The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Yangtze valley and beyond
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.
Title: The Yangtze valley and beyond
Author: Isabella Lucy Bird
Release date: February 4, 2026 [eBook #77853]
Language: English
Original publication: London: J. Murray, 1899
Credits: Richard Tonsing, Peter Becker, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE YANGTZE VALLEY AND BEYOND ***
THE YANGTZE VALLEY AND BEYOND
[Illustration: TIBETAN LAMAS MASKED FOR A RELIGIOUS DANCE.]
THE YANGTZE VALLEY AND BEYOND
AN ACCOUNT OF JOURNEYS IN CHINA, CHIEFLY IN THE PROVINCE OF SZE CHUAN
AND AMONG THE MAN-TZE OF THE SOMO TERRITORY
BY MRS. J. F. BISHOP
(ISABELLA L. BIRD), F.R.G.S.
HONORARY FELLOW OF THE ROYAL SCOTTISH GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY
HONORARY MEMBER OF THE ORIENTAL SOCIETY OF PEKING, ETC. ETC.
WITH MAP AND 116 ILLUSTRATIONS
DEDICATED BY PERMISSION TO
THE MARQUESS OF SALISBURY, K.G.
LONDON
JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET
1899
DEDICATED BY PERMISSION
TO THE
MARQUESS OF SALISBURY, K.G.
WITH THE AUTHOR’S PROFOUND RESPECT, AND ADMIRATION
OF THE NOBLE AND DISINTERESTED SERVICES
WHICH HE HAS RENDERED TO THE
BRITISH EMPIRE
PREFACE
These journeys in China [concluding in 1897], of which the following
pages are the record, were undertaken for recreation and interest
solely, after some months of severe travelling in Korea. I had no
intention of writing a book, and it was not till I came home, and China
came very markedly to the front, and friends urged upon me that my
impressions of the Yangtze Valley might be a useful contribution to
popular knowledge of that much-discussed region, that I began to arrange
my materials in their present form. They consist of journal letters,
photographs, and notes from a brief diary.
In correcting them, and in the identification of places, not an easy
matter, I have been much indebted to the late Captain Gill’s _River of
Golden Sand_, _The Gorges of the Yangtze_, by Mr. A. Little, three
papers on “Exploration in Western China,” by Mr. Colborne Baber, in the
_Geographical Journal of the Royal Geographical Society_, and very
specially to the official reports of H.B.M.’s Consuls at the Yangtze
ports. I have denied myself the pleasure of reading any of the recent
literature on China, and it was only when my task was done that I
glanced over some of the later chapters in _The Break Up of China_, and
_China in Transformation_. For a great part of my inland journey I have
been unable to find any authorities to refer to, and as regards personal
observation I agree sadly with the dictum of Socrates—“The body is a
hindrance to acquiring knowledge, and sight and hearing are not to be
trusted.”
I cannot hope to escape errors, but I have made a laborious effort to be
accurate, and I trust and believe that they are not of material
importance, and that in the main this volume will be found to convey a
truthful impression of the country and its people. The conflicting
statements made on every subject by well-informed foreign residents in
China, as elsewhere, constitute a difficulty for a traveller, and
homogeneous as China is, yet with regard to very many customs, what is
true in one region is not true in another. Even in the single province
of SZE CHUAN there is a very marked unlikeness between one district and
another in house and temple architecture, methods of transit, customs in
trade, and in much else.
I have dwelt at some length on “Beaten Tracks”—_i.e._, treaty ports and
the Great River—though these have been described by many writers, for
the reason that each one looks at them from a different standpoint, and
helps to create a complete whole. The illustrations in this volume, with
the exception of the reproductions of some Chinese drawings, and nine
which friends have kindly permitted me to use, are from my own
photographs. The spelling of place names needs an explanation. I have
not the Chinese characters for them, and in many cases have only been
able to represent by English letters the sounds as they reached my ear;
but wherever possible, the transliteration given by Consul Playfair in
his published list of Chinese Place Names has been adopted, and with
regard to a few well-known cities the familiar but unscholarly spelling
has been retained. To prevent confusion the names of provinces have been
printed in capitals.
I am painfully conscious of the many demerits of this volume, but
recognising the extreme importance of increasing by every means the
knowledge of, and interest in, China and its people, I venture to ask
for it from the public the same kindly criticism with which my former
records of Asiatic travel have been received, and to hope that it may be
accepted as an honest attempt to make a contribution to the data on
which public opinion on China and Chinese questions must be formed.
ISABELLA L. BISHOP
_October, 1899._
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. GEOGRAPHICAL AND INTRODUCTORY 1
II. “THE MODEL SETTLEMENT” 15
III. HANGCHOW 29
IV. THE HANGCHOW MEDICAL MISSION HOSPITALS 44
V. SHANGHAI TO HANKOW (HANKAU) 55
VI. THE FOREIGNERS—HANKOW AND BRITISH TRADE 61
VII. CHINESE HANKOW (HANKAU) 67
VIII. HANKOW TO ICHANG 83
IX. ICHANG 95
X. THE UPPER YANGTZE 104
XI. RAPIDS OF THE UPPER YANGTZE 114
XII. RAPIDS AND TRACKERS 128
XIII. LIFE ON THE UPPER YANGTZE 138
XIV. THE YANGTZE AND KUEI FU 150
XV. NEW YEAR’S DAY AT KUEI-CHOW FU 160
XVI. KUEI FU TO WAN HSIEN 166
XVII. CHINESE CHARITIES 181
XVIII. FROM WAN HSIEN TO SAN TSAN-PZU 194
XIX. SZE CHUAN TRAVELLING 207
XX. SAN-TSAN-PU TO LIANG-SHAN HSIEN 214
XXI. LIANG-SHAN HSIEN TO HSIA-SHAN-PO 223
XXII. HSIA-SHAN-PO TO SIAO-KIAO 240
XXIII. SIAO-KIAO TO HSIEH-TIEN-TZE 249
XXIV. HSIEH-TIEN-TZE TO PAONING FU 264
XXV. PAONING FU AND SIN-TIEN-TZE 282
XXVI. SIN-TIEN-TZE TO TZE-TUNG HSIEN 296
XXVII. TZE-TUNG HSIEN TO KUAN HSIEN 316
XXVIII. KUAN HSIEN AND CHENGTU 338
XXIX. KUAN HSIEN TO SIN-WEN-PING 361
XXX. SIN-WEN-PING TO LI-FAN TING 373
XXXI. LI-FAN TING TO TSA-KU-LAO 395
XXXII. THE “BEYOND” 404
XXXIII. THE MAN-TZE, I-REN, OR SHAN-SHANG-REN 443
XXXIV. FROM SOMO TO CHENGTU FU 455
XXXV. DOWNWARD BOUND 460
XXXVI. LUCHOW TO CHUNG-KING FU 477
XXXVII. THE JOURNEY’S END 490
XXXVIII. THE OPIUM POPPY AND ITS USE 506
XXXIX. NOTES ON PROTESTANT MISSIONS IN CHINA 518
CONCLUDING REMARKS 530
ITINERARY 545
APPENDICES 546
INDEX 549
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
Tibetan Lamas masked for a Religious Dance (Lal Singh) _Frontispiece_
Zig-zag Bridge and Tea House, Shanghai 27
A _Pah_, or Haulover 33
West Gate, Hangchow 35
Pavilion in Imperial Garden, Si-hu 39
God of Thunder, Lin-yang 42
C.M.S. Mission Hospital, Hangchow 45
A Street in Hankow (John Thomson, F.R.G.S.) 69
Hankow from Han Yang 73
Coffins awaiting Burial 76
Female Beggar in Mat Hut 78
A Travelling Restaurant 80
Chinese Soldiers 87
Military Officer 88
A Fisherman and Plunge Net 90
The Tablet of Confucius 97
Entrance to Ichang Gorge 107
The Author’s Boat 111
Bed of the Yangtze in Winter, Ta-tan Rapid 116
The Hsin-tan 120
Ping-shu Gorge, Hsin-tan 125
The Mitan Gorge 129
Temple near Kueichow 133
Trackers’ Houses 143
Author’s Trackers at Dinner 158
A Chinese Punchinello 161
Temple of Chang-fei 167
Pagoda near Wan Hsien 169
Guest Hall, C.I.M., Wan Hsien 173
Bridge at Wan Hsien 179
A Chinese Burial Charity 185
Baggage Coolies 197
A Pai-fang 199
Granite Dragon Pillar 203
Pass of Shen-kia-chao 215
Wayside Shrine 218
A Chinese Chatsworth 225
Bridge and Inn of Shan-rang-sar 229
A Porcelain Temple 233
The Water Buffalo 235
Ordinary Covered Bridge 237
A Group of Kuans (Mandarins) 255
Lady’s Sedan Chair (Chinese Propriety) (Dr. Kinnear) 259
A Sze Chuan Farmhouse 267
A Sze Chuan Market-place 271
Pedagogue and Pupils 275
Recessed Divinities, Chia-ling River 281
Temple of God of Literature, Paoning Fu 283
The Right Rev. Bishop Cassels, D.D., Paoning Fu 287
Chinese Protestant Episcopal Church, Paoning Fu 289
C.I.M. Sanitarium, Sin-tien-tze 293
Entrance to a Market-place 297
Author’s arrival at a Chinese Inn 303
An Ox Mill 306
A Hand Mill 307
The Ta-lu 309
Woman Reeling Silk 317
The Rev. J. Heywood Horsburgh, M.A., in Travelling Dress 322
Water Mill, Chengtu Plain 325
Bridge at Mien-chuh 328
Treadmill Field-pump (Captain Gill) 332
Wooden Bridge, Kuan Hsien 335
Roof of Erh-wang Temple 341
Oil Baskets and Wooden Purse 344
Barrow Traffic, Chengtu Plain 345
Poppy Field in Blossom 349
The White Opium Poppy (F. S. Mayers) 351
The Author in Manchu Dress (Moffat, Edinburgh) 353
Divinity in Wen-shu-yuan Temple, Chengtu 359
Entrance to Grounds of City Temple, Kuan Hsien 363
Double Roofed Bridge 368
Tibetan Rope Bridge (Captain Gill) 370
Human Pack Saddle for Timber 374
Bamboo Suspension Bridge, Weichou 379
Ancient Towers at Kanpo 383
Kan-chi 387
Rock Temple, Li-fan Ting 391
Village of Wei-gua 397
Street of Tsa-ku-lao 401
A Sugar-loaf Mountain, Siao Ho 405
Revolving Prayer-Cylinders 408
Bridle Track by the Siao Ho 411
View from Chuang Fang 414
Castle at Chu-ti 416
Headman’s House, Chu-ti 417
Altar of Incense on Man-tze Roof 418
Sick unto Death 420
Lama-serai and Headman’s House, Mia-ko 421
Elephantiasis (Dr. Christie) 427
Chinese Officer and Spearmen, Mia-ko 432
Village of Rong-kia 434
Canyon of the Rong-kia 435
Square Tower, Somo 438
Distant View of Somo 439
A Man-tze Village 444
Somo Castle (back view) 447
Entrance and Judgment-seat, Somo Castle 453
Heshui Hunter, and Notched Timbers 456
A Heshui Family, Ku-erh-kio 457
A Dragon Bridge 459
Village on the Min 462
West Gate, Chia-ling Fu 465
Frieze in Rock Dwelling, Min River 468
Boat on the Min (Dr. Causland) 469
Town on the Yangtze 472
Suburb of Sui Fu 473
Tsiang Ngan Hsien, with entrance to Rock Dwelling 476
Pagoda near Luchow 479
The Author’s _Wu-pan_ 483
Method of carrying _Cash_ and Babies 486
Fishing Village, Upper Yangtze 487
Wall of Chung-king, with Gate Towers 491
Chung-king Soldiers, Customs Guard 494
Gala Head-dress, “Dog-faced” Woman (Dr. Kinnear) 498
The Author’s last _Wu-pan_ 500
“Stone Precious Castle,” Shi-pao-chai 502
ERRATA.
Page 2. Third line from bottom, for “140” read “263.”
„ 177. Footnote, third line from bottom, after “illustration” read
“on page 498.”
„ 415. Eleventh line from bottom, for “_Tu-sze_” read “_Tu-tze_.”
„ 495. Eighteenth line from top, for “88°” read “87°.”
„ 518. Eleventh line from bottom, for “six thousand” read “8875.”
THE YANGTZE VALLEY
CHAPTER I.
GEOGRAPHICAL AND INTRODUCTORY
The events which have rendered the Yangtze Valley literally a “sphere of
interest” throughout the British Empire lie outside the purview of these
volumes. Few people, unless they have been compelled to the task by
circumstances or interests, are fully acquainted with the magnitude and
resources of the great basin which in the spring of 1898 was claimed as
the British “sphere of influence,” and I honestly confess that it was
only at the end of eight months (out of journeys of fifteen months in
China) spent on the Yangtze, its tributaries, and the regions watered by
them that I even began to learn their magnificent capabilities, and the
energy, resourcefulness, capacities, and “backbone” of their enormous
population.
Geographically the Yangtze Valley, or drainage area, may be taken as
extending from the 90th to the 122nd meridian of east longitude, and as
including all or most of the important provinces of SZE CHUAN, HUPEH,
HUNAN, KIANGSI, NGANHUI, KIANGSU, and HONAN, with considerable portions
of CHE KIANG, KUEICHOW, and YUNNAN, and even includes the south-eastern
drainage areas of KANSUH, SHENSI, and SHANTUNG. Geographically there can
be no possible mistake about the limits of this basin.[1] Its area is
estimated at about 650,000 square miles, and its population, one of the
most peaceable and industrious on earth, at from 170,000,000 to
180,000,000.
The actual length of the Yangtze is unknown, but is believed not to
exceed 3000 miles. Rising, according to the best geographical
information, almost due north of Calcutta, its upper waters have been
partially explored by Colonel Prjevalsky and Mr. Rockhill up to an
altitude in the Tang-la mountains of 16,400 feet, and as far as lat. 34°
43′ N. and long. 90° 48′ E.[2]
It has thus been ascertained that the Great River, though not tracked
actually to its source, rises on the south-east edge of the Central
Asian steppes, and, after draining an extensive and little-known basin,
pursues a tempestuous course under the name of the Chin Sha, hemmed in
by parallel ranges, and raging through gigantic rifts in YUNNAN and
South-western SZE CHUAN, which culminate in grandeur at the Sun Bridge,
a mountain about 20,000 feet in altitude, “which abuts on the river in a
precipice or precipices which must be 8000 feet above its waters”
(Baber).
It is not till these savage gorges are passed and the Chin Sha reaches
Ping Shan, forty miles above Sui Fu, that it becomes serviceable to man.
In long. 94° 48′ Colonel Prjevalsky describes it as a rapid torrent,
with a depth of from five to seven feet, a bed, upwards of a mile wide,
covered in summer, and a width in autumn of 750 feet at about 2800 miles
from its mouth. In travelling from its supposed source to Ping Shan, a
distance roughly estimated at 1500 miles, its fall must be fully 15,000
feet (assuming that the altitude of its source is 16,400 feet),[3] while
for the same distance (again roughly estimated) from Ping Shan to
Shanghai the fall is only 1025 feet, and from Hankow to the sea, a
distance of 600 miles, only an inch per mile.
The Min or Fu appears to have its source in the Baian Kara range, called
in Tibetan Maniak-tso,[4] and joins the Chin Sha at Sui Fu. While the
Chin Sha is only navigable for about forty miles above this junction,
the Min is navigable to Chengtu, about 266 miles from Sui Fu, and by
another branch to Kuan Hsien, forty miles higher. I descended the Min
from Chengtu to Sui Fu in a fair-sized boat at the very lowest of low
water. As being navigable for a far greater distance, the Chinese
geographers regard the Min as the true “Great River,” the superior
length of the Chin Sha not being taken into account. It should be noted
that the Chinese only give their great river the name of Yangtze for the
two hundred miles of its tidal waters.[5]
After the River of Golden Sand and the Min unite at Sui Fu, the Great
River asserts its right to be regarded as the most important of Asiatic
waterways by furnishing, by its main stream and the tributaries which
thereafter enter it, routes easy of navigation through the rich and
crowded centre of China, with Canton by the Fu-ling, with only two
portages, and with Peking (Tientsin) itself by the Grand Canal, which it
cuts in twain at Chin Kiang.
It is only of the navigable affluents of the Yangtze that mention need
be made here. The raging and tremendous torrents foaming through rifts
as colossal as its own, and at present unexplored, lie rather within the
province of the geographer.
In estimating the importance of these affluents it must be remembered
that the Yangtze, of which they are feeders, is not _an_ outlet, but
_the_ outlet, for the commerce of SZE CHUAN, which, owing to its size,
population, wealth, and resources, may be truly termed the empire
province of China.
On the north or left bank the Min, before uniting with the Chin Sha at
Sui Fu, receives near the beautiful trading city of Chia-ling Fu the
Tung or Tatu, a river with a volume of water so much larger than its own
as to warrant the view taken by Mr. Baber and Mr. von Rosthorn that it
ought to be considered the main stream, and the Ya, which is navigable
for bamboo rafts up to Ya-chow, the centre of the brick tea trade with
Tibet. After this the Yangtze at Lu-chow receives the To, which gives
access to one of the richest regions of the province, and at Chungking,
the trading capital, the Chia-ling.
This is in itself a river of great importance, being navigable for over
500 miles, actually into the province of Kansuh. It receives several
noble navigable feeders, among the most important of which are the Ku,
entering it a little above Ho-chow, the Honton or Fu, and the Pai Shui.
It passes for much of its course through a rich and fertile region, and
through a country which produces large quantities of salt, and it
bisects the vast coal-fields which underlie Central SZE CHUAN. On the
right or south bank above the gorges, at the picturesque city of
Fu-chow, the Fu-ling, which has three aliases, enters the Yangtze. This
is an affluent of much commercial importance, as being the first of a
network of rivers by which, with only two portages, goods from the Far
West can reach Canton, and as affording, with its connections the Yuan
Ho and the Tungting lake, an alternative route to Hankow, by which the
risks of the rapids are avoided.
After the Yangtze enters the gorges, which at one point, at least,
narrow it to a width of 150 yards, there are no affluents worthy of
special notice until Ichang is passed, when the Han, navigable for cargo
boats for 1200 miles of north-westerly windings from its mouth at
Hankow, takes the first place, followed by the Yuan, Hsiang, Kan, Shu,
and others, which join the Yangtze through the Tungting and Poyang
lakes. These rivers, specially the Han, are themselves swelled by a
great number of navigable feeders, which east of Sha-shih, in the Great
Plain, are connected by a vast network of navigable canals, the
differences in level being overcome by the ingenious contrivance called
the _pah_. These natural and artificial waterways are among the chief
elements of the prosperity of the Yangtze Valley, affording cheap
transit for merchandise, land carriage in China, mile for mile, costing
twenty times as much as water carriage.
The time of the annual rise and fall of the Great River can be counted
on with tolerable certainty. With regard to the rise, from what I saw
and heard I am inclined to attach more importance to the swelling of its
Yunnan affluents during the south-west monsoon than to the melting of
those snows which, as seen from the stupendous precipice of Omi-shan,
are one of the grandest sights on earth—the long and glittering barrier
which secludes the last of the hermit nations.
The rise of the Yangtze is from forty feet or thereabouts at Hankow to
ninety feet and upwards at Chungking. During three months of the year
the rush of the vast volume of water is so tremendous that traffic is
mainly suspended, and even in early June many hundreds of the large
junks are laid up until the autumn in quiet reaches between Chungking
and Wan Hsien. The annual rise of the river as well as the rapids have
to be taken into consideration in the discussion of the question as to
whether steam navigation on the Upper Yangtze can be made commercially
profitable.
The actual rise, which is more reliable than that of the Nile, begins
late in March, is at its height early in August, and then gradually
falls until December or January. Late in June, when I descended the
Great River, its enormous submerged area presented the same appearance
on a large scale as the limited Nile valley—an expanse of muddy water,
out of which low mounds, probably of great antiquity, rise, crested with
trees and villages, with boats moored to the houses.
The country in the neighbourhood of Shanghai is a fairly good example of
the characteristics of the Great Plain. In ordinary dry weather the
surface of the soil is not more than five feet above the water-level,
and as seen from any pagoda the whole country, with the exception of the
two or three low Tsing-pu hills, which are seldom visible, presents the
aspect, familiar to dwellers in the fens, of a cultivated dead level,
intersected by numerous canals and creeks and by embankments for the
preservation of the fields from inundation. Much the same sort of view
in winter may be seen from any elevated point for hundreds of miles,
modified by a few ranges of hills of somewhat higher elevation, wider
creeks, and shallow marshy lakes.
It is not solely by deposits of rich alluvium brought down by the annual
rise of the river that the soil of the Great Plain is gradually raised.
The agency of dust storms is an important one, and these occur
extensively throughout Northern and Central China, moving much material
from place to place. I saw a dust storm at Kueichow which lasted for
seven hours, burying some hovels and much agricultural country, and even
producing a metamorphosis of the rocky bed of the Yangtze. Such storms
have been observed as far east as Shanghai, but their occurrence at
Kueichow shows that their area is not limited to the Great Plain or even
to the region east of the mountain barrier between HUPEH and SZE CHUAN.
