dinner or find
an inn for the night. The elbow-shaped gates and the narrow streets were
often so crowded that we had as hard a time getting through as an
automobile does on Fifth Avenue, so we did not wonder that many caravans
went around the outside of the walls.
Another reason for caravans staying outside is that those which carry
foods or produce have to pay taxes whenever they enter a city gate. For
a great many years China has had these local taxes, called _likin_. When
the Constitution of the United States was written, not only duties on
exports were forbidden, but it was forbidden to levy duties on goods
shipped from state to state. If we had the Chinese system, there would
be customs duties not only on things coming into the country but on
those going out also; and goods shipped from New York to New Orleans,
for instance, would have to pay taxes perhaps a hundred times along the
way, at every town or river-post or military barrier. Treaties with
foreign countries do not allow the Chinese to collect _likin_ on foreign
goods, but now some of the military dictators ignore the treaties made
in Peking under the Manchus and require that all goods pay duties.
A Land of Peddlers
Even in this far interior of the country there were many peddlers along
the roads. As it is very difficult for the women, because of their bound
feet, to go to town to shop, there is plenty of trade for peddlers. On
that two months’ trip I saw only one girl whose feet were natural, and
she was an orphan and slave-girl whom no one had taken the trouble to
“make beautiful” for a future husband. She had little hope of ever
getting a husband, and the Chinese consider it disgraceful for a woman
not to be married.
There were not only peddlers but even traveling restaurants! Each
“restaurant” consisted of a coolie who trotted along carrying two big
baskets of food warmed by little clay stoves. Most of the country people
of Kansu live on wheat or Indian corn or _kaoliang_. They grind the
grains between big millstones, the bottom one stationary and the top one
turned by hand. Often we saw two women or girls marching round and round
these mills on their crippled feet, and sometimes a blind man or boy who
did nothing else all day long, without even a Sunday off. But the
Chinese, from babyhood, are hardened to comfortless and laborious lives,
and no one ever seems to complain of hardships.
We could buy chickens and eggs, mutton and sometimes beef, and
vegetables and fruit along the way. Of course there was also plenty of
pork, the favorite Chinese meat. But most foreigners do not eat Chinese
pork, because the pigs live on all sorts of garbage. The Chinese seldom
drink milk, and they do not make butter or cheese. We could get tea
anywhere, but no coffee or cocoa. So we found that of the trunkful of
tinned things we had brought along, the canned milk, cocoa, oatmeal,
sugar, butter, jam, cheese, and fish were very useful. As most of the
native food is good and nourishing, we could have lived without any of
our own things. We might even have gotten along without our cook and
“boy.” But we preferred to see to the preparing of our own meals, for
the cooks in most Chinese inns have very little idea of cleanliness.
[Illustration:
A Chinese mother and her baby in winter clothing. The baby wears a
string of “cash” (money) as an ornament, and perhaps in the hope
that it will keep evil spirits away. The child’s clothes have much
red in them. To the Chinese, red stands for happiness.
]
There was much game along the way. The American major who traveled with
me shot pheasants as pretty as any you ever saw in a zoological garden,
and plenty of pigeons, wild ducks, and wild geese. Under the Manchus the
people of China were not allowed to own guns, so that even where nearly
all the inhabitants looked hungry, as in Kansu, they could not shoot the
plentiful game. In every town there were great quantities of persimmons,
much better than those of our southern states. They looked like huge
tomatoes and tasted best of all after they had been frozen. We ate them
with spoons and found them as good as ice cream. But the Chinese pears,
also very plentiful, were much poorer than ours. They were hard as
rocks, not a bit sweet, and had no more taste than a raw potato.
Almost every hill or mountain along the way was terraced in great
shelves of earth, to the very top. When we saw them they were quite
bare, making the whole landscape a dreary yellowish brown. But with
spring a great change would come. Then all the terrace-fields would be
green, and if the traveler looked down upon them from above, all the
earth about him would seem green. Yet if he were down in one of the
sunken roads, looking up, he would get quite a different impression, for
then he would see only the wall-like sides of the terraces, and they
would still be bare and brown.
Sons of Han
Millions of the Chinese are Mohammedans or Moslems. There are nine
mosques even in Tientsin, on the eastern edge of the country, and every
large town has at least one mosque. But in the great northwestern
province of Kansu fully half the people are followers of Mohammed. The
other Chinese call themselves Han-ren or “sons of Han.” The Mohammedans
who conquered much of Asia and a part of Europe more than a thousand
years ago made their way through Sinkiang, which we call Chinese
Turkestan, into Kansu, but did not travel clear across China.
Some of the soldiers remained, and took Chinese wives. This explains why
many of the Mohammedans of this great northwestern province look more
Arabic or Turkish than Chinese. Most Chinese Mohammedans, however, look
just like the other Celestials, except that the men and boys usually
wear a white cap. That is because their ancestors were not soldiers from
the west but Han-ren who were converted, or compelled to turn Moslem or
be killed.
Mohammedans do not eat pork, and where there are more of them than of
Han-ren in a Kansu town no one is allowed to keep pigs. We often stopped
at Mohammedan inns, and the proprietor always told our cook that he must
not use any lard or cook any pork on his premises. Yet we noticed before
long that we were getting bacon for breakfast every morning, and asked
the “boy” about it.
“Oh, Hwei-hwei no catchee know bacon allee same pork,” he answered in
the pidgin-English that he had learned in Peking.
By that he meant that the Mohammedan inn-keepers did not know that the
bacon we had brought along in tin cans or glass jars was a form of pork;
and he went on to say that the cook told the inn-keepers it was
“foreign-style” beef. We asked the cook not to play that trick any more,
for travelers should not do anything to offend the people they are
among.
[Illustration:
A donkey-load of water buckets made of bamboo splints woven as if for
a basket. Such buckets are not entirely water-tight, but they do
very well.
]
In many cities and towns where there are more Han-ren than Moslems the
latter have to live outside the walls. Several times there have been
great Mohammedan rebellions in China, and some people think there will
be another one. But the Mohammedans are better treated now than they
were under the Manchus. There are Mohammedan soldiers in Kansu and in
some other parts of China, and some Hwei-hwei have even become generals.
When China took the name of Chinese Republic, it changed its flag from
the big yellow Manchu banner bearing a dragon, to a flag of five
stripes, one color to represent each kind of people in the old empire.
The yellow stripe stands for the Han-ren, or ordinary Chinese, the blue
for the Manchus, the black for the Tibetans, the red for the Mongolians,
and the white for the Mohammedans.
Good Mohammedans Do Not Drink Wine
Most Mohammedans, obeying the rules of their religion, do not drink wine
or other intoxicating liquors, and will not allow themselves to be
photographed. But the Chinese Moslems do not seem to know their Koran
(the Mohammedan Bible) very well. Some of them get intoxicated on
Chinese rice-wine, and even the mullahs, or Moslem priests, allowed me
to take their pictures and, still more strange, to photograph the
interiors of their mosques.
They were very simple interiors compared to those of ordinary Chinese
temples. There were no gaudy pictures or painted gods or demons. The
floor was covered with straw mats and always the western wall contained
an Arabian niche. When a Chinese Mohammedan prays, as he is expected to
do five times a day, he must bow down with his face toward the west, for
Mecca, the holy city of his faith, lies in that direction.
All the Mohammedan men come to the mosques on Fridays, but no women are
allowed inside. There are washing-vats outside every mosque, because the
men must wash themselves before entering. They are even supposed to
change their clothes, though many of those in Kansu are too poor to have
a change. In each mosque is kept a coffin having a false bottom. In this
Chinese Mohammedans carry their dead to the grave. There they leave the
body and bring the coffin back again. The Chinese of other faiths, who
bury their dead in huge wooden coffins, think this very stingy and
disgraceful.
CHAPTER X
WHERE THE FISH WAGGED ITS TAIL
A few years ago there was a great earthquake in Kansu. As the soil is
almost sandy, with no tree-roots to hold it together, this did much
damage. Millions of the people live in caves, and thousands were killed
by being buried in these underground houses. We passed many places where
the great road to Lanchow had been covered deep under the mountain-sides
that had slid down when the earth shook. In others the whole road, with
its four rows of willows and even the mule-paths in it, had been carried
nearly half a mile or turned at right angles to its former course. The
new road was a trail that climbed over the new hills wherever the first
travelers after the earthquake had been able to get through.
One Chinese name for the earthquake is “Where the Earth Walked.” The
landscape looked as if the earth had been boiled, leaving a ruined
world, a world wearing away. There were places where all the population,
all the terraced fields, all the villages had been wiped out. Elsewhere
other people had come in, or those who had escaped the earthquake had
rebuilt their towns. Most of mankind seem to be optimistic. People come
back to live where such a calamity has happened, as if it could never be
repeated.
Some of the sides of hills that fell off during the earthquake dammed up
little streams and made big lakes where there had never been a lake
before. There was so much danger that some of these would overflow and
drown towns or villages below them that a great deal of work had to be
done to cut channels for draining these lakes. Many thousands of dollars
subscribed by Americans were spent in this work.
Most Chinese still think the earth is flat and held up by a turtle or a
huge fish. Even our mule-driver, who was just as sensible in most things
as an American workman, believed the earthquake was caused by this great
fish’s wagging its tail!
The Chinese “Fast Mail”
Almost every day we met the Chinese “fast mail.” This consisted of a
coolie who carried across his shoulder a pole with some mail-bags at
either end of it. On his blouse big Chinese characters warning people
not to disturb him were painted or sewed. Such men carry about eighty
pounds, and they trot nearly fifteen miles before they turn the bags
over to another coolie. Their monthly pay is only about nine American
dollars, yet they are very loyal in their work. Sometimes they are
robbed and even killed, and many of them have an iron point on the
shoulder-pole to use as a weapon.
Of course where there are railroads or steamers or other modern forms of
travel the mails are carried as they are in our country. But all China
has fewer miles of railway than many of our single states. About half of
the eighteen provinces have never heard a train-whistle, and some of the
others have only one short rail line. Until the fighting between rival
generals stops there will probably be no more railroads and very few
highways built. For this reason most of the mail must continue to be
carried on men’s shoulders, or on the backs of pack-animals.
[Illustration:
One of the sturdy and loyal coolies who are the “fast mail” in
interior China. They can trot fifteen miles with eighty pounds of
first-class mail on their shoulders. Each wears characters on his
blouse telling that he is a postman and must not be delayed or
molested.
]
We now and then met a long pack-train wending its way across the broken
country with many loads of parcel-post packages. In other parts of
western China I met caravans of more than a hundred coolies toiling
painfully along under cruel loads of this heavier mail. Many people say
that the Chinese postal system is so good because the men at the head of
it are foreigners. They point to the very poor telegraph system as proof
that the Chinese cannot do such things properly for themselves. But
anyone who has traveled in the far interior will give much of the credit
to the hard-working and poorly clad coolie mail-carriers who trot night
and day over the difficult trails.
Curiosity about Foreigners
The Chinese seem to have more curiosity than any other people on earth.
Or it may be that this appears to be so, because among them staring is
not considered bad manners. Even in cities where there are many
foreigners, gaping crowds often gather about one.
Way out in Kansu, and in most other parts of the country, enormous mobs
crowd about a foreigner the moment he appears in the street. Often on
this trip almost all the men and boys and many of the girls in town left
whatever they had been doing and packed themselves so closely about me
that it was hard to breathe, especially as great clouds of dust were
raised by their feet shuffling on the unpaved street.
I never found one of these mobs unfriendly, though some foreigners have
even been killed by them. I always saw far more smiles than scowls. If I
could think of enough Chinese words to make a joke, the whole crowd
roared with laughter. If I started to go away, they made an opening for
me much more quickly than most American crowds would. They had merely
come to see the “strange looking person” and watch his “queer” doings.
If I wrote in my notebook, they stared and laughed at what they
considered my funny way of writing. As they write from top to bottom and
from the right-hand side of the page toward the left, and use a camel’s
hair brush to make marks like chicken-tracks, my fountain-pen and the
marks I made with it seemed very amusing to them. If I read a book, they
thought it queer that I did not begin at what we call the last page, as
they do. Almost everything the foreigner does seems strange to Chinese
who have not met many foreigners.
In some of those Kansu villages people told us they had never seen a
foreigner before. Most of the people of interior China cannot tell one
kind of foreigner from another. I was often asked if I were a Japanese,
though I hardly think I look like one. Any person not Chinese is a
_wai-kuo-ren_, an “outside-country-man,” to most Chinese, and many of
them think there are only two kinds of people in the world—themselves
and those who live in the other country which they think makes up the
rest of the earth.
A Difficult Language
I had learned to speak some Chinese by this time, and I learned more
before my travels in China were over. But if you have ever been in a
country where you do not speak the language well you have probably found
that many people think they can make you understand by shouting their
strange words louder and louder. I have even known Americans who tried
in this way to make foreigners understand.
Sometimes it became rather painful to have a great mob crowded about me
and one or several men shrieking in my ears. However, I found a way to
cure those shriekers. I would put my lips very close to the ear of the
man who had just shouted a question at me as if I were stone-deaf, and
shout back at him in English some such words as “You don’t say so?” He
would go away rubbing his ear but laughing with the rest of the crowd,
for the Chinese are very quick to appreciate a joke even on themselves.
The story would travel so far ahead of me that it might be several days
before another crowd would think it was my ears that were weak rather
than my understanding.
Money Strung about the Neck
In many of these far-away parts of old China the money still consists of
the little brass coins, with a square hole in the center, which
foreigners call “cash.” They are strung on strings, usually a thousand
to a string. A knot is tied to mark off each hundred coins, and the ends
of the strings are tied together. One “string” of “cash” weighs about
eight pounds, yet it is hardly worth twenty-five cents in our money.
Can you imagine carrying a dollar that weighs thirty-two pounds? Yet we
saw many men in Kansu with as many as six “strings” on their shoulders.
They were usually soldiers or workmen or carrying-coolies who had just
been paid off; and you can see how lucky they are that their wages are
only about a dollar a week! Our mule-driver paid fifty or a hundred
“cash” for a bowl of rice, and coolies who carried my things on their
shoulders in other parts of China would often lug also an additional
eight or sixteen pounds in change with which to buy their food and
lodging and tobacco.
[Illustration:
A Chinese coolie with his week’s wages, worth about a dollar, and
weighing forty pounds or more in strings of “cash.”
]
Not very long ago the only money in China, besides the strings of
“cash,” consisted in silver lumps often called “shoes” by foreigners,
because they were shaped somewhat like a shoe. Each shopkeeper had a
scale like one of our steelyards but made of wood, and when a customer
bought something the silver to pay for it was weighed out. If one “shoe”
was too much, out came a little saw or ax to cut it in two. We saw
people using this kind of money in Kansu, sometimes adding a little
silver BB shot to complete the weight. But now most of China uses big
copper coins, worth ten or twenty, and in some places even fifty “cash,”
and for bigger transactions the silver dollar.
Silver Dollars Introduced
When foreigners began to trade with China about a hundred years ago,
they did not want “cash” in payment for their goods, and they did not
like the lumps of silver. So they introduced into China the dollars that
the Spanish used in Mexico and other Latin-American countries. Now the
Chinese mint their own “Mex” dollars, which are just as big as ours but
worth only about half as much. They call them _E quai ch’ien_, or “one
piece money.”
There is paper money like ours in Peking and the large coast cities,
usually issued by foreign banks, but this is seldom accepted in any
other city, and it is of no use in the country districts. On this trip
into Kansu, and many other journeys that I made in other parts of China,
I had to carry long rolls of silver dollars wrapped in paper. The
governor of that province had melted up all the “cash” and coppers that
came into his treasury and made new coins by pouring the metal mixed
with sand into moulds. These coins we could break in two with our
fingers, and they were worth so little that merchants had to send
donkey-loads of them from town to town in payment of new goods. We often
met these donkeys, their bags of coin rattling like a junk-shop in a
cyclone. Even in the capital of the province the money poured out on
shop counters sounded like coal rolling down an iron chute.
A Great Walled City
Lanchow, the capital of Kansu, is a great walled city in a little valley
on the Yellow River, way up where the stream is neither yellow nor very
large. It has several walls, dividing it into sections. Many of the
inhabitants are Mohammedans. Those men who wore thick skull-caps of
natural white wool and kept mutton-shops we knew at once to be Moslems,
as we did the _ahong_, or mullahs, who went up to the top of the mosques
five times a day and called the Moslems to prayer with words meaning
“Allah is great.” The Chinese Mohammedans are not allowed to translate
the Koran into their own language. They must read it in the original
Arabic even if they do not understand the words they are pronouncing.
Inside its walls China’s most northwestern city was much like other
Chinese cities. Swarms of people poured back and forth through the
narrow streets, along with donkeys, mules, horses, and camels. Coolies
carried every kind of thing, clean and dirty, and shouted and bumped
their way along as they do all over China. Hundreds of them were engaged
in carrying two big buckets of water apiece from the river to all parts
of town. People who wanted water paid these men about a cent a bucket.
Now, in December, it was bitterly cold and though there is much coal in
northwestern China few of the people could afford to burn it. There were
many almost-naked beggars wandering the streets of Lanchow. They slept
in any hole they could find, like the hungry homeless mongrel dogs that
roamed about looking for scraps of food.
[Illustration:
In Lanchow I saw these Mohammedan schoolgirls, whose garments were a
riot of color.
]
There are no rickshaws in Lanchow, nor in all Kansu Province. High
officials rode in the picturesque old sedan-chairs once used all over
China. One of those officials was a European, head of the Salt Monopoly
office in Kansu, and to see him come rushing home after dark carried by
six shouting men swinging great Chinese lanterns in front of them was a
very interesting sight. Like a great many other Chinese cities, Lanchow
has no street-lights, except those which people set up or carry
themselves.
A Midwinter Journey Back to Peking
[Illustration:
These very handsome boots are the kind worn by a tribe living on the
borders of Tibet.
]
Over the mountains not far from Lanchow is Hochow, a sort of capital of
the Mohammedans. From there we might have gone on to Sinkiang and the
Kokonor, or Blue Lake, region of Tibet. Tibetans, and in fact people of
all the races of central Asia, were to be seen in the streets of
Lanchow. We should have liked to go on to all the places they had come
from, but the traveler soon finds that it is as hard to go everywhere
during one lifetime as it would be to take all the courses in a great
university in four years.
Most people returning from Lanchow float down the Yellow River on rafts
made of goat-skins filled with air. But the river was full of ice now,
and in some places frozen solid. So we bought horses and hired two more
mule-carts to carry our things and our servants, and set off one morning
across an American-built bridge. That three weeks’ journey northeastward
was interesting, but not so much so as the route we had come by. Often
the only building we saw all day was the government inn for travelers
where we spent the night. So much of the land was covered with ice that
we wished we had skates.
[Illustration:
Our party coming back from Lanchow. I am in the middle; the American
major on my right (as we stood facing the camera); our cook on my
left; our “boy” on the major’s right; and our three mule drivers at
the ends of the row. You can see that we seem to have been well
supplied with clothing, yet we were often cold. It was December and
we were several thousand feet above sea level.
]
One cold morning we passed through the Great Wall, but away out there it
was merely a big mud ridge. For two days we waded through sand dunes
like those at the southern end of Lake Michigan, and if it had not been
so cold we might have imagined ourselves in the Sahara. Some of the
towns were ruled by Mohammedans and others by European Catholic priests.
Nearly every day we heard rumors of bandits who might fall upon us along
the lonely road. But we reached the end of the railroad through Kalgan
safely, and twenty-four hours later stepped off the train in Peking. As
we had always started long before daylight every morning, when it seemed
as cold as the North Pole, we had not shaved for weeks. My beard must
have made me look like a Bolshevik, for my small son wept when he met me
at the station.
[Illustration:
I didn’t look like “Daddy.”
]
CHAPTER XI
CHINA HAS HER OWN WAYS
The Fourth of July, Christmas, and our other holidays mean nothing to
the Chinese, but they do celebrate certain days of their own. The most
important of these is New Year’s, though even that is not the same day
as ours. For the Chinese still use the moon calendar, and their lunar
New Year’s comes from three to six weeks later than our January first.
Every time there is a new moon they start a new month. As it is only
twenty-eight days from one new moon to another, this makes their year
short. So they put in an extra month every two or three years.
They have no real names for their months, but call them “First Moon,”
“Second Moon,” and so on. The extra month is not named thirteen,
however, but is “tucked in,” as it were. So if you happen to be in China
during one of their years of thirteen months you may wake up some
morning and find the month that was finished the night before starting
over again. Its name might be translated “June number two,” or something
of the sort.
The years, however, have names. They are named for twelve animals—the
rat, the dog, the goat, and so on. When the twelve are finished, a new
start is made. Five times around forms an era, or what we sometimes call
a Cycle of Cathay. Probably that is because sixty years is about the
natural length of a man’s life. Also, it is easier to record dates if
the years are grouped into cycles, in the same way that we group them
into centuries.
If you ask a Chinese when he was born, his answer will be something
like, “I appeared on the tenth day of the third moon in the Year of the
Rooster.” If he is speaking of his grandfather or giving some date long
ago, he will also mention the cycle or the reign of some emperor. When
parents plan a Chinese marriage, a horoscoper is asked to make sure that
the positions of the stars and the moon at the dates of birth of the boy
and girl to be married, would be favorable. We would regard such
dependence on signs as superstitious, yet other peoples, Western as well
as Eastern, have similar superstitions.
In some ways the calendar of the Chinese is better, or at least truer,
than ours. Their seasons are more exact, because their New Year’s is
nearer the real middle of winter. The dates they call “Stirring of the
Insects,” “Corn Rain,” “Sprouting Seeds,” “Small Heat,” “Great Heat,”
are close to the times described by those phrases. On the other hand, in
America the hottest days may come long before the middle of summer, or
they may come in September; so “Great Heat” would not mean much to us.
It is convenient to be able to tell, merely by looking at the moon, what
day of the month it is. Centuries ago our ancestors also used the moon
calendar. But the Chinese are gradually changing many of their old
customs. Since the revolution of 1911 the official government calendar
is the same as ours, just as it is in Japan. Those who work for the
government get two New Year’s holidays.
[Illustration:
Among the many sorts of things sold at the Chinese New Year’s are
kites of all imaginable shapes, including those representing birds
and butterflies.
]
We saw two Chinese New Year’s days, one in Peking and the other down in
southern China. They were especially good ones, for the first began the
Year of the Pig, last of the twelve, and the second opened a new Cycle
of Cathay. The Chinese expect all kinds of bad luck during the Year of
the Pig—which the Mohammedans call the Year of the Black Sheep, because
they cannot mention the “unclean” animal they are forbidden to eat. But
they think all their troubles will be over when the new cycle begins. In
this they are sure to be disappointed, but they have a great celebration
anyway.
Feeding the Spirits of the Dead
Every Chinese who can do so, returns to his family home for New Year’s.
All the ancestral graves should be cleared and redecorated then. The
ancestors have to have religious services in their honor and must be
given food. The Chinese think the spirits of the dead eat the aroma of
the food set before their altars, and leave for the living the food
itself. So New Year’s is a time of feasting, like our Thanksgiving and
Christmas. Everyone wears his best clothes, brand-new ones from head to
foot if possible. The children dress just like their parents, except
that they may wear gayer colors.
For days before New Year’s the markets are crowded, since everyone who
possibly can is buying. Besides the new clothes, one must have gifts for
all his friends and relatives. New Year’s day rather than Christmas is
the time to give presents in China, just as it is in France. Toys of all
kinds appear in little booths built in the streets and in the temple
grounds. People flock to the temples, to burn bundles of paper that they
pretend is money, and handfuls of joss-sticks. More firecrackers are
heard than on our Fourth of July. The Chinese think the noise drives
away evil spirits. There was so much of it all about us that lunar New
Year’s eve in Peking that even our little boy could hardly sleep.
The people eat all night long, one feast after another. The next day
they make calls all day and eat and drink still more. The stores close,
not simply for the day but for a week or more. But before you accuse the
Chinese of being lazy in taking so long a holiday, as some travelers
have, remember they do not have fifty-two Sundays of rest every year.
Old men go out and fly kites, or take their birds for an airing. Younger
men go to the theaters, or gamble at fantan or mah jong behind the
closed shutters of their own or their friends’ shops. However, if you
know the shopkeeper’s back door or secret entrance, you can usually buy
anything you want, for the Chinese are enterprising and do not like to
miss a chance to do business.
Many Days of Feasting
We wandered for days about the streets of Peking during the first week
of that Year of the Pig, and still we did not see all the celebrations.
There were brick walls covered with painted pictures, temple-grounds as
packed as a county fair-ground, streets swarming with buyers and sellers
and strollers, and lined for miles with hawkers’ stands and amusement
booths. These sold only holiday things, but there were such quantities
of them that the whole city looked like crisscrossed streaks of color.
Not only the colors but the people were gay, and all sorts of noises
that the Chinese call music rose above the happy uproar.
On the wall of every Chinese house, above the place where the cooking is
done, is a paper with a picture of what the Chinese call the Kitchen
God. At the end of the year this god is supposed to go to heaven and
tell how the family behaved itself for the twelve or thirteen months
just ended. So the picture is taken down just before New Year’s day, and
burned. But before the Kitchen God is sent to heaven by fire his lips
are rubbed with candy or sugar, sometimes with opium, so that he will
tell only “sweet” things of the household he spent the year in! This
trip to heaven and back is supposed to take seven days. At the end of
that time new Kitchen Gods, in very bright colors quite different from
the old smoked ones, appear everywhere.
[Illustration:
The Chinese New Year’s is a great time for outdoor shows. These
acrobats could not ask for a more interested crowd to watch them
perform.
]
In the small, poor towns of southern China where I spent the second New
Year’s, there was not room in most of the little houses to feed and
worship the ancestors. So out in the narrow street before almost every
door stood a table, with a cooked chicken or duck, its head tucked under
its wing, and other food, as well as bowls of rice-wine. Just behind
this, inside, was the ancestral altar, with a crude picture representing
the dead fathers of the family.
Every hour or two the oldest living man or boy would come out into the
street and kneel before the table, touching his head to the ground. Then
he would stand up and burn incense-sticks and make motions with the cups
of wine toward the altar inside as if he were inviting the ancestors to
eat and drink. Sometimes there was only an old woman left to perform
this ceremony, either because the family was dying out or because no man
or boy of it could get home for New Year’s. Between these family
services nearly all the people of the town spent their time gambling and
refused to do any work whatever.
Guarding against Evil Spirits
It seems terrible to the Chinese to have a family die out, because then
no one will look after the spirits of the members who are dead.
Therefore all manner of queer tricks are used to “protect” boys from the
evil spirits which the Chinese think are always trying to harm them.
Many Chinese boys wear an iron or silver chain about their necks, with a
great padlock on it. This is put on by a priest and is meant to warn
evil spirits that the boy belongs to the temple and must not be harmed.
Often a boy is dressed as a girl, or called by a girl’s name, because
the evil spirits do not bother with girls. Once I had as a servant a boy
of about twelve with a ring in his nose. More exactly it was a piece of
telegraph-wire twisted into a ring shape and thrust through the
cartilage between the nostrils. This was supposed to prove that he was a
pig—which in some ways he was!—so that invisible spirits of evil would
let him alone.
If the Chinese did not have as a religion what we usually call ancestor
worship, they would be able to live better. Because everyone, even
beggars, must leave sons to burn incense to them after they are dead,
China is terribly crowded. Because huge coffins are used to bury those
who have left sons, much of China is suffering for lack of trees.
Because graves must be kept for many generations, if not forever,
millions of acres of land are wasted. If all the grave lands were
cultivated the Chinese would have much more to eat.
Most of the Chinese are so poor that they never really have all they
want to eat, except perhaps at New Year’s. There are so many Chinese
that if one man leaves a job twenty will come running to get it.
Therefore most jobs are sold by the man who has more than he can do
himself, just as we sell goods. There are many labor unions in China,
some of them hundreds of years old. But they cannot raise wages as our
labor unions can, because there are too many people looking for work.
[Illustration:
A Chinese girl making paper umbrellas. The ribs of the umbrellas are
of bamboo splints, tied together with colored strings. Tough, oily
paper, brightly colored in gay designs, is fastened to the ribs. A
number of finished umbrellas, closed, are in the rack.
]
The Hard-working Chinese
The Chinese are probably the hardest workers in the world, and certainly
they are the most cheerful under hardships. No doubt that is because
there have been so many more people than jobs for many centuries. They
do not go around with chips on their shoulders as much as with smiles on
their faces. Perhaps if we were as crowded for room as the Chinese are,
we should have discovered that it is best to get along with other people
as smoothly as possible, instead of picking a quarrel easily.
The Chinese are workers rather than fighters. They consider it bad
manners to get angry, or at least to show anger. They call it “losing
face” to be seen doing that, or anything else that makes them ashamed.
They do fight sometimes, especially those of the coolie or poorer class.
For even the Chinese have nerves, though they have learned to keep them
under better control than we have. But like most people of Asia they do
not even know how to “make a fist.” They fight by scratching, or still
more by shouting. The man who can call the other the most names or get
the crowd about them to laughing at the other wins the fight, by making
the other “lose face.”
“Losing Face”
I must tell you a story to illustrate that peculiar Chinese custom of
“losing face.” An American missionary doctor who has lived almost all
his life in China was once giving out tracts in a country village. It
was years ago, before the Boxer uprising in which many foreigners were
killed, and when there was more danger of being mobbed. As he sat down
in the village tea shop a woman came up and began insulting him.
“Ah,” she cried, “there is one of those wicked foreign devils who cut
out the eyes of our children to make medicine, and eat our hearts to
give themselves our courage!” In those days most of the Chinese believed
such silly tales about foreigners, and some do yet. They could not
understand modern medicine and surgery, brought to China by missionary
doctors.
The doctor went on calmly sipping his hot tea. The crowd began to look
angry. There seemed to be danger that the mob would fall upon the
doctor. Then up walked a man without any nose! But he was smiling
broadly and greeted the doctor in a very friendly way.
“Don’t you remember me?” he asked. “Don’t you remember when you cut off
my nose?”
“There,” cried the woman, “what did I tell you? See what that wicked
foreigner did to this man!”
Then the doctor remembered that the man had come to his hospital with
cancer of the nose, and the only way to save his life was to cut the
nose off. The crowd grew more and more angry, but the noseless man
calmed it down, and finally the doctor, who speaks excellent Chinese,
said: “Yes, we do sometimes cut off a man’s nose, and sometimes even
take out an eye. But it is only when there is no other way of curing
him. Now, if you people will give this woman money enough to come to my
hospital, I will cut out her tongue, and your village will not be
bothered any more with her scolding.”
The crowd roared with laughter, for no one likes a joke better than the
Chinese. The woman, laughed at, had “lost face.” She slunk quickly out
of sight, and the doctor was as safe in that village ever after as he
would have been at home.
It is often said that the Chinese do things backward. But there are
reasons for all Chinese customs, and if we stop to think we shall
perhaps find that it is our own ways of doing things that are backward.
For instance, the Chinese call the compass, which they invented, a
“point-south pin.” Does it not point south as well as north? In China
the women wear trousers. We are beginning to find that in some ways they
are better for women than skirts. The Chinese always put the family name
first and the given names after it. When we make telephone-books or
directories we do the same thing. Instead of saying “good-by,” or “I
must be running along,” the Chinese say “_Mant-zow_,” that is, “Walk
slowly.” They consider it undignified to hurry. It is all in the point
of view. The Chinese do not see a man’s face in the moon but an old man
chopping down a tree. Who will say that they are wrong and we are right?
CHAPTER XII
THE CHINESE LANGUAGE AND SCHOOLS
We should always be interested in the language of any country we travel
in. If we take the trouble to learn a little of it we shall get much
more pleasure as well as more learning out of our travels. Interpreters
often fool us even when they have no intention of doing so, for it is
not easy to translate so strange a language as Chinese. It is not simply
that the words are different from ours, but the Chinese mind often works
differently. For instance, if you ask a Chinese waiter, “Is there no
bread?” he will answer “Yes” if there is _none_ and “No” if there is
_some_. What he means is “Yes, you are right; there is no bread,” or
“No, you are wrong, there is bread.” This is really just as sensible as
our way, isn’t it?
It is not very hard to learn enough of a language, even as strange a
language as Chinese, to get around alone. If you study it a little and
listen to the people all the time, you will be surprised to find how
soon you can talk to them on simple matters. It is a good idea to take
along a few picture books when you travel in China, or in any other
foreign country. The pictures interest the boys who gather around you,
and you will learn the names of the things in the pictures by hearing
the boys pronounce them.
Magazine advertising pages will do almost as well. The trouble there is
that many Chinese do not know the difference between photographs and
fanciful drawings. Several times in out-of-the-way parts of China boys
asked me if we really had such funny-looking people in our country as
the dwarfs and trolls and fat little men carrying cans of soup shown in
some of our advertisements.
A Picture Language
The Chinese do not write with letters. Each word is a kind of picture,
and there are tens of thousands of them. There is no way of telling from
the characters or pictures how the word should be pronounced. So instead
of only twenty-six letters, all the thousands of characters have to be
learned separately. The Chinese typesetter in a printing-shop does not
sit down at his work. He has to walk from one end of a long room to the
other to get the characters he needs. These characters are the same not
only all over China but in Japan, Korea, Formosa, and French Annam. But
they are pronounced differently in each country, and in different parts
of China also.
A Korean can talk to an Annamese, or a Japanese to a Formosan, or a man
of northern China to one from the south. But he has to do it the way
deaf and dumb people talk to us—by writing, sometimes by merely
pretending to write, the character with a forefinger in the palm of the
hand. I have had Chinese or Japanese servants, who could not make me
understand by talking, draw invisible pictures for me in their hands.
Because a Korean or an Annamese would have understood them they thought
any foreigner should.
Although the language spoken by the Chinese is really primitive in its
make-up, like the language of our Indians and many uncivilized tribes,
they have made it a very civilized language, and can talk as easily
about literature or philosophy as we can. Each word or character has one
syllable. Sometimes several characters are combined, as in “point-south
pin,” but those are really separate words.
Now if you will try to invent a language with only one-syllable words in
it you will find there are not enough sounds to make many words. The
Chinese got around this difficulty in a very clever way. If they drawl a
word it means one thing; if they say it sharply it means something else;
if they say it in a high voice it means quite a different thing from
what it means when said in a bass voice. A boy whose voice is changing
has a hard time talking Chinese.
Foreigners call these different ways of saying the same words “tones,”
though they are rather intonations. The language of Peking has four
“tones”; down in Canton there are nine, that is, the same syllable means
nine different things, depending on the “tone” in which it is
pronounced.
An Easy Yet a Difficult Language
My little boy, who was just beginning to talk when we reached Peking,
learned Chinese more quickly than he did English. That was natural, for
words of one syllable are easier to learn than long ones. In fact, in a
way Chinese is a child’s language. It has almost no grammar, no genders,
no tenses, no singular and plural, no articles, and very few of the
other troubles that we have in our own language lessons.
[Illustration:
A Chinese school of the old sort. It has no front wall, though a main
road goes past it and there is no “front yard” at all! How would you
like to try to get lessons sitting out on the curbstone or on the
edge of the highway? The old style of study consists in shouting
Chinese classics, so as to memorize them, while the teacher sleeps
or smokes.
]
If a Chinese wishes to ask whether a thing is good or bad he simply
says, “Good not good?” For “A man riding a horse came down the lane,” he
says, “Man horse come lane.” But that does not mean that Chinese is an
easy language to learn well. The “tones” alone are harder than all our
grammar, and most boys take from six to eight years to learn to read and
write. So we should find it hard work to learn Chinese properly.
Modern Schools
China now has many schools much like our own. The pupils study about the
same subjects that you do, though of course they take Chinese history
instead of American or European. They sit at desks like yours, have
teachers paid by the government or the city, and use books similar to
your schoolbooks, except that they begin at the back and read down
columns from right to left.
Some American schoolbooks have been translated into Chinese. There are
gymnasiums and physical training in some schools, though many Chinese
boys seem to like to play checkers or ping-pong or croquet rather than
baseball and football. There are manual-training schools and all kinds
of technical high schools and several large Chinese universities. Boys
and girls usually go to different schools, or at least to different
classes, for the Chinese think that this is the best arrangement.
Out in the villages and in the far-away parts of the country there are
still many of the old-fashioned schools which China had before the
revolution. There the pupils usually sit on narrow sawhorses and shout
all day long at the top of their lungs. The old style of teaching was to
have the pupils memorize as many of the old Chinese classics as
possible, and to write essays just like those that were written hundreds
of years ago. If we had that system in our schools, you would have a
book of Shakespeare or of some old philosopher before you, and each
pupil would be reading in a different place and shouting different words
at the same time. The teacher pays very little attention, unless the
shouting dies down. Then he jumps up, perhaps with a switch or ruler,
and sets everyone to shouting again.