It is not till the Yangtze reaches Sha-shih that its character
completely changes. The first note of change is a great embankment,
thirty feet high, which protects the region from inundation. Below
Sha-shih the vast river becomes mixed up with a network of lakes and
rivers, connected by canals, the area of the important Tungting lake
being over 2000 square miles. The Han alone, with its many affluents and
canals, disperses goods through the interior for 1200 miles north of its
mouth at Hankow, but there are some difficult rapids to surmount. The
Hsiang and the Yuan, uniting with the Yangtze at the Tungting lake, are
navigable nearly as far to the south. The Kan, which unites with the
Yangtze through the Poyang lake, which has an area of 1800 square miles,
is navigable to the Mei-ling pass, near the Kwantung frontier.
The delta of the river is indicated below Wu-sueh by even a greater
labyrinth of tributaries, lakes, and canals, the area of the Tai Hu and
the other lakes in the southern delta being estimated at 1200 square
miles, and the length of the channels used for navigation and irrigation
at 36,000 miles. In summer, after the spring crops have been removed,
the whole region is under water. The population migrates to mounds, and
the temporary villages communicate by boats.
At Chinkiang the Grand Canal enters the Yangtze from Hangchow, and
leaves it on the left bank, some miles away, for Tientsin. On that north
bank engineering works, extending over a vast area of country, have been
constructed, evidencing the former energy and skill of the Chinese.
These have diverted the river Huai, which with its seventy-two
tributaries form important commercial routes to North An Hui and Honan,
from its natural course to the sea, and have compelled the bulk of its
waters to discharge themselves into the Yangtze through openings in a
large canal which runs nearly parallel with it for 140 miles. By means
of innumerable artificial waterways, the excavation of some lakes, and
the enlargement of others, the Huai no longer has any existence as a
river east of the Grand Canal, most of this work having been carried out
to prevent undue pressure on the bank of that great waterway at any one
point south of the old course of the Hoang Ho.
North of the canal, and parallel with the Yangtze, lies a parallelogram
the extent of which is estimated by Père Gandar at 8876 square miles,
and is one of the most productive rice-fields in China. This is below
the water-level. It has immense dykes protecting it from the sea,
pierced by eighteen drainage canals, but its chief drainage is into the
Yangtze. Waterways under constant and careful supervision intersect this
singular region. For the remaining distance the mighty flood of the
Yangtze rolls majestically on through absolutely level country, in which
in winter embankments and waterways are everywhere seen. The influence
of the tide is felt for about 200 miles.
There is an ancient Chinese proverb regarding the mouth of the Great
River: “Lo, this mighty current hastens to its imperial audience with
the ocean.” But opaque yellow water and mud flats, extending as far as
the eye can reach, leave the imperial grandeur to the imagination.
Tennyson’s description of the work of rivers as being “to sow the dust
of continents to be,” applies forcibly to the Yangtze, which, after
creating the vast alluvial plains which stretch from Sha-shih for 800
miles to the ocean and endowing them in its annual overflow with
sufficient fresh material to keep up an unsurpassed fertility, has yet
enough to spare to discharge 770,000 feet of solid substance every
second into the sea, according to scientific estimates. The Yangtze has
done much to create, within comparatively recent years, at least the
eastern portion of the province of Kiang Su and the island of Tsung-ming
near Shanghai, capable of supporting a population of considerably over
1,000,000 souls. Another marked instance of its power to create is shown
near the treaty port of Chinkiang. The British fleet ascended the
Yangtze, so recently as in 1842, by a channel south of the beautiful
Golden Island. Now, instead of the channel, there is an expanse of
wooded and cultivated land sprinkled with villages.
Nearly a mile wide 600 miles from its mouth, nearly three-quarters of a
mile at 1000, and 630 yards at 1500, with a volume of water which, at
1000 miles from the sea, is estimated at 244 times that of the Thames at
London Bridge, with a summer depth of ninety feet at Chungking and of
ten feet at its few shallow places at Hankow when at its lowest winter
level, with a capacity for a rise of forty feet before it overflows its
banks, with an annual rise and fall more reliable than those of the
Nile, with navigable tributaries penetrating the richest and most
populous regions of China, navigable in the summer as far as Hankow for
the largest ships in the world, and during the whole year to Ichang, 400
miles farther, for fine river steamers carrying large cargoes, even the
Upper Yangtze, that region of grandeur, perils, and surprises, is
traversed annually by 7000 junks, employing a quarter of a million of
men. During my own descent of the Min and Yangtze from Chengtu to
Shanghai, a distance by the windings of the river of about 2000 miles, I
was never out of sight of native traffic, and those who, like myself,
have waited for two or three days at the foot of the great rapids for
the turn to ascend, can form some idea of how vast that traffic is.
The navigable portion of the Yangtze, as regarded from the sea,
naturally divides itself into three stretches, the first, of 1000 miles,
rolling as a broad turbid flood, traversed by several lines of steamers,
through the deep grey alluvium of some of the richest and most populous
provinces of China, mainly its own creation; the second, the region
between Ichang and Kueichow Fu, through which hitherto goods have been
carried by junks alone, in which it cleaves the confused mass of the
HUPEH ranges by a series of magnificent gorges and tremendous cataracts;
and the third, the long stretch of rapids and races between Kueichow Fu
and Sui Fu at its junction with the Min.
It is not possible to exaggerate the sublimity and risks of the
navigation of the Upper Yangtze, especially at certain seasons. Of the
vast fleet of junks which navigate its perilous waters, five hundred on
an average are annually wrecked, and one-tenth of the enormous
importation of cotton into Chungking arrives damaged by water. Yet so
ample are the means of transport, and so low the freight considering the
risks, that, according to Mr. von Rosthorn, of the Chinese Imperial
Maritime Customs, foreign cottons are sold in SZE CHUAN at a barely
appreciable advance on their price at Ichang, to which point they are
brought by steam from the coast in eight days.
The _Chinese Gazetteer_ notifies one thousand rapids and rocks between
Ichang and Chungking, a distance of about 500 miles; and in winter this
does not seem an outlandish estimate, but in early summer, with the
water twenty-four and thirty feet higher, many of the vigorous rapids,
alternating with smooth stretches of river only running three knots an
hour, disappear, along with boulder-strewn shores, rocks, and islets,
giving place to a broad and tremendous volume of water, swirling
seawards at the rate of seven, eight, and ten knots an hour, forming
many and dangerous whirlpools.
Of the magnitude of the native traffic on the Lower Yangtze,
undiminished by the various steamboat lines which keep up daily
communication with Hankow, it is scarcely needful to write. In ascending
it is evident to the traveller by the time that Chinkiang, the port of
junction with the Grand Canal, is reached, that, broad as the river is,
there is none too much “sea room” for the thousands of junks of every
build, from every maritime and riverine province, fishing and cargo
boats of every size and rig, rafts, lorchas, and cormorant boats, which
throng its waters.
The open ports of Wuhu and Kiu-kiang, each with its fleets of junks, and
trade worth several millions sterling annually, and big cities such as
Nanking, Yangchow, and Nganking, each with its highly organised
mercantile and social life, and trade guilds and charities, are
important and interesting; and it is seen in a rapid glance that large
villages with numerous industries, rice, cotton, and silk culture
predominating, abound, that everything is utilised, that every foot of
ground capable of cultivation is bearing a crop, and that even the
reed-beds of the irreclaimable swamps furnish materials for houses,
roofs, fences, and fuel. It is seen that elaborate and successful
engineering works have reclaimed large tracts of country and keep them
drained, that a network of irrigating and navigable canals spreads over
the whole level region, and that the traffic on these minor waterways is
enormous.
So ceaseless are the industries by land and water, that it is hardly a
surprise to find them culminating 600 miles from the ocean in the
“million-peopled” city of Hankow (Han Mouth), the greatest distributing
centre for goods in China, with miles of craft moored in triple rows
along the Han, itself navigable for 1200 miles.
The empire province of SZE CHUAN, with the great navigable tributaries
of the Yangtze, by which goods are conveyed at small cost to countless
towns and villages, will be treated in some detail farther on. It is
enough to remark here that it has about the area of France, that it has
a population estimated by the Chinese census authorities at 70,000,000,
and by none at less than 50,000,000; that it has a superb climate,
ranging from the temperate to the sub-tropical; a rich soil, much of
which, under careful cultivation, yields three and even four crops
annually of most things which can be grown; forests of grand timber, the
area of which has not even been estimated; rich mineral resources, and
some of the most valuable and extensive coal-fields in the world. It
cannot be repeated too often that for its export trade, estimated at
£3,300,000, and its import trade, estimated at £2,400,000, the Yangtze
is the _sole_ outlet and inlet.
Such an exhibition of Chinese energy, industry, resourcefulness, and
power of battling with difficulties is not to be seen anywhere to the
same extent as on the Upper Yangtze, where the enormous bulk of the vast
import trade has to be dragged up 500 miles of hills of water by the
sheer force of man-power, at two or three of the worst rapids a junk of
over one hundred tons requiring the haulage of nearly four hundred men.
Waterways take the place of roads, which are usually infamous,
throughout the Yangtze basin, but the bridges are marvels of solidity,
and in many cases of beauty. The annual inundations on the Great Plain
partly account for the badness of the roads, and constitute an expensive
difficulty in the way of the forthcoming railroads.
To write of the Yangtze Valley, the British “sphere of influence” (a
phrase against which I protest), without any allusion to such an
important factor as its inhabitants, would be a mistake, for sooner or
later, in various ways, we shall have to reckon with them.
The population throughout, from the ocean to the unexplored rifts of the
Chin Sha, is homogeneous, that is Chinese, with the exception of certain
tribes of the far west: the Sifan, Mantze, and Lolo. The Tartars or
Manchu, who have supplied the throne with the present dynasty, whose
fathers drove the Chinese before them like sheep, and who still garrison
the great cities, have mainly degenerated into opium-smoking loafers,
the agent in their downfall being hereditary pensions.
Throughout this vast population, perhaps not over-estimated at
180,000,000, with the exception of spasmodic and local rebellions now
and then, law and order, prosperity (except in such disasters as floods
or famines) and peace prevail, and that security for the gains of labour
exists without which no country is great. The system of government, the
written language, and the education are uniform, and the “three
religions”—Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism—are so mixed up together
that there is little antagonism between them.
The organisation of this valley population, social and mercantile, is a
marvel, with its system of trade, trade guilds, trade unions, charities,
banking and postal systems, and powerful trade combinations.
In much talk about “open doors” and “spheres of influence” and
“interest,” in much greed for ourselves, not always dexterously cloaked,
and much jealousy and suspicion of our neighbours, and in much interest
in the undignified scramble for concessions in which we have been taking
our share at Peking, there is a risk of our coming to think only of
markets, territory, and railroads, and of ignoring the men who, for two
thousand years, have been making China worth scrambling for. It may be
that we go forward with “a light heart,” along with other European
empires, not hesitating, for the sake of commercial advantages, to break
up in the case of a fourth of the human race the most ancient of earth’s
existing civilisations, without giving any equivalent.
In estimating the position occupied by the inhabitants of the Yangtze
Valley, as of the rest of China, it is essential for us to see quite
clearly that our Western ideas find themselves confronted, not with
barbarism or with debased theories of morals, but with an elaborate and
antique civilisation which yet is not decayed, and which, though
imperfect, has many claims to our respect and even admiration. They meet
with a perfectly organised social order, a system of government
theoretically admirably suited to the country, combining the extremes of
centralisation and decentralisation, and under which, in spite of its
tremendous infamies of practice, the governed enjoy a large measure of
peace and prosperity, a noteworthy amount of individual liberty and
security for the gains of labour, and under which it is as possible for
a peasant’s son to rise to high position as in the American Republic.[6]
Western civilisation finds itself confronted also by a people at once
grossly material and grossly superstitious, swayed at once by the hazy
speculations and unintelligible metaphysic which in Chinese Buddhism
have allied themselves with the most extravagant and childish
superstitions, and by the dæmonism of Taoism, while over both tower the
lofty ethics and profound agnosticism of Confucius. It finds a classical
literature universally held in profound reverence, in which, according
to all testimony, there is not a thought which could sully the purest
mind, and an idolatry puerile, superstitious, and free from grand
conceptions, but in which bloody sacrifices and the deification of vice
have never had a part, or immoral rites a place.
The human product of Chinese civilisation, religion, and government is
to me the greatest of all enigmas, and so he remains to those who know
him best. At once conservative and adaptable, the most local of peasants
in his attachments, and the most cosmopolitan and successful of
emigrants—sober, industrious, thrifty, orderly, peaceable, indifferent
to personal comfort, possessing great physical vitality, cheerful,
contented, persevering—his filial piety, tenacity, resourcefulness,
power of combination, and respect for law and literature, place him in
the van of Asiatic nations.
The Chinese constitute an order by themselves, and their individuality
cannot be read in the light of that of any other nation. The aspirations
and modes of thinking by which we are ruled do not direct their aims.
They are keen and alert, but unwilling to strike out new lines, and slow
to be influenced in any matters. Their trading instincts are phenomenal.
They are born bargainers, and would hardly think half an hour wasted if
through chaffering they gained an advantage of half a _cash_, a coin
forty of which are about one penny. They are suspicious, cunning, and
corrupt; but it is needless to run through the established formula of
their vices. Among the things which they lack are CONSCIENCE, and such
an enlightened public opinion as shall sustain right and condemn wrong.
Matthew Arnold has said that Greece perished for want of attention to
conduct, and that the revelation which rules the world is the
“pre-eminence of righteousness.” It may be that the western powers are
not giving the Middle Kingdom a very desirable object-lesson.
On the whole, as I hope to show to some extent in the following pages,
throughout the Yangtze valley, from the great cities of Hangchow and
Hankow to the trading cities of SZE-CHUAN, the traveller receives very
definite impressions of the completeness of Chinese social and
commercial organisation, the skill and carefulness of cultivation, the
clever adaptation of means to ends—the existence of provincial
patriotism, or, perhaps, more truly, of local public spirit, of the
general prosperity, and of the backbone, power of combination,
resourcefulness, and independence possessed by the race. It is not an
effete or decaying people which we shall have to meet in serious
competition when it shall have learned our sciences and some of our
methods of manufacturing industry. Indeed, it is not improbable that
chemistry, for instance, might be eagerly adapted by so ingenious a race
to the perpetration of new and hitherto unthought-of frauds! But if the
extraordinary energy, adaptability, and industry of the Chinese may be
regarded from one point of view as the “Yellow Peril,” surely looked at
from another they constitute the Yellow Hope, and it may be possible
that an empire genuinely Christianised, but not denationalised, may yet
be the dominant power in Eastern Asia.
The Chinese are ignorant and superstitious beyond belief, but on the
whole, with all their faults, I doubt whether any other Oriental race
runs so straight.
The Yangtze Basin is a magnificent sphere of interest for all the
industrial nations for fair, if not friendly, rivalry, and to preserve
the “open door” there, and throughout China, is a worthy object of
ambition. To strengthen instead of to weaken the Central Government is
undoubtedly the wisest policy to pursue, for in the weakness of the
Peking Government lies the weakness and possible abrogation of all
treaty obligations. It is its strength and capacity to fulfil its
treaties which alone make them worth anything. In the weakening of the
Central Government, and the disintegration of the empire, our treaty
rights in the Yangtze Valley, for instance, would be worth as much as
our sword could secure, and it cannot reach above Ichang, while if the
integrity of the empire be preserved, and it is aided along judicious
paths of reform, this vast basin, with its singular capabilities, and
its population of 180,000,000, may become the widest arena for
commercial rivalries that the world has ever seen.
CHAPTER II.
“THE MODEL SETTLEMENT”
Those of my readers who have followed me through all or any of my eleven
volumes of travels must be aware that my chief wish on arriving at a
foreign settlement or treaty port in the East is to get out of it as
soon as possible, and that I have not the remotest hankering after
Anglo-Asiatic attractions. Nor is Shanghai, “The Model Settlement of the
East,” an exception to the general rule, though I gratefully acknowledge
the kindness and hospitality which I met with there, as everywhere, and
recall with pleasure my many sojourns at the British Consulate as the
guest of Mr. and Mrs. Lowndes Bullock.
But as the outlet of the commerce of the Yangtze Valley, and as a
foreign city which has risen on Chinese shores in little more than half
a century to the position and importance of one of the great trading
centres of the world—its exports and imports for 1898 being of the value
of £37,680,875 sterling[7]—it claims such notice as I can give it, which
is chiefly in the shape of impressions.
I have reached Shanghai four times by Japanese steamers, three times in
coasting steamers of American build, once in one of the superb vessels
of the Canadian _Empress_ line, once from Hankow in a metamorphosed
Dutch gunboat, and the last time, after nearly three and a half years of
far eastern travel, in a small Korean Government steamer, her quaint,
mysterious, and nearly unknown national flag exciting much speculation
and interest as she steamed slowly up the river. Of these vessels, the
_Empress of China_ alone discharged her passengers and cargo at
Woo-sung, a railroad terminus twelve miles below Shanghai, and that not
necessarily.
Many hours before reaching port, the deep heavenly blue of the Pacific
gradually changes into a turbid yellowish flood, well named the Yellow
Sea, holding in suspension the rich wash of scarcely explored Central
Asian mountain ranges, the red loam of the “Red Basin” of SZE CHUAN, and
the grey and yellow alluvium of the Central Provinces of China, all
carried to the ocean by the “Great River,” according to a careful
scientific estimate, to the extent of 6,428,858,255 cubic feet a year,
solid stuff enough to build an island ninety feet in depth and a mile
square annually.
Countless fishing-boats roll on the muddy waste; sailing vessels,
steamers, and brown-sailed junks of every build show signs of
convergence towards something, and before long a blink of land is
visible, and a lightship indicates the mouth of the Yangtze Kiang and a
navigable channel. It is long even then before anything definite
presents itself, and I confess to being disappointed with the first
features of the Asiatic mainland—two long, thin, yellow lines, hardly
more solid-looking than the yellow water stretching along the horizon,
growing gradually into low marshy banks, somewhat later topped with
uninteresting foliage, through which there are glimpses of what looks
like an interminable swamp. Then Woo-sung appears with its new railroad,
godowns, whitewashed buildings, and big ships at anchor discharging
cargo into lighters and native boats, and then the banks of the
narrowing Huang-pu, the river of Shanghai, are indicated by habitations
and small fields and signs of small industries.
Within four miles of Shanghai the vivacity of the Huang-pu and its banks
becomes overpowering, and the West asserts its ascendency over the
slow-moving East. There are ranges of great godowns, wharves, building
yards, graving docks, “works” of all descriptions, filatures, cotton
mills, and all the symptoms in smoky chimneys and a ceaseless clang of
the presence of capital and energy. After the war with Japan there was a
rapid increase in the number of factories.
The life and movement on the river become wonderful. The channel for
large vessels, though narrow, shifting, and intricate, and the subject
of years of doleful prophecies as to “silting up” and leaving Shanghai
stranded, admits of the passage of our largest merchantmen, and
successful dredging enables them to lie alongside the fine wharves at
Hongkew. American three and four-masted and other sailing vessels are at
anchor in mid-stream, or are proceeding up or down in charge of tugs.
Monster liners under their own steam at times nearly fill up the
channel, their officers yelling frantically at the small craft which
recklessly cross their bows; great white, two-storeyed paddle arks from
Ningpo and Hankow, local steamers, steam launches owned by the great
firms, junks of all builds and sizes, manageable by their huge rudders,
_sampans_, hooded boats, and native boats of all descriptions, lighters,
and a shoal of nondescript craft make navigation tedious, if not
perilous, while sirens and steam whistles sound continually. “The plot
thickens.” Foreign _hongs_, warehouses, shipping offices, and hotels are
passed in Hongkew, the American settlement, and gliding round Pu-tung
Point, the steamer anchors abreast of the bund in a wholesomely rapid
flow of water 2000 feet wide.
I arrived in Shanghai the first time on a clear, bright autumn day. The
sky was very blue, and the masses of exotic trees, the green, shaven
lawns, the belated roses, and the clumps of chrysanthemums in the fine
public gardens gave a great charm to the first view of the settlement.
Two big, lofty, white hulks for bonded Indian opium are moored
permanently in front of the gardens. Gunboats and larger war-vessels of
all nations, all painted white, and the fine steamers of the Messageries
Maritimes have their moorings a little higher up. Boats, with crews in
familiar uniforms, and covered native boats gaily painted, the latter
darting about like dragonflies, were plying ceaselessly, and as it was
the turn of the tide, hundreds of junks were passing seawards under
their big brown sails.
On landing at the fine landing-stage, where kind friends received me and
took me to the British Consul’s residence in the spacious grounds of the
Consulate, I was at once impressed with the exquisite dress of the
ladies, who were at least a half of the throng, and with the look of
wealth and comfort which prevails.
All along the British bund, for at least a mile from the Soochow Creek,
which separates it from Hongkew, to the French settlement, are banks,
hongs, hotels, and private houses of the most approved and massive
Anglo-Oriental architecture, standing in large, shady gardens, the Hong
Kong and Shanghai Bank, the “P. & O.” office, the Canadian-Pacific
Railroad office, the fine counting-house and dwelling-house of the old
and famous firm of Jardine, Matheson & Co., and the long façade of the
British Consular buildings, with their wide sweep of lawns, being
prominent.
The broad carriage-road and fine flagged side-walk are truly
cosmopolitan. Well-dressed men and women of all civilised nations, and
of some which are not civilised, promenade gaily on the walk and in the
garden. Single and two-horse carriages and buggies, open and closed,
with coachmen and grooms in gay and often fantastic cotton liveries,
dash along the drive. Hackney victorias abound, and there are
_jinrickshas_ (from which foreigners drop the first syllable) in
hundreds, with Chinese runners, and Shanghai wheelbarrows innumerable,
some loaded with goods or luggage, while the coolies of others are
trundling along from two to four Chinese men or women of the lower
classes, seated on matted platforms on either side of the wheel, facing
forwards.