Very few girls go to these old-fashioned schools. In fact most Chinese
still think girls do not need an education. Millions of boys and even
more girls, especially the sons and daughters of peasants and coolies
and other poor people, never get to school at all. There are not yet
places enough for them, and only in a few cities are children required
to go to school if they or their parents do not wish it. In olden times,
not so long ago, students were shut up in cells in great
examination-halls when the time came to take their examinations. They
were left there sometimes for two or three days, during which they had
to write essays as much as possible like those in the old Chinese
classics. No one was expected, or even allowed, to have any ideas of his
own.
The Chinese Are Very Intelligent
You would be very much mistaken if you thought that because millions of
them cannot read or write, the Chinese are not intelligent. Even those
who still have many of the ridiculous old superstitions are very bright
and have a great deal of hard common sense. In fact I have seen many an
“ignorant” Chinese coolie whose mind was much sharper than the minds of
some Americans who go through high school and then read nothing much for
the rest of their lives but a daily newspaper and now and then a cheap
novel.
Compared to the number in our country, there are very few newspapers in
China. Most of those are miserable little sheets that look like the
handbills scattered about by our stores and theaters. But the Chinese
get the news, for all that. They hear much of it at the tea shops where
all the men gather. The women do not often go to such places, but many
of them exchange gossip on the river-bank or pond-edge where they do
their washing. Whenever I traveled through the country away from
railroads and steamers I heard my mule-drivers or boatmen or
carrier-coolies exchanging the news with those they met from the other
direction everywhere along the way.
Tea shop gossip is, of course, hardly equal to a good daily newspaper,
or to the better class of weekly and monthly magazines. There are no
movies in most parts of China, either, and very few of our many other
ways of telling people what they ought to know. That is one of the
reasons why China cannot yet be a real republic, just as it is the
reason why there is so much uncleanliness and unhygienic living and
disease. If you have no way of showing people the truth you cannot teach
them why they should brush their teeth every day and take frequent
baths.
Some Chinese men and women, as well as foreign missionaries, are doing
all they can to teach the poor people who have never had time to go to
school or could not find room in one. In Taiyuanfu, the capital of
Shansi Province, the “model governor” put up big billboards with one
thousand of the most important Chinese characters painted on them.
Rickshaw-coolies waiting for customers and women going to market can
study these and perhaps in time learn them. Of course knowing only one
thousand of the many Chinese characters is much like knowing only the
words in one of our readers for first grade. But with that start many a
coolie who has never been inside a school has learned to read at least
the newspapers. Now the thousand-character idea is being used in many
parts of the country.
[Illustration:
My Chinese name, Fei Lan-kuh.
]
Every foreigner who goes to China, by the way, should take a Chinese
name. The Chinese cannot pronounce or even write our names in their
characters. Besides, there are only about a hundred Chinese family
names, and they are the only ones the Chinese recognize. My own Chinese
name is Fei Lan-kuh. Fei is as nearly as the Chinese who have not
studied English can pronounce my last name. They could no more read my
real name on a visiting-card than you can read the one on my Chinese
card. To the Chinese I was Mr. Fei. The character with that sound means
extravagance, and Lan-kuh means orchid and self-control. But I do not
believe the Chinese thought me either extravagant or flower-like!
Work on a New Alphabet
Some Chinese and many foreigners have tried to make an alphabet that
could be used instead of the thousands of picture-words it takes so many
years to learn. But that is not easy, because even if you can invent
letters to represent all the queer Chinese sounds you still have to find
ways to show whether the word should be pronounced high or low, fast or
slow, or in any other of the various “tones.” Besides, the Chinese say
that if they stop using the old characters they will no longer be able
to read their famous classics. They remind us that the boys and girls of
Korea and Annam, where the Japanese and the French have introduced
simplified books, can no longer read Confucius or any of the old
philosophers. We should not like it if the English language were so
changed that our children would be unable to read the great classics of
our literature.
In olden times education was held in great honor in China. Those who
stood highest in the old-fashioned examinations had the best chance of
becoming high government officials. Coolies still consider a boy who
goes to high school very far above them. Some students have taken
advantage of this to start trouble against foreigners or against the
government, but most of them are learning to take a really intelligent
interest in the problems of their country.
We must not forget that the Chinese invented gunpowder, the compass,
printing, porcelain, and many other important things. They have thought
out some of the greatest proverbs, some of the wisest philosophy that
the world possesses. They are the most ingenious people on earth. If
they have never become really inventive as well as ingenious, it is
because there were always so many men ready to work for almost nothing
that it was cheaper to get along, for example, with a windlass than to
invent a windmill.
CHAPTER XIII
FOREIGNERS IN CHINA
Would it not seem strange if certain foreign countries owned and
governed parts of New York, Washington, St. Louis, and others of our
large cities? Yet that is exactly the condition in China. Not only does
England own the island of Hong Kong and a portion of the neighboring
mainland, but the best parts of nearly all important Chinese ports
belong to Japan, Great Britain, France, Italy, and other European
countries. These foreign colonies in China are called “concessions,”
because they were conceded by the old Chinese government, sometimes
after wars between the foreign countries and China. Most of them were
merely leased for a long term of years, rather than given. But they are
really foreign colonies within China.
China did not want to open her doors to the West any more than Japan or
Korea did. The Chinese thought all other peoples were barbarians; and
they still do, to a large extent—just as we still sometimes call them
heathen. So the emperors decided that it would be better if their people
did not come into contact any more than necessary with the rude traders
and seamen from the outside world. To begin with, therefore, the Chinese
quite willingly allowed the foreigners to build up ports and cities on
certain bits of Chinese territory turned over to the outsiders.
Foreigners Make Many Improvements
Many of the pieces of land leased to the foreign governments were so
poor that the Chinese officials must have snickered to themselves when
they gave them to the despised “barbarians.” Where the great modern
foreign part of Shanghai now is there was little more than a swamp. The
pretty little foreign business and residential island of Shameen in
Canton was a patch of sand in the river, covered with water at high tide
and with garbage or refuse at low tide. So it was with most of what have
now become the most modern parts of many Chinese cities. In the
beginning the Chinese thought they were holding the “barbarians” back by
letting them live only on such pieces of ground. But now, seeing how
much better off the foreigners are under their own laws in cities they
have built for themselves, many Chinese wish that the concessions
belonged to China.
There is at least one very good argument in their favor. If a Chinese
politician or general or thief or murderer gets into one of the foreign
concessions, the Chinese government cannot do anything to him. If he
puts his stolen money into one of the foreign banks in a concession, the
Chinese from whom he stole it cannot get it back. We naturally would not
like it if France or England or China or any other country protected our
criminals in certain parts of our own cities. So we are rather glad the
United States has no concessions in China, except that Americans help to
govern the part of Shanghai known as the International Settlement.
Foreigners Have Their Own Laws
After the World War Germany and Austria and Russia lost their
concessions in China, and also the privilege of trying their own people
in China under their own laws. But if an American were to rob or kill a
Chinese, or anyone else, in any part of China, he could not be tried by
a Chinese judge according to Chinese laws and be shut up in a Chinese
prison if he were found guilty. All the Chinese could do to him would be
to arrest him and take him to the nearest American consul. If he were
charged with only a small crime, the consul himself could try him. If it
were something important he would have to be taken before the regular
American court in Shanghai presided over by a judge appointed by the
President in Washington. He would be tried by American laws, and if he
were found guilty he would be sent to an American prison, perhaps in the
Philippines.
Strangely enough, the Chinese themselves wanted the foreigners to have
this privilege of extraterritoriality (as it is called), just as they
wanted them to take the concessions. They did not care for the bother of
trying to make the rough seamen and other “barbarians” who came to their
ports behave themselves. They preferred that the “barbarians’” own
governments should attend to such matters. It was much as if the boys of
one school had gone to another school to play football. Naturally the
teachers of the “home” school would rather have the visiting teachers
look after the conduct of their own pupils.
But in time the Chinese discovered that this privilege of not being
subject to the laws and officials of China was an advantage to the
foreigners in the country, just as the concessions were. From every
country go out bad as well as good men, and some foreigners took
advantage of the situation to do things in China which they should not
have done. Then consuls and judges have sometimes seemed too lenient in
dealing with their countrymen. Besides, the Chinese say that it is not
fair to a great nation like theirs to allow other peoples to have such
privileges. It makes China “lose face.”
Yet even now the people of fourteen different nationalities, all
European except ourselves and the Japanese, have extraterritoriality in
China. Russians and Germans and Austrians, however, can be tried in
Chinese courts and sent to Chinese prisons. Up in Manchuria I saw more
than two hundred Russian prisoners in a Chinese penitentiary, and at
least one of them was afterward executed. There were two or three
Germans in prison in Peking, and a few in other parts of the country.
Now many of the Chinese are demanding that all foreign nations give up
legal privileges, as well as concessions. But foreign governments say
that it would not be fair to their people living in China to do this
until Chinese courts become less corrupt and more independent of local
dictators, and until Chinese prisons are improved.
Thousands of Foreigners in China
You would probably be surprised, as we were, to find how many foreigners
live in China. There are thousands of Americans, to say nothing of all
the other nationalities. Perhaps half of these are business men, many of
them living in Shanghai. Some of them are interested in the Chinese
people, but too many are interested only in the money they can make out
of them. When they leave their offices they go to their own clubs or
parks or golf-links, where no Chinese are admitted except as servants.
Many of them never learn to speak Chinese, even though they live in
China half their lives. In fact some who were born there cannot do so.
They talk to their servants and clerks and rickshaw-men in
pidgin-English, which is a dreadful “language” made up of Chinese
sentences translated into words that are really not English at all.
“Master no wantchee catchee sampan chop chop” is the way they would say,
“I do not wish to take the boat yet.”
If any of you ever go out to China to represent an American company I
hope you will not look down upon the Chinese as some business men do.
Parts of China are made as ugly by advertising billboards as many of our
own roads and railroads are at home. Some foreign companies even paint
their advertisements on temples and city walls. When they receive such
treatment, it is no wonder that the Chinese occasionally call us
_Yang-gwei-tze_ or _Fang-gwy-lo_, that is, “foreign devils.”
Many Mission Schools
There are at least ten thousand foreign missionaries in China, more of
them Americans than of any other one nationality. They learn Chinese,
study Chinese history, and take much interest in the people. Chinese
temples are everywhere, but there are now many churches also. I do not
remember a single large city anywhere in China that has not at least one
church and a foreign missionary or two. Some have many more than that.
Great establishments, such as schools, hospitals, and universities, have
been built by foreigners in Peking and in nearly all the provincial
capitals. Hard-working American and British and other men and women go
about the country holding services in the villages and curing sick
people.
[Illustration:
High school girls who are attending an American mission school in
Shantung Province. They are not allowed to have bound feet.
]
In the olden days missionaries suffered hardships in China. They lived
in miserable Chinese mud-brick houses and ate poor native food. Often
they caught dreadful diseases and sometimes they were mobbed and even
killed. But now nearly all of them live as comfortably as they could at
home. They build good foreign houses, eat their own kind of food, and
have more servants than they could possibly have in the United States.
Of course some things are not so pleasant as they are at home, but
others are more so. Missionaries living far back in the interior still
sometimes have to rough it. I spent two days with a French priest who
had lived all alone in a miserable little Chinese city for twenty-five
years. He had never been back to France and expected to die at his post.
Most Protestant missionaries go home for a year every seven years, and
they usually have their families with them.
Although foreign missionaries have been working among the Chinese for
nearly a hundred years there are by no means as many Chinese Christians
as there are Chinese Mohammedans. Yet it must be very interesting work
to be a missionary in China. A doctor or a teacher, especially, should
get great satisfaction out of helping the Chinese, for in some things
they are not yet able to help themselves.
Many Chinese are now objecting to mission schools. They say that every
country should control its own schools. They believe the children will
lose their patriotism for China and become attached to the countries
their missionary teachers come from. They ask us if we would like it if
Chinese started schools for American boys and girls in the United States
and tried to make them Buddhists or Confucianists. However, China
herself has not yet built enough schools for all her children.
There are Chinese Christians who wish to establish a Chinese Church
also, and quite a number of missionaries agree with them. They say that
they should pay their own way in religious matters as well as in any
other. They cannot see any good reason why they should be divided as
Methodists, Presbyterians, and so forth just because Christians in
America and Europe are so divided. The time may perhaps come when nearly
all Chinese Christians will join together to form a true Chinese Church.
CHAPTER XIV
ALONG THE GREAT YANG-TZE KIANG
China is so large a country that what is true in the north is often not
true at all in the south, nor perhaps even in what is called Central
China, the basin of the Yang-tze Kiang. This “Son of the Sea,” as its
name means in English, cuts China in two much as the Mississippi does
the United States. But instead of flowing from north to south, it flows
from west to east. Rising among the lofty mountain ranges of Tibet, it
runs clear across China proper to the Pacific Ocean. It is more than
three thousand miles long, considerably longer than the Mississippi, and
with its many branches it drains fully as much territory as our own
greatest river.
Yet though most foreigners think so, the Yang-tze does not exactly
divide northern from southern China. The real dividing-line is farther
north, about at the thirty-fourth parallel of latitude. In crossing that
invisible line on our way south by railway, either from Peking to
Shanghai or from Peking to Hankow, six hundred miles up the Yang-tze, we
shall see an almost sudden change in the life and realize how much
difference is made by climate. There will be no more camels; no more
“Peking carts” bumping along on wheels having sharpened spikes for
tires; no more wide roads. We shall see narrow trails winding through
the rice fields, wide enough only for men on foot or for wheelbarrows.
[Illustration:
Plowing a rice field is not exactly fun for the man, but the water
buffalo seems to enjoy the muddy, flooded field.
]
Coolies and Rice Fields
Even the most important “roads” of southern China are seldom more than
two and a half or three feet wide, though often they are paved for
hundreds of miles with broad slabs of stone. The carrier-coolie, usually
with his load at the two ends of a springy pole, carried over the
shoulder, is the chief beast of burden throughout southern China. I have
had coolies tell me that this is an easy way to carry heavy loads
because, since the load bounces up and down as they trot, they really
feel the weight only half the time! At any rate, they become so used to
carrying things that way that if they have load enough for only one end
of the pole they put a stone, or perhaps a little boy or girl in a
basket, at the other end. Often it is easier for a Chinese to carry two
of his small children than one, especially if he has twins!
[Illustration:
Men in China are so used to carrying everything hung by long cords
from the ends of a pole that they often take the baby to balance
some other load. Or, if they have twins to take for a ride, it is
very easy to carry them in this way.
]
Instead of the _kaoliang_ and millet and wheat of northern China we now
find rice growing everywhere. Along with the flooded rice fields comes
the water-buffalo, the _carabao_ of the Philippines. He loves to wallow
in places where rice grows, only his eyes and nostrils above the surface
of the water. Though the line between northern and southern China is not
marked on a map, it is so distinct that I know places where wheat grows
in one field and rice in the next one.
[Illustration:
The boys, and some of the girls, in southern China ride the water
buffaloes to keep them out of the rice fields while grazing along
the dikes. A Chinese boy learns to sleep soundly stretched out on
the animal’s back, but it is hard to see how he can do that and be
really “on the job” too.
]
Shanghai
Most people who visit China land at Shanghai and perhaps think of that
as the most important Chinese city. This is not true, although it is the
most important “foreign” city in China. In the International Settlement
or the French Concession you can almost imagine yourself in some big
American city; and it is the foreigners rather than the Chinese who rule
it. Yet there is a big Chinese part of Shanghai also, an old city that
was once walled, where things are much the same as they are a thousand
miles from any foreign concession. At the end of the electric car lines
built for the foreign sections, passengers often transfer to
wheelbarrows which bounce them away over roads almost as bad as those in
the far interior. As a port, Shanghai leads all other cities of the Far
East.
[Illustration:
In many ways, Shanghai is a very up-to-date, modern Western city, but,
as appears here, men still do much of the work that horses or trucks
would do in our country.
]
Shanghai is not on the Yang-tze, but on a branch of it called the
Whangpoa. Yet all the big steamers going up the “Son of the Sea” start
from there. Many of these steamers are British or American or Japanese;
indeed, one of the complaints of the Chinese against foreigners is that
they were forced to make a treaty allowing anyone to use their great
river. The United States does not allow foreign boats to carry freight
or passengers on the Mississippi, you know, or even between the ports on
our coasts.
[Illustration:
This is a scheme that beats the “daily dozen.” Boatmen around
Shaohsing, which is across Hanchow Bay from Shanghai, row with their
feet and paddle with their hands, at the same time. They can keep
this up for twenty-four hours at a stretch.
]
Important Cities
Two cities we must not fail to see before we go farther inland are
Soochow and Hangchow. Both of them are on the Grand Canal, though not
exactly on the Yang-tze itself. They are famous old cities with many
canals and queer high-arched stone bridges, and the Chinese have a
saying that they are the most beautiful places outside of heaven. I
doubt, however, whether you would think them so very beautiful, and I am
sure you would not find them clean enough to be called heavenly.
The Grand Canal, by which the people of southern China sent their taxes
in rice to Peking for hundreds of years, crosses the Yang-tze at a
pretty place called Chinkiang. The canal goes on northward and the river
takes us to the west. Almost at the junction is the famous old city of
Nanking. Its name means “southern capital,” as Peking means “northern
capital.” But though it has been the capital of China at various times
during the past two thousand years, like several other cities, it is now
only the capital of a province. If it filled all the space inside its
great wall, it would be one of the largest cities on earth. But it was
almost destroyed several times during various wars, especially in the
war against the Taiping rebels, about the time of our Civil War. We rode
for miles through hilly country even after entering the city gate, and
found Nanking itself down in the southern end of the inclosure—much as
if it were a peck of potatoes left in a two-bushel sack.
We can travel to Nanking from Shanghai either by railroad, in about five
hours, or by steamer. On the river we shall pass modern cotton-mills and
other proofs that China may in time become a great industrial nation of
factories, like Japan or the United States. But as we travel farther we
shall discover that the great mass of the Chinese still work in little
groups, often in their own houses, and that they are still in the family
stage of industrial development, just as Western peoples were once—and
not so long ago, either, as world history is measured.
[Illustration:
A “street” of Shaohsing which, like many cities of southern China,
somewhat resembles Venice in having many canals. These
water-streets, if not so beautiful as those of the Italian city, are
certainly picturesque.
]
On Up the “Son of the Sea”
As we plow on up the Yang-tze, so wide that sometimes we can see only
one of its low flat banks at a time, we do not wonder that the Chinese
named it “Son of the Sea.” Besides the big foreign steamers, as
comfortable as those crossing the Pacific, there are thousands of native
craft. Sometimes a hundred sails are in sight at once; near at hand we
see that they have ribs of bamboo which remind us of the lines on a
sheet of writing-paper. Many of the boats or junks have an eye painted
on each side of the bow, usually protruding like the eyes of a fish. The
Chinese think that a boat needs to see its way just as a man or an
animal does.
There are many smaller boats also on the Yang-tze. Some are what we call
_sampans_, which in Chinese means “three boards,” and that is about all
some of them are. The fishing boats crawl along the shores and sometimes
go far out into the stream. Some are rowed by an old man or woman, or
even by a boy or two, while at the bow stands a stronger man with what
looks like a huge pair of scissors made of bamboo. He thrusts the
crosspieces and attached net down to the bottom, closes the “scissors,”
and draws them in again. If he catches a fish, or anything else good to
eat, he dumps it into the boat. Generally he catches nothing, but he
goes right on working as fast as he can without really hurrying. As I
have said before, the Chinese think it undignified to hurry. Along some
of the canals of China we shall find men lifting weeds and slime off the
bottom with these scissor-like implements; nothing is wasted in China,
and the stuff collected makes good fertilizer.
[Illustration:
Thousands of Chinese cloth weavers work in little dens like this.
Often they eat at their loom, and sleep on a board or mat underneath
the crude wooden machine. Yet these workmen do not seem to think
their lot a hard one.
]
The more common form of fishing-boat along the Yang-tze and in many
other parts of China is a raft, usually anchored at the shore. A little
hut made of grass and reeds shelters the fisherman, and a long square
dip-net, much like the one we sometimes use, held open with a bent
bamboo fastened to each of its corners, is balanced at the end of a long
pole. Now and then the fisherman pulls up the net by hauling the inboard
end of the pole down to him in his hut. Even such nets do not seem to
catch many fish, but no people have more fisherman patience than the
Chinese. They even fish in little ponds about the towns, and fix rows of
poles so as to spoil the net of anyone who tries to catch their fish at
night.
[Illustration:
Silk thread hung out in a yard to dry before being woven into cloth.
The making of silk is one of the most important industries of China,
but it is nearly always a home-and-family, rather than a factory,
industry.
]
Several times we saw big flocks of ducks being driven across the river.
Two men in small boats each had a long pole with a lash on its end. They
hit the water with the lashes to make the ducks go the way they wished.
I have seen hundreds of these duck-herders driving their flocks over
hills and through swamps and rice fields looking for feeding grounds, or
bringing them home again at night.
Living on the Water
Even beggars have boats on the Yang-tze. Some, in miserable “three
boards,” paddle up close when travelers stop, and beg for the rice that
has been left over from the last meal. If they see a stick of wood in
the river, or anything else they can possibly use as fuel or food or for
any other purpose, they hurry after it and fish it out. Some of these
beggar-boats make one think of big washtubs, and nearly all contain
whole families, the children lying about on bundles of rags that serve
as bedding. More than once I saw a man in a tub hardly as large as those
we use on wash-day, paddling himself about with two pieces of board
smaller than tennis-rackets. In ponds about Nanking and along the
Yang-tze a man or woman, or a child, sometimes goes out in one of these
tubs to pull up water-chestnuts from the bottom. The Chinese eat these,
as they do almost anything, although from them, the missionary doctors
say, comes one of the worst native diseases.
The Chinese never really row a boat. Sometimes a dozen or more men stand
at the front, facing forward, and push at long oars. But the more common
way is to scull, just as the gondolier of Venice does, with a single oar
sticking out behind, its inboard end fastened to the deck with a piece
of rope. All over southern China there are families that have no other
home but their boat. They are born, grow up, marry, and die on boats.
Most of them have an altar to their ancestors taking up the best part of
their floating home. The women handle a boat just as well as the men do,
and baby sleeps serenely on mother’s back while she sculls.
[Illustration:
The duck herder, driving his flock to a place where they can pick up
food, is a very common sight in China.
]
There are a number of large cities along the Yang-tze, but the big
foreign steamers dock at only a few of them. At other places, such as
Anking, capital of the province of Anhwei, passengers landing have to
jump into small boats sculled out from the shore. Those who wish to
board the steamer scramble, somehow, with many shrieks, onto the lower
deck. Often baggage is lost in the confusion, and sometimes passengers
are drowned.
The Ever-present Pagoda
Outside its walls Anking has a pagoda that looks quite new, but like
nearly all pagodas in China it is about a thousand years old. A pagoda
is supposed to protect a town from evil spirits, and sometimes it has
another use, as is the case with that at Anking. The Chinese imagine
that this city is a boat, and think that its _two_ pagodas keep it
anchored. The second pagoda is only the shadow thrown across the river
by the real one at sunrise. Now, unless they wish to float away and live
somewhere else, you would think that the people of a town that is a boat
would be careful to keep repaired the pagoda that serves it as anchor.
But the people of Anking either thought they would be better off
somewhere else or they grew very careless. They allowed their pagoda to
fall almost into ruin. Finally a rich Chinese rebuilt it, in gratitude
for having been kept from sailing on a steamer that sank during the
voyage he had planned to make on it.
Not far from Anking is a sacred mountain called the Chio Hwa Shan, or
Nine Flowery Mountains, because of the strange form of its peaks. I
climbed to the cluster of temples and monasteries at the top, along with
hundreds of pilgrims. But as we shall climb even more famous sacred
mountains before we leave China I shall not take time to tell you much
about this one. Kiukiang, the next important city above Anking, is
partly a concession belonging to foreigners, like Nanking and Wuhu. From
the river the walled city of Kiukiang along the bank looks very
picturesque, but when we land we find only the foreign part of it clean
enough for an enjoyable walk.
Triplet Cities
Higher still, six hundred miles up the river, are the triplet cities of
Hankow, Hanyang, and Wuchang. Together they have nearly as large a
population as Chicago. Hankow is a foreign concession, with some six- or
eight-story buildings, modern streets, and a wonderful foreign club with
everything from golf to cricket, from horse-racing to swimming-pools,
where the many foreign residents come in the afternoon and evening to
hear band concerts and enjoy themselves even more than most of them
could at home. Just across a creek with hundreds of native boats on it
are the great steel mills of Hanyang. The Japanese have a strong
influence in the control of these mills as they loaned money to build
them. Across the Yang-tze is Wuchang, a big Chinese city and capital of
an important province. Here began the revolution of 1911 that drove the
Manchu emperor off the throne at Peking and gave China the name of a
Republic.
Foreign and Chinese steamers go on up the “Son of the Sea” a thousand
miles more, but they are smaller steamers than those between Hankow and
Shanghai. That part of the great river is often beautiful and much more
interesting than the wide lower Yang-tze with its flat shores. We shall
see it when we come down from far western China at the end of our
Chinese travels. Now we will return to Kiukiang and climb to Kuling, a
foreign city. Here my family and I spent the summer with more than three
thousand other foreigners. There were at least twenty different
nationalities in that foreign community, and China has no more to say
about governing it than it has about governing Kansas City.
[Illustration:
When a rice field is plowed, the children follow and gather a certain
kind of snails which the Chinese consider good eating. It doesn’t
seem to be very hard work for these youngsters, who probably get the
same kind of pleasure from the task as American children would in
making mud pies or sand forts.
]
CHAPTER XV
DIFFICULT JOURNEYS
We could easily imagine ourselves in an airplane when looking down upon
the great Yang-tze plain from Kuling, four thousand feet above it. Most
of the summer the river was so full that it overflowed its banks and
flooded much of the surrounding country. But we could still tell which
was the real river, by the darker yellow of it, as it wound away across
the green country like a gigantic snake. On the other side of our
mountain we could look down upon the great lake of Poyang, the largest
in China. The Tung Ting Hu, farther up the Yang-tze, is sometimes called
the largest; but it is so only when the flooding Yang-tze fills it
during the summer.
Far away across Poyang Lake lies a city that ought to be more famous
than it is, for it is the china-town of China, where nearly all the best
Chinese porcelain has been made for hundreds of years. Yet many
foreigners who know that the most wonderful porcelains on earth have
always been made in China have never heard of Kingtehchen, and millions
of Chinese themselves do not know its name. That is what comes of a
city’s being so far away from a railroad or any other modern form of
transportation that only those who are willing to endure hardships can
reach it. As the crow flies it is only about a hundred miles from Kuling
to Kingtehchen, but it took me longer to get there than it does to go
from New York to Salt Lake City.
First of all I had to descend the mountain, this time on the lake side.
I had found a coolie, who carried my cot and bedding and some cans of
food and other baggage, and who boiled my eggs and did other simple
cooking for me along the way. He thought that seventy coppers a day
(fifteen cents in our money) would be about the right wages. On the way
down the narrow trail, steep as a stairway, we met many other coolies,
such as we had seen climbing to Kuling all summer.
Everything that goes up there has to be carried on men’s backs, whether
it is a trunk or a barrel of cement or the timbers as big as
telegraph-poles that are used as beams in the foreign houses. We passed
long trains of these coolies, each with two great poles tied together in
V-shape over his shoulders. Almost all foreigners and wealthy Chinese
who come to Kuling are carried up in chairs. The coolies were naked to
the waist, with streams of sweat running down their sun-browned bodies.
Yet when they stopped to rest, leaning the ends of their poles against
the mountain side, they seemed to shiver, though we had often found
Kuling too hot.
I have made many difficult trips in various parts of the world, but I do
not remember a short journey that was as hard as that tramp to
Kingtehchen. We might have gone by boat along the lake and up a river,
but no one knew how long that might take. So after crossing the lake by
_sampan_, we found one of those flagstone roads that wind through rice
fields in southern China. Though hardly three feet wide, it dropped so
suddenly into the muddy fields on either side that we had to walk on the
stones all the time. You can imagine how hot it was, in the middle of
August, with never a cloud in the sky or a tree along the way; for we
were as far south as Georgia.
[Illustration:
Did you ever hear of buffaloes wearing straw sandals? The driver is
carrying a supply of such footgear for these water buffaloes. The
animals’ hoofs are so soft that when a long trip is taken the
sandals are put on them for protection.
]
Wading along Flooded Roads
To make matters worse, much of the country was flooded. I waded all one
day and part of another, in water often above my knees. If you have ever
tried that, you know how it makes the thighs ache. My bare feet slipped
on the slimy stones of a road which squirmed about almost invisible
beneath the water. If I stepped off the edge I went up to my waist in
mud. Once I split a toe-nail, but luckily it did not become infected.
Before the trip was over I had a dozen blisters on my feet, and my legs
ached from pounding the hard stones and ploughing through the water all
day.
[Illustration:
A crowded passenger boat on Lake Poyang, the largest lake in China.
You will notice that the one big sail has many parallel ribs, made
of strips of bamboo, to keep it stiff.
]
The first night I stayed with an English customs officer in a town at
the edge of the lake. I was so hot from the walk that I might have been
wakeful anyway, but the hubbub kept up by the night watchman made sleep
quite impossible. For hundreds of years Chinese watchmen have made their
rounds pounding sections of dried bamboo that sound like drums, or
clashing pieces of iron together, or shouting at the top of their lungs.
Some of them, like this watchman, do all these things at once. They say
it is to prove that they are awake and on the job, but I suspect it is
partly to give warning in time, so that they will not have to fight
thieves and robbers. Can you imagine one of our policemen going about
town pounding a drum or blowing a whistle all night?
The other nights I slept outdoors, putting up my cot with its
mosquito-net on some corner of the narrow road, and once down on the
bank of a river. The Chinese never sleep outdoors at night, if they can
help it, no matter how hot it may be inside, and when traveling they
always stop at the largest, noisiest, and dirtiest town they can find
instead of out in the pleasant country. My coolie was horrified at my
foolishness, and all the people for miles around came and stood near my
cot half the night, talking about the “crazy outside-country-man.” In
fact I was often pointed out along the way as the queer fellow who
risked being moon-struck or killed by the evil spirits that fly at
night.
It was harvest-time, and all day long the dull thump! thump! thump! of
the threshers sounded in our ears. Instead of using reapers or binders
and threshing-machines the Chinese cut their rice by the handful with a
sickle and then beat out the heads of it into a big wooden box so heavy
that it usually takes two men to carry it from field to field. Often
there were four men at one box, each pounding on a different side of it
and making a sound as regular as do several men with sledges working at
the same blacksmith’s anvil.
[Illustration:
This father and son of Kingtehchen are noted for the porcelain figures
they make. After the figures are baked, they are covered with bright
colors and baked again.
]
Where Chinese Porcelain Is Made
We reached Kingtehchen on the fourth morning and found it a very large,
crowded, and busy town, with streets as narrow as they were a thousand
years ago. It stretches five miles along the inner curve of a shallow
river, and the bank is twenty or more feet high because broken china has
been thrown out upon it for centuries. Walls and every other possible
thing are made of porcelain dishes that melted together in the kilns or
were broken or otherwise ruined in the making. Yet much rubbish remains
unused.
[Illustration:
An old potter of Kingtehchen, the china-town of China, who has worked
in a porcelain factory since he was a boy. He throws a lump of clay
upon a horizontal disk, or “wheel,” makes the wheel revolve, and
“shapes up” a vase or bowl from the whirling mass of clay, using his
fingers and a stick.
]
Almost everyone in town above the age of six or eight works in one way
or another in the manufacture of porcelain. Hundreds of families make
china dishes in their own homes, but there are also some larger
factories. The most important establishment used to make porcelains for
the emperors, and the manager of it showed me some of the most
magnificent vases and delicate porcelain things I have ever seen.
Hundreds of men do nothing all their lives but carry loads of pine
firewood on their shoulder-poles from the boats that bring it down the
river to the kilns where the dishes are baked. Sometimes as many as six
thousand dishes are stacked up in a single kiln, where they are baked
for about thirty-six hours.
[Illustration:
These vases and other porcelain articles represent the finest work
done by the skilled potters of Kingtehchen, that fascinating city
far off the beaten track of travel.
]
During that time the kiln-boss never sleeps. He tells whether the fire
inside is hot enough by spitting into the hole where the tons of pine
wood have been thrown. Nearly everything else is done in the same
primitive, old-fashioned way. For instance, the “biscuit,” as the
unbaked dishes are called when they are still soft clay, are carried
through town to the kilns on boards which are balanced on men’s
shoulders. These men become so expert that they can make their way with
a board on each shoulder through the narrow crowded streets of
Kingtehchen without once having an accident. There are a few rickshaws
in the china-town, but they are not allowed to operate until after four
o’clock in the afternoon, because they would interfere with the
“biscuit” carriers and the other thousands of carriers racing back and
forth to do their part in giving to the world the famous porcelains of
China.
Nearly all the best things made in Kingtehchen go down the river by
which I returned to the lake. There were whole junk-loads addressed to
an old Chinese firm located in New York City. The river is so shallow on
account of the broken china that has washed down it during hundreds of
years that the boatman of our _sampan_ had to wade and push most of the
twenty-four hours. The dirty old steam-launch that carried me across the
lake towed six fantastic old junks which reminded me of the ships of
Columbus. They were all piled so high with porcelains packed in
rice-straw and boxes that they looked doubly strange in the full
moonlight.
[Illustration:
Not “three men in a tub” this time, but only one; and perhaps the
result will not be so tragic as when the three wise men of Gotham
went to sea in a bowl. Certainly, in China, one sees a great deal of
boating of this sort. The man shown here was paddling himself about
the harbor of Jaochow on Lake Poyang, picking up anything that he
could use for food or otherwise.
]
Birds That Catch Fish
There are many cormorant fishers on Lake Poyang, and in other parts of
southern China. The small boats they use have a pole perch along either
side, and on these sit the silly birds who do the fishing. The instant a
cormorant sees a fish in the water it dives, coming up with the fish in
its beak. The bird would like to swallow the fish, or at least drop it
into the great neck pouch which every cormorant possesses, until there
was time for a meal. But the bird’s owner has put a ring around its
neck, so that it can do nothing but drop the fish into the boat. Yet the
cormorant goes on fishing all day long, and all it gets from the man is
now and then a few of the smallest fish.
[Illustration:
Publishers’ Photo Service
Cormorants fishing for their Chinese owners. Each bird, prevented by a
ring around its neck from swallowing the larger fish, drops these
into the boat.
]
Another Trip by Boat and on Foot
From Lake Poyang I made another very interesting trip, to Foochow on the
southern coast. People said it would be dangerous, because of the many
bandits along the way. On my river journey down to the lake I had been
so crowded in a _sampan_ with a dozen Chinese that I could hardly turn
over on my cot. This time I was the only passenger on a much larger
boat, and I had my meals on another boat in which traveled two American
women missionaries.
The river was so very shallow and the wind so often from the wrong
direction that it took us eight days to go a hundred miles up the
stream. Often we put on our bathing-suits and waded ahead of the boats,
and sometimes we had to wait an hour or two before they caught up with
us. I went ashore and walked the last fifteen miles, and had coolies
ready to go on over the mountains to Fukien Province with us when the
boats finally arrived.
This overland trip was also just about a hundred miles, but it was
faster than the one by boat. However, instead of sitting in my
canvas-chair and reading or sleeping, I had to walk more than
twenty-five miles a day over very rough trails under a blazing sun. The
ladies rode in bamboo chairs, each carried by three coolies.
The three most interesting things along the river had been the
irrigation, the indigo, and the trackers. The land was dotted with
circular thatch roofs over water-wheels, around which water-buffaloes or
oxen or cows marched all day long slowly hauling up water for the
thirsty rice fields. Often we saw from a dozen to twenty huge casks or
tall tubs standing at the edge of the river. When I got ashore I found
these filled with what looked like willow switches, covered with a very
blue liquid. Fields of these switches grew along the banks, and I
discovered that they were indigo, from which the Chinese make, not
blueing for wash-day, because they do not use that, but the dye for the
denim garments worn by nearly all the poorer people of China.