I was not prepared for the Chinese element being so much _en evidence_
in the foreign settlement. It is not only that clerks and compradores
dressed in rich silks on which the characters for happiness and
longevity and the symbols of luck are brocaded are in numbers on the
bund, and that all the servile classes, as may be expected, are Chinese,
but that Chinese shops of high standing, such as Laou Kai Fook’s, are
taking their places in fine streets which run back from the bund, that
some of the handsomest carriages on the bund and the Bubbling Well Road,
the fashionable afternoon drive of Shanghai, are owned and filled with
Chinese, that Chinese ladies and children richly-dressed drive in the
same fashion, and that of late, specially, wealthy Chinese have become
keen competitors for British houses, and have even outbid foreigners for
them. Is Shanghai menaced by the “Yellow Peril” as Malacca, Singapore,
and Penang have been?
A great trading Chinese city, with an estimated population of 200,000,
has grown up within the foreign boundary, subject to foreign municipal
laws and sanitary regulations, but so absolutely Chinese, that were it
not for the wide streets and the absence of refuse-heaps and bad smells,
one might think oneself in one of the great cities of the interior. The
Chinese are quite capable of appreciating the comfort and equity of
foreign rule, and the various advantages which they enjoy under it. They
pay municipal taxes according to their rating, and “feu duty” for their
land, which it is usual for them to hold in the name of a foreigner.
They are under the jurisdiction of the Chinese Government, but civil
cases in which foreigners are concerned and breaches of the peace are
tried in what is known as the “Mixed Court,” an apparently satisfactory
and workable arrangement, and serious criminal cases belong to the
Chinese Shanghai magistrate.
I soon began to learn why Shanghai is called, or calls itself, “The
Model Settlement,” and to recognise the fitness of the name. The British
and American settlements are governed by a Municipality elected by the
ratepayers, consisting of nine gentlemen, who, assisted by a secretary
and general staff, expend the sums provided by the ratepayers to the
general satisfaction, arranging admirably for the health, security,
comfort, and even enjoyment of the large foreign community, as well as
for the order and well-being of the constantly increasing Chinese
population, showing to the whole East what can be accomplished by an
honest and thoroughly efficient British local administration. This body
is, as it deserves to be, grandly housed.
The more important streets are lighted with electricity, the others with
gas. Mounted Sikh police patrol the suburban roads, and a mixed force of
Europeans, Sikhs, and Chinese preserves order and security in the
settlement by day and night. An expensive but successful drainage system
keeps Shanghai sweet and wholesome. Water-carts are always at work in
dry weather, and scavengers’ carts cleanse the streets three times
daily. Waterworks three miles from city pollutions supply pure water
abundantly, and keep up a very high pressure unfailingly. The band of
thirty performers, which plays in the public gardens every afternoon in
winter, and three evenings a week in summer, attracting nearly the whole
foreign community to lounge under the trees or stroll on the smooth
gravel walks, is the creature of the Municipality.
Shanghai has two telegraph lines embracing London; daily papers well
conducted, the _North China Daily News_ specially maintaining a
deservedly high reputation; several magazines, and communication with
Europe always once a week, and usually oftener, by well-appointed mail
steamers of four lines. Telegraphic news from all parts of the world
appears simultaneously in London and Shanghai; it is thoroughly in touch
with Europe and America, and European politics and events in general are
discussed with as much intelligence and almost as much zest as at home.
Excellent libraries, and the large book-store of Messrs. Kelly & Walsh,
cater for the intellectual needs of the population, but it is likely
that the depressing climate in spring and summer, and the whirl of
society and amusements in winter, indispose most of the residents for
anything like stiff reading.
The tremendous energy with which Shanghai amuses itself during seven
months of the year is something phenomenal. It is even a fatigue to
contemplate it. Various causes contribute to it on the part of the
ladies. There is the Anglo-Saxon vitality which must find some outlet.
Then there is the absence of household cares owing to the efficiency of
Chinese cooks and “boys,” and ofttimes the absence of children also,
owing to the need for home education; and there is also the lack of
those benevolent outgoings among “the poor” which occupy usefully a
portion of the time of leisured women at home. Then, owing to the
imitative skill of Chinese tailors, who can construct the most elaborate
gowns from fashion-plates for a few shillings, it is possible for women
to have the pleasure of appearing in an infinite variety of elegant
toilettes at a very small expense, and dress is certainly elevated into
a fine art in Shanghai.
Of the men I write tremblingly! Chinese tailors seem as successful as
Chinese dressmakers, and the laundrymen equal both, no small matter when
white linen suits are in question. May it be permitted to a traveller to
remark that if men were to give to the learning of Chinese and of
Chinese requirements and methods of business a little of the time which
is lavished on sport and other amusements, there might possibly be less
occasion for the complaint that large fortunes are no longer to be made
in Chinese business.
For indeed, from ignorance of the language and reliance on that limited
and abominable vocabulary known as “Pidgun,” the British merchant must
be more absolutely dependent on his Chinese compradore than he would
care to be at home on his confidential clerk. Even in such lordly
institutions as the British Banks on the bund it seems impossible to
transact even such a simple affair as cashing a cheque without calling
in the aid of a sleek, supercilious-looking, richly-dressed Chinese, a
_shroff_ or _compradore_, who looks as if he knew the business of the
bank and were capable of running it. It is different at the Yokohama
Specie Bank, which has found a footing in Shanghai, in which the alert
Japanese clerks manage their own affairs and speak Chinese. May I be
forgiven?
An extraordinary variety of amusements is crowded into every day. Then
the community is most hospitable, as every visitor to Shanghai knows,
and the arrival of every ship of war and eminent globe-trotter is the
signal for a fresh outbreak of gaiety. Home diversions are reproduced,
and others are superadded, such as paper hunts in the adjacent
cotton-fields, house-boat picnics and pleasure excursions, and
house-boat shooting excursions, lasting from three days to a week, for
which special advantages exist, as the inland cotton-fields during the
winter are alive with pheasants, partridges, quail, woodcock, and hares,
while the watercourses abound with wild fowl. Pony races are a leading
institution, with gentlemen riders of course. The morning gallops
extract people from their beds at unwonted hours, and in spring and
autumn the prospects of the stables make great inroads on conversation.
But I will not go further. The very imperfect list given below gives
some idea of the diversions which the community provides for itself.[8]
Amateur theatricals are “the rage” in the winter, the amateur company
providing several performances in a theatre built by a subscription of
£5000, and holding over eight hundred persons, and the Fine Art Society
gives an annual exhibition.
The continual presence of strangers imparts a needed element of
freshness to society, and a zest to amusements which might pall, and
gives people an excuse, if any were needed, for enjoying themselves.
Shanghai has become the metropolis of gaiety for the Far East, and a
week at the Astor House, the great recreation looked forward to not only
by the dwellers in the treaty ports of China and Japan, but by those who
roast and dissolve on the rock at Hongkong, and its delirious whirl
attracts people even from Singapore.
But it would be quite an error to suppose that amusement crowds out the
kindlier emotions. Europeans fall into distress constantly, some from
misfortune, and some from fault, and many widows and orphans are left
penniless. One may safely say that there is never a case of distress
arising from any cause which is not immediately and amply relieved and
planned for; and benevolence never wearies, the Ladies’ Benevolent
Society doing a ceaseless good work. There is a Sailors’ Home and Rest
in a very efficient and flourishing condition, with musical evenings
frequently, at which ladies and gentlemen play and sing; and, without
going further into detail, it may be said that the various useful
organisations which our civilisation considers essential for a large
community, from a fine general hospital downwards, have their place in
Shanghai.
Church accommodation is ample for the church-goers. The Protestant
cathedral, a really beautiful edifice, built from the designs of Sir
Gilbert Scott, is one of the greatest adornments of the settlement, and
is the finest ecclesiastical building in the Far East.
From the early days of Shanghai many Protestant missions, both European
and American, have had mission houses in the settlement, the most
important being the large, appropriate, and substantial headquarters of
the China Inland Mission, the gift of Mr. Orr Ewing, with a home for a
hundred missionaries, a hospital, goods and business departments, and
postal arrangements. Dr. Muirhead, of the L.M.S., whose missionary zeal
is unchilled in the winter of his age, and Dr. Edkins, of the same
Society, whose Chinese scholarship and researches among things Chinese
have won him a European fame, are well known to, and are much respected
by, the foreign community. There is also a large Roman mission. British
and American Bible Societies, and the English Religious Tract Society
and others also have agents and depôts there, and much translation is
done by missionaries, and by agencies which have for their noble object
the diffusion of pure and useful western literature among the Chinese,
and their elevation mentally and morally.
There is a North China branch of the Royal Asiatic Society in Shanghai,
with a fine library, regular meetings, and a journal, which gathers up a
great deal of very valuable matter. If the size and material of the
audience on the night when I had the honour of reading a paper before
the Society may be regarded as an indication of the interest in its
objects, it must be flourishing indeed.
The topography of this metropolis is fully dealt with in various
official and other volumes. The salient points which impress a newcomer
are Hongkew, the American settlement, with its commercial activity, the
Soochow creek, with its fine bridge, the handsome buildings of the
British Consulate, the British Bund, with its fine retaining wall, the
long line of handsome private and public buildings, and the glimpses of
broad and handsome streets full of private residences which run from the
bund towards the boundary.
The French Bund is a continuation of the British; but the French
settlement is small, markedly inferior, and gives one an impression of
arrested development, the only noteworthy buildings being the Consulate,
the Town Hall, and the large but plain Roman cathedral. As some
compensation, the fine wharves at which the big Yangtze steamers load
and discharge their cargoes are in this settlement, as well as the
handsome and commodious premises of the Messageries Maritimes, beyond
which stretch, far as the eye can reach, the crowded tiers of the
Chinese shipping. The French boundary is an undesirable creek, running
past the east gate of the native city, between which and the Huang-pu
are crowded and unsavoury suburbs.
It is apparent that France regards her concession as a colony rather
than a settlement, and she has lately urged her claims for an extension
of it in a most selfish and indefensible manner. The settlement has been
frequently in very hot water, and a serious disagreement with the
Chinese occurred so recently as 1898. Its Municipal Board was once
forcibly dissolved by the French Consul for a difference of opinion, and
some of its members were imprisoned.
The English settlement makes a proud display of the wealth of the
insular kingdom in the number of its stately buildings, the Consulate,
the cathedral, the municipal buildings, the four-storeyed and
elaborately-designed club house, the banks and shipping offices, and the
massive mansions of historic firms, standing in their secluded grounds;
though of the magnates of eastern commerce in the days of the rapid
making of great fortunes almost none remain. British, too, in design,
architecture, and arrangement, in all indeed but cost, is the
magnificent pile of buildings in which the Imperial Maritime Customs and
the new Post Office, under the same management, are housed.
Shanghai in every way makes good her claim to be metropolitan as well as
cosmopolitan, and, in spite of dark shadows, is a splendid example of
what British energy, wealth, and organising power can accomplish.
To us the name Shanghai[9] means alone the superb foreign settlement,
with all the accessories of western luxury and civilisation, lying
grandly for a mile and a half along the Huang-pu, the centre of Far
Eastern commerce and gaiety, the “Charing Cross” of the Pacific—London
on the Yellow Sea.
But there was a Shanghai before Shanghai—a Shanghai which still exists,
increases, and flourishes—a busy and unsavoury trading city, which leads
its own life according to Chinese methods as independently as though no
foreign settlement existed; and long before Mr. Pigou, of the H.E.I.C.,
in 1756, drew up his memorandum, suggesting Shanghai as a desirable
place for trade, Chinese intelligence had hit upon the same idea, and
the port was a great resort of Chinese shipping, cargoes being
discharged there and dispersed over the interior by the Yangtze and the
Grand Canal. Yet it never rose higher than the rank of a third-rate
city.
It has a high wall three miles and a half in circuit, pierced by several
narrow gateways and surrounded by a ditch twenty feet wide, and suburbs
lying between it and the river with its tiers of native shipping as
crowded as the city proper. This shipping, consisting of junks, lorchas,
and native craft of extraordinary rig, lies, as Lu Hew said, “like the
teeth of a comb.”
To mention native Shanghai in foreign ears polite seems scarcely seemly;
it brands the speaker as an outside barbarian, a person of “odd
tendencies.” It is bad form to show any interest in it, and worse to
visit it. Few of the lady residents in the settlement have seen it, and
both men and women may live in Shanghai for years and leave it without
making the acquaintance of their nearest neighbour. It is supposed that
there is a risk of bringing back small-pox and other maladies, that the
smells are unbearable, that the foul slush of the narrow alleys is over
the boots, that the foreigner is rudely jostled by thousands of dirty
coolies, that the explorer may be knocked down or hurt by loaded
wheelbarrows going at a run; in short, that it is generally abominable.
It is the one point on which the residents are obdurate and disobliging.
I absolutely failed to get an escort until Mr. Fox, of H.M’s Consular
Service, kindly offered to accompany me. I did not take back small-pox
or any other malady, I was not rudely jostled by dirty coolies, nor was
I hurt or knocked down by wheelbarrows. The slush and the smells were
there, but the slush was not fouler nor the smells more abominable than
in other big Chinese cities that I have walked through; and as a foreign
woman is an every-day sight in the near neighbourhood, the people minded
their own business and not mine, and I was even able to photograph
without being overborne by the curious.
Shanghai is a mean-looking and busy city; its crowds of toiling,
trotting, bargaining, dragging, burden-bearing, shouting, and yelling
men are its one imposing feature. Few women, and those of the poorer
class, are to be seen. The streets, with houses built of slate-coloured,
soft-looking brick, are only about eight feet wide, are paved with stone
slabs, and are narrowed by innumerable stands, on which are displayed,
cooked and raw and being cooked, the multifarious viands in which the
omnivorous Chinese delight, an odour of garlic predominating. Even a
wheelbarrow—the only conveyance possible—can hardly make its way in many
places. True, a mandarin sweeps by in his gilded chair, carried at a
run, with his imposing retinue, but his lictors clear the way by means
not available to the general public.
All the articles usually exposed for sale in Chinese cities are met with
in Shanghai, and old porcelain, bronzes, brocades, and embroideries are
displayed to attract strangers. Restaurants and tea houses of all grades
abound, and noteworthy among the latter is the picturesque building on
the Zig-Zag Bridge, shown in the illustration. The buildings and
fantastic well-kept pleasure grounds of the Ching-hwang Miao, which may
be called the Municipal Temple, the Confucian Temple, the Guild Hall of
the resident natives of Chekiang, and the temple of the God of War, with
its vigorous images begrimed with the smoke of the incense sticks of
ages of worshippers, its throngs, its smoke, its ceaseless movement, and
its din are the most salient features of this native hive.
_Yamens_, of course, exist, and _yamen_ runners, for Shanghai has the
distinction of being the residence of a Taotai, or Intendant of Circuit,
and a magistrate, in whose hands the administration of justice is
placed, involving responsibility for the interests of over 560,000
Chinese, the estimated native population of the city and the
settlements, the total population being estimated at 586,000.
On returning to the light, broad, clean, well-paved, and sanitary
streets of foreign Shanghai, I was less surprised than before that so
many of its residents are unacquainted with the dark, crowded, dirty,
narrow, foul, and reeking streets of the neighbouring city.
[Illustration: ZIG-ZAG BRIDGE AND TEA HOUSE, SHANGHAI.]
CHAPTER III.
HANGCHOW[10]
A journey of 150 miles to visit friends in the ancient city of Hangchow
required no other preparations than the hire of a boat and the engaging
of a servant, who I was compelled to dismiss a few days later for gross
dishonesty. 2755 steam launches, owned and run by Chinese, towing 7889
passenger boats, carrying 605 foreign and 125,000 native passengers,
entered and cleared in 1897 between Hangchow, Shanghai, and Soochow.
Every evening one of these launches, towing a long string of native
boats, leaves the Soochow creek below the British Consulate for the new
treaty ports, opened as such only in 1896. My small bamboo-roofed boat,
in which I could just stand upright, much decorated in the tawdry style
of Chinese fourth-class fancy, and through which irremediable draughts
coursed friskily, was the contemptible final joint of a tail of nine
quaint and picturesque passage junks and family house-boats, a varnished
procession of high-sterned, two-storeyed, many-windowed arks, squirming
and snaking along at the stern of a noisy, asthmatic tow-boat. There
were red flags flying, gongs crashing out dissonance, crackers
exploding, poles with clothes drying on them pushed out of windows,
incense sticks smouldering, and reports of firearms; and with this
cheerful din, the usual accompaniment of Chinese movement, we started in
the red twilight.
I paid six dollars for my boat with three men, and five dollars fifty
cents for towage, about 23_s._
All day long the life on the two-storeyed open-sterned boat in front of
mine was exposed to view. It was occupied by three generations, nine
souls in all, under the rule of a grandmother. They rose early, lighted
the fire and their incense sticks, kotowed to an idol in a gilded
shrine, offered him a small bowl of rice, and cooked and ate their
morning meal. The smell of their cooking drifted for much of the day
into my boat, and “broth of abominable things was in their vessels.” The
man sat in the bow smoking and making shoes. The grandmother lived below
in blissful idleness and authority. The wife, a comely, healthy,
broad-shouldered woman, with bound feet, worked and smoked all day, and
contrived to steer the boat as she stooped over the fire or the wash-tub
by holding its heavy tiller under her arm or chin or pressing her knee
against it. Four young children lived a quiet life on a broad high
shelf, from which they were lifted down for meals. A girl of thirteen
helped her mother slightly. Cooking, washing, mending, eating, and
watching my occupation with far less interest than I watched theirs,
filled up their day. Evening brought fresh kotowing and burning of
incense sticks, the opium lamp was lighted, the man passed into elysium,
and they wrapped themselves in their wadded quilts and slept till
sunrise.
I learned their habits and knew their few “plenishings,” and perhaps, as
they stared persistently at me, they were wondering how much I earned a
day by writing and sewing, a question of much speculative interest to
the Chinese.
The country looked inviting in the first flush of early spring,
although, like our own fens, it is a dead level. Houses, villages,
mulberry plantations, temples, groves, large farmhouses, shrines, and
_Pai fangs_ succeeded each other rapidly. Great lilac clusters of
wistaria bloom hung over the water from every tree, the beans were in
blossom, and the greenery was young and fresh. At times our curiously
twisting procession passed through ancient water-streets of large
cities, with the inevitable picturesqueness given by deep eaves,
overhanging rooms and balconies, steep flights of stone stairs, and rows
of armed junks full of soldiers or river police in brilliant, stagey
uniforms. Several times we were delayed for an hour or more by the
difficulty of getting through the crowded river streets _en route_.
I have since learned by experience that China is a land of surprising
bridges, but at that time it amazed me that we entered nearly every city
under a fine arch, from fifteen to thirty feet in height, formed of
blocks of granite cut to the curve of the bridge, the roadway attaining
the summit by thirty-nine steps on each side. Or there are straight
bridges, the piers being monoliths thirteen feet high, and the roadway
massive blocks of stone thirty feet long.
Part of the route is along the Grand Canal, that stupendous work,
wonderful even in its dilapidation, which connects Hangchow with
Tientsin. This part of it, which connects Imperial Hangchow with the
flourishing port of Chinkiang on the Yangtze, was cut in 625 A.D., but
never mapped till the work was undertaken by our own War Office in 1865.
If the “nine thousand barks conveying tribute to the emperor,” as
described by an ancient writer, no longer crowd its waters, I can
testify that at the points where I touched it, such as Chinkiang, the
laden fleets were so vast as to leave only a narrow lane of water
available for traffic, and that on arriving at Tientsin from Tungchow my
boat took two days and a half to make its way through the closely-jammed
mass of cargo and passage boats at the terminus.
The neighbourhood of the Grand Canal, which suffered terribly in the
Taiping Rebellion, has recovered itself, and is again yielding its great
harvests of rice and silk, the inexhaustible fertility of the Great
Plain having effaced every trace of destruction. If the Grand Canal
since the dilapidation caused by the outbreak of the Yellow River in
1851 is far less valuable for through traffic than it was, it is still
of immense importance as an artery for the commerce of the great
provinces through which it passes. Lu Yew, a much-travelled mandarin of
the twelfth century, the translated account of whose journey from
Shanjin near Ning Po to Kueichow on the Upper Yangtze is a fascinating
bit of literature, writes that at the sluice gates “the concourse of
vessels was packed together like the teeth of a comb,” and so it is
still in certain places. The bridges which span this canal are among the
most striking and beautiful in all China—single arches, sometimes 220
feet in span and 30 feet in height, piles of massive masonry, with
massive decorations wherever any deviation has been permitted from the
ordinary stately simplicity.
Seven centuries ago Lu Yew commented on the remarkable industry of the
population of this region, and noted that “both banks near the villages
are covered with waterwheels pumping up the water, women and children
alike exerting all their efforts, cattle in some cases being also at
work.” The heredity of industry is still manifest. Not an idler was to
be seen along river or canal. Every agricultural operation of the season
was being carried on vigorously, even children of seven years old were
carrying agricultural burdens on their shoulders. Women with robust
infants strapped on their backs had their hands busy with the distaff,
while working the waterwheels with their feet; and all along the
waterways fishermen were busy with their great bamboo plunge nets. Lu
Yew mentions the women as employed with both waterwheel and distaff in
the twelfth century.
On the morning of the second day from Shanghai the steam launch cast off
her tail at the mouth of a narrow canal overarched with trees, up which
my boat moved silently as far as a “lock,” by which we mounted into a
broad waterway leading direct into Hangchow, encircling it on three
sides and connected with other navigable canals, spanned by picturesque
stone bridges, and giving easy access to most parts of the interior of
the city.