What we usually call trackers are a very common sight on the rivers of
southern China. They are the coolies who haul boats upstream, sometimes
with freight or passengers. We passed long lines of them on the shore or
out in the water itself, each with the boat rope over one shoulder. In
places the pulling was so hard that they bent double, touching the
ground with their fingers, and pulling like plow-horses.
Because there are always so many looking for jobs in China, a man must
toil his best if he is to satisfy his employer and avoid being
discharged. Nearly all the way up the river we kept pace with a fleet of
rafts loaded with American kerosene. Every morning the trackers started
pulling them before daylight and every evening they worked until it was
pitch-dark before they gathered around a small fire to eat their rice.
Traveling on the Min River
But going down a river is very different from coming up, especially on
the native boats of China. From the ancient town where I left the ladies
at their mission station, I took a “slipper-boat,” as it is called
because of its shape, down the Min River. This stream was so swift that
three days were enough for the last half of a journey which had already
taken me more than two weeks. Every day there were dozens of rapids that
I should never have gotten through alive if my Foochow boatman had not
been so expert with his sculling oars.
There were many bandits along the Min just then. An American woman had
been robbed even of her shoes. At one town I met a group of
missionaries, returning from their summer homes on the seashore, who had
lost most of their baggage when they were attacked by a large band. But
it is hard to stop anyone going down-river on the Min. Once some bandits
leveled their rifles at me and ordered me to come ashore, but before
they had gotten up courage to shoot we were around a bend and out of
sight.
Southern China is much more wooded than the north. Trees grow faster,
and besides there have not been so many people through the centuries
cutting them down and grubbing out their roots. Fukien Province had big
forests, which made it look so different from treeless Shantung or Kansu
that it did not seem to belong to the same country. But now an American
lumber company is also doing its share toward making Fukien treeless and
rainless. Some of the huge logs, started floating down the river at
high-water season, were caught now on sharp points of rock. There were
wrecks of boats here and there, too.
All the towns along these Chinese rivers are built so close to them that
they seem to be fairly hanging over the stream. Rubbish and garbage are
thrown from the backs of houses into the river. American cities often
make the river-bank a boulevard or promenade, but the Chinese make it a
dumping ground. The main street is just inside the first row of houses.
Of course there is reason in this, because it is so hot most of the year
in southern China that a narrow, shaded street is more pleasant than a
sunny river-bank.
The big boats along the Min have a high platform, much like the bridge
of a steamer. The steersman stands on this, so that he can see all the
rocks and other dangers, and at the same time handle the enormous oar
used as a rudder. Some of the oars were forty or fifty feet long, and
even then they were not always strong enough to swing the boat around
quickly in a dangerous place. In order to balance this oar-rudder so
that one can handle it, the inboard end has a big stone tied to it. Or,
as the Chinese are always very saving, it may be weighted with a piece
of the cargo, such as a heavy bundle of brown rice-paper.
[Illustration:
This is the coolie who carried my cot and other baggage on the
overland part of the trip from the Yang-tze to Foochow. The strip of
cloth keeps the pole from slipping off his sweating shoulders.
]
Below the pretty walled city of Yenping the Min is so broad and has so
few rapids that we went on all night instead of tying up to the bank at
the foot of a town. But along about two in the morning, when we were in
a very wide place in the river, so strong a wind came up that the top of
my boat was blown over upon me and we only just managed to get to a
sandy shore without being upset. Later we found that a typhoon had swept
the southern coast of China that night, and in the morning it was still
blowing so hard that the boatmen did not dare go on. I decided to go
across country. Four hours of tramping along winding flagstone roads
brought me to Foochow, but my boat and baggage did not get there until
the following evening.
CHAPTER XVI
DOWN THE SOUTHERN COAST
Foochow is one of the most important ports along the southern coast of
China. It is not exactly on the coast, however, being thirty-four miles
up the Min River. The old city was placed three miles back from the
river, because in the olden days the inhabitants feared attacks by
pirates. Now there is also a long, slender city all the way from the
walled town to the river. Besides, two islands in the river are so
covered with houses and shops and people that it is hard to draw one’s
breath, and on the farther bank is still more city. Part of this last is
the foreign concession, called Nantai, with one long modern street or
road shaded by big evergreens and lined by comfortable foreign houses,
offices, schools, and churches, each in its own yard.
The view from these foreign houses over the several parts of Foochow and
up and down the Min is very picturesque. Besides the people crowded upon
the two islands and on the mainland there are thousands who live in
boats. These are packed tightly together, row after row, so that the
water too seems to have its streets. If a boat gets a job carrying a
passenger or some freight it is very fortunate, for there are many more
boats than there are boating jobs. Most of the boats simply serve as
homes, and the man goes ashore in the daytime to earn the family rice by
pulling a rickshaw or doing any other work he can find.
A very ancient bridge, made of huge stone blocks that have been worn
glass-smooth by millions of feet, crosses the river, taking in the two
crowded islands on the way. It has so many piers that when the river is
high the water is held back, and most of the boats cannot pass it at
all. So Foochow is talking of putting up a modern iron bridge, which
will be more convenient but less picturesque than this old stone
structure, crowded with people all day long.
Some Chinese Are Fine Craftsmen
Large steamers do not come up to Foochow, but stop at Pagoda Anchorage
several miles down the river. Yet, handicapped as it is, the city is a
great port. Quantities of tea, grown in Fukien, are shipped from
Foochow. The city is noted for its waterproof oiled silk, its
silversmiths and goldsmiths, and its lacquer-work. I saw a lacquered
screen that a man had spent eight years in making. He worked every other
hour and rested in between, because this work is so wearisome. Two or
three such screens are all he can make in a lifetime. It took him until
he was about twenty to learn how, and after he is thirty-five his eyes
will no longer stand such fine work. Yet he was paid only about
twenty-five cents a day, with rice and a plank to sleep on. Foochow and
the cities higher up the Min are noted for their pillows, but you would
not recognize them as such. They are made of a block of wood covered
with woven-bamboo that gives slightly, and are painted bright red. Like
the Japanese, most Chinese prefer a hard pillow, and coolies think a
brick makes a very good one.
In Foochow and the region about it much of the work is done by women who
wear three great silver or pewter daggers in their hair. It is said that
they are descendants of tribes conquered by the Chinese, and that
because their ancestors were given daggers as a protection against the
Chinese soldiers these present-day women wear the weapons also.
[Illustration:
In Foochow District “field women” such as these do any work that men
can do, for they do not have bound feet and they have become used to
hard labor. Each of them wears three silver or pewter daggers in her
hair. The “field women” are said to be descendants of tribes that
were conquered centuries ago by the Chinese.
]
Different Chinese Dialects
Most of China speaks more or less the same language, which we call
mandarin. But all along the coast from Shanghai onward, in a strip about
a hundred miles wide, there are many dialects. Only about three million
people use the Foochow speech, and few of them can talk to other
Chinese. It is much as if Chicago had its own language which other
Americans could not understand.
Amoy, as foreigners call it, farther on along the coast in the same
province, also has its own dialect. There the foreign concession is a
rocky island a mile or more from the native city. Between it and the
shore is a splendid harbor. A little piece of railroad that runs a few
miles inland is the only railway in all Fukien Province. Out in the
ocean opposite Foochow and Amoy is the big island of Formosa. Formerly
it belonged to China, but it was taken by Japan after her war with China
in 1894–95. The Chinese in Formosa, except recent immigrants, have
Japanese citizenship and rights of extraterritoriality when on the
mainland, and some of them cause the Chinese authorities there much
trouble.
Swatow, still farther on, is of more importance to foreigners and their
steamers than it is to the Chinese. Some time before I reached the city
a great tidal wave had swept over it, destroying many buildings and
killing thousands of people. Certain of the narrow streets were
crisscrossed with timbers holding up the house-walls on either side. In
other places the streets were wide and well paved, with quite new and
modern shops along them—as if the tidal wave had done the place some
good after all, by making rebuilding necessary.
Queer Old Customs
A railroad about thirty miles long runs from Swatow to a larger and much
older city, called Chaochowfu. There I saw some things which I had read
of in old books on China but which I thought had now disappeared. For
instance, thirty men were carrying an enormous slab of stone through
town, and in some places they had to go far out of their way because the
stone was too long to turn a corner. Each coolie had the end of a bamboo
over his shoulder, and they were all chanting a kind of song as they
crept along. Chaochowfu is famous for a great bridge. Part of it is made
of great stone slabs such as those I saw being carried. The rest of it
is a pontoon bridge, that is, a bridge of boats which can be moved aside
when other boats wish to go up or down the river.
The queerest of the old-fashioned customs I saw in Chaochowfu was hard
to believe. Two young men went about inflicting wounds on themselves in
order to arouse sympathy and induce people to give them money or food.
There are so many more people than good jobs almost anywhere in China
that such queer ways of getting a living are often tried. Once I saw a
dwarf who earned his rice by the use he made of a pipe with a very long
stem. Wherever he saw a crowd of coolies, he went up to them and passed
around the end of the stem. Each man who took a few puffs gave the dwarf
some “cash” or a copper coin.
An English Possession in China
Hong Kong is not really in China, but it is quite Chinese. It is a high
rocky island belonging to England, but Chinese make up most of the
population. Its wonderful blue harbor can accommodate hundreds of ships,
and nearly all the flags of the world are seen there. Most of the
English residents live on the mountain side, back above the native town
and business section.
[Illustration:
Thousands of boats like these are used as homes along the coast of
southern China. The people are born, married, and die on boats. Do
you notice the _eyes_ at the bow of some of these queer craft? The
Chinese think a boat needs to see just as well as a man or an
animal.
]
Two-story street cars run along the main street, but curious chairs,
like shallow boxes on poles, carry the people who wish to ride up the
hillside. An electric cog-wheel railway, with stout steel cables between
the cars, takes passengers up to the Peak, from which there is a
wonderful panorama of sea and islands. Four hours by steamer across the
bay from Hong Kong is the oldest foreign colony in China, Macao. The
Portuguese have had it for nearly three hundred years, but now it is
little more than a big gambling and opium den.
The Great City of Canton
The most interesting city in southern China is Canton, a short day or
night ride up the Chu-kiang, or Pearl River, north of Hong Kong. Since
shortly after the revolution of 1911 it has been separated from the rest
of China, with a government of its own. Therefore it often calls itself
the “southern capital.” Its spoken language is also different from
mandarin, so that we could not talk to the people at all. I once acted
as interpreter between two Chinese. One was a man from Canton who spoke
English, and the other a man from the north, whose language I could
speak a little, but of which the Cantonese could not speak a word. The
Chinese name of Canton is Kwangchowfu, and it is the capital of
Kwangtung Province, from which we get our name for the city.
We lived for several months in Canton. Our house was in Saikwan, the
western suburb. Never have you seen such a labyrinth of winding narrow
streets as the one through which we had to pick our way to get home.
Many of the houses and shops had outer doors of wooden bars, so that the
air could enter but beggars and robbers could not. Most foreigners who
have just come to China are afraid to go into those narrow streets of
old Canton.
[Illustration:
A board with round hollows in it is used in Canton as a sort of cash
register. The principal money in that city is the silver twenty-cent
piece. A man tosses a handful of money onto the board, shakes the
board until there is a coin in each hollow, empties the coins into a
basket, and picks up another handful.
]
The noise made by rushing coolies and yellow-faced merchants shrieking
for customers is enough to terrify anyone at first. Yet when one gets
used to it one finds this fear of Chinese street life as foolish as
being afraid of the dark. We had no trouble at all during our many long
wanderings through the famous old city, though often we were lost and
had to wander a long time before finding our way. In time we became very
friendly with these rushing, shouting people who at first seemed rather
dreadful.
There was formerly a great wall about Canton, and a second one not far
from the river. But Dr. Sun Yat-sen, a famous Chinese who headed the
revolution against the Manchus, had the walls removed while he was
governor of Canton. Once when he was a young man he had to climb over
the city wall in the middle of the night in order to save himself from
the Manchu soldiers. So perhaps he was glad of the chance to tear down
the walls and make wide streets in place of them.
Some similar avenues have been cut through the old walled city. Here one
sees private automobiles and autobuses rather than the old sedan-chairs.
But during most of the year it is pleasant to turn off the sun-scorched
dusty new streets and wander through the old ones, so narrow that
sometimes you can touch both walls at once. Many of these streets are
roofed over with awnings made of oyster-shells, so that they are
completely protected from the glaring sunshine.
The best view of Canton is from Five Story Pagoda hill, once a part of
the city wall. The famous old temple that gives the hill its name is in
a ruinous state, and may soon fall down entirely unless the Cantonese
repair it. In the center of the city below rises the Flowery Pagoda, one
of the prettiest in China. Close to it is a great green spot called the
British Yamen, because the English took it during a war and still hold
it. Beyond stands what the Cantonese call the Smooth Pagoda. Unlike
other Chinese pagodas, this is not built in stories. It is really an old
minaret, with a little mosque at its foot, and dates from the time when
there were many Mohammedans in Canton. Outside the old walled city among
other Moslem graves is the tomb of a man who claimed to be the uncle of
Mohammed.
The two church spires that rise above the city to the left belong to the
big cathedral built by the French. Down by the river, on the farther
edge of the city, stands a high building that seems to belong to New
York. It is a great Chinese department store, much like ours at home,
where you can buy almost anything. There are other quite modern
buildings along the Bund, the wide water-front street that is always
filled with traffic. Wireless towers stand out against the skyline.
Across the river is more of Canton, on an island called Honam. There we
found no wide streets at all, and it was like solving a Chinese puzzle
to find our way through its maze of narrow crooked passageways.
Beautiful Things Made in Canton
Canton produces much silk, beautiful native furniture, fans made of
everything from peacock feathers to stout paper on which are written
Chinese sentences. It would take pages just to mention the beautiful and
interesting things found in the city’s open-front shops. Near the French
cathedral is a dirty little street where all sorts of pretty and
sometimes useful things are made of ivory. Boys who do not seem old
enough to have learned any trade carve artistic figures and curious
playthings out of elephant tusks. Some of the shops use bone instead of
ivory, and strangers must be careful when buying. Across the river in
Honam the famous Canton china is decorated with bright red
fighting-cocks and other designs; but it is not made there, coming
undecorated all the way from Kingtehchen.
[Illustration:
Watering a garden in the outskirts of Canton. The Chinese are tireless
agricultural workers and know their business well.
]
The foreign concession in Canton is an island called Shameen. One third
of it belongs to the French and the rest to the British. But Americans
and Japanese and people of many other nationalities live there and have
banks, consulates, and so forth. No vehicles except baby-carriages are
allowed on Shameen. With its wide shaded streets, its park, tennis
courts, and football field, it looks much like an old New England city.
A narrow canal separates Shameen from the native city, and watchmen keep
most Chinese from crossing either of the two bridges. Boat-homes, of
which there are thousands in the river and in the canals of Canton, are
not allowed to stay on the foreign side of the canal, but they are as
closely packed against the opposite bank as automobiles in a city
street. Several other foreign communities have grown up in the outskirts
of Canton, for Shameen is by no means large enough to accommodate all
foreigners.
Gaudy weddings and funerals make their way through the city streets. The
delicious Chinese fruit called _laichee_, which America knows only after
it is dried, grows in some of the parks. Not every feature of Canton is
pleasing, however. The rickshaws do not have wire wheels and pneumatic
tires, like those of Peking and most of northern China, but wooden
buggy-wheels that make a great racket and give one a rough ride. When
the tide is out, the canals on which people glide home at high tide are
often very smelly and far from pretty. One day I saw an official
pounding a prisoner with a big hickory club to make him confess; sights
even more distressing are sometimes seen.
CHAPTER XVII
IN THE PROVINCE OF KWANGTUNG
Kwangtung, the province in which Canton is located, is as big as some of
our largest states, and rich and important. From Sze Yap, the Four
Districts, on the western side of the Canton delta, come nearly all the
Chinese laundrymen and restaurant-keepers and other Chinese who live in
the United States. In fact a large proportion of the Chinese in all
other parts of the world are from Sze Yap. If you ask them they may say
they are from Canton. But that is either because they know by experience
that you have never heard of Sze Yap and that you may know of Canton, or
because they mean by that name the province of Kwangtung.
On the junk that carried me from the Bund in Canton to Kongmoon,
principal port of the Four Districts, my cabin was much like a piano-box
turned on its side, and the queerly shaped boat was piled with Chinese
cargo until it looked like a haystack floating down the river. First we
went upstream a little way, towed by a launch that showered sparks and
cinders on us, and steered by half a dozen men who walked back and forth
along a cleated board at the stern, pushing an enormous oar that stuck
out behind. When we wished to warn another boat, a man beat with a
hammer on a hanging piece of iron. Roosters among the cargo did their
part in helping to keep us awake nearly all night.
[Illustration:
The queer cargo boat in which I went from Canton (seen in the
background) to Kongmoon in the Four Districts.
]
A Visit to Sze Yap
There is a railroad more than a hundred miles long from Kongmoon on into
Sze Yap. It is an interesting railroad because it was built by a Chinese
who came to the United States when he was seventeen and later was a
foreman during the construction of one of our great transcontinental
railways. He had worked in California as a laundryman and a
fruit-picker, but finally grew rich. He still owns a big store in
Seattle. He decided to spend his money for the good of his home
district, so he came back and built this railroad. He was more than
eighty years old when I spent a night with him at his railroad
headquarters at Sunning, but he was still president and general manager
and superintendent as well as owner of the line.
[Illustration:
Making brown paper of rice straw. The chopped straw is soaked in water
and pressed out into sheets. The wet sheets are pulled off one at a
time and put on the mud walls to dry.
]
Almost every day I met Chinese men in Sze Yap who had been in the United
States and spoke more or less English. That was lucky, for the people of
the Four Districts do not speak real Chinese. This is the reason that
the Chinese we have in America cannot talk to those from other parts of
China. One evening I spent with a Mr. Lee who, with his brothers, owns a
Chinese restaurant in Cleveland. He took me to a restaurant in Kung-yik
where I had a real American meal. Another man I met was dressed like an
American high school student, and spoke English so perfectly that I did
not know he was Chinese until I had looked closely at his face. As a
matter of fact, he could not speak Chinese, for he had been born and
educated in Oregon. His name was Fred Hang. He had come home to be
married, so that his family line would not die out, and soon after the
wedding was over he was going back to the university of his native
state. He acted as if he were very homesick for America, and he must
have found it stupid not to be able to talk to his Chinese relatives.
[Illustration:
Palm-leaf fans are made of the young leaves of a low palm, which are
fastened to sticks so as to be kept open and are laid out to dry.
The ground here is covered with drying fans.
]
One of the curious facts about Sze Yap is that the millions of Chinese
palm-leaf fans come from one little section of it, around the old town
of Sunwei. The very short palm-trees or bushes from which these fans are
made do not seem to grow well in any other place. When they are large
enough, the leaves are cut and piled up in stacks. Then they are spread
open with a stick and laid out to dry. After that, old women cut the
ends off and sew a cloth border around them. These women earn about ten
cents a day, and the fans are so cheap in China that almost every coolie
in the south carries one. The tops of the leaves are made into
raincoats.
Dangerous Pirates
There are a great many pirates in the lower Canton delta, as there have
been for hundreds of years. They capture people and hold them for
ransom, tying them to stakes and leaving them to die if someone does not
pay to have them freed. They have better boats and better weapons than
the government itself, and now and then they capture and loot foreign
steamers. The English captains of two boats I traveled on were killed
soon afterward by pirates, and one night a band of them stole one of the
big steam launches that ferry people across Hong Kong Harbor, carrying
it off, passengers and all. Yet two American missionaries who are
working among the lepers on an island in the delta can go anywhere among
the pirates and are treated like old friends. The pirates watch for
Chinese returning from America and other foreign countries and often rob
them of all they have earned. I met one old man who had only an old
silver watch left when he got back to the town he had emigrated from
when he was a boy.
From the Yang-tze to Canton
Once I went overland from the Yang-tze to Canton. The northern part of
the province was very mountainous, and the mountains were dotted with
the whitewashed stone-heaps that are the graves of that region. Cement
graves of horseshoe shape and of all sizes, some of them as big as a
house, are common in other parts of Kwangtung and in Fukien. The ranges
of high hills about Sunwei are dotted with graves as far as one can see,
and Paak Wan Shan, or White Cloud Mountain, near Canton is covered with
thousands of them.
Part of that trip from the Yang-tze was down the North River of Canton,
and the last 140 miles of it was on a railroad built by Americans. This
was intended to run all the way from Canton to Hankow, where one can
take a train for Peking. Some day, if the Chinese ever stop fighting
among themselves, that important line will be finished, and then Peking
and Canton will perhaps become better friends. The trains on that
railroad and on the one in Sze Yap were crowded with soldiers, most of
whom had no tickets. Two other railroads enter Canton, but I found that
the one from Hong Kong had been broken by the armies of rival Chinese
generals who used this region as a battle-field.
China’s Largest Island
From Canton I went to Hainan (“South of the Sea”), China’s largest
island. It also belongs to Kwangtung Province, and some day it will
probably be joined to the peninsula stretching toward it from the
mainland, for the channel becomes more shallow every year, and ship
captains always dread the passage through the Straits of Hainan. We saw
the wrecks of several steamers on our way to Hoihow, the principal port
of Hainan. There is no real harbor, and passengers have to climb down
rope ladders into sailboats that are often dancing wildly in the waves.
Sometimes, when the tide is out, they have to wade the last half mile to
shore.
[Illustration:
“Field women” and girls lifting water into the rice fields by means of
sluiceways with a chain of paddles such as are used in many parts of
southern China.
]
Kiungchow, the chief city, and much of the northern part of Hainan, are
not very different from the rest of China. But in the interior there are
great valleys of palm-trees, from which copra, or coconut-meat, is
exported. The climate and landscape remind the traveler that he is not
very far from the Philippines.
A tribe called the Loi lives in the mountainous center of the island,
especially about the beautiful peaks called the Five Finger Mountains.
The woods are thick, and travelers there are always much troubled by
leeches. The Loi have their own headmen and are not governed by Chinese
law. In harvesting rice, they cut off the upper six inches and bundle
it, hanging the bundles head-down over poles and threshing it as they
need rice to eat. Rattan, to gather which is painful work since it grows
among masses of thorns, is sold to Chinese who export it.
Hainan is particularly noted for its pigs. On the way inland I met
thousands of coolies _carrying_ pigs—the pigs seem to prefer this to
being driven, and the Chinese humor them. If the pigs are small, a man
carries one at either end of his shoulder-pole. If they are large, two
men carry one on a pole between them. Every steamer that passes Hoihow
east-bound takes a load of pigs. They are piled up on the deck like
cordwood, sometimes six or eight layers deep, each in the kind of
basket-net in which they are brought from the interior. You may imagine
what such a ship smells like!
The Valuable Bamboo
Bamboo is another important Hainan product. It would take at least a
whole page even to mention all the things the Chinese make out of that
very valuable plant. It is not properly called a tree, though sometimes
it reaches fifty feet in height, and shoots up so fast that one can
almost see it growing. The rivers of Hainan have enormous water-wheels
made of bamboo, so large that you wonder how a people without pulleys or
other modern contrivances can raise them. Dozens of sections of the
hollow bamboo are set at an angle on the outside of the wheel, and as
the wheel turns, these dip up the water, pouring it into troughs that
carry it away into the fields. When the river is too low to run a
water-wheel, the farmer has to walk along the top of his wheel all day
long.
[Illustration:
This little pig really went to market, and he was carried there too.
In China pigs won’t walk to market, and as they are the most
important product of Hainan Island they have to be transported
somehow.
]
Another way of raising water in rice-growing southern China is by a
wooden sluice that has an endless chain of upright boards running
through it. Men, women (since Hainan women do not have bound feet) and
children trot up and down all day on the kind of treadmills that keep
such sluices working. Sometimes the sluices are run by hand, with two
handles like the pedals of a bicycle. The Chinese have invented all
sorts of primitive devices to raise water for their irrigation, but they
never seem to have thought of windmills. The treadmill is useful in
various ways in a country where there is plenty of cheap labor. Some of
the boats on Canton’s river are propelled by a big stern-wheel turned by
many coolies climbing forever up a treadmill inside.
Down the West River
The last time I came back to Canton I traveled the whole length of the
Si-kiang, or West River, through the province of Kwangsi. The little
Chinese steamers were so crowded with passengers that men slept even on
the floor under my cot. Most of them smoked opium, and the sweetish odor
of that destructive drug was in my nostrils during the entire two weeks’
journey. Although it is against the law in China to grow poppies and
transport the opium made from them, nearly every steamer down the
Si-kiang carries tons of it. The rival generals make much money out of
it, and no one dares interfere with them. Some of the boats fly the flag
of the United States, because a rascal who pretends to own them gets
them registered as American ships and no Chinese can interfere with a
boat flying our flag. There are very few of our countrymen, however, who
take such mean advantage, and our consuls are gradually driving out of
the country those who do.
An attempt on the part of China to stop the importation of opium from
India resulted in a war with Great Britain in 1840, and in China’s being
forced to open certain ports to opium or anything else that Western
nations chose to send. However, in 1907 an agreement was made between
Great Britain and China by which the Indian Government was to reduce
gradually the opium exportation to China.
Kwangsi is much poorer than Kwangtung, because so much of its land is
rocky. Along the upper part of the West River stand queerly shaped rock
hills like rows of fantastic skyscrapers. Many have caves in them,
sometimes a hundred feet up, and bandits often use these as their
headquarters. In the Bay of Along, at the western end of Kwangtung
Province, there are thousands of these rocky peaks that seem to float on
the blue sea. I do not know a more beautiful place than this bay
anywhere in the world.
A Chinese who had been cook for the British customs commissioner at
Nanning, capital of Kwangsi Province, opened a foreign restaurant. But
there are few foreigners in Nanning, and those have their own homes,
cooks and all. So the enterprising Chinese did not get much trade until
he began serving the favorite Chinese dish in those parts. It is a
mixture of cat and snake meat, and Chinese who have eaten it say it is
very “sweet” and good. I did not try it.
At Kachek in the island of Hainan I saw a man roasting dogs in a pit he
had dug in the ground. People who were attending a fair and theatrical
entertainment near by sometimes came to him for a feast of dog-meat.
Dried rats may occasionally be seen hanging before shops in southern
China. Yet it would not be fair to say that the Chinese in general eat
cats, rats, dogs, and snakes. In a few parts of the country they do,
especially in times of famine. It is claimed by some Chinese that
wherever any of these animals are used as food, it is because of certain
medicinal qualities that they are supposed to possess. For instance, the
snake meat is said to be a remedy for a kind of leprous ailment; and the
Chinese say that the “rats” are not really rats as Americans know them,
but a sort of field mice which feed on the rice plant.
CHAPTER XVIII
A SUMMER IN SOUTHWESTERN CHINA
Not one foreigner among a thousand who come to China ever travels into
the part of it we are now going to visit. Yet the least known parts of
many a country are often the most interesting. It would have been better
to have turned my travels about, and gone to Kansu in the summer and to
the other two great western provinces of Yunnan and Szechuan south of it
in the winter. But we cannot always arrange things exactly right in
traveling any more than in the other affairs of life.
The usual way to Yunnanfu now is by the railway from Haiphong, chief
northern port of the French colony of Indo-China. The trip takes three
days, but to go in any other way would take at least that many weeks.
The narrow-gauge railway, built by the French, is one of the most
remarkable pieces of engineering in the world, and the scenery along the
last two thirds of the way is magnificent. The trains do not run at
night, so the passengers have to go to hotels. The first night is spent
in the Indo-Chinese border town of Laokay and the second in the Chinese
town of Amichow.
Almost as soon as we had crossed the frontier again into China the
second morning, we began to climb up into rather bare mountains. The
train dashed from one tunnel into another, passing over many a
steel-arch bridge high above roaring mountain torrents. Sometimes the
engine and the last car came so close together that the train reminded
us of a kitten chasing its own tail. Once we were three hours making our
way in a horseshoe curve between two towns that were only a few miles
apart across a gorge. All the time beautiful mountain scenery surrounded
us. At two or three points the railway is more than a mile and a half
above sea-level. There is a saying that as many coolies lost their lives
in building that railroad as there are ties along it.
[Illustration:
The Chinese may not know what a picnic is, but they often eat outdoors
in such a makeshift restaurant as this. These people under the big
umbrella are having a meal just inside the city wall of Yunnanfu,
lofty capital of Yunnan Province.
]
A City in the Clouds
At last we came out high above a great blue lake and descended into the
capital of Yunnan Province. Though it is as far south as our Palm Beach,
this place is a favorite summer resort for the French of Indo-China,
because it stands six thousand feet above the ocean. Of course the older
part of it is walled, but the governor who has ruled it since the
revolution has cut conveniently wide openings in place of some of the
old gates, and has made a few good straight streets, well paved with
stone. Most of the streets are still narrow, and covered with
cobblestones worn so smooth that the least rain makes them as slippery
as ice.
Yunnanfu shows many queer contrasts. The new university owns some big
modern buildings, including laboratories and dormitories, and an
athletic field. Several of the professors were educated in Kansas. On
the other hand, the street cleaning is done by ragged and almost naked
prisoners, with great irons clanking on their legs. Many of the shops
are so shallow that customers have to stand in the street lined up along
the shop’s counter. Street-stands have rows of tin basins and towels for
those who wish to bathe, and combs and brushes are for rent.
Good and Evil Dragons
One day the governor came to the dedication of a new wing of the British
Mission hospital. He wore the long silk robes of the Chinese gentleman,
but had on his head an ordinary stiff straw hat. This, we fancied, was
the result of his Japanese training, which had given him many of his
modern ideas of governing. The people of Yunnanfu are so superstitious
that when a fire broke out near one of the governor’s new openings in
the city wall, they said he must have angered the spirits by cutting
into the wall. Claiming that this same action was to be blamed for a
great drouth, they paraded through the streets carrying the rain dragon
from one of the temples, and everyone threw water on it. They painted
out the sun god on the city gates and painted the rain dragon in its
place. They also dressed up a dog in the queerest costume they could
find and led him about town, while everyone laughed loudly at him; for
an old Chinese proverb says that if you laugh at a dog rain will come.
Sure enough, finally it did rain, but now so much water fell that crops
were drowned out, the railroad was broken in a dozen places, and the
whole city was in danger of being flooded. So the people decided that
they had prayed too hard for rain, and began to pray for it to stop.
They painted out the rain dragon and painted in the sun again. They
closed the northern gate, because they thought wicked spirits were
sending in the rain that way. Anyone living outside the north wall had
to walk a long way around every time he entered the city. At last the
rain stopped and the people were sure their gods had answered them.
Away on a Thousand-Mile Trip
It was during the first rains that I started on a thousand-mile trip to
the capital of the next province and beyond. Both the American consul
and the Chinese governor refused to let my family go with me. They said
it was too dangerous. But I was allowed to go myself, if I would let the
authorities send a military guard to protect me along the way.
[Illustration:
This blind girl, whose feet were bound, was carried for a week along
the trail that we took north from Yunnanfu. Her home was two hundred
miles inland.
]
The American agents of some of our big corporations doing business in
China sometimes have as many as five hundred soldiers with them on a
journey through Yunnan. I had visions of having to pay much more than I
could afford for the trip, for while the government pays the soldiers
their regular two or three dollars a month, the man they escort is
expected to give each of them at least ten cents every day. Suppose you
spent five hundred dimes a day for a month, how much less money would
you have at the end of that time?
Fortunately for me, the governor did not think that I was a very
important person. When I was ready to start only four soldiers were sent
to accompany me! Every day or two along the way other soldiers would
take their places. Sometimes there would be only one man, without even a
gun. Those who had guns did not always have cartridges. Once a soldier’s
rifle began dropping apart and he borrowed string from me to tie it
together! Perhaps my guard expected to scare the bandits, if we met any,
without firing a shot.
I took a horse with me on that trip, though I intended to walk a great
deal. In fact I often had to walk, for in many places the trail was so
bad that I could not ride. Yet I was following an ancient and important
highway between two of the three great provincial capitals of western
China. I had a servant, named Yang Chi-ting, who cooked very good
American meals, and did any other work I needed done along the way. He
walked all the time, until I was able to buy a horse for him nearly five
hundred miles north. Although his wages were only five dollars a month
(and he bought his own food), that was so much in Yunnan that along the
way I often heard him boasting of his high wages, and the people gasped
with astonishment when they found how much he got. A more faithful and
harder-working servant it would be very difficult to find anywhere. By
this time I had learned enough Chinese so that I could often have long
talks with Yang and for weeks at a time I did not speak a word of
English, unless it was to myself.
Opium Smokers
At the start I had four coolies to carry my baggage and supplies. Two
were enough on the last part of the trip. The coolies all smoked opium,
as do many people of Yunnan. The poppies from which opium is made grow
there profusely. Every morning I had hard work getting my carriers
started early, because they must smoke opium first and then eat
breakfast. If they did not eat after smoking, they would fall sick along
the way. When we stopped at noon they would lie down on the earth floor
of some hut and smoke again, and at night they would smoke for hours.
This dreadful habit finally makes wrecks of those who indulge in it. Yet
those coolies could carry a hundred pounds each, over terrible mountain
roads, for twenty-five or thirty miles a day.
Sometimes the trail was like a deep ditch full of stones, in which we
waded and slipped and sprawled. At other times it was as steep as the
roof of a church. Once we passed a caravan of more than two thousand
pack-mules, carrying opium and silver money. We were three days getting
past it. With it were many soldiers and rich men or officials riding in
sedan-chairs, carried by poor coolies who looked like worn-out horses.
Some day perhaps there will be a railroad through that part of the
world, and then all such freight and passengers will go by train. But
now the Chinese toil along just as their ancestors did a thousand years
ago, stopping each night in mud hovels where there is nothing but the
earth floor to sleep on, unless they have brought bedding with them.
Mountain Scenes
All the Chinese women along the way had bound feet. When they had to
walk in the mud they used little wooden sandals that looked like a
horse’s hoofs. In this mountainous province many of the people are so
poor that their clothing is nothing but rags. We saw children eating
cornstalks. Yunnan grows much corn and many potatoes, though it is so
far south that the potatoes at least would not grow at all if most of
the province were not higher than Denver. The majority of Chinese have
never heard of potatoes. Even in Yunnan they are called “foreign
vegetables.” In other parts of China people will not eat potatoes if
they can get anything else, and even the Yunnanese much prefer rice. But
most of them cannot afford it.
Among the places we stopped at for the night were Ta Pan Chiao, which
means Big Plank Bridge, and Hong Shih Ai, or Red Stone Cliff. As I have
said before, though Chinese names look and sound queer to us, their
mystery vanishes when we find what they mean. The same is true of the
gaudy wooden signboards that stand before Chinese shops. In one large
city I saw a sign that had been turned into English, and it said “Happy
Heart Furniture Shop.” Most Chinese signs would be as simple as that if
we could read them.
One of Many Adventures
I must mention one of the many adventures that happened to me on that
Yunnan journey. It had been raining all day, and we had been slipping
and sliding along the side of a high mountain, almost as steep as the
wall of a house. Many streams without bridges crossed the trail; the
biggest roared down a great gorge. Still, there was nothing to do but
try to cross it, unless I wished to lie out on the mountain side all
night. After driving my horse in, I went higher up and crossed on some
rocks.
[Illustration:
From this you can get an idea of the terrible road that we traveled
over for weeks on the overland route between Yunnanfu and Chengtu,
capitals of the great southwestern provinces of China.
]
When I reached the other side no horse was to be seen. Coolies whom I
could not hear above the roar of the stream waved their arms and pointed
down the gorge. I looked, and was horrified to see only the head of my
poor horse, whirling around far down in the rapids. Not far beyond, the
gorge fell into a deep and swift river that later joins the Yang-tze. I
fancied that the carcass of my poor horse, with the saddle and the
several valuable things in the saddlebags and the coat I had tied on it,
would finally be washed out into the ocean at Shanghai, about a month
later.
But Chinese horses are hardy, just as the coolies are. Some men ran down
to the edge of the stream and managed to catch the horse by the head.
Finally they got its front feet up on a rock. Without even waiting to
reach solid earth again, the animal began calmly eating the grass it
could reach. Perhaps if it had fallen a few hundred feet farther it
would have been still more hungry. But I found later that its nerves had
been badly shaken. For two days after that it trembled at every tiny
stream and I had to walk all the way, though sometimes the road seemed
to be almost vertical for half a day at a time.
The Chinese Make Felt Rugs
I spent the Fourth of July in a city named Tungchuan, but I did not hear
a single firecracker. Not only was there not another American within
several hundred miles of me, there was not even a white man of any
nationality; and as it did not happen to be a Chinese holiday, no
Chinese were shooting off firecrackers. (By the way, do you know that
firecrackers are red because that is the Chinese color for happiness?)