That which I have called a “lock,” properly a _pah_ or “haulover,” is an
ingenious contrivance by which the difficulty of “negotiating” different
levels in the same boat is skilfully adjusted. The illustration shows
the principle and the mode of applying it in Chekiang, but various
methods are adopted. The essential parts of the contrivance, as shown
here, are a smooth stone slide, from the higher to the lower level, the
middle of which is thickly coated with moist mud, two stout and tall
uprights, two rude wooden windlasses, and stout bamboo ropes with strong
iron hooks. In ascending, the boat is wound up to the higher level by a
number of men at the windlasses, and in going down she is drawn to the
verge and tipped over, descending with great velocity by her own
impetus, the restraining rope at her stern scarcely moderating the
violence of the plunge with which she takes a header into the water
below, when everything not securely fastened breaks adrift, and a lather
of foaming water surges round the surprised passenger’s feet. A few
_cash_ are charged for the transfer.
[Illustration: A _PAH_, OR HAULOVER.]
I thought the canal entrance to Hangchow grand, although below the high
blank walls of large private residences the grassy slopes are the resort
of unpleasantly active pigs searching, and not vainly, for offal. The
gunboats, or police junks, with their striped blue and white canopies
and brilliant crews, and the lofty bridges are pleasing to the eye. At
one of the latter Dr. Main, for eighteen years a C.M.S. missionary
doctor in Hangchow, met me, and I was carried through a populous and
dirty quarter, through a door in a high wall, and under a trellis from
which hundreds of lilac wistaria clusters were hanging, into a large
enclosure, partly lawns and partly rose borders, with an old-fashioned
English house on one side, and on the other two the fine two-storeyed
buildings of two of the crack hospitals of the East, with their
outgrowths of leper hospitals for men and women, a home for leper
children, and an opium refuge. It was a bewildering change from the
crowds, dirt, and sordid bustle of the lower parts of a Chinese city to
broad, smooth, shaven lawns, English trees and flowers, English
buildings with their taste and completeness, and the refined quiet of an
English home.
This most ancient city, situated on the left bank of the shallow Ch’ien
T’ang river, of which a magnificent description is given by Marco Polo
under the name of Kinsai, though it has not fully recovered from the
destruction wrought by the Taiping troops, is still handsome and
dignified, and to my thinking, with its lovely environs, is the most
attractive of the big Chinese cities.
It is certainly one of the most important, as the capital of the rich
and populous province of Chekiang, the centre of a great silk-producing
district, and of the manufacture of the best silks, the sole source of
the silk fabrics supplied to the Imperial Household, the southern
terminus of the Grand Canal, and a great centre of Chinese culture and
literature. It possesses the Ting Library, the finest private library in
China, appropriately housed in buildings adjoining the “palace” of the
Ting family. The arrangements for the storage and classification of
books are admirable, and a very gentlemanly and intelligent son of the
enlightened possessor is the enthusiastic and capable librarian. The
treasures of this library are open freely to anyone who introduces
himself by a card from an official. The collection of zoological and
botanical books, superbly illustrated in the best style of Chinese wood
engraving, is in itself a noble possession. Every part of a plant is
figured, and the illustrations are almost photographically accurate,
leading one to hope that the letterpress accompanying them has equal
scientific merit!
Hangchow is also important as a “residential” city, the chosen home of
many retired merchants and mandarins. The homes, frequently palaces, of
men of leisure and local patriotism adorn its streets, but their stately
proportions and sumptuous decorations are concealed from vulgar view by
high whitewashed walls, in which heavily-barred and massive gates give
access to the interiors. The mansion of the Ting family, in which I took
“afternoon tea,” with its lofty reception-rooms, piazzas, and courts,
must cover two acres of ground. It is stately, but not comfortable, and
the richly-carved blackwood chairs with panels of clouded grey marble
for backs and seats, and table centres of the same, seem only fitted for
the noon of a midsummer’s day. Besides the dwellings of the “leisured
class” there are those of high officials, bankers, and wealthy tea and
silk merchants, many of them extremely magnificent, the cost of one
built by a wealthy banker being estimated at £100,000.
[Illustration: WEST GATE, HANGCHOW]
I wrote of dirt and sordid bustle. This is chiefly by the waterside, and
is not surprising in a city of three-quarters of a million of
inhabitants. The “west-end” streets are, however, broad, light, well
flagged, and incredibly clean for China. Hangchow impresses one with a
general sense of well-being. I did not see one beggar. The people are
well clothed and fed, and I understood that except during epidemics
there is no abject poverty. It is the grand centre for the trade of a
hundred cities, and much of the tea and silk sold in Shanghai and Ningpo
passes through it.
Everything in the city and neighbourhood suggests silk. In all the
adjacent country the mulberry tree is omnipresent, planted in every
possible place along the creeks, on the ridges separating the fields, in
plantations, acres in extent, and near villages, in nurseries each
containing several thousand shoots, in expectation of a greatly
increased demand for this staple product. There are 7000 handlooms for
the weaving of silk in Hangchow, employing about 28,000 people, and 360
of these looms under the inspection of an Imperial Commissioner work
exclusively for the Imperial Household.
Some of the silk shops rival that of Laou Kai Fook at Shanghai. In them
are rich self-coloured silks in deep rich colourings and the most
delicate shades, brocaded washing silks in various shades of indigo
dyeing, and delicate mauves and French greys, which become more lustrous
every time they are washed, heavy and very broad satins, plain and
brocaded, and, what I admire more than all, heavy figured silks in
colourings and shades unknown to us sold for Chinese masculine dress,
and brocaded with symbolical bats, bees, spiders, stags’ heads, dragons
for mandarins’ robes, and the highly decorative characters representing
happiness and longevity. These quaint and beautiful fabrics are not
exported to Europe, and are not shown to Europeans unless they ask for
them. Fans exported to all parts of the empire are another great
industry, and provide constant work for many thousand people. Elaborate
furniture, silk and gold embroidering, and tinselled paper money for
burning, to supply the dead with the means of comfortable existence, are
also largely manufactured in this thriving capital.
The situation of Hangchow is beautiful, separated only by a belt of
clean sand from the bright waters of the Ch’ien T’ang river. The
south-western portion is built on a hill, from which broad gleams of the
sea are visible; and to the west, just outside the walls, is the Si Hu
[Western Lake], famous throughout China, a lovely sheet of water,
surrounded by attractive country houses, temples, and shrines, studded
with wooded islands connected by ancient and noble causeways, the
islands themselves crowned with decorative pavilions, some of which are
Imperial, and are surrounded by the perfection of Chinese gardening, as
in the case of the beautiful Imperial Library, with its ferneries,
rockeries, quaint ponds, and flowering shrubs. This lovely lake, with
its deep, wooded bays and inlets, its forest-clothed hills and ravines,
its gay gondolas and pleasure boats, and its ideally perfect shores,
which I saw over and over again in the glorious beauty of a Chinese
spring, mirrors also in its silver waters a picturesque range of hills,
bare and breezy, close to the city, on which stands, in an imposing
position, a very ancient pagoda, while the lower hill-slopes are clothed
with coniferous trees, bamboo, plum, peach, cherry, camphor, azalea,
clematis, roses, honeysuckle, and maple. Near the lake is a deep, long
dell, the cliffs of which are recessed for stone images, and which
contains several famous temples, one the temple of the “Five Hundred
Disciples,” who, larger than life-size, adorn its spacious corridors.
The temples and shrines of this beautiful glen are visited daily by
crowds from Hangchow, and have such a reputation for sanctity and
efficacy as to attract 100,000 pilgrims annually. The dell is guarded by
two colossal figures, under canopies, the gods of Wind and Thunder, very
fine specimens of vigorous wood carving, and by an antique pagoda.
Hangchow is also famous for the phenomenon of the “Hangchow bore,” seen
at its best at the change of the monsoon, when an enormous mass of tidal
water, suddenly confronted by the current of the river, uplifts its
foaming crest to a height of from fifteen to twenty feet, and with a
thunderous roar and fearful force rages down the narrow waterway as fast
as a horse can gallop, affording a welcome distraction to the sightseers
of Shanghai.
[Illustration: PAVILION IN IMPERIAL GARDEN, SI-HU.]
[Illustration: GOD OF THUNDER, LIN-YANG.]
Hangchow is enclosed by a wall faced with hewn stone, about thirteen
miles in circumference, from thirty to forty feet high, from twenty to
thirty feet broad, and pierced by ten large gateways with massive gates.
The houses are mainly two-storeyed. The business streets blaze with
colour; the principal street is five miles long. The population,
estimated at 700,000, cruelly diminished during the Taiping Rebellion,
is rapidly increasing. The officials, merchants, and common people are
unusually friendly to foreigners, who, before the recent opening of the
port, were all missionaries. The cry “Foreign devil!” is never heard.
Mr. Sundius, our consular officer, considers that these very
satisfactory relations are due to the greater prosperity of the people,
in consequence of the increased foreign demand for silk, and to the
success of the exertions of the missionaries to win their respect and
esteem.
The new general and Japanese settlements are in an excellent position on
the Grand Canal, four miles from the city wall. They are nearly a mile
in length by half a mile in depth, and have a fine road and a bund sixty
feet wide, hereafter to be turfed. The Japanese, who opened the port
with their swords, have not been in any hurry to occupy it. It will be
interesting to see how far foreigners will take advantage of the
opening, and settle in this, one of the friendliest and most attractive
of the Chinese cities. There is a well-known Chinese proverb, “Above is
heaven, below are Hangchow and Suchow.”
CHAPTER IV.
THE HANGCHOW MEDICAL MISSION HOSPITALS
The hospitals, and the dispensaries attached to them, are too important
as a feature of Hangchow, and as an element in producing the remarkable
goodwill towards foreigners which characterises it, to be dismissed at
the tail of a chapter.
These beneficent institutions treat between them over 14,000 new
patients annually, afflicted with all manner of torments. The services
of Dr. Main and his coadjutor, Dr. Kimber, are in request among
officials, from the highest to the lowest. Mandarins of high rank,
attended by their servants, are treated in the paying wards, and
occasionally leave donations of 100 dollars in addition to their
payments. Officials of every rank in the Chekiang province send to the
British doctors for advice and medicines. Among the many marks of the
approval with which the Viceroy and other highly-placed officials regard
the medical work is their recent donation of an acre and a half of land
in an excellent position for the site of a branch hospital. It is no
disparagement to the work of Bishop Moule, who was absent during my
visit, and the other British and American clerical missionaries, to
express the opinion that the tact, _bonhomie_, and devotion of Dr. Main
during the last eighteen years, are one cause of the friendliness to
foreigners, the Chinese being as accessible to the influence of
personality as other people are.
The men’s and women’s hospitals, of which the illustration only shows
portions, are of the latest and most approved European type. They are
abreast of our best hospitals in lighting, ventilation, general
sanitation, arrangement and organisation, and the facility of obtaining
the celebrated Ningpo varnish, really a lacquer, which slowly sets with
a very hard surface, reflecting much light and bearing a weekly rub with
kerosene oil, greatly aids the sanitation. The purity of walls, floors,
and bedding is so great as to make one long for a speck of comfortable
dirt!
[Illustration: C.M.S. MISSION HOSPITAL, HANGCHOW.]
The men’s hospital buildings consist of four roomy and handsome general
wards, eleven private paying wards, holding from one to three each, a
range of rooms for the ward assistants, who are practically male nurses,
students’ rooms, rooms for the three qualified assistants, a
lecture-room with an anatomical [in lieu of the unattainable human]
subject which cost a thousand dollars, a reception-room for mandarins
with appropriate Chinese furniture, Dr. Main’s private room and medical
library, a fine consulting-room and operating theatre, bathrooms, a room
for patients’ clothing done up in numbered bundles after it has been
washed, wardrobes for the clothing which is lent to them while in
hospital, a cashier’s office, a large bottle-room, extensive storage,
and an office for out-patients.
On the street side and connected with the hospitals is a fine lofty room
where any non-patient passers-by, who are either tired or curious, can
rest and smoke, amusing themselves meantime with the transactions of the
other half of the hall, a large and attractive “drug store,” fitted up
in conventional English style, where not only medicines, but medical
requisites of all kinds can be procured both by non-patients and
foreigners. It has been remarked by Consuls Carles and Clement Allen in
their official reports, that missionaries unconsciously help British
trade by introducing articles for their own use, which commend
themselves to the Chinese; and this drug store has created a demand for
such British manufactures as condensed milk, meat extracts, rubber
tubing, soap, and the like, condensed milk having “caught on” so firmly
that several of the Chinese shops are now keeping it on sale.
This rest room is also a street-chapel for preaching and discussion, and
an office for inquiries of all kinds. There is also a large and handsome
waiting-room for out-patients, decorated with scripture pictures, in
which patriarchs and apostles appear in queues and Chinese dress, and an
opium refuge—a mournful building full of bodily torment and mental
depression. In the opinion of the doctor, “the cure” is seldom other
than temporary, and could only be effected by building up the system for
six months after leaving the refuge by tonics and nutritious diet.
Besides these buildings there are large kitchens, storehouses, and a
carpenter’s shop.
The women’s hospital, the great central ward of which, with its
highly-varnished floor, flowers, pictures, tables, chairs, and
harmonium, looks like a pleasant double drawing-room in a large English
mansion, is specially under Mrs. Main’s charge, and has head and junior
nurses and a dispenser trained by herself. It is equally efficient and
admirable.
Besides the hospital staff of twenty-six persons, there are three native
catechists who, along with Dr. Main, give Christian instruction in the
hospital to those who are willing to receive it, one of them looking
after patients in their homes, who, having become interested in
Christianity, have returned to their villages within a radius of one
hundred and fifty miles. Recently a patient, who had been for some weeks
in the hospital, recounted what he had there heard of Christianity with
such effect that over forty of his fellow-villagers, after some months,
gave up their heathen practices and became Christians; and this after he
had been beaten for his new beliefs on first going home.
The hospital is also an efficient medical school, where the usual
medical and surgical courses are given, along with clinical instruction,
during a period of five years. This school has helped largely to win the
favour of the mandarins, who have learned to appreciate Western surgery
from the cures at the hospital. Some of these students, after
graduation, have taken good positions in Shanghai and elsewhere. A few
in going into practice in the province have somewhat dropped European
medicine, and have resorted to Chinese drugs and the method of using
them, but all adhere to Western surgery, the results of which in Chinese
eyes are little short of miraculous, but possibly their mode of carrying
out antiseptic treatment would hardly come up to Lord Lister’s standard!
It is frequently believed by Chinese patients that the object of this
treatment is to prevent devils from gaining entrance to the body by
means of surgical wounds!
Dr. Lu, a refined and cultured man, Dr. Main’s senior qualified
assistant, a graduate of the hospital school, would anywhere be a
remarkable man in his profession, first as a brilliant operative
surgeon, and then for insight and accurate diagnosis. He has won the
confidence of the resident foreigners. He is a skilful medical
photographer, and his microscopic and physiological drawings are very
beautiful and show great technical skill.
The clock tower is a decorative feature of the building, and everything
within moves with clockwork regularity. The hospital is in a high state
of efficiency and spick-and-spanness, such as I have seldom seen
equalled abroad, and never exceeded.[11] Such work, done with skill,
love, and cheeriness, has an earthly reward, and Dr. Main is on most
friendly terms with the leading mandarins, who have it in their power to
help or hinder greatly. The hospital blazes with their red and gold
votive tablets, and I doubt if they would refuse him anything which he
thought it wise to ask. Almost the latest additions to a work which is
always growing are convalescent homes in the finest position outside the
city, on the breezy hill above the Si Hu [Western Lake].
I have heard some grumbling at home at the expense at which this
hospital is carried on, but perfection is not to be attained without
outlay, and in my opinion the Hangchow hospital is a good investment. It
is most desirable that Western methods of healing should be exhibited in
their best aspects in the capital of this important province, and also
that the medical school should be as well-equipped as is possible. The
benefit of this and similar schools is incalculable. The linked systems
of superstition and torture, which enter largely into Chinese medical
treatment, are undermined, and rational Western surgery is demanded by
the people. European treatment also assails the degrading belief in
sorcery and demonism in its last resort—the sick-bed—showing processes
of cure which work marvels of healing, altogether apart from witchcraft
and incantations.
Of the Medical Mission Hospital as a Christian agency I need scarcely
write, as its name is significant of its work. I believe in medical
missions, because they are the nearest approach now possible to the
method pursued by the Founder of the Christian faith, and to the
fulfilment of His command, “Heal and preach.” It is not, as some
suppose, that the medical missionary takes advantage of men in their
pain and distress to “poke at them” the claims of a foreign religion,
though if he be an honest Christian he recognises that the soul needs
enlightenment as much as the body needs healing. I have never seen a
medical mission among the forty-seven that I have visited in which
Christianity was “poked” at unwilling listeners, or in which, in the
rare cases of men declining to hear of it in the dispensary
waiting-room, it was in the very smallest degree to their disadvantage
as patients.
A fee of twenty-four _cash_ is charged for admission to the dispensary
to foster a spirit of independence, and the charge in the paying wards
is from two to ten dollars per month. Crowds of out-patients marshalled
like an army, carefully trained assistants knowing and doing their duty,
catechists, ward assistants, cashiers, photographers, cooks, gardeners,
artisans, make up the crowd which in all the morning hours swarms over
the staircases of the hospital and round the great entrance. The
dispensary patients present a sorry spectacle, owing to the prevalence
of skin diseases, superficial sores, and cavernous abscesses, from which
the plasters with which the Chinese doctors had hermetically sealed them
have been removed. Young and old, maimed, deaf, blind, loathsomely
disfigured persons, meet together, and there are often cases of gunshot
wounds, elephantiasis, and leprosy in the throng.
But, wretched as the patients are, they are capable of being amused by
Dr. Main’s jokes, and on one occasion when I was photographing four
soldiers of the Viceroy’s guard in the hospital grounds the hilarity
burst all bounds, and the distempered mass yelled with enjoyment. When I
photographed the backs of the soldiers they shouted, “She pictures their
backs because they ran away from the _wojen_” (dwarfs); and when Dr.
Main displayed their brawny legs, they nearly danced with the fun of it,
yelling, “Those are the legs they ran away on.” Not that the Viceroy’s
guard had encountered the Japanese, but these people were near enough to
Shanghai to have heard of the figure the Chinese troops had cut. A
Chinese loves a joke, and, as I have often experienced, if he can only
be made to laugh his hostility vanishes.
One of these men, picturesquely uniformed in blue and crimson, was
brought back an hour later at the point of death from opium, having
attempted his life, not because he had been laughed at, but because of a
tiff with his superior officer.
As is well known, suicide is appallingly common in China; and in the
great cities of Swatow, Mukden, and Hangchow, as a guest at medical
mission houses, I have come much into contact with its various methods.
In Mukden a frequent mode of taking life, specially among young wives,
is biting off the heads of lucifer matches, though the death from
phosphorus poisoning is known to be an agonising one. Swallowing gold
leaf or chloride of magnesium, jumping down wells or into rapid rivers,
taking lead, cutting the throat, and stabbing the abdomen have been
popular modes of self-destruction. But these are rapidly giving place to
suicide by opium owing to the facility with which it can be obtained,
the easy death which results from it, and the certainty of its operation
in the absence of the foreign doctor, his emetic, and his stomach-pump.
Medical mission hospitals in China save the lives of hundreds of
would-be suicides every year.
So far as I have been able to ascertain, the causes of suicide in China
are, not as in Europe, profound melancholia, heavy losses, or
disappointment in love, but chiefly revenge and the desire to inflict
serious injury on another. Suicide enables a Chinese to take a truly
terrible revenge, for he believes that his spirit will malignantly haunt
and injure the living; and the desire to save a suicide’s life arises in
most cases not from humanity, but from the hope of averting such a
direful catastrophe. If a master offends his servant or makes him “lose
face,” or a shopkeeper his assistant or apprentice, the surest revenge
is to die on his premises, for it not only involves the power of
haunting and of inflicting daily injuries, but renders it necessary that
the body should lie where death occurs until an official inquiry is
made, which brings into the house the scandal and turmoil of a visit
from a mandarin with a body of officials and retainers. It is quite
common for a man or woman to walk into the courtyard of a person against
whom he or she has a grudge, and take a fatal dose of opium there to
ensure these desirable results!
Among common incentives to suicide are the gusts of blind rage to which
the Chinese of both sexes are subject, the cruelty of mothers-in-law,
quarrels between husband and wife, failure to meet payments at the New
Year, gambling losses, the desire to annoy a husband, the gambling or
extravagant opium smoking of a husband, imputation of theft, having
pawned the clothes of another and being unable to redeem them, being
defrauded of money, childlessness, dread of divorce, being sold by a
husband, abridgment of liberty, poverty, and the like. Opium, from the
painless death it brings, is now resorted to on the most trivial
occasions, and has largely increased the number of suicides. Though the
reasons which I have given for self-destruction apply mostly to women,
yet where statistics are obtainable men are largely in the majority, and
revenge and the desire of inflicting injury are their great motives.
Of course, there are very many risks and difficulties in the treatment
of out-patients. Chinese medicines are administered bulkily, a pint or a
quart at a time, and patients do not understand our concentrated and
powerful doses. Hence dangerous and grotesque mistakes are continually
made, such as the following:—
_Patient_—“Doctor, when I took the medicine you gave me yesterday it
made me very sick; it has given me diarrhœa and a severe pain in the
stomach; my fingers and toes also feel very numb.”