Tungchuan makes vessels of copper and brass. They are pounded out by
hand on little anvils stuck in the ground, and turned on crude lathes
run by a foot lever. You have perhaps seen a grindstone run in that way.
But the greatest industry of Tungchuan is the making of felt rugs.
Chopped up sheep’s wool is rolled out into a kind of thick blanket, just
as the Mongols make the felt for their movable houses. Then flour paste
is daubed on it, in patterns of flowers, birds, and so forth, after
which it is soaked in vats of dye. The dye colors the parts that are not
covered with paste, and when that is scraped off the flowers or other
designs remain white. Most of the Tungchuan rugs are bright red. Often
we saw trains of pack-mules loaded with them struggling along the trail.
[Illustration:
In Tungchuan one of the chief industries is the making of felt rugs.
The decorative designs are painted on in flour paste so as to remain
white when the rest of the rug is dyed bright red or some other
color.
]
Money for Use of Ancestors
Thousands of towns in China are noted for making one or two particular
kinds of articles, which may not be made anywhere else. Other things are
made in many places, nearly always by the same crude methods. False
money to be burned at graves is one of these things. In almost every
town, boys stand at a great wooden block driving a hollow chisel into
big piles of rice-paper. Each sheet comes out looking as if it were a
sheet of brass “cash,” and the pious people buy the sheets in quantities
so that their ancestors will have money in the next world. We met many
coolies carrying enormous loads of this coarse paper. In other towns men
take bars of tin and pound them for days at a time to make sheets of
tinfoil. These are folded together to look like the “shoes” of silver
that are still used as money in some parts of China. Some of the
“shoes,” painted yellow to represent gold, are burned by the richer
people at the graves of their ancestors.
[Illustration:
The two sides of a Chinese “cash,” issued in the reign of the Manchu
Emperor Kwang-su. Kwang-su was on the throne from 1889 to 1908,
although the Empress Dowager was the real ruler.
]
CHAPTER XIX
AMONG THE PRIMITIVE TRIBES
The halfway station on the ancient trail between Yunnanfu and the
Yang-tze is the walled city of Chaotung. I left most of my baggage there
and went on a side-trip to the eastward. That was the only way to see
Kweichow, the most isolated province of China, and I had determined to
visit all eighteen provinces. Besides, the western part of that province
is noted for its wonderful scenery, and—most important of all from my
point of view—many of the tribesmen of China live there.
Long before the Chinese conquered what we now call China, many other
tribes or races of people occupied that territory. In a way they were
much like the Indians in America, and the conquering was very much the
same. That is, the Chinese gradually defeated the tribes in the north
and the east, and the conquered people either were absorbed, by marrying
with the Chinese, or they fled south and west. That is probably why
there are many dialects along the coastal strip of land between Shanghai
and Indo-China. The descendants of the people who fled south, and were
finally conquered when the ocean stopped them from fleeing farther, kept
their own languages, more or less mixed with Chinese.
[Illustration:
The coal mines near Chaotung are so shallow that only boys can carry
the coal out of them, and they have to stoop in this four-legged
fashion. What an outcry would be made if growing boys in America
worked under such conditions!
]
The first signs I saw of aboriginal tribes not entirely absorbed by the
Chinese, were the “field-women” of Foochow district, each with three
daggers through her hair. The farther west I went, the more I saw of
peoples who have lived in China for thousands of years and still are not
Chinese. In Kwangsi Province many of the inhabitants are Chung-chiah,
one of the most important of what we might almost call China’s Indian
tribes. The tribes are especially numerous in the southwest, but have
farms of their own or rent them from the Chinese. The Chinese have had
less trouble with these early peoples than we once had with our Indians.
Millions of them are left, although it is many centuries since the
Chinese began to conquer them. One of the aboriginal tribes has never
been conquered, and lives under its own laws in a mountainous region
where the Chinese rarely dare go.
Over the Trail into Kweichow
I rode and walked all day in the rain over a very difficult mountain
trail from Chaotung to a place called Shih-men-k’an, or Stone Gateway,
in Kweichow. British missionaries have headquarters there, in several
whitewashed buildings that stand out against the green mountain sides.
They work among the Hwa Miao, or Flowery Miao, who get their name from
the gaudy garments they wear. There are also Black Miao, who wear black
garments, and River Miao, who live in river valleys. The many thousands
of Flowery Miao live among high mountains, at least a mile above
sea-level, and they are all farmers.
Two of the missionaries went on with me next day. There was to be a Hwa
Miao festival at one of their stations in the mountains. My servant,
Yang Chi-ting, walked all that day, just as he always had; but it was so
distressing to see him toiling up and down those terrible mountain
trails that I bought him a horse next morning. The horse, by the way,
was a splendid little stallion, plump and lively, and a wonderful hill
climber; and I paid just ten dollars for him. Later I sold him in
another part of China for more than he had cost; but if only I could
have brought him back to America and had wished to sell him, I could
easily have asked and obtained ten times as much for him.
The only way I can describe the wonderful scenery of western Kweichow is
to ask you to imagine several great green worlds, covered with little
farms of strange shapes, piled up into the sky on the far side of gorges
so deep that the rivers at the bottom seem threads. There were many
tracts of splendid forest on this high rolling landscape; for parts of
southern and especially southwestern China have not been settled long
enough by the Chinese to have all their trees turned into coffins.
The Flowery Miao
The Hwa Miao live off the main trails. They do not like visitors as well
as the Chinese do, and they do not have stores, with things to sell.
Their villages are usually hidden in clumps of trees back among the
hills. They raise hemp, in what geologists call sink-holes, and weave
their own garments from the fiber in the stalk. They eat oatmeal and
buckwheat and corn, which are their principal crops. I saw many a
buckwheat field in blossom, adding to the beauty of the landscape. Some
of the cornfields were so steep that we wondered how the women and girls
hoeing them could stand up.
Miao oatmeal is rather different from our own. When these people go out
to work in their steep fields, or start on a journey, they take along
dry oatmeal in a sack. When they are hungry they put some of this in a
bowl and pour cold water on it, mixing it with their fingers. Then, if
they have no chopsticks, they make a pair out of the first switch they
can find, and eat. If they are more thirsty than hungry they use much
water, and if they are more hungry than thirsty they use little water.
Of course they have no sugar or milk, and not even salt. The rest of
their life has just as little luxury. If you looked into one of their
huts you would probably think it a very badly built and poorly kept
pig-sty.
Yet the Hwa Miao are very likable as well as simple people. Nearly three
thousand of them were gathered for the festival. Missionaries did not
find it so hard to convert the Hwa Miao as they did the Chinese, perhaps
because no one else had ever been kind to them as far back as they could
remember. Formerly they had festivals in which everyone drank too much
corn-whiskey and did even worse things. So the missionaries introduced a
kind of field day with our style of sports. I saw running and jumping
and pageants and outdoor games that are much more familiar to us than
they are yet to the Miao.
Most interesting to me were the people who had come to see the games.
Some had walked for two days over the mountains to get there. Many had
changed their clothes in a gully or in one of the mission buildings.
Even the girls each carried a sack containing her best clothes, and
oatmeal or cornmeal enough to live on while away from home. The people
filled a steep cornfield above the playground, as they might a stadium.
Flowery Miao Girls Dress Gayly
[Illustration:
A Miao mother watching the of the Christian festival while her baby
sleeps on her back. Below her gay skirt she wears wrap leggings and
straw sandals.
]
No wonder they are called the Flowery Miao. It would be so difficult to
describe the gaudy homespun garments, especially those of the girls and
young women, that I shall have to let the photographs I took give you
some idea of them. Red and black were the most common colors, but there
was every other hue one could think of. The women’s hair was not
jet-black, and oiled, as it always is among the Chinese women, but had a
reddish-brown tinge. Possibly the color is caused by the sun, as Miao
girls never wear hats. They never cut their hair, but do it up in puffs
and masses and coils, and adorn it with all manner of ornaments, such as
porcupine quills, silver bangles, wooden combs and more things than I
can name. Many of them wear huge silver earrings of strange designs, and
bracelets that clank as they walk. Their gay pleated skirts come barely
to their knees. Below the knees they wear what we might call wrap
leggings, in gay colors. Their feet are always bare, except that
sometimes they wear _tsao-hai_, or straw sandals, like the Chinese. Once
a girl is married, however, she puts away all her ornaments. Earrings,
bracelets, her gayest garments, all disappear. Her hair, wound tightly
about a stick set upright on her head, is built into a cone shape. A
Miao mother’s hair is quite safe from tangling by baby’s fingers.
[Illustration:
A Hwa Miao mother with her baby on her back, and a Hwa Miao girl. The
girls wear elaborate garments and do their hair in complicated style
with many ornaments. Married women never put on ornaments, and they
build their hair up into a cone shape, wrapped around a stick.
]
The I-bien, Nosu, or “Lolos”
The Hwa Miao are almost slaves, for they all have to rent their land
from a more powerful tribe or from the Chinese, and do just about what
the landlords tell them to do. We call that other tribe the “Lolos.” You
will find this word in geographies and encyclopedias, which is
unfortunate, for it is the insulting name given these people by the
Chinese. They prefer to be called the I-bien or Nosu. They are tall and
stately, quite different from the short, sturdy Hwa Miao. The women wear
cloth turbans and long gowns, often of purple, but never of the gaudy
colors liked so well by the Flowery Miao. The men now usually dress like
the Chinese, though some of them still wear a turban, and many use a
white felt cape nearly half an inch thick.
The “Lolos” are divided into three classes. At the top are the “Earth
Eyes,” landlords owning often thousands of square miles of land and
ruling much as did the feudal barons of Europe during the Middle Ages.
Their homes are castles, generally on some high spot from which they can
see for many miles around. Under them are the Black Nosu, who are
freemen, usually owning some land, but obliged to become soldiers and
fight for the “Earth Eyes” when the latter are in danger. Under these
are the White Nosu, who have been slaves for hundreds of years.
Over in Kweichow the “Lolos” have been conquered by the Chinese, or at
least live in peace with them. But in a great mountainous region almost
encircled by the Golden Sands, as the upper Yang-tze is called, are the
independent “Lolos.” We passed within sight of this region on the way
northward again from Chaotung by the main trail. But I did not cross the
river for a visit. So far as is known, only three white men have ever
been among the independent “Lolos.” One was an English lieutenant, whom
they killed. The other two were English missionaries, one of whom told
me about his trip. He found some of the “Lolos” so well educated that
they could read the Chinese classics.
The women were much more independent than most women of Asia—more nearly
regarded as the men’s equals. There were many tribes, each ruled by its
headman, and most of them were at war with other tribes. Their country
is so mountainous that many of the trails seem as steep as ladders.
To me, the most interesting fact of all about the independent “Lolos” is
that they have many Chinese slaves. If you can imagine our Indians of
Colorado, for instance, living in their mountains so independently that
whenever a white American ventures among them he is put to work and kept
as a slave, you will understand that the Chinese have really never
conquered all of China. In fact the independent “Lolos” make raids on
the territory across the Golden Sands whenever they need new workmen. An
American farmer who needed more hired men during harvest-time would have
to go to a labor-agency, but not so the “Lolo”!
[Illustration:
On the left are three Black Nosu or “Lolos,” who have to bear arms
(and such queer arms!) to protect their feudal lords, the “Earth
Eyes.” On the right is a “Lolo” woman. These people belong to a
tribe which the Chinese have never entirely conquered.
]
Yet I might have visited the independent “Lolos,” as well as the “tame”
ones of Kweichow, if I had had time, for they do not hate white men as
they do the Chinese. But they are a very suspicious people; and I should
either have had to find a missionary whom they had known for years, and
coaxed him to go with me, or have lived on the “tame” side of the river
myself for years until they had come to know me. Perhaps some boy who
reads this will be the one to make the world acquainted with that
strange tribe who have defied the conquering Chinese for hundreds of
years. Spots are still left on this old globe of ours for boys now
growing up to explore, thereby making themselves as famous as some of
our old geographers.
On to the Northward
Most travelers take two weeks to go from Chaotung to the Yang-tze. But
it is all downhill, and by promising my coolies special wages I made the
trip in ten days. The trail follows a river which, when I first saw it,
was a small white stream that seemed to drop from the sky. It fell,
really, from a mountain, the summit of which was lost in clouds. For
hours we went down steep stone steps alongside it, and for a week we
scrambled along a terrible trail, with the roar of the stream always in
our ears. The hills were so steep that the people had to build their
houses right over the trail. In one day we often rode or walked through
several dozen houses, in some of which rice and tea were sold and
sometimes poor lodgings were offered. As the houses close their doors at
night no one can travel after dark.
[Illustration:
On the way from Chaotung to the Yang-tze we often had to ride straight
through dozens of houses in a day because they are built over the
narrow trail and it is impossible to go around them. This introduces
to you my very valuable servant, Yang Chi-ting, riding on the fine
little stallion I bought for ten dollars in Kweichow.
]
Pigs were tied by one leg to prevent them from falling down the mountain
side. Land was so scarce that many a farmer piled a few shovelfuls of
good earth on top of a huge rock and grew three or four stalks of corn
in it. As we dropped lower and lower, it became hotter and hotter. The
delightful climate of the highlands disappeared, along with the potatoes
and finally the corn, and before long we were surrounded again by rice
fields.
Human Pack Horses
The most interesting people we saw on that part of our trip were the
_bay-fu_. Most Chinese carry their loads at the ends of a pole across
the shoulders. But out in the mountainous parts of Yunnan and Szechuan,
the great west-central province which I entered about a week’s journey
below Chaotung, they _bay_—that is, they “carry on the back.” We met
thousands of these men every day, some in caravans miles long. It was
often very difficult to get past them with our horses, on the narrow
trail. Each had on his back a kind of heavy wooden knapsack, something
like a dog-sledge with the runners stretching forward over the head. On
this contrivance the _bay-fu_ carried loads that we would not believe
possible, if missionaries and other foreigners had not often weighed
them.
Most of these coolies, so thin that their ribs could be counted ten feet
away, were hardly as big as the average American woman; yet many of them
carried leads of more than two hundred pounds! They start in as
children, and of course the training their ancestors have had for
hundreds of years helps also.
I met a boy of eight who had fifty pounds of rock-salt on his back,
besides the heavy wooden framework itself. The coolie cannot lift his
load. He has to be lifted to his feet after he gets under it, unless he
has put it together on a ledge or a table. Once up he will walk twenty
or twenty-five miles a day over the mountain trails. But if he falls
down under his load he cannot get up until someone without a load comes
along to help.
[Illustration:
A load weighing about 150 pounds, consisting of bamboo splints from
which will be made ropes such as are used in the deep salt wells of
Tzeliuching in Szechuan Province. The coolie has to pick his way on
the narrow flagstone road which, winding endlessly between the rice
fields, is typical of southern China.
]
CHAPTER XX
SZECHUAN, LARGEST OF PROVINCES
It was hot in Suifu at the end of July when Yang Chi-ting and I, with
our horses and our baggage, reached there on a very shaky native boat.
The water in the branch which we had been following for a week was so
high that it snatched us in about four hours over a distance that
usually takes two hard days by land. It gave us a queer feeling not to
hear a sound from the river while we were traveling on it, though it had
roared in our ears day and night when we were clambering along its stony
shores. Two hours after we took the boat the branch joined the Yang-tze,
1700 miles above where it reaches the ocean near Shanghai. Up there the
Yang-tze rushes on as if it were still dizzy from its fall down out of
the mountains of Tibet—a very different stream from the broad placid
river below Hankow.
We were still more than two hundred miles from the capital of the great
province of Szechuan, which means “Four Rivers.” We might have taken a
small steamer up another branch of the Yang-tze and perhaps have found
water enough in a small branch of this big tributary to have gone on to
Chengtu by another native boat. But only those with plenty of time and
no end of patience should travel up small rivers in China. So we hired
two new coolies for what was left of our baggage, and started off still
farther to the north.
The road for the first two days was brand new. Yet it was just the same
kind of road as those that have been built in southern China for many
centuries, described in an earlier chapter—a very winding ridge of earth
high above the flooded rice fields, covered with huge slabs of stone,
and barely three feet wide. As a road of this kind gets older, the rains
wash away the earth ridge under the stone slabs and sometimes leave them
balanced so that a breeze will almost move them. Up in the mountains I
often had my heart in my mouth for fear my horse would step on the
unsupported outer edge of one of these stones where the road hung over
some great cliff or steep river bank. As a matter of fact, the foolish
animal three times went over a cliff, stone and all, and once with me on
its back. But that horse seemed to have as many lives as a cat, and
nothing ever seemed to hurt it, though it was thin as a _bay-fu_ coolie
before our thousand-mile journey was over.
Szechuan is the largest and one of the most fertile of the eighteen
provinces of China proper. It is nearly as large as Texas. But while our
largest state has hardly five million inhabitants, Szechuan is said to
have fifty-five million! Many parts of it are mountainous and its
scenery is beautiful almost everywhere. Even if the hills we were
traveling among now were mere knolls compared to the great mountains of
Yunnan and Kweichow, they were often of such curious shapes, and the
humid atmosphere made the landscape so attractive, that every mile
forward was a new pleasure. Here and there over the road was a
_p’ai-lou_, or memorial arch of stone, elaborately carved, and in some
cases hundreds of years old. Such arches are found all over China, but
there seem to be more of them in Szechuan than anywhere else.
[Illustration:
There are thousands of old _p’ai-lou_ or memorial arches in China,
many of them of carved stone. The arch shown at the left in this
picture is the only one I ever saw being built. It and its companion
are of wood, gaily painted.
]
Queer Lodgings
Caravans of freight-coolies often crowded the Chinese inns so that I had
to sleep in a temple. But the people do not object to that at all, if
you give the caretaker a few cents when you leave. In fact they see
nothing wrong even in letting a foreigner sit in the priest’s chair
before the altar and put his feet on the table on which, during
ceremonies, food is laid out for the god or spirit inside. I did not do
that, but Yang Chi-ting used to serve my supper on that table, while I
sat in the priest’s comfortable armchair. Sometimes he brought in a
wooden tub and filled it for my bath. As the temples had no floors
except the earth, a little water spilled meant only a patch of mud.