_Dr. Malcolm_ (looking at the bottle)—“Why, you have already almost
finished the eight days’ medicine” (arsenic) “that I gave you yesterday.
The wonder is that you are alive at all.”
_Patient No. 2_ enters—“Where is the old boss of this shop? I want some
foreign devil medicine to cure malaria.”
_D._—“Allow me to tell you I am not a devil. You had better go home; and
when you can come and ask respectfully for medicine we will give it
you.”
_P. No. 3_ enters, holding out her hands and asking the doctor to find
out her disease by “comparing her pulses.”
_D._—“Tell me what is the matter with you.”
_P._—“My bones and muscles are sore all over.”
_D._—“What was the cause of your trouble?”
_P._—“It was brought on by a fit of anger.”
_D._—“How long have you had it?”
_P._—“From the time the heavens were opened, and the earth was split”
(_i.e._ a very long time).
The arms and shoulders of this woman were covered with pieces of green
plaster, given her by the Chinese doctors. She proposed to throw these
away and “to publish the doctor’s name abroad” if he cured her. So she
received medicine with very full directions about taking it; these were
not enough. She asked a string of questions such as if she must heat it
before taking it, if she must keep the bottle tightly corked, if she
must take it along with anything else, and lastly—
_P._—“Shall I abstain from eating anything?”
_D._—“No.”
_P._ (greatly disappointed).—“What! shall I not forbid my mouth anything
at all?”
_D._ (jokingly).—“Yes. Do not talk too much; do not revile your
neighbours; do not smoke opium; do not scatter lies.”
The doctor getting worried, reiterates plain directions regarding the
medicine, tells her they are very busy, and that she must not ask any
more questions, and shows her out.
_P._ (returning after a few minutes).—“Is the medicine to be taken
inwardly, or rubbed on the outside?”
Or a man comes in and describes “chills,” and a dose of quinine is
prepared for him, when he smiles serenely and says, “To tell you the
truth, it is not I that take the chills; it is my mother.”
Another comes in, and describes with great minuteness and self-pity his
symptoms, which are those of malarial fever. He will not take a dose of
quinine in the dispensary, but wants to take it home, saying he will not
“shake” till the next day. He is feigning sickness, in order to get
quinine and sell it. Or an operation for cataract has been performed in
one of the hospital wards, and the son of the patient comes to the
doctor, begging him to go to his father, who says that his eye pains him
so that he cannot stand it. The doctor finds that the bandage has been
removed, and reproaches the son, who said that some friends came in to
see if he could really see after being blind for so many years, and took
off the bandage. The patient had rubbed the eye, the wound had burst
open and was suppurating, and the man was blind for life.
Some patients come to a hospital out of impudence, some in the hope of
getting drugs to sell, others out of curiosity to see how the “foreign
devil doctor” works, others to steal the clothes which are lent to
in-patients, and others for a lark, pretending to have various diseases,
but with these the Chinese assistants occasionally indulge in a lark on
their own account, and turn on them a pretty vigorous current from the
electric battery.[12]
With so much vexatious expenditure of time, so much imposition and
greed, and so many disappointments regarding interesting cases owing to
the gross ignorance of the patients and their friends, there are many
drawbacks in the life of a missionary doctor, and even in such
long-established work as that at Hangchow, and with such admirable
equipments and assistance, it cannot always be easy to preserve the
courtesy, gentleness, patience, and forbearance which are among the
essentials of success.
Of the patients treated in Hangchow last year one thousand were
in-patients. “Discharged cured” might be written against the great
majority of their names, and those who were incurable were greatly
benefited, as in the case of the lepers, whose “grievous wounds” are
closed and healed, and whose pains are subdued.
Certainly this great hospital is one of the sights of Hangchow, and no
one could become acquainted with it without recognising that those who
work it and support it are following closely in the footsteps of Him who
came “not to destroy men’s lives, but to save them.”[13]
CHAPTER V.
SHANGHAI TO HANKOW (HANKAU)
From Hangchow I made a very interesting journey by canal and river to
the important and historical city of Shao Hsing, with its beautiful
environs, and from thence by inland waterways to Ningpo and its lovely
lakes, passing through a region of great fertility, beauty, and
prosperity. I must put on record that I made that journey without either
a companion or servant, trusting entirely to the fidelity and goodwill
of Chinese boatmen, and was not disappointed. At Ningpo the Commissioner
of Customs kindly lent me the Customs tender, a fast-sailing lorcha, for
a week, and engaging a servant, I visited the Chusan Archipelago in
glorious weather, spending three days on the remarkable island of Putu,
the Island of Priests, sacred to Kwan Yin, the goddess of mercy, and two
at Tinghai, on the island of Chusan, where the graves of the four
hundred British soldiers who died there during our occupation present a
melancholy spectacle of neglect and disrepair. The region beyond Shao
Hsing technically belongs to another drainage area than that of the
Yangtze, and is therefore passed over without further remark. I returned
from Ningpo to Shanghai by sea.
The difficulties of getting a reliable interpreter servant who had not
previously served Europeans and who was willing to face the possible
risks and certain hardships of the journey I proposed were solved by the
kindly intervention of friends, and I engaged a tall, very fine-looking,
superior man named Be-dien, who abominated “pidgun,” spoke very fairly
correct English, and increased his vocabulary daily during the journey.
He was proud and had a bad temper, but served me faithfully, was never
out of hearing of my whistle except by permission, showed great pluck,
never grumbled when circumstances were adverse, and never deserted me in
difficulties or even in perils.
My other preparations consisted chiefly in buying an open bamboo
armchair to be carried in, plenty of tea and curry powder, and in
discarding most of my few possessions.[14] As nobody in Shanghai had
travelled in the region which I hoped eventually to visit, there was no
information about it to be gained, and I left for my journey of six or
seven months remarkably free from encumbrances of every kind.
Several foreign and one Chinese company own the eighteen fine steamers
which keep up daily communication between Shanghai and Hankow, and
dissipate the romance of travel by their white enamel, mirrors, gilding,
and electric light. The _Poyang_, by which I was a passenger, and the
only one, as far as Chinkiang, resembles most of the others, being of an
American type, about 2000 tons burden, luxurious to a fault, and
officered by efficient and courteous gentlemen.
Sailing at night, the lumpy sea which is apt to prevail in the estuary
of the Yangtze is got over comfortably, and by the following morning it
is possible to believe that the expanse of muddy water is actually a
river, for there are hazy outlines of brown shores.
The first day on the river was cold and raw, as, indeed, were the days
which followed it; the damp-laden air wrapped one round in its dismal
chill. White enamel and mirrors were detestable. The only things which
harmonised with the surroundings were the stove and the thick woollen
carpet. Yet the mercury was at 45°—not bad for midwinter!
After passing Silver Island, a wooded rock, on which is a fine temple,
we reached Chinkiang, the first of the treaty ports on the Yangtze, and
well situated at the junction of the Grand Canal with the river. On my
two visits I thought it an attractive place. It has a fine bund and
prosperous-looking foreign houses, with a British consulate on a hill
above; trees abound. The concession[15] roads are broad and well kept. A
row of fine hulks connected by bridges with the shore offers great
facilities for the landing of goods and passengers. Sikh police are much
_en evidence_, the hum of business greets one’s ears, traffic throngs
the bund, the Grand Canal is choked with junks, and the rule regarding
sub-letting to Chinese being honoured only in the breach, the concession
is covered with godowns and Chinese residences, and judging from
appearances only, one might think Chinkiang a busier port than Hankow,
the great centre of commerce in Central China. The gross value of the
trade of this port is, however, only about £4,000,000 sterling annually,
but is advancing. One great export is ground-nut oil, which is carried
and shipped in baskets lined with paper. Another, which accounts for
nearly one-fourteenth of the value of the exports, is the dried perianth
of certain lily flowers (_Hemerocallis graminea_ and _Hemerocallis
flava_), which is greatly esteemed as a relish with meats, specially
with pork.
As tokens of the increasing prosperity of Chinkiang, it is interesting
to note that recently two filatures, owned and managed by Chinese, were
opened, the machinery in one of them being of Chinese manufacture, while
the factory was erected without foreign aid. The hands employed are
women, who work twelve hours daily, at 10½_d._ a day, Sunday being a
holiday. The success of this, under native management, was considered
dubious. A distillery, for distilling spirit from rice, is another sign
of progress (or retrogression?), and our German rivals have done a very
“neat thing” in starting an albumen factory, in which the albumen,
dexterously separated from the yolks of the eggs, is made into slabs,
which are sent to Germany for use in photography, the preparation of
leather, and the printing of cotton, etc. The eggs are ducks’ eggs
solely. The yolks undergo some preservative treatment, and after being
packed in barrels are exported for use in confectionery and bar-rooms.
My informant, Consul Carles, is silent on the use to which they are then
applied, but doubtless it is well known to frequenters of such
establishments.
The workmen in out-of-doors trades, such as masons and carpenters, seem
to comport themselves much like our own, at all seasons of the year
drinking tea, resting, and smoking whenever it pleases them, taking a
long siesta in summer, and in winter not beginning work till nine. The
building trade is a guild,[16] and there are five large guilds in
Chinkiang, with guild funds for the relief of widows and orphans of
former members. There are various missions in Chinkiang, and some
general stir, which may be expected in a city of 140,000 souls.
The next day, which was raw and grim, and made the stove-side a magnet,
we reached Wuhu, the ugliest, if I may be allowed to say so, of all the
Yangtze ports, but its trade is not unprosperous, having more than
doubled in the last ten years, its gross value as to the principal
articles of export and import being now nearly £2,000,000 sterling a
year.[17]
There again the Germans have started an albumen factory, which employs
fifty women and ten men. It takes 7000 eggs to produce 100 pounds of
albumen. Feathers to the amount of £23,000 for the last year of returns
were also exported to Germany for the making of feather beds.
The most interesting export of Wuhu to the general reader is, however,
“China ink,” which is largely produced in the province of NGANHUI. The
small, black sticks, decorated with Chinese characters in gold, are
known and appreciated by us all. From Wuhu it goes to all parts of China
and of the world. In 1895 _two tons_ of it were exported from Shanghai
to foreign countries. Nearly the whole of the writing done in the vast
Chinese empire, as well as in Japan, Korea, Tonquin, and Annam, is done
with this beautiful ink, which is rubbed down on a stone ink-slab, and
applied with a sable brush. This is altogether apart from its value to
the water-colour art of all nations. It is made from the oil expressed
from the large seeds of the _Elœococca verrucosa_, sesamum oil, or colza
oil, varnish, and pork fat, burned, the resulting lampblack being of
various degrees of fineness according to the process adopted; gold leaf
and musk are added. There are a dozen different grades, and the price
varies from 2_s._ to 140_s._ per pound, a pound containing about thirty
sticks.
Various industries, including a steam flour mill, have been started by
the Chinese in Wuhu, and it is a city of 80,000 people, but to a mere
passer-by it is most uninteresting, and its busy streets had neither
novelty nor picturesqueness enough to repay me for a struggle through
the slush.
That night, while we were dining, there was a tremendous bump, a crash,
and a stoppage. The junk we cut into went down like a stone with all
hands. Not a shout or cry was heard. Boats were lowered, and we hung
about for an hour; it was not very dark. A Frenchman brutally remarked,
“Good! there’ll be some yellow skins fewer.” That was all.
The next day we reached Kiu-kiang, another treaty port, with a pretty,
shady bund, and pleasant foreign houses in shady gardens, but it has a
sleepy air for a city of 55,000 souls and a trade worth two millions and
a quarter a year.
Totally destroyed during the Taiping Rebellion in 1858–59, it has been
rebuilt, is surrounded by a defensive wall six miles in circumference,
and has regained more than its former prosperity, its imports having
increased steadily for the last five years.
I have mentioned only the treaty ports, but from Chinkiang westwards the
great cities on or near the bank divide attention with the engineering
works and the singular vagaries of build and rig in the countless craft
on the river. Among the cities on or near the river are Yang Chow Fu,
Nanking, the southern capital, with its ruined splendours and
picturesqueness, Taiping Fu, the great and prosperous city of Nganking
Fu, and many others, besides countless villages, which are apt to lead
an amphibious existence. After leaving Kiu-kiang, the most prominent
objects of interest are the Great and Little Orphans, picturesque rocks
about 300 feet in height, rising direct from the bed of the river, and
appropriated, as all picturesque sites are, by the Buddhists for
religious purposes. The Great Orphan is near Hu-kow, a bluff on the
river crowned by an inaccessible-looking building, half temple, half
fortress, close to the junction of the important Poyang lake with the
Yangtze, which is effected by a short, broad stream.
A city on a dead level can scarcely be imposing, and Hankow is not
impressive from the water. Some chimneys of Russian brick tea factories
rise above the greenery of the bund, and on the right bank of the broad
Yangtze, above a squalid suburb of Wu-Chang, appear some tall chimneys
belonging to a Chinese cotton factory under native management, but
differing from those at Shanghai in that no women or girls are employed,
the Viceroy considering that such occupation for women is opposed to
good morals and Confucian principles! On an elevation there is also a
camp with crenelated walls, an abundance of fluttering silk banners, and
various antiquated engines of war.
The day was damp and grim, but the kindly welcomes, cordial hospitality,
and big blazing fires at the British Consulate, where I was received,
made amends for the external chill, and my visit to Hankow is among my
many pleasant memories of China. Later in the day Dr. Griffith John
called on me, the veteran missionary of the L.M.S., great as an
evangelist, a Chinese writer and translator, and as an enthusiast. The
L.M.S. has its mission buildings, which include a church, dispensaries,
and hospitals, and the houses of its missionaries, in some of the
pleasant shady streets which intersect the settlement. They have various
agencies at work, and are full of hope as to the result. I understand
that Dr. Griffith John, who has devoted his life to China and means to
die there, partly from his devotion and partly from his literary gifts,
is much respected by many of the official and upper classes, and has
much influence.
CHAPTER VI.
THE FOREIGNERS—HANKOW AND BRITISH TRADE
Hankow or Hanmouth, Wu-Chang Fu, the capital of HUPEH, and Han Yang
would be one city were they not bisected by the broad, rolling Yangtze,
nearly a mile wide, and its great tributary the Han. Hankow and Han Yang
are on the north bank, and Wu-Chang on the south. The “congeries of
cities,” as the three have been aptly termed, is about 600 miles from
Shanghai. Till 1863 Hankow was an open city, but the dread of an attack
by northern banditti that year led the Government to enclose it with a
stone wall, four miles in circuit and thirteen feet in height, raised by
a brick parapet to eighteen feet.
Hankow considers that it has the finest bund in China, and I have no
wish to dispute its assertion. In truth its length of 800 yards, its
breadth of 80, its lofty and noble river wall and fine flights of stone
stairs, ascending 40 feet from low water, its broad promenade and
carriage-way and avenue of fine trees, with the “palatial” houses, very
similar to those of Shanghai and Singapore, on the other side in large
gardens and shaded by exotic trees, make it scarcely credible that the
first authentic visit of Europeans to the city was that made by Lord
Elgin in H.M.S. _Furious_ in 1858, and that the site for this stately
British settlement was only chosen in 1861, the year in which the port
was opened to foreign trade.
Among the principal buildings are the British and French Consulates, the
residence of the Commissioner of Customs, and the Municipal Buildings.
There is a Municipal Council charged with the same functions as that at
Shanghai, and Sikh policemen make a goodly show. Dead levels are not
attractive unless they are bounded by the living ocean, and the bund is
dull and gives one the impression that the British settlement has “seen
better days.”
The foreign community consists of the consuls and their staffs, the
_employés_ of the Chinese Maritime Customs, a very few professional men,
a large number of British and American missionaries, and the members of
British and other European mercantile firms, Russians taking a very
prominent position. The residents have carried their amusements with
them, and amuse themselves on a small scale after the fashion of those
at Shanghai. There is a popular club which welcomes passing visitors,
and combines social attractions with a library, reading-room, and
billiard-room, keeping in touch with the world by frequent telegrams.
There is a creditable newspaper—the _Hankow Times_, which has papers on
Chinese, social, and other subjects—an episcopal service, a hotel, a
livery stable, and other necessaries of the British exile’s life.
Kindness and cordial hospitality to strangers are not less
characteristic of Hankow than of the less frequented ports.
The climate is not an agreeable one. The summers, lasting from May till
the middle of September, are hot and damp, and severe cases of malarial
and typhoid fever are not unusual. The atmosphere is thick and stagnant,
and there are swarms of mosquitoes. Some of the men residents pass the
hottest summer nights on the bund to get the little air stirring on the
river, and the Chinese sleep on their roofs and in the streets. The
autumn months are very pleasant, the mercury falls to the freezing point
in January, and after light frosts there is a damp, raw period till warm
weather sets in again.
Neither Hankow nor its neighbours have any special features of interest
except their gigantic trade. The populations are not openly unfriendly;
but Consul Carles, his wife, and I, although attended, had mud thrown at
us at Han Yang.
The glory of Hankow, as well as its terror, is the magnificent Yangtze,
nearly a mile wide even in winter, rolling majestically past the bund,
lashed into a dangerous fury by storms, or careering buoyantly before
breezes; in summer, an inland sea fifty feet deep. In July and early
August Hankow is at its worst, and the rise of the river is watched with
much anxiety. The bund is occasionally submerged, boats ply between
houses and offices, the foundations of buildings are softened, exercise
is suspended, gardens are destroyed, much business stands still, frail
native houses are swept away—as many of those perched on piles were,
with much loss of life, in the summer rise of 1898—and thousands are
deprived of shelter and livelihood, and when the water falls widespread
distress and a malarious film of mud are left behind. The appearance of
the SZE CHUAN water, the red product of the “Red Basin” of Richthofen,
indicates to the Chinese intelligence the approaching subsidence of the
water, and points to a fact of some scientific interest. During the
ordinary summer rise the whole region, viewed from Pagoda Hill, has the
dismal aspect of a turbid, swirling inland sea, above which many
villages with trees appear, built on mounds, probably of ancient
construction.
Hankow is the most westerly port in which the Mexican dollar is actually
current, and even in its back country copper _cash_ are preferred to
either coined or uncoined silver. For western travel, over and above any
amount of cash which the traveller can burden himself with, “sycee”
silver is necessary, which can be obtained from the agency of the Hong
Kong and Shanghai Bank, as well as “good paper”—Chinese drafts on
Chinese merchants of repute in the far west. Silver “shoes,” as the
uncouth lumps of silver obtained from the banks are called, are worth
about fifty taels, but the tael itself is not of fixed value, the
Haikwan tael, in which the Customs and some other accounts are kept,
varying from the Shanghai tael, and that again from the Hankow tael, and
so on.
Nor is this all. The silver itself is unfortunately of variable quality.
Hankow sycee is of 2½ per cent. higher “standard” than Shanghai sycee,
and SZE CHUAN silver is of higher standard than that of Hankow, so that
the traveller is subject to frequent losses on his bullion, besides
suffering a good deal from delays and annoyances consequent on weighings
and occasional testings, though the trained eye alone can usually detect
the inferior “touch” of his silver. “Confusion worse confounded”
describes the currency system, if “currency” is an applicable word, when
once the simplicity of the Mexican dollar is left behind, and I ceased
to be surprised at the employment of Chinese “shroffs” by foreign firms,
for what but an Oriental intellect could unravel the mysteries of
“touch,” the differences in the value of taels, the soundness and
genuineness of _cash_, and the daily variations and entanglements of the
exchanges?
In a treaty port which has been open for thirty-nine years, and which in
1898 had a net import trade of £3,422,669, and a net export trade of
£4,643,048, and of which, so far as the import of foreign goods is
concerned, the British share is one half, the stranger naturally expects
to find British merchants piling up big fortunes, and the size and
stateliness of the houses on the bund gives colour to this expectation.
But, in fact, while the British firms in Hankow are merely branches of
houses in Shanghai, their Chinese rivals, who have driven them out of
the import trade, are Hankow merchants with branches in Shanghai. There
are about eleven of these big native firms which supply the Hankow
market with British cotton goods, and which have risen on the ruins of
British competitors. These wealthy firms, dealing wholesale, supply the
up-country merchants and local shopkeepers, buying goods through their
branches in Shanghai, which employ Chinese brokers speaking “pidgun”
English to buy the particular goods they want from the foreign
importers. They keep well up to date regarding Shanghai auction sales,
of which they get catalogues in Chinese, and are quick to seize on every
small advantage. The British merchant was shortsighted enough totally to
neglect to open up direct business relations with the up-country
merchants, and was content to deal entirely with the Hankow native
importer, to whom he left all the advantages of local connection and
knowledge.[18]
This unfortunate state of things does not seem likely to improve either
in Hankow or elsewhere. Our methods of doing business are frank and
open, and the Chinese merchants have become as well acquainted with
foreign trade methods as are Europeans themselves, while of their
customs in trade and their arrangements among themselves for conducting
business we know scarcely anything, and have no organisations equivalent
to those centred in the guilds. Whether it is too late to stem the tide
which is gradually sweeping business out of foreign into native hands I
know not, but though actual British trade may not suffer, the openings
for young men in mercantile houses in China are diminishing yearly,
unless capital, push, a preference for business over athletics, a
working knowledge of the Chinese language and business methods, and a
determination to succeed, should develop the trade and traffic of the
Tungting lake, and turn to account the great possibilities for
Lancashire trade in HUNAN, even though the ground lost in other
directions can never be recovered.
As to the trade of Hankow, naturally an interesting subject, I shall
make very few remarks, the first being that in the year 1898, 550,000
tons of British shipping entered the port, against 60,624 of all other
nationalities, exclusive of the Chinese, Japan taking the lead among
them with 32,099. Hankow has lost much of her once enormous tea trade,
owing to deterioration in quality and the change of fashion in
England.[19] Russian merchants now have the tea trade in their hands;
they have factories for the production of “brick tea” at both Hankow and
Kiu-kiang, while in 1898 five of the big steamers of the Russian
Volunteer Fleet loaded tea direct for Odessa, and one steamer for St.
Petersburg.
German and Austrian firms have started several albumen factories in
Hankow, the best of the product being used in photography; the Japanese
are now running two steamers a week between it and Shanghai, and will
not improbably “cut in” ahead of others for the trade and traffic of the
lake and inland rivers. Numbers of these alert traders have come up the
Yangtze, and in their practical way are spreading themselves through the
country, finding out the requirements and tastes of the people, and
quietly pushing their trade in small articles, while Japan is also going
ahead with her larger exports, the quantity of her cotton yarn imported
into Hankow having risen from 150 cwt. in 1895 to 260,332 in 1898,
displacing Indian yarn to a considerable extent. Japanese merchants,
like the German, do not despise _littles_ in trade, and are content with
small profits, and most of what is known as the “muck and truck” trade
is in their hands, in extending which they will prove formidable
competitors of each other. Nor ought the competition of Japan in the
larger branches of trade to be ignored by us, for to extend her markets
is an absolute necessity of her existence, and the markets of China are
a fair field for her commercial ambition.
I cannot omit all mention of kerosene oil, the import of which increases
“by leaps and bounds,” American taking the lead, and which is greatly
diminishing the production of the native illuminating oils. This
kerosene oil, imported from Russia, America, and Sumatra, to the
quantity, in 1898, of 16,055,000 gallons, goes from Hankow through six
provinces. It is one among the agents which are producing changes in the
social life of China. I have seen the metamorphosis effected by it in
the village life of the Highlands of Scotland and Korea, where the
saucer of fish oil, with its smoky wick, and the dim, dull _andon_ have
been replaced by the bright, cheerful “paraffin lamp,” a gathering point
for the family, rendering industry and occupation possible. Chinese
rooms are inconceivably dark, and smoking, sleeping, and gambling were
the only possible modes of getting rid of the long winter evenings among
the poorer classes till kerosene oil came upon the scene.
Hankow has eight regular guilds, which are banks and cash shops, rice
and grain dealers, clothiers and mercers, grocers and oilmen,
ironmasters, wholesale dealers in copper and metals, dealers in KIANGSI
china, and wholesale druggists, Hankow having one of the largest and
best drug markets in China. It would be well if we realised the extreme
importance of these and similar trade organisations. We may talk of
spheres of interest and influence, and make commercial treaties giving
us the advantages of the “most favoured nation” clause; but till we
understand the power of the guilds, and can cope with them on terms of
equality, and are “up to Chinese methods of business,” we shall continue
to see what we are now seeing at Hankow and elsewhere, which I have
already alluded to. There is much that is admirable in these guilds, and
their trades-unionism, combinations, and systems of terrorism are as
perfect as any machinery of the same kind in England. In any matters
affecting the joint interests of a trade, the members or their delegates
meet and consult. The rules of guilds are both light and severe, and no
infringement of them is permitted without a corresponding penalty; these
penalties vary from a feast and a theatrical entertainment being
inflicted on the guilty person to expulsion from the guild in a flagrant
case, which means the commercial ruin of the offender.
CHAPTER VII.
CHINESE HANKOW (HANKAU)
It is a short step from the stately dulness of the bund to the crowds,
colour, and noise of the native city—the “Million-peopled City,” the
commercial centre of China, the greatest “distributing point” in the
empire, the centre of the tea trade, which has fallen practically into
Russian hands, and the greatest junk port in China.
The city wall is imposing, with a crenelated parapet, forts at the
corners, and tunnelled under double-roofed gate-towers for heavily
bossed gates, which are closed from sunset to sunrise. The unpaved
roadways are usually foul quagmires owing to the perpetual passage of
water carriers; where big dogs of the colour of dirty flannel, with pink
patches of hairlessness, wrangle over offal. The streets are from ten to
twelve feet wide. The houses are high. Matting or blue cotton is
stretched across from opposite roofs in summer to moderate the sun’s
heat and glare; so the traffic is carried on in a curiously tinted
twilight, flecked now and then by a vivid ray gleaming on the red and
gold of the long, hanging shopboards, lighting up their flare and glare,
and giving them a singular picturesqueness.
The shape of the signboard and the different colours of the letters and
face of the sign indicate different trades. The devising of a signboard
is a very important matter; it may affect the luck of the shop. The name
of the shopkeeper comes first, but in the case of a firm a word of good
omen is substituted for the names, with a character signifying union. In
both cases the top characters are followed by words of good omen,
suggesting wealth, prosperity, and increase.
Gold platers of ornaments use salmon-coloured boards with green
characters, druggists gilded boards frequently traced with many lines,
and large standard tablets which remain in their sockets at night, and
there are a few other combinations of colour used by different traders
for the sake of easy distinction; and on some signboards the articles
sold within are carefully pictured, but black and gold and carnation-red
and gold largely predominate, the gold being used for the highly
decorative characters, the writing of which is a lucrative trade. An old
signboard is a valuable piece of property, and if the business is sold
fetches a high price, like the goodwill of a long-established business
at home. An old-established druggist’s sign has sold for as much as 3000
taels, about £450. In the winter, with the streets so decorated, with
the overhead screens removed, the narrow strips of bright blue sky
above, and the slant sunbeams touching gold and colour into marvellous
brilliancy, Chinese cities, especially Canton and Foochow, have a nearly
unrivalled picturesqueness.
Of the crowded and semi-impassable state of such streets no adequate
idea can be given. Though on my first visit to the native city the
British Consul was walking beside me with an attendant, and my bearers
wore the red-plumed hats and well-known liveries of the Consulate, I was
often brought to a halt, more or less ignominious, or was roughly shaken
by the impact of the burden of some hurrying coolie, while the chairmen
threaded their way with difficulty through thousands of busy, blue-clad
Chinese, all shouting or yelling, my bearers adding to the din by the
yelling in chorus which is supposed to clear a passage for a chair.
Among the meaner cotton-clad folk there were not wanting rich costumes
of heavy brocaded silks and costly furs, worn probably by compradores
and shopkeepers, who in the treaty ports are coming to vie with the
highest officials in the splendid expensiveness of their dress.
Occasionally yells louder than usual, and an attempt on the part of the
crowd to pack itself to right and left, denoted the approach of a
mandarin in a heavy, coloured and gilded official chair, with eight
bearers, and many attendants in heavily plumed hats and red and black
decorated dresses; the official himself sitting very erect within his
chair, nearly always very pale and fat, with a thin moustache of long
curved hairs, and that look of unutterable superciliousness and scorn
which no Oriental of another race is equally successful in attaining.
[Illustration: A STREET IN HANKOW.]
The principal streets are flagged; the others are miry ways cut into
deep ruts by wheelbarrows. “Ancient and fish-like smells” abound, and
strong odours of garlic, putrid mustard, frizzling pork, and of the
cooking of that most appetising dish, fish in a state of decomposition,
drift out of the crowded eating-houses. If of the lower class, the
culinary operations of restaurants are visible from the street, the
utensils consisting of a row of pans set into brickwork, one or two iron
pots, and a few earthenware dishes. Not a tipsy man or a man noisy with
drink was to be seen. The Chinese have the virtue of using alcoholic
liquor in great moderation, and almost altogether with their food.
Oil in earthenware jars, each large enough to contain a man, or freshly
arrived in the paper-lined wicker baskets in which it is shipped from
SZE CHUAN, denotes the oil shops; parcels of tea done up in oiled paper,
built up to a great height with surprising regularity, slabs of brick
tea, and sacks of sugar denote the grocers; while rolls of carefully
packed silk, which one longs to investigate, proclaim the prince of
retail shopkeepers, the dealer in silks.
There are bean cakes, melon seeds, dates, and drugs from the north and
west, brought in by the great junks, with huge sweeps and Vandyke-brown
sails, which crowd the Han. There are idol-makers with every sort and
size of idol for home use and export, some of which find their way to
Tibet and Turkestan, and receive perpetual worship in the homes and
_gonpas_ of Ladak and Nubra; but none of them are treated with even
scant respect until the ceremony takes place which invests them with the
soul, represented by silver models of the “five viscera,” which are
inserted at a door in the back. In the same quarter are dealers in the
manifold paraphernalia of idol worship, in the tinsel, gold, and silver
shoes burned in ancestor-worship, and in the very clever and in some
cases life-size representations of elephants, tigers, horses, asses,
cows, houses, carts, and many other things which are burned at funerals,
adding to their great costliness, the sons of a merchant of average
means often spending a thousand dollars on these mimicries.
But while there are dealers in everything which can minister to the
luxury or necessities of the “Million-peopled City,” many of the shops
give a piteous notion of the poverty of their customers. And everywhere
in these crowded streets not a thing is sold, from a valuable diamond
down to a straw shoe, without the deafening din of bargaining, no seller
asking what he means to take, and no purchaser offering what he
eventually means to give, the poorest buyers, to whom time is money,
thinking an hour not misspent if they get a reduction of half a _cash_.
As all the bargaining, except in the case of the great shops, is done at
the shop fronts, and the bargainers are men, and Chinese men, specially
of the lower orders, shout at the top of their voices, the Babel in a
Chinese commercial street is inconceivable.
Enormous quantities of goods are everywhere waiting for transit, for
Hankow is the greatest distributing centre in China, and the big
steamers lying at the bund, or at anchor in the stream, and the thousand
junks which crowd the waterways, seem barely sufficient for her gigantic
commerce.
Among the ghastly curiosities of Hankow, as of all big Chinese cities,
are the coffin shops, which usually herd together in special quarters
and are apt to use portions of the streets for their timberyards. In
them are seen the great cumbrous coffins, at times ten and even twelve
feet in length, which Chinese custom demands, of all grades and prices,
from highly polished lacquer with characters raised or incised in gold
to the roughly put together shell in which the tired coolie takes his
last sleep. Many of the more costly are ordered as filial gifts from
children to parents, and from grandchildren to grandparents, and take
their lugubrious place, set up on end, among the decorations of the
lofty vestibule by which rich men’s houses are entered, and where they
may rest for years. As a body may remain for months or years unburied,
waiting for the decision of the geomancers as to an auspicious place and
date for the interment, the coffins are very carefully constructed, and
are either lacquered or treated with the celebrated Ningpo varnish,
which is practically impermeable both to air and moisture.
The varnishers and lacquerers also herd together, and their trade, which
is based on the _Rhus vernicifera_, is a very important one. The
eating-houses—and from the number of them and the crowds which frequent
them it might be supposed that nobody eats at home—the tobacconists, and
the opium shops are scattered broadcast through the city, and each has
its special _clientèle_.
[Illustration: COFFINS AWAITING BURIAL.]
[Illustration: HANKOW FROM HAN YANG.]
Possibly there may have originally been a plan on which the Hankow
streets were built, but it must have been outgrown for some centuries,
and at present there is little suggestion of design; streets and alleys
intersect each other in singular confusion, and only a practised hand
can find any given point without irksome and delaying tergiversations.
On the whole there is a tendency to arrive at the top of the river bank,
where at low water (winter) a singular spectacle presents itself.
The Han, an opaque, yellow, rapid flood, 200 yards wide, lies from forty
to sixty feet below. Its summer rises have carried away its banks on the
Hankow side, and the dense mass of ill-looking houses which formerly
stood, as is the wont of houses, on the ground, have been undermined,
and are now propped up on what it would be flattery to call piles, for
they are only slender and casual poles lashed together till the
requisite length is gained, some leaning one way, some another, while
the dwellings they upbear owe their continued existence to their
involuntary mutual support, and to the pestilent habit which such
ramshackle buildings have everywhere of hanging together. Thousands of
the poorer class of coolies live in these precarious abodes, which,
however, are less unsavoury than some, for they have fresh air below and
innumerable holes in the floors for the easy disposal of refuse. In the
summer of 1898 a great many of these dwellings were carried away with
much loss of life.
Almost below these, on the mud slope above the river, are hundreds of
mat huts, which have to be removed as the water rises. These are the
miserable, peripatetic kennels of the very lowest dregs of the Chinese
humanity of a large city. It is difficult to say how this large
population lives. Doubtless the “odd jobs” which support it are mostly
connected with junks, for below each house is moored some rotten leaky
thing capable of floating, to which descent is made by iron spikes
driven into the strongest of the piles. Here are the men who on these
“odd jobs” perpetuate lives which are not worth living—the beggars,
blind and seeing, with malformed and loathsome bodies; lepers with
gaping sores and fingers and toes dropping off; the unsightly and
unnatural who rely for their living on revolting the feelings of the
passers-by; suffering women old and friendless, who prefer the free
Bohemianism of beggary to the almshouse or refuge provided by Chinese
charity; and hosts of others, the pariah _débris_ of Hankow. These
wretched beings have one solace in life—the opium pipe—and they starve
themselves to procure it.
Flights of stone stairs, one of them at least of magnificent width and
appearance, always crowded with water carriers splashing the contents of
their pails, with coolies carrying burdens, and with passengers hurrying
to and from the ferries, lead from the bank to the water. Through every
opening in the dilapidations the river traffic is seen.
[Illustration: FEMALE BEGGAR IN MAT HUT.]
At least three miles of junks[20] and other craft lie two, three, and
four deep (to quote Lu Hew again), “like the teeth of a comb,” of all
sizes, colours, and builds, having but two features in common: a
prominent eye on each side of the bows and sterns considerably higher
than the bows. Every maritime province of China is represented on that
crowded waterway. One could never weary of the spectacle. It represents
the extent, the enterprise, the industry, and the conservatism of China,
and with an unrivalled variety and picturesqueness.
No junks interested me more than the great passage and salt boats, from
seventy to one hundred tons burthen, with their lofty, many-windowed
sterns like the galleys of Henry IV., their tall single masts and their
big brown-umber sails of knitted cane or coarse canvas extended by an
arrangement of bamboo, looking heavy enough to capsize a liner, and with
hulls stained and oiled into the similitude of varnished pine, as coming
from that Upper Yangtze for which I was bound. There were huge junks
from the Fukien province, bringing to me recollections of Foochow and
the Min river, piled high with bamboos and poles, and extended to a
preposterous width by masses of the same lashed on both sides, the
buoyancy of the cargo permitting as little as five inches of freeboard,
gaily painted and decorated junks from Canton, with rows of
carefully-tended plants on their high sterns, sombre craft from Tientsin
and the north, junks from the Poyang and Tungting lakes, nondescript
craft from inland streams and canals, alert tenders to the big junks,
lorchas, some of them foreign-owned, doing homage to Chinese nautical
experience by their Chinese rig, rafts, with their inhabitants,
_sampans_ of all sizes, and huge junks heavily laden, crawling slowly
down stream with their great sweeps, and the wild melancholy wail of the
oarsmen—the Argonauts of Swatow or Ningpo.
People who think it witty to ridicule everything Chinese poke fun at
these junks and their “pig-tailed,” long-coated crews, but the handling
of them is masterly; in emergencies there is no confusion, every man
obeys orders, and the ease with which these apparently ungainly craft
tack, with their complicated arrangement of bamboos stiffening their
vast sails, is absolutely beautiful.
The streets of Hankow, like those of most of the large trading cities,
present a perpetual series of dramas. In them hundreds of people eat,
sleep, bargain, gamble, cook, spin, and quarrel, while they are the
sculleries, sinks, and sewers of a not inconsiderable portion of the
population. They are the playgrounds of the children, if that can be
called play which consists merely in rolling and tumbling over each
other after the manner of puppies, the elder among them watching with
greedy eyes the bargains of their seniors, eager cupidity and ofttimes
precocious depravity written on faces which should be young.
[Illustration: A TRAVELLING RESTAURANT.]
Itinerant barbers pursue their essential calling, carrying their
apparatus on their backs, and perambulating the streets with a curious
cry. Their business is an enormous one in China, where hair is regarded
as an enemy to be battled with. Once a week at least, the Chinese,
however poor, must have the front and middle of his head smoothly
shaven, or he looks like a convict, his face, I cannot say his beard,
and his eyebrows, if he has any, trimmed, when he emerges from the
barber’s hands a respectable member of the community. All these
operations are conducted publicly under the eaves and gateways and at
the street corners, with much shampooing, and dexterous manipulation of
oddly shaped razors, which scrape rather than cut, the face of the
client nevertheless wearing a look of serene contentment. The fees of
the barber are an important item in the expenditure of a Chinese coolie.
Many other industries are carried on in the streets, and the Government
is lenient to all encroachments, so long as a mandarin’s chair and
retinue can pass unhindered. Government is represented in this
_congeries_ of cities by _yamens_, with picturesque curved roofs, and
gateways with a certain stateliness, and courtyards usually filled with
petitioners and their agents, prisoners awaiting trial, _yamen_ runners,
who, from three to six hundred or more in number, hang about official
residences; while clerks and writers carrying papers and dressed in
expensive brocaded silks move haughtily among the common herd. The inner
court is concealed by a plastered brick screen, on which is emblazoned
in brilliant colouring a bold representation of the dragon of the Dragon
Empire.
Government in its military aspect is made apparent by a number of
soldiers, usually in picturesque but stagey and unserviceable uniforms,
in which blue and carnation-red predominate, who are encountered in the
streets hanging round opium or tobacco shops, or gambling for _cash_, or
attached slightly to some procession, or lounging at the city gates, or
swaggering at the great entrance to the _yamen_, under the curse of
abounding leisure. Their somewhat mediæval military equipments are
supplemented with additions laughably grotesque, long fans attached to
their girdles, and big paper umbrellas, occasionally gaudily decorated
with mythical monsters, but oftener with proverbs or Confucian maxims.
Hurry, crowds, business, the absence of the feminine element, and noise,
are common to all Chinese cities. Drums and gongs are beaten, cymbals
are clashed, bells ring, muskets are fired, crackers are exploded
everywhere, beggars wail, there are street cries innumerable, the din of
bargaining tongues rises high, and the air is full of the discordant
roar of a multitude.
In the centre of such surroundings, within hearing of the ceaseless din,
and within smelling of the foul and ancient odour which pervades the
city, the colony of English Wesleyan missionaries has placed itself in
close contact with its medical missionary hospitals and dispensaries for
men and women, its home and school for the blind, and its other
missionary agencies, and not far off in a Chinese house, and living and
dressing as a native, was one of the noblest and most sympathetic
missionaries who ever sought the welfare of the Chinese, the Rev. David
Hill, who died of typhus fever shortly after my first visit, genuinely
mourned by those for whom he had sacrificed himself.
CHAPTER VIII.
HANKOW TO ICHANG
I left Hankow, without seeing a gleam of sunshine upon it, by the
deck-over-deck, American-built, stern-wheel steamer _Chang-wo_. She had
some hundreds of Chinese and two China Inland missionaries on board
below, and her very limited saloon accommodation was taken up by four
Canadian missionaries returning to SZE CHUAN, and the inevitable baby.
They had fled nearly a year before, after the destruction of their
houses in the riots. I was greatly indebted to two of them. I had a
cabin directly over the boiler. The floor was very hot, and even with
the window open I could not get the temperature below 74°, and they gave
me their cool room in exchange.
The captain was kind and genial. He let me tone unlimited photographic
prints in the saloon, ignoring the dishes and buckets involved in the
process, and the engineer provided an unlimited supply of condensed
water, free both from Yangtze mud and from the alum used to precipitate
it. But he had a unique affluence of bad language, which neither the
presence of clergy nor women sufficed to check, and which was brought
out with slow, thrilling, and emphatically damnatory deliberation on the
many occasions on which we ran on shoals.
I had abundant occupation in writing, printing and toning photographs,
learning a little from Mr. Endacott of the region for which I was
finally bound, taking walks below past the Chinese cabins, where the
inmates were reclining in the bliss of opium smoking, the faint, sickly
smell of the drug drifting out at the open doors, or on the upper deck
to watch the fleets of strange junks through which the _Chang-wo_
steamed, howling and bellowing. Lumbering, unhandy craft they look, but
they are handled with consummate skill.
The Great River was at its lowest winter level, and its shores, so far
as one could see them under these circumstances, were most monotonous,
and then it was midwinter. We steamed for hours between high, grey
mud-banks, ceaselessly eaten away by the rush of the current, gaining
little beyond an idea of the vastness of the level country, the depth of
the grey alluvium, and the extent of the commerce of which the Yangtze
is the highway. To get deep water we were often close under the right
bank, and had the _divertissement_ of being pelted with mud and with
such names as “foreign devils” and “foreign dogs,” an amusement which
one would have supposed would have palled upon the peasants in the years
during which these steamers have been running.
Our progress was not rapid, owing to shoals and changes in the channel,
and the _Chang-wo_ anchored at night. Then, during the day, there was
the frequent grinding sound of running on gravel, or the thud of
touching a bank, or the buzz of a whirlpool created by ourselves in
steering clear of a junk. All day long resounded the melancholy note of
the Chinese leadsman calling out the soundings, varied by the sharp
“Hard a-port!” or “Hard a-starboard!” of a European officer as some
peril presented itself, or the low and terrible maledictions of the
captain on all and sundry, as far back as the builders of the ship. The
grounding was exasperating, losing us two hours at times. Quick as
thought at every touch on shoal or mud-bank down clattered the anchor,
and various skilled operations followed, which invariably resulted
successfully, but at one time the navigation was so intricate, and the
water shoaled for such a long distance, that, after getting off a bank
after two hours’ tedious work, the steam launch was lowered to sound
ahead, and direct us by signal flags.