One night I slept on the high stage of a great town temple, while
hundreds of people came to gaze up at me from the courtyard below as if
I were a theatrical performer. Another night I slept in a church—I do
not mean during services! As they have never had our feeling of
reverence for religious buildings, it is not strange that Chinese
Christians think it all right for a foreign traveler to use a church as
a lodging. But the church was much less comfortable than a temple. A
poor little mud-brick hovel with Mother Earth for floor, filled with
narrow wooden benches, it was stuffy and hot, and a very noisy street
was just outside. But Yang slept as soundly on two benches set together
as I did in my cot covered with a mosquito-net.
Accidentally I packed the net in a different load from the cot one
morning, and that night I had to sleep without it. The coolie who
carried the box I had put it in fell behind and did not overtake us
until next day. Such an occurrence is very rare in China. Not more than
two or three times during my two years of traveling in that country did
a carrier stop at night before he caught up with me, no matter how bad
the road or weather, or how tired he may have been. Nor did the carriers
ever steal a thing out of my baggage, though they were often alone with
it for hours and knew that there were rolls of silver dollars in boxes
that were sometimes not even locked.
[Illustration:
An arched bridge that carries a temple on its shoulders. It crosses a
mountain tributary of the upper Yang-tze.
]
As I look back, the worst trick ever played upon me by a carrier in
China was this one of leaving me without my mosquito-net. Not only did
swarms of mosquitoes feast on me all night, so that I never once fell
entirely asleep, but in the morning I found that they were the kind of
mosquitoes that carry malaria. I lost no time in taking a large dose of
quinine and luckily I did not fall sick. I once had malaria in South
America, and I would rather be captured by bandits than have it again.
Speaking of bandits, no soldier guard was sent with me after I crossed
the border of Yunnan Province. Yet Szechuan also has its brigands. Two
Americans had been killed by them the summer before, and one day I met
an Englishwoman who had been robbed of everything except the clothes she
wore and her wedding-ring. No other white man went over the trail from
Yunnanfu to Chengtu during all that year, because it was so dangerous.
Possibly the reason robbers and bandits never trouble me, no matter
where I travel, is that I always look too poor to be worth the bother!
Where the Chinese Obtain Salt
The day after that mosquito-y night was Sunday, and I spent most of it
at a famous old city named Tzeliuching. That may sound like a terrible
name, but it means nothing worse than “Salt Wells.” No one seems to know
for how many centuries salt water has been taken out of the ground in
that region. The wells are hundreds of feet deep and hardly a foot in
diameter, though sometimes in solid rock. Yet the Chinese still use
their crude, ancient tools to dig them, instead of modern drills. They
use ropes made of bamboo strips, in place of steel cables, and
water-buffaloes that plod round and round a great wooden drum take the
place of steam or electric engines. The water is brought up in very long
bamboos, with a valve in the end. Hundreds of coolies do nothing all
their lives but carry water to pour into those wells so as to soak up
the salt rocks. The brine is boiled down, and the salt, in big blocks
like flat stones and almost black in color, is carried away in every
direction. Coolies often toil along for a month with two hundred pounds
of it on their backs.
On the Plain of Chengtu
One morning, a week north of the Yang-tze, we climbed up over some rock
hills and came down upon the great plain of Chengtu. That rich,
floor-flat region is so large that it took me six hours to reach the
city it supports, and a long day of trotting later on to get to the
northern edge of it. My horse could not trot on this first day, because
the ditch that the Chinese call a road was deep with mud.
There were still slabs of stone laid sidewise, but here they were laid a
foot or more apart, to save the cost and labor of putting them close
together. Stone has to be carried a long way to the plain of Chengtu,
where there is not even a pebble. Besides, horses or mules very rarely
pass over that road, and the coolies who do their work can step from one
stone to another.
The people of this region so seldom see a horse that they called our
_s’en-kou_, which means just “animal,” as if they did not know what
particular kind of animal we rode. Though our horses were very tame,
almost everyone shrieked and ran away when we were seen coming. Often we
had to ride through the narrow main street of a town crowded with people
on a market day, and the only way to do so was to let our horses plow
through the dense throngs as a boat does through water. You have never
seen anything in the movies as funny as the way people would tumble over
one another to get out of the way the moment they felt or heard or
smelled or saw one of our “animals” close behind them.
[Illustration:
Just to see how it felt, I rode one day in a _hwa-gan_. I found my
riding as smooth as if I had been in a Pullman car. If I wanted to
sleep, all I had to do was to stretch out, with my legs over the
poles.
]
The Chinese of this region who can afford to ride use sedan-chairs or
wheelbarrows, and especially _hwa-gan_. The _hwa-gan_ consists of two
bamboo poles with a seat and a foot-rest hanging from them by ropes. I
once rode in one myself, just for the experience, and found it easier
riding than an American railroad car, though I prefer to do my own
walking. The chair-coolies of Szechuan are famous for the smoothness of
their trot. If you get tired of sitting up in a _hwa-gan_ and reading or
looking at the landscape, all you have to do is stretch out and hook
your legs over the poles in front of you and go to sleep. The Chinese
learn to do this very well.
In Old Chengtu
There was a very strict young governor at Chengtu when I reached there,
and he no longer allowed wheelbarrows to come inside the city walls. As
there are no rickshaws so far west, nearly everyone had to walk. That
was especially hard on the ladies, for almost all except foreign ladies,
and the Manchu women remaining from imperial days, had bound feet.
Every foreigner who comes to one of these far interior provincial
capitals is expected to call on the governor. I had to borrow a
sedan-chair from an American resident, for it would have been very bad
Chinese manners to have gone to the _yamen_, or governor’s palace, on
one of my horses.
The chairs for rich or important people have poles curving upward in the
middle, so that the person carried is high above the common crowd; and
the carriers knock out of the way anyone who does not hear their shout
of warning in time to jump. The Chengtu chair-coolies jog through the
crowded narrow streets at about five miles an hour, and a third man
changes places with one of the other two every block or so, without the
passenger’s even feeling it.
I often called on governors and other high officials in China and always
found them very courteous, though occasionally one of them thought the
way to shake hands was to grasp my thumb with his right hand. Some
governors invited me to Chinese feasts, where I ate too much for my
health. Not only is the best Chinese food very good indeed, but it is
bad manners at such a feast not to eat just as much as possible. These
feasts usually came at about eleven in the morning and four in the
afternoon, and when I was invited to luncheon and dinner by foreigners
on the same day that I went to Chinese meals I was very well fed indeed.
The governor of Chengtu invited me to the movies rather than to a feast.
He took six of his wives with him, leaving the seventh at home to look
after the children. The American “Wild West” film shown that evening
seemed to be greatly enjoyed by the large crowd that packed the outdoor
auditorium. This governor had very modern ideas. He let his wives bob
their hair and ride bicycles. At the time I talked with him he was
cutting seventeen wide streets through the ancient capital. Since then
he has been driven out in one of China’s many civil wars, but before he
went Chengtu saw its first automobile, and other modern things are to
come.
The streets of Chengtu are gay in many places with bright silk threads
that are being woven into cloth. The place has a mint and an arsenal and
some other modern establishments; but most work is still done in family
groups rather than in big factories. A pleasant feature of that huge and
very interesting old city is that even the coolies have bamboo armchairs
in their tea houses, instead of the narrow uncomfortable sawhorses that
in most parts of the country serve the poorer people as seats.
I Climb a Sacred Mountain
My last side-trip in China was the climax of them all. I climbed a stone
stairway more than two miles high, to the Golden Summit, as the Chinese
call it, of the sacred mountain of Omei-shan. It is 11,000 feet above
sea-level, and though August had been blazing hot down on the plain, we
felt as if we were at the North Pole up among the great wooden temples
above the clouds.
[Illustration:
For those who cannot climb the 11,000 feet to the summit of the sacred
mountain of Omei-shan in western China, this kind of steed is
waiting.
]
Many thousands of pilgrims climb Omei-shan in a year, and now and then
one throws himself from the top, because he expects in that way to get
to heaven. From the summit I had a splendid view of the vast snow-capped
mountain ranges of Tibet, that lofty land which so few white men have
even entered.
If I tell you that I came down that two-mile stairway much faster than I
went up, you will not be surprised; and if you have ever come down so
steep a mountain you will also not be astonished that my legs ached for
days afterward.
Homeward Bound!
I found I could get into a boat at the foot of Omei-shan, or under the
walls of Chengtu, and go by water all the way to San Francisco or to New
York. Of course, I had to change to larger and larger boats, first at
Kiating, with its enormous Buddha carved in the high river bank. The
next change was to a comfortable foreign steamer at Chungking, the great
river port of Szechuan, on its rock shaped like an alligator’s back.
This boat took me through the wonderful gorges of the Yang-tze, with
their cliffs higher than our highest skyscrapers. From Ichang another
steamer carried me to Hankow, where I boarded a still larger one for
Shanghai. There an ocean liner was ready to carry me and my family
homeward across the Pacific.
PRONUNCIATION LIST
AUTHOR’S NOTE: The pronunciation of Chinese words here indicated is as
nearly as possible that of the Chinese people themselves, rather than
the usual foreign pronunciation. Since the Chinese language has sounds
which ours does not have, and since there is less accent than “tone”—a
kind of musical inflection which it is impossible to indicate with any
symbols we have—it is in some cases impossible to give the exact
English equivalent.
In the unenviable task of Latinizing all these sounds, the Americans
and British (missionaries, for the most part) who reduced them to the
accepted spellings with our alphabet, were not always entirely
successful in expressing exact shades of sound. From the start,
certain Chinese words might well have been spelled differently in
English, to give us more nearly the real pronunciation. For example,
some of the _k’s_ might better have been _j’s_, the _j’s_ more exactly
_r’s_, the _p’s_ preferably _b’s_, etc. Thus, if the name of the
capital of China had been Latinized as “Bayjing,” foreigners would
pronounce it much more nearly in the Chinese way than they do in
saying “Peking.” As people have become accustomed to the spellings
employed in maps, encyclopedias, and geographies for generations—and,
more or less, to the pronunciations indicated in dictionaries and
other reference works, the attempt here to give more exactly the
Chinese pronunciations will doubtless provide some surprises.
The symbols of Webster’s New International Dictionary have been used.
ahong (ä’hông’)
Along (ä-lông’)
ama (ä’mä)
Amichow (ä’mē’jō)
Amoy (ä-mō’ee)
Anhwei (än’hwā)
Anking (än’jĭng’)
Annam (ăn-näm’)
bay-fu (bā’-foo’)
Bogda-Khan (bôg’dä-hän’)
Buddha (bood’ä)
cangue (kăng)
carabao (kä-rä-bä’ō)
Canton (kăn-tŏn’)
Cathay (kă-thā’)
Changchun (chäng-choon’)
Chaochowfu (jou’jō-foo’)
Chaotung (jou’toong)
Chekiang (chē’jē’äng’)
Chengtu (chĕng’tū’)
Chihli (jĕ’lē’)
Chinkiang (chĭn-jē-äng’)
Chio Hwa Shan (jī’ō’ hwä shän)
Chosen (chō-sĕn’)
Chufu (chü-fū’)
Chu-kiang (joo’jĭ-äng)
ch’ung-chiah (choong’jĭ-ä)
Chungking (chŭng’kĭng’)
Confucius (kŏn-fū’shĭ-ŭs)
Dairen (dī-rĕn’)
Dalai Lama (dä-lī’ lä’mä)
E mao ch’ien (ē mou’ chĭ-ĕn’)
E quai ch’ien (ē kwī’ chĭ-ĕn’)
Fang-gwy-lo (fäng-gwī-ō’) (Cantonese or Southern Chinese. See
Also “Yanggwei-tze.”)
Fei Lan-kuh (fā län’-kẽ’)
Fengtien (fēng’tĭ’ĕn’)
Foochow (foo-chou’)
Formosa (fôr-mō’sä)
Fukien (foo’jï-ĕn’)
Gobi (gō’bē’)
Hainan (hī’nän’)
Haiphong (hä-ē-fông’)
Hangchow (häng-chou’)
Hankow (hăn-kou’)
Han-ren (hän’rĕn)
Hanyang (hän’yäng’)
Harbin (här’bĭn’)
Hoang-ho (hō’äng’hü’)
Hochow (hō’jō’)
Hoihow (hō-ĭ-hou’)
Honam (hŭ’näm’)
Honan (hŭ’nän’)
Hong Kong (hŏng kŏng; customary English pronunciation,
although a poor equivalent of the Chinese.)
Hong Shih Ai (hông shĭr ī)
Hsi-ling (shē’lĭng’)
Hunan (hū’nän’)
Hupeh (hū-bā’)
hutung (hoo’tŭng)
hwa-gan (hwä’-gän’)
Hwa Miao (hwä mĭ’-ou’)
Hwei-hwei (hwā’-hwā’)
I-bien (ē’-byĕn)
Ichang (ẽ’chäng)
Irkutsk (ẽr’kootsk’)
Jaochow (rou’jō)
Jehol (rẽ’hẽr)
Kachek (kä-chĕk’)
Kaiyukwan (kī-yū-gwän’)
Kalgan (kăl-gän’)
k’ang (käng)
Kansu (gän’sū)
kaoliang (gou-lẽ-äng’)
Kiangsi (jē’äng’shē’)
Kiangsu (jē’äng’sū’)
Kiating (jē’ä’dĭng’)
Kingtehchen (jĭng’tẽ-jēn)
Kiukiang (jē-ū’jē-äng’)
Kiungchow (jẽ’oong’jö’)
Kokonor (kō’kō’nōr’)
Kongmoon (kông’moon’)
Koran (kō-rän’)
Korea (kō-rē’ä)
Kuling (gũ’lĭng’)
Kung (goong)
Kung-yik (koong’yĭk)
Kwangchowfu (gwäng’jō-foo’)
Kwangsi (gwäng’shē’)
Kwang-su (gwäng’-soo’)
Kwangtung (gwäng’toong’)
Kweichow (gwā’jō’)
laichee (lî’chē) or litchi (lē-chlē’)
lama (lä’mä)
Lanchow (län’jō’)
Laokay (lou-kī’)
Lao-an (lou’-än’)
Lhasa (lä’sä)
likin (lē’kĭn—foreign pron.; lē-jĭn’—Chin. pron.)
Loi (lō’ĭ)
Lolo (lō’lō)
Lu (lū)
Macao (mä-kä’ō)
Manchuli (män-choo-lē’)
Manchuria (măn-choo’rĭ-ä)
mandarin (măn’dä-rĭn)
Man-tzow (män-tzō’)
Mecca (mĕk’ä)
Mei Lan-fang (mā’ län-fäng’)
Mei-shan (mā-shän’)
Min (mĭn)
Mohammed (mō-hăm’ĕd)
Mongolia (mŏn-gō’-lĭ-ä)
Mukden (mook’-dĕn)
Nanking (nän’jĭng’)
Nanning (nän’nĭng’)
Nantai (nän-tī’)
Nosu (nô’soo)
Omei-shan (ō-mā-shän’)
Paak Wan Shan (päk wän shän)
Pagoda (pä-gō’dä)
p’ai-lou (pī-loo’)
Pei-ho (bā-hŭ’)
Peking (pē-kĭng’; Chin. pron. bā’jĭng’)
peng (pēng)
Pingliang (pĭng-lĭ-äng’)
Potala (pō-tä-lä’)
Poyang (pō-yäng’)
puk’ai (pūk’ī’)
Saikwan (sī-gwän’)
Sampan (säm’pän’)
sen-kou (sēn’kō)
Shameen (shä-mēn’)
Shanghai (shăng’hī’)
Shanhaikwan (shän’hī-gwän’)
Shansi (shän’shē)
Shantung (shän’doong)
Shaohsing (shou-shĭng’)
Shensi (shă’ăn-shē’)
Shih-men-k’an (shēr-mēn-kän’)
Sianfu (shē’än-foo’)
Siberia (sī-bē’rĭ-ä)
Si-kiang (shē’jĭ-äng)
Sinkiang (sĭn-jĭ-äng’)
Soochow (soo’chou’)
Suifu (swē-foo’)
Sunwei (sün’wā)
Sun Yat-sen (sün yät-sẽn’)
Swatow (swä’tou’)
Szechuan (ssē’chwän)
Sze Yap (sē’ yäp)
Tai-shan (tī-shän’)
Taiyuanfu (tī’yū-än-foo’)
Ta Pan Chiao (dä bän jĭ-ou’)
Tartar (tär’tär)
Tibet (tĭ-bĕt’)
Tientsin (tĭ-ĕn’tsēn’)
tsao-hai (tsou’-hī)
Tsing-hwa (tsĭng’-hwä)
Tsuchulin (tsoo-choo-lĭn’)
Tungchuan (dŭng’chwän)
Tung-ling (doong’-ling’)
Turkestan (toor-kĕ-stän’)
Tzeliuching (tsē-lĭ-ū-jĭng’)
Tzinanfu (tsē’nän-foo’)
Urga (ŭr’gä)
Wai-kuo-ren (wī’gwô-rĕn’)
Wan Li Chang Chen (wän lĭ chäng chēn)
Whangpoa (whäng’pō-ä)
Wuchang (woo’chäng’)
Wuhu (woo’hoo’)
Yalu (yä’loo)
yamen (yä’mĕn)
Yang Chi-ting (yäng jē-dĭng’)
Yang-gwei-tze (yäng-gwā’dzē) (Mandarin or Northern Chinese.
See also “Fang-gwylo.”)
Yang-tze Kiang (yäng’-tzē jē-äng’)
yao-fan-ti (you-fän’tē)
Yenping (yĕn’bĭng’)
Yunnan (yün-nän’)
Yunnanfu (yün’nän-foo’)
yurt (yoort)
[Illustration]
[Illustration: SOUTHERN CHINA and SURROUNDINGS Scale Approximately 192
Miles to an Inch]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TRAVELS IN MANY LANDS
A series of Geographical Readers for
Intermediate Grades, written by Harry A. Franck
and published by F.A. Owen Publishing Company:
THE JAPANESE EMPIRE
CHINA
MEXICO AND CENTRAL AMERICA
_Others in preparation_
✧
Books by Mr. Franck published by The Century Company, New
York:
A Vagabond Journey Around the World
Four Months Afoot in Spain
Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras
Zone Policeman 88
Vagabonding Down the Andes
Working North from Patagonia
Vagabonding Through Changing Germany
Roaming Through the West Indies
Glimpses of Japan and Formosa
Wandering in Northern China
Roving Through Southern China
East of Siam (French Indo-China)
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
● Fixed typos; non-standard spelling and dialect retained.
● Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.
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