Still it was hard to get up any excitement over these mishaps, even
though the captain enlarged on the risk of losing the wheel or the
rudder. Very little diversified the monotony of the winter voyage, but
when I returned in summer, and could look over the banks, a vast
population and innumerable industries were to be seen.
Yo-chow, a fortified monastery on a high promontory, once a place of
considerable domination, and Yo-chow Fu, a large city near the junction
of the Tungting Lake with the Yangtze, are the chief features of the
featurelessness. This lake, a vast but imperfectly known sheet of water,
surrounded by towns and villages, is of very great importance to the
trade of the rich HUNAN province.
The farther route lies among embanked watercourses, great flats of muddy
land receiving alluvial accretions from each summer’s floods, and
shallow meres with a wealth of wild fowl I never saw equalled, and
abounding in fish, both fish and fowl being snared in great numbers by
the nearly amphibious inhabitants, by many ingenious devices born of
Chinese poverty.
Among the many varieties of boats are pairs of large _sampans_, lashed
together, and at once kept apart and connected by platforms, on which
reeds are piled to the height of a haystack, the lowest part of the
centre of the load being recessed and shored up for a sleeping and
cooking place. These reeds, which are a speciality of the Yangtze for
900 miles from its mouth, and attain a height of fifteen feet and over,
are as invaluable to the people of this region as are the vast reed-beds
of the Liao to those of Southern Manchuria, furnishing them with
building, roofing, and fencing material, as well as with fuel. Quite a
large part of the internal freighting business of this low-lying level
is the transport of these reeds on sledges over the marshy ground, on
four-wheeled wooden trucks, which might be called “trollies” if they had
rails to run on, some dragged by men, and others by the quaint,
appropriate water buffalo, as well as loaded on coupled boats.
In the late afternoon of the third day from Hankow we anchored in the
rushing mid-stream of the Yangtze, abreast of the treaty port of
Sha-shih (Sand Market), opened by the treaty of Shimonoseki in 1895,
and, as was fitting, first occupied by the Japanese. I was not
prepossessed with the city either on the upward or downward journey.
Communication with the shore is tedious, difficult, and not free from
risk. Several of the boats which attempted to reach us were unable to
“catch on,” and even a lighter, failing to make fast, was carried far
astern and did not work her way back till the next morning.
At low water Wan-cheng Ti, the great dyke, averaging 150 feet in width
at the bottom, and twenty-five at the top, twenty feet high on the river
side, and forty on the land side, which follows the Yangtze for
twenty-five miles to the west of Sha-shih and thirty to the east,
effectually conceals the town from view, only a seven-storeyed pagoda
and the curved roofs of temples and _yamens_ appearing above the heads
of the crowds which throng the roadway on the dyke-top.
China must have been a greater country when this great public work was
constructed than she is now, for this dyke where it protects Sha-shih is
a noble, three-tiered, stone-faced construction, on the top of which are
remnants of a stone balustrade; and broad, stately flights of stairs are
let into the stonework at intervals, each tier of stairs being about
twelve feet high. It must have been fully as impressive as the superb
walls on the Chia-ling at Paoning Fu, which still remain a thing of
grandeur and beauty.
Sha-shih is pre-eminently and abominably dirty; and on this fine
embankment dirt is in the ascendant, and dirt and bad smells assail the
traveller on landing. Much of the refuse of the crowded city at the back
is thrown over the river wall, accumulating in heaps which at low water
conceal half of it. Steep steps lead up these vile mounds, and appear to
be preferred to the stone stairs covered with slippery, black ooze.
Below the heaps lie from one to two thousand junks with crews on an
average of ten men each, and frequently the junkman’s wife and family in
addition, giving an average floating population of 10,000.
Beggars’ huts encroach on the top of the embankment; and when I write
that hosts of gaunt, sore-eyed, mangy dogs, and black pigs each with a
row of bristles standing up along his lean, curved back, and beggars,
one mass of dirt and sores, are always routing and delving in the heaps,
the reader will not be surprised that I did not find Sha-shih
prepossessing. It has always had the reputation of being hostile to
foreigners, which hostility expressed itself unpleasantly in a riot in
May, 1898, when the China merchant’s, S. N. Co.’s premises ashore and
afloat, the new buildings of the Imperial Customs, and the Japanese
Consulate were destroyed. The three steamship agencies in 1898
practically withdrew their agencies from the port, the British Consulate
was withdrawn, Japan has taken no steps towards occupying her
concession, foreign trade and passenger traffic have fallen off
materially, and so far the port must be pronounced a failure.
A noisy and dirty rabble follows a stranger; mud is thrown—and, as is
the fashion of mud, some of it sticks—bad names are bandied about
freely; the foreigner is conscious of a ferment which may or may not
result in more active annoyance, and, after being nearly suffocated by
the ill-mannered and malodorous crowd in a fruitless attempt to see the
lions of the city, he retreats not reluctantly to his steamer, which, in
my case, was detained by heavy fog until noon of the next day.
[Illustration: CHINESE SOLDIERS.]
(_From a Chinese Drawing._)
But Sha-shih, though unprepossessing and unlikely to fulfil the
expectations formed of it as a treaty port, is one of the most important
cities on the Yangtze; nor is its importance a thing of yesterday. Two
miles above it lies the _Fu_, or prefecture, of Ching-chou, of which it
may be regarded as the trading suburb. All around are the remains of
fortresses and cities, mounds, earthworks, and look-out terraces,
ancient in the days when our fathers were painted savages, marking the
sites of the strongholds and capital of the powerful kings of Ch’u in
the early days of Chinese authentic history.
[Illustration: MILITARY OFFICER.]
(_From a Chinese Drawing._)
Ching-chou Fu is grandly fortified, and is surrounded by a wide canal of
great depth. It is the seat of a _taotai_, or intendant of a circuit,
which includes Ichang, eighty miles off, and though not a provincial
capital, is of such importance that it has a Manchu garrison of 12,000
men(?), the largest Manchu force south of Peking, the Manchu military
colony numbering 40,000 souls. The whole organisation of this colony is
military, and it is kept separate from the civil population. Otherwise
it has no interest, except that the women have unbound feet and wear
long outer dresses, and that the men look lazy and demoralised. Besides
this large garrison there are river and lake police, and a small body of
militia under the command of a provincial general, and a thousand HUNAN
“braves” trained in the rudiments of drill under a brigade-general.
“Braves” are fighting mobile troops, whose superior qualities command
superior pay. They receive four or five taels a month, while the common
provincial soldier only gets one tael fifty cents. Now, as formerly,
Ching-chou is regarded as one of the most important strategical
positions in China.
It has an estimated Chinese and Manchu population of 100,000, and
Sha-shih an estimated population of 80,000, a temporary one averaging
8000, and a boating one (as mentioned before) of, at the very least,
10,000, nearly 200,000 in all. The distance to Ichang is 80 miles by
land and 100 by water. To Hankow, with which the great trade of Sha-shih
is done, it is 300 miles by water, and would be 135 by land, if there
were land! No land carriage is possible, except in seasons of drought,
much of that which poses as _terra firma_ on the maps being meres,
relapsed agricultural lands, morasses, shallow lakes, fens,
watercourses, and reed swamps, most productive wherever areas are
drained and embanked.
Among the interesting features of Sha-shih are a ninth century
seven-storeyed pagoda, with eight faces, each face recessed on each
storey, and containing a stone image of Buddha, and a dark and foul
staircase, leading to a remarkable view from the top, and the imposing
halls of the trade guilds, of which I failed to see the superb
interiors, owing to the clamour and pressure of the rabble. In Sha-shih,
as everywhere else, these guildhalls serve the purposes of banqueting
halls, temples, and even theatres at times. They number thirteen, named
from the provinces or cities of which their members are natives, and
each has its patron deity. There are several charitable institutions,
including two orphanages, one of which receives 220 orphans annually,
and boards them out until the age of sixteen.
Benevolence was considerably strained in the winter of 1896–97, when
thousands of refugees flying from famine in SZE CHUAN received
unwholesome and insanitary shelter in mat sheds outside Sha-shih, where
a terrible and uninvestigated epidemic broke out, and was carried into
the city and neighbourhood, so that during the spring and summer it was
estimated that 17,000 perished in the city only. Nearly all the
refugees, after being kept alive chiefly by the charitable, died, and
were decently buried by those societies which in every Chinese city
undertake this sacred duty for the bodies of strangers, and for those of
the very poor. I am always glad to call attention to Chinese charities,
for the continual reiteration of facts on the other side only tends to
produce an unfair and one-sided impression of the Chinese character.
[Illustration: A FISHERMAN AND PLUNGE NET.]
(_From a Chinese Drawing._)
Superstition had its say regarding this baleful epidemic, which
unfortunately never came under skilled observation. It was attributed to
a malignant black bird, of vast size, which was said to hover over the
city. It had ten heads, but one had been cut off, and the severed neck
bled profusely and continuously, and wherever the blood fell disease and
death followed. A day was set apart for the propitiation of this
malignant fowl, and fire crackers were burned before the door of every
house.[21]
The fish market is an excellent, though an uncleanly one, nets, angling,
cormorants, lines with hooks, and great frame nets lowered and raised by
pulleys, all being employed. Sturgeon, weighing from 500 to 700 pounds,
are caught off the port. There are no unusual articles of diet to be
seen, except Japanese seaweed, which is largely consumed in the belief
that it counteracts the bad effects of the sulphur fumes proceeding from
coal fires!
The Roman Catholics and three Protestant missions hold property in the
town, but mission work has to be conducted very cautiously owing to the
strongly anti-foreign feeling. There are seventeen foreigners, including
the Japanese consul, but not one foreign merchant, though two or three
foreign firms have agencies.
Foreign articles, few of which find any place in the customs returns,
are to be bought in the shops. Very many of them are Japanese, owing to
the energy or, as our merchants call it, the peddling and huckstering
instincts of the Japanese traders, who through their trained
Chinese-speaking agents find out what the people want and supply it to
them. The cotton gins largely used in the neighbourhood are of Japanese
make, and cheap clocks, kerosene lamps, towels, handkerchiefs, cotton
umbrellas, cheap hardware, soaps, fancy articles of all descriptions,
and cotton goods are poured into Sha-shih by that alert empire. Among
English goods are rugs, blankets, and preserves and tinned milk and
fruits. Most of the dealers in “assorted notions” are Cantonese.
Cotton cloth, raw cotton, silk fabrics, and hides are the staple export
of Sha-shih. There are few local industries besides the weaving of
cotton. Pewter, “hubble bubbles,” household pewter ware, long bamboo
pipes, not fashionable “down the river,” coarse silk twist for plaiting
into the ends of queues, boiling salt out of old salt bags, a smoky and
smelly process carried on owing to the monstrous price of Government
salt, brick and tile making, and furniture-making, specially of carved
and gilded bedsteads and cabinets, showy but somewhat trashy, I think
exhaust the list. The annual export of raw cotton is estimated at
9,000,000 pounds. Enormous quantities of it arrive to be woven at
Sha-shih into a strong, durable, white cloth, fifteen and twelve inches
wide, which I saw all over SZE CHUAN, and of which at least 20,000,000
pounds are annually exported. Samples of this make and of English
cottons were frequently shown to me by the women in SZE CHUAN villages,
with a scornful laugh at the expense of the latter.
Sha-shih is called “The Manchester of China.” In it this comparatively
indestructible cloth is graded, packed, and shipped away, the adjacent
country being the greatest centre of weaving in the empire. There are
110 dealers in raw cotton in the city, and 114 shops deal in native
cotton cloth, and there is a daily market for its sale in the early
mornings. Silks, both plain and figured, are also produced in great
quantities, and satin bed-covers, which are used all over China. Rich
satins are also woven for altar cloths, bed and door hangings, and
cushions.
Sha-shih was the first point on my journey at which I encountered the
money difficulties which press so severely on the traveller in China. My
broken silver was of little use, and my dollars of none, copper _cash_
and _cash_ notes forming the entire currency of the port. The merchants
and shopkeepers calculate silver in Sha-shih taels, which vary from 6 to
11 per cent. from the standard Haikwan, Hankow, and Shanghai taels, and
the exchange between _cash_ and silver varies daily. There are about 130
_cash_ shops in the town, nearly all of them issuing notes. Notes for
1000 _cash_ abound, mostly issued by small Manchu shops in Ching-chou,
for which change can hardly be obtained in Ching-chou itself. The _cash_
shops issue notes for 1000, 5000, and 10,000 _cash_, but though those
issued by the banks and pawnshops are current for thirty miles round,
they are worthless at Ichang, as I found to my inconvenience. Each
hundred _cash_ being strung separately on a wisp of straw or paper, and
every string having to be counted over and examined for small or
spurious _cash_, the purchase of 10,000, or about 23_s._ 3_d._, is a
weighty matter in various senses, and is apt to take from two to three
hours, including the time spent in bargaining about “the touch” of sycee
silver procured at Hankow.
I have dwelt so long, albeit so superficially, on Sha-shih because it is
the most important of the treaty ports opened since the war, and because
nothing is known of it by the general reader. Certainly the _couleur de
rose_ expectations of an outburst of foreign trade have not been
realised, nor, I think, are likely to be, unless the methods of commerce
on the Yangtze undergo a radical change. The total trade for 1898 was
only £24,444 in value, against £47,509 in 1897, but these figures only
apply to the exports and imports passing through the Imperial Maritime
Customs. For Sha-shih has not only one, but several, “back doors”
through which her enormous commerce is poured, the principal one being a
canal to Hankow, called at its western end the Pien-Ho, and which is not
only free from the risks of the river, but is from sixty to seventy
miles shorter. Altogether several routes to Hankow are practicable,
either wholly by canal and lake, or partly by road and partly by canal,
the water route being available during the whole year.
The Chinese are rigid conservatives. Junks are always obtainable, and
wait the convenience of their hirers, and their freight and passenger
charges are much lower than those of the steamers. Certainly if I had
not been hurried I should have preferred a junk! The canals pass through
towns which offer facilities for both trading and dawdling, so that,
although there are two _likin_ stations on the canal route to Hankow,
the native trader finds that the junk has many advantages over the
steamer. _Likin_ is charged on all goods landed at Sha-shih, and the
Imperial Customs duty is, in fact, only an additional tax levied on
goods conveyed by steamer. These inland routes are of the greatest
commercial importance.
Besides the canal and lake routes to Hankow, the great delta between the
Yangtze and the Han is spotted with lakes connected by waterways, and in
other directions there are available roads connecting Sha-shih with
important trading cities. Among these are the great southern highway
from SZE CHUAN, and the great north road leading by the Han and over the
mountains to the capital of SHENSI, from which mule carts and mule
litters, conveyances hardly known in Central China, descend into the
Yangtze plain.
All that region lies below the summer level of its rivers, and it is a
problem on which no light is likely to be shed why a country so oddly
circumstanced should have become a populous and powerful kingdom at a
very early date, and why its chief city has continued to be one of the
most important of military positions and of commercial centres in the
Chinese Empire.
Returning to the river voyage, after passing Yungtze, the western
mountains appeared for the first time. The scenery changed rapidly. The
river narrowed; some of its promontories were boulder-strewn; low,
wooded knolls appeared above pleasant agricultural country, green with
young wheat; and hills of conglomerate and limestone replaced the grey
alluvium through which we had been steaming for nearly 1000 miles.
Although much detained by fogs, we reached the Tiger Teeth gorge, ten
miles below Ichang, in the early afternoon of the fifth day from Hankow.
This gorge, which hardly deserves so thrilling a name, is a channel two
miles long and about 700 yards wide, in the easternmost of those ranges
through which the Yangtze has forced itself on its way to create the
Great Plain. This range, rising to a height of 2600 feet, is broken up
into peaks, one of which is crowned by an inaccessible-looking Buddhist
monastery, this building, a fine pagoda, and great masses of
conglomerate being the only noteworthy features until we reached Ichang
in the glorifying light of a late afternoon sun.
CHAPTER IX.
ICHANG
Unlike Sha-shih, the first view of Ichang, opened to foreign trade in
1887, is very attractive. At low water it stands high on the river bank,
on a conglomerate cliff above a great level sandbank, but in summer it
loses whatever dignity it gains by height, and is nearly on the river
level. A walled city of 35,000 people, gate towers, and temple roofs
rise above the battlements and the mass of houses. Between the city and
the river is a straggling suburb fairly clean, composed of small retail
shops. On the river bank are the buildings and godowns of the Imperial
Customs, including the Commissioner’s house and large garden, dainty
dwellings for the staff of twelve Europeans, and a tennis ground, with a
fine bund and broad flight of stone stairs in front. Near these are the
large houses of the Scotch Church Mission, and beyond a new plain
building put up by the China Inland Mission. The Roman Catholic
buildings are the first to attract attention from the water. There are a
few foreign hongs and godowns, and a customs pontoon moored in the
stream. Behind the British Consulate, a substantial new building with a
tennis lawn used for weekly hospitalities, breezy hills, much covered
with grave mounds, roll up towards a mountainous region, and below, the
Yangtze, with its perpetual rush and current, swirls in a superb flood
half a mile wide.
At the time of my first visit a British gunboat, a wholesome and not
unneeded influence, lay at anchor opposite the town.
The imposing feature of Ichang to my thinking is its multitude of junks
of every build and size, lying closely packed along its shore for a mile
and a half, their high castellated sterns making a goodly show. There
lay in hundreds big SZE CHUAN junks, strongly built for the rapids,
their stained and oiled woodwork looking like varnished pine, the junks
bound up the river with their masts erect, the masts of those which had
come down lashed along their sides. Big passenger boats there were too,
for all passengers, as well as cargo, bound up the Yangtze must “change”
at Ichang.
On the opposite side are cliffs along the river front, backed by hills
and fine mountains, among which are fantastic peaks and pyramids, one of
them known as Pyramid Hill, exactly resembling the Great Pyramid in
shape, and said to have the same height and area as its prototype. Its
peculiar position and form were supposed or believed by the local
geomancers to interfere with that mystery of mysteries the FUNG SHUI,
and thus to act injuriously on the prosperity of Ichang, so the powers
that were, it is said, built a monastery opposite, on the Ichang side of
the river, at great expense, the priests of which have as their special
business to pray that the disastrous influences of Pyramid Hill may be
warded off from the city.
The dead who people the hillsides far outnumber the living, and their
abodes having the aspect of exaggerated mole-hills, lack the frequent
stateliness of Chinese places of interment in some of the other
provinces, being mostly circular mounds of earth and sod kept together
by stones rudely built into them.
Just before I arrived many of these stones had served a sinister
purpose, and had been used as ammunition. On entering the house of Mr.
Schjöltz, the Commissioner of Customs, who was my host at Ichang and
later at Chungking, I was surprised to see cairns of stones which were
nearly as big as a human head both in the hall and outside it, which had
been collected in the dining and drawing-rooms after their windows had
been smashed in an anti-foreign riot a few days before. During some
festivities the Chinese cook of the gunboat _Esk_ accidentally shot a
very popular Chinese officer. On this there was naturally a great
ebullition of fury, specially as the cook was not given up to the
Chinese authorities when they demanded him. The Customs buildings were
guarded by Chinese soldiers, but the staff, who are all efficiently
drilled, did sentry duty at night. This was the least serious of the
many riots which have occurred in the treaty ports on the Yangtze in
recent years.
[Illustration: THE TABLET OF CONFUCIUS.]
There are now about forty-five foreigners in Ichang, about twenty of
them being missionaries. It is to be supposed that all of these have a
sufficiency of serious occupation. Their amusements consist chiefly in
tennis, shooting, and boating picnics to some of the picturesque ravines
and rock temples off the main river, and to the Ichang gorge. The
British Consul, Mr. Holland, and Mr. Woodruff, the Commissioner of
Customs, throw their spacious gardens open constantly, and by the
exercise of much hospitality do their best to alleviate what, it must be
confessed, is the great monotony of life in a small and isolated foreign
community.
Unless people are students or specialists or hobbyists of some
description, as I think every man and woman should be who goes to live
in so very foreign a country as China, amusements are apt to pall. The
winter evenings are long and dull, and those of summer hot and
mosquito-infested. People soon gauge the mental and social possibilities
of new-comers, and know exactly what their neighbours think on every
subject which can arise, and have sounded their intellectual depths and
_shallows_, and the arrival of a stranger and of the mail boat and the
changes in the customs staff are the chief varieties in life. That this
and several other of these small communities “get on” with little
apparent friction is surely much to their credit. Some say that it is
because they are chiefly masculine!
In summer large vessels can make fast under the bund, but at low water
they anchor in mid-stream, and how to get goods with due regard to
economy from the steamers to the godowns when there is an average
difference of forty feet between the summer and winter levels of the
river is somewhat of a problem. Though in itself only a comparatively
poor town in a mountainous country, the total value of the trade of
Ichang for 1898 amounted to £2,298,437. All goods going west have to be
transhipped at this port, and nearly all goods bound east, so that it is
one of the busiest places on the river. It is a curious fact that, with
enormous coal-fields only three or four days away, the river steamers
1000 miles from the sea are burning Japanese coal!
Ichang is the headquarters of a large Roman mission. Its head, Bishop
Benjamin, with whom I had the pleasure of spending one afternoon, has
been sixteen years in his present position without even a visit to
Shanghai. His large, lofty room, though furnished with all absolute
necessaries, is bare and severe, and contains nothing on which the eye
can pleasurably rest. The Bishop is a most genial elderly man, with much
charm of manner, thick iron-grey hair, and an unclerical moustache. As
we walked down the lanes to the orphanage numbers of Chinese children,
unmistakably delighted to see him, ran up to him, kissing his hands and
struggling for positions in which they could hold on to his robe.
With him I visited the orphanage and hospital, both under the charge of
French and Belgian sisters, comely women with much grace and geniality
of manner, in which the loving, all-embracing maternal instinct finds
its winning expression. The hospital, which is on the ground floor, was
crowded, indeed overcrowded, and, as is usual in Roman hospitals in
China, the doctor and much of the medical treatment were Chinese, the
aid of the foreign doctor (a medical missionary) being called in in
surgical cases.
The orphanage is a large building, with very lofty, well-ventilated
rooms, constructed for four hundred, but there were only eighteen girls
in it, who are instructed in the Christian faith, and in embroidery and
other industrial occupations. The Bishop told me that the Chinese do
not, as formerly, bring orphans and foundlings in numbers to their
keeping; indeed, I gathered that in Ichang at least the day for this is
past. I can only hazard a guess at the reasons. These may be the
anti-foreign spirit which has been laboriously stirred up recently; the
increasing competition of orphanages founded by charitable Chinese; the
partial disappointment with the temporal results of conversion; and
perhaps, above all, the excessive mortality which prevails in these
institutions, very much owing to the fact that the infants are brought
to them in great numbers either dying or suffering from disease, or in
such a feeble and emaciated state that they are unable to assimilate
their food. This mortality seems a matter of thankfulness rather than
regret to the pious sisters, one of whom elsewhere, in speaking to me of
a mortality of 1600 in the late summer, said with emotion, “So many,
thank God, safe.”
Besides the Bishop and his priest secretary there are French and Chinese
fathers, a French professor, and a seminary with eight students, who
study the Chinese classics and philosophy for ten years and theology for
seven. These Roman missionaries appear to rely for the conversion of
adults chiefly on native agency. A Belgian priest, who called on me,
claimed 3000 converts in a region above the gorges, where he had worked
for eleven years. It is well known that one cause of the successes of
the Roman missionaries is the assistance given by them to litigants, and
the pressure brought to bear upon magistrates at the instance of the
French Minister in Peking in legal cases in which his co-religionists
are concerned. This Catholic priest mentioned to me, as among the many
trials of his missionary vocation, the case of a village in which nearly
all the inhabitants placed themselves under Christian instruction with a
view to baptism. These villagers had a suit against another village in
which the possession of a certain piece of land was the point in
dispute. French influence was brought to bear, and they gained their
case, let us believe justly, after which they returned _en masse_ to
their idolatrous practices.
My Belgian visitor, in very vivid language, depicted the sufferings of
educated men from the deprivations of their lives, and specially from
the absolute solitude in which he and others are placed, living in one
room of low-class Chinese houses. He was obviously a man of much culture
and refinement, and felt the whole life acutely—the dark and filthy
houses, the dirty food, the unceasing noisy talk in a foreign tongue,
the lack of real privacy and quiet, the ingratitude of the Chinese, and,
more than all, his own failure to love them. This, though my first, was
not my last glimpse of the anguish of loneliness which these Roman
missionaries endure. “Madness would be the certain result,” my visitor
said, “but for the sustaining power of God, and the certainty that one
is doing His work.”
As I shall not return to the subject of Roman missions, I will refer
briefly to four of the causes, in my opinion, of their undoubtedly
growing unpopularity in SZE CHUAN and elsewhere, in spite of the
assistance given to Christian litigants previously referred to.
1. The exorbitant indemnity, out of all proportion to the losses
sustained, demanded and obtained by M. Gerard, then French Minister at
Peking, for damage done to mission property during the riots in SZE
CHUAN in 1895.
2. The claim of the Roman hierarchy [now conceded] to be placed on a
level in position with the higher mandarins as to the number of their
chair-bearers, etc., and the amount of personal reverence exacted by the
clergy from a people essentially democratic.
3. The non-admission of the heathen into Roman churches during the
celebration of mass and other services, while the secrecy which attends
the administration of the last rites of the Church is undoubtedly
obnoxious to the lower orders among the Chinese, who have no conception
of privacy.
4. The opposite methods pursued by the Protestants of all denominations
since their settlement in the far west a few years ago are doubtless
working against the practices of the Roman missionaries.
On the other hand, it is but just to say that the Chinese appreciate the
celibacy, poverty, and asceticism of the Roman clergy. Every religious
teacher, with one notable exception, who has made his mark in the East
has been an ascetic, and when Orientals begin to seek after
righteousness, rigid self-mortification is the method by which they hope
to attain it.
Wherever I have met with Roman missionaries I have found them living
either like Bishop Benjamin and Bishop Meitel of Seoul, and like the
sisters in Seoul, Peking, Ichang, and elsewhere, in bare, whitewashed
rooms, with just enough tables and wooden chairs for use, or in the
dirt, noise, and innumerable discomforts of native houses of the lower
class, personally attending on the sick, and in China, Chinese in life,
dress, style, and ways, rarely speaking their own language, knowing the
ins and outs of the districts in which they live, their peculiarities of
trade, and their political and social condition. Lonely men, having
broken with friends and all home ties for the furtherance of
Christianity, they live lives of isolation and self-sacrifice, forget
all but the people by whom they are surrounded, identify themselves with
their interests, and have no other expectation but that of living and
dying among them.
It must be admitted that the Chinese contrast this life of
self-surrender with that of large numbers of Protestant missionaries
living in comfortable, and what seem to them wealthy, homes in the
treaty ports, surrounded by as many of the amenities of life as are
usual in the simpler homes in foreign settlements, and with wives,
children, friends, and society, not very often, as in the case of the
Wesleyan missionaries at Hankow, living in the native cities among the
Chinese, and going home with their families for a year or more once in
five or seven years.[22]
While admiring the self-denial and devotion of the Roman missionary
priests, I do not express any opinion as to rival methods and merits,
but only state facts which are forced upon every traveller, and purpose
to return to the subject of Protestant missions later.
CHAPTER X.
THE UPPER YANGTZE
I was very impatient to be off on my western journey, but after the boat
was engaged, the tracking ropes examined by experts at the customs, and
my few stores—tea, curry powder, and rice—had been bought, I had four
days of “hanging on.” The boatmen made various excuses for delay. One
day it was that the _lao-pan_, or master, had not advanced them money
wherewith to buy stores; another was a feast day; a third must be spent
in paying debts or they would be detained; and on the fourth they said
they must visit certain temples and make offerings for the success of
the voyage! The weather was raw, grim, and sunless. I had had a fire day
and night in my room at the customs, and a fireless, draughty boat was a
shivery prospect, but things usually turn out far better than either
prophecies or expectations, and this voyage was no exception.
I was fortunate in being able to take as far as Wan Hsien Mr. Owen
Stevenson, of the China Inland Mission, who had had ten years’
experience in Yunnan, accompanied by Mr. Hicks, a new arrival; and they
engaged the boat for the next stage to Chung-king, which gave Mr. S.
some little hold on the _lao-pan_, who was a mean and shifty person,
coerced into evil ways by a terrible wife, a virago, whose loud tongue
was rarely silent, who had beaten her eldest boy to death a few months
before, and of whom the remaining boy—a child of eight—lived in piteous
terror, lest he should share the same fate. This family of five lived in
the high stern cabin, but were apt to run over into parts of the boat
which should have been _tabu_. The crew consisted of a pilot who is
responsible for the navigation, a steersman, a cook, and sixteen
trackers and rowers.
The boat itself was a small house-boat of about twenty tons,
flat-bottomed, with one tall mast and big sail, a projecting rudder, and
a steering sweep on the bow. Her “passenger accommodation” consisted of
a cabin the width of the boat, with a removable front, opening on the
bow deck, where the sixteen boatmen rowed, smoked, ate, and slept round
a central well in which a preternaturally industrious cook washed bowls,
prepared food, cooked it, and apportioned it all day long, using a
briquette fire. At night uprights and a mat roof were put up, and the
toilers, after enjoying their supper, and their opium pipes at the
stern, rolled themselves in wadded quilts and slept till daybreak.
Passengers usually furnish this cabin, and put up curtains and
photographs, and eat and sit there; but I had no superfluities, and my
“furniture” consisted only of a carrying-chair, in which it was very
delightful to sit and watch the grandeurs and surprises of the river.
But gradually the trackers and the skipper’s family came to over run
this cabin, and I constantly found the virago with her unwelcome baby
girl, or a dirty, half-naked tracker in my chair, and the eight-year-old
boy spent much of his time crouching in a corner out of reach of his
mother’s tongue and fist.
Abaft this were three small cabins, with windows “glazed” with paper,
and a passage down the port side from the stern to the bow, on which I
cannot say they “opened,” for they were open (!), and a partial privacy
was only obtained by making a partition with a curtain. Abaft these was
the steersman’s place, which was also a kitchen and opium den, where my
servant cooked, and where the pilot and most of the crew were to be seen
every night lying on the floor beside their opium lamps, passing into
felicity. Abaft again, at a greater height, the skipper and his family
lived. On the roof there were hen coops and great coils of bamboo rope
for towing.
It was an old boat, and the owner was not a man of substance. The paper
on the windows was torn away; the window-frame of the cabin in which I
slept, ate, and carried on my various occupations, had fallen out, the
cracks in the partitions were half an inch wide; and as for many days
the sun seldom shone and the mercury hung between 38° and 43°, and
hugging a charcoal brazier was the only method of getting warm, and that
a dubious one, the earliest weeks were a chilly period.
On the afternoon of January 30th I embarked from the customs pontoon
much exhilarated by the prospect before me, but we only crossed the
river and lay all night in a tremendous noise among a number of big
junks, the yells of the skipper’s baby being heard above the din. This
man excused this last delay in starting by sending word from the shore
that he was waiting for the mandarin’s permit, and would be ready to
leave on the following daybreak.
I was up at daybreak not to lose anything, but hour after hour passed,
and no _lao-pan_ appeared, and at ten we started without him to meet him
on the bank a few miles higher, when there was a tremendous row between
him and the men. We were then in what looked like a mountain lake. No
outlet was visible; mountains rose clear and grim against a dull grey
sky. Snowflakes fell sparsely and gently in a perfectly still
atmosphere. We cast off from the shore; the oars were plied to a wild
chorus; what looked like a cleft in the rock appeared, and making an
abrupt turn round a high rocky point in all the thrill of novelty and
expectation, we were in the Ichang Gorge, the first and one of the
grandest of those gigantic clefts through which the Great River, at
times a mile in breadth, there compressed into a limit of from 400 to
150 yards, has carved a passage through the mountains.
The change from a lake-like stretch, with its light and movement, to a
dark and narrow gorge black with the shadows of nearly perpendicular
limestone cliffs broken up into buttresses and fantastic towers of
curiously splintered and weathered rock, culminating in the “Pillar of
Heaven,” a limestone pinnacle rising sheer from the water to a height of
1800 feet, is so rapid as to bewilder the senses. The expression “_lost_
in admiration” is a literally correct one. At once I saw the reason why
the best descriptions, which are those of Captain Blakiston and Mr. A.
Little, have a certain amount of “fuzziness,” and fail to convey a
definite picture.
[Illustration: ENTRANCE TO ICHANG GORGE.]
With a strong, fair wind our sail was set; the creak and swish of the
oars was exchanged for the low music of the river as it parted under our
prow; and the deep water (from fifty to a hundred feet), of a striking
bottle-green colour, was unbroken by a swirl or ripple, and slid past in
a grand, full volume. The stillness was profound, enlivened only as some
big junk with lowered mast glided past us at great speed, the fifty or
sixty men at the sweeps raising a wild chant in keeping with the scene.
Scuds of snow, wild, white clouds whirling round pinnacles, and desolate
snow-clothed mountains, apparently blocking further progress, added to
the enchantment. Crevices in the rocks were full of maidenhair fern, and
on many a narrow ledge clustered in profusion a delicate mauve primula,
unabashed by the grandeur and the gloom. Streams tumbled over ledges at
heights of 1000 feet. There are cliffs of extraordinary honeycombed
rock, possibly the remains of the “potholes” of ages since, rock carved
by the action of water and weather into shrines with pillared fronts,
grottoes with quaint embellishments—gigantic old women gossiping
together in big hats—colossal abutments, huge rock needles after the
manner of Quiraing, while groups of stalactites constantly occur as
straight and thick as small pines, supporting rock canopies festooned
with maidenhair. Higher yet, surmounting rock ramparts 2000 feet high,
are irregular battlemented walls of rock, perhaps twenty feet thick, and
everywhere above and around are lofty summits sprinkled with pines, on
which the snow lay in powder only, and “the snow clouds rolling dun”
added to the sublimity of the scenery.
It was always changing, too. If it were possible to be surfeited with
turrets, battlements, and cathedral spires, and to weary of rock
phantasies, the work of water, of solitudes and silences, and of the
majestic dark green flow of the Great River, there were besides lateral
clefts, each with its wall-sided torrent, with an occasional platform
green with wheat, on which a brown-roofed village nestled among fruit
trees, or a mountain, bisected by a chasm, looking ready to fall into
the river, as some have already done, breaking up into piles of huge
angular boulders, over which even the goat-footed trackers cannot climb.
Then, wherever the cliffs are less absolutely perpendicular, there are
minute platforms partially sustaining houses with their backs burrowing
into the rock, and their fronts extended on beams fixed in the cliff,
accessible only by bolts driven into the rock, where the small children
are tied to posts to prevent them from falling over, and above, below,
and around these dwellings are patches of careful culture, some of them
_not larger than a bath towel_, to which the cultivators lower
themselves with ropes, and there are small openings occasionally, where
deep-eaved houses cluster on the flat tops of rocky spurs among the
exquisite plumage of groves of the golden and green bamboo, among
oranges and pommeloes with their shining greenery, and straight-stemmed
palms with their great fan-like leaves. Already in these sheltered
places mauve primulas were blooming amidst a profusion of maidenhair,
and withered clusters and tresses showed what the glory of the spring
had been and was yet to be when the skirts of these spurs would be
aflame with azaleas, and clematis, and great white and yellow roses, and
all the wealth of flowers and trailers of which these were only the
vestiges.
Another feature was boats large and small, and junks, some laboriously
tracked or rowed like my own, when the wind failed, against the powerful
stream, or descending, keeping the necessary steerage headway by crowds
of standing men on the low deck, facing forwards, vigorously working
great sweeps or _yulows_, five or ten at each, the gorge echoing all
along its length to the rise and fall of the wild chants to which the
rowers keep time and which are only endurable when softened by distance.
After some hours of this region of magic and mystery, near sunset we
emerged into open water, with broken picturesque shores, and at dusk
tied up in a pebbly bay with glorious views of mountain and woodland,
not far from the beautiful village of Nan-to, and the “needle” or
“pillar” of heaven, well known to the dwellers in Ichang. The Ichang
gorge is about twelve miles long; the Niu-kan, grander yet, about three;
the Mitan about three and a half; the Wushan about twenty; and the
Feng-hsiang, or “Wind-Box,” the last of the great gorges, about four.
These are the great gorges.
I halted for Sunday in this lovely bay, an arrangement much approved of
by the trackers, who employed the holiday in washing their clothes,
smoking a double quantity of opium, and making a distracting noise,
aggravated by the ceaseless yells of the boat baby, yells of an
objectionable heredity and undisciplined naughtiness, which at first
imposed on my ignorant sympathies. Nevertheless I luxuriated in the
quiet which one can obtain when a babel is unintelligible.
[Illustration: THE AUTHOR’S BOAT.]
In the afternoon the air was keen and bracing, the sky very blue, and
the sunshine, after three weeks of gloom, had the charm of novelty. By
the narrowest of paths I climbed a cleft down which a crystal rivulet
fell in leaps, pausing to rest now and then in deep pools fringed with a
profuse growth of maidenhair. Minute plots for rice rose in steps along
it; its banks were masses of ferns, roses, and clematis, the beautiful
“Connecticut running fern” being as common as is the _Filix mas_ with
us. Higher rose the steep path; more glorious were the mountain views,
more marvellous the forest of spires and pinnacles, more graceful the
slender-stemmed palms, finer the contorted _Pinus sinensis_, more lush
the dense foliage, bluer the sky above—not the China we picture to
ourselves, of water, quaint bridges, curled roofs, and flat, formal
gardens, but a Chinese Switzerland, sub-tropical, an intoxication, a
dream!
In such scenery it was appropriate to come upon a deep-eaved _châlet_ of
brown wood, with surroundings, models of cleanliness, shady with
magnificent bamboo and orange groves, through which were seen far below
deep ravines and picturesque brown villages, and the broken sparkle of
the Great River, with snowy mountains on the other side, and from the
junks on its broad breast the rowers’ chant floated up harmoniously, and
from the farmhouse, where the people seemed to be leading a rural,
domestic life with guests about them, a man came out speaking politely,
and hauled off a fierce dog, decidedly hostile to foreigners.
CHAPTER XI.
RAPIDS OF THE UPPER YANGTZE
On inquiring of Mr. Endacott, at Ichang, his ideas of occupation on the
upward voyage, his reply was, “People have enough to do looking after
their lives.” Certainly the perils of the rapids are great, and few
people of whom I have heard have escaped without risks to life and loss
or damage to property, either, like Consul Gardner, finding their boats
disappear from under them, or like a missionary, who, coming down with
his wife’s coffin, came to grief, the coffin taking a lonely and ghastly
voyage to a point far below, or like many others whom I met who reached
their destinations minus their possessions in whole or in part. Signs of
disaster abounded. Above and below every rapid, junkmen were encamped on
shore under the mats of their junks, and the shore was spread with
cotton drying. There were masts above water, derelicts partially
submerged in quiet reaches, or on some sandy beach being repaired, and
gaunt skeletons lay here and there on the rocks which had proved fatal
to them. The danger signal is to be seen above and below all the worst
rapids in the shape of lifeboats, painted a brilliant red and inscribed
with characters in white: showy things, as buoyant as corks, sitting on
the raging water with the vexatious complacency of ducks, or darting
into the turmoil of scud and foam where the confusion is at its worst,
and there poising themselves with the calm fearlessness of a perfect
knowledge of every rock and eddy.
[Illustration: BED OF THE YANGTZE IN WINTER, TA-TAN RAPID.]
I have found that many of the deterrent perils which are arrayed before
the eyes of travellers about to begin a journey are greatly exaggerated,
and often vanish altogether. Not so the perils of the Yangtze. They
fully warrant the worst descriptions which have been given of them. The
risks are many and serious, and cannot be provided against by any
forethought. The slightest error in judging of distance on the part of
the pilot, any hampering of the bow-sweep, a tow-rope breaking, a
submerged boulder changing its place, and many other possibilities, and
life and property are at the mercy of a raging flood, tearing downwards
at the rate of from seven to eleven miles an hour. I have no personal
perils to narrate. A rock twice knocked a hole in the bottom which took
a day to repair, and in a collision our bow-sweep was fractured, which
led to a severe quarrel lasting half a day; this was all. I never became
used to the rapids, and always felt nervous at the foot of each, and
preferred the risk of fracturing my limbs among the great boulders and
shining rock faces of the shores to spending hours in a turmoil,
watching the fraying of the tow-ropes.
Before starting my boat’s crew made offerings and vows at their
favourite temples, and on the first evening they slew a fowl as an
offering to the river god, and smeared its blood over the bow-sweep and
the fore part of the boat. My preparations were to pack my plates,
films, and general photographic outfit, journals, a few necessaries, and
a few things of fictitious value, in a waterproof bag, to be carried by
my servant, along with my camera, at each rapid where we landed.
The night at Lao-min-tze was too cold for sleep, and before dawn I heard
the wild chant of the boatmen as great cargo boats, with from fifty to
ninety rowers, swept down the stream. We untied at daylight, and, after
passing the lovely village and valley of Nan-to, admired and wondered
all day. It was one long glory and sublimity. A friend lately asked me
if I whiled away the time by “walking on the river banks,” thinking,
doubtless, of the level towing paths of the meadows of the Thames and
Ouse. The accompanying illustration shows the banks of the Yangtze below
Wan Hsien at their best, and the pleasant possibilities for strolling!
The river-bed, there forty feet below its summer level, is an area of
heaped, contorted rock-fragments, sharp-edged, through which one or more
swirling streams or violent rapids pursue their course, the volume of
water, even at that season, being tremendous. At its highest level these
upper waters are practically non-navigable. Cliffs, mountain spurs, and
noble mountains rise from this chaotic river-bed, and every sharp turn
reveals some new beauty. The dark green pine is but a foil to the
feathery foliage of the golden bamboo on the steep, terraced sides of
tumbled heights; pleasant brown farmhouses are half seen among orange
groves and orchards; grand temples, with noble specimens of the _Ficus
religiosa_ in their grounds, lighten hill and glen sides with their
walls of imperial red. Then suddenly the scene changes into one of
Tibetan grandeur and savagery, and the mountains approach the river in
stupendous precipices, walling in almost fathomless water. We tied up
the second night in the last crimson and violet of the sunset, where the
river narrowed and progress looked impossible, and crags and pinnacles,
snow-covered, rose above the dark precipices.
On that afternoon a red lifeboat suggested the first rapid, the Ta-tan,
rather a _chipa_ or race than a rapid, though I believe sufficiently
perilous at half high water. I landed and scrambled up to the top for a
three hours’ wait, while three junks, each dragged up by fifty men, came
up before mine, boats having to take their turn without favour. Even
that ascent was an anxious sight, for sometimes the boat hung, ofttimes
slipped back, and several times it looked doubtful whether the crowd of
men attached to the tow-rope could get her up at all. This was the first
sight of the trackers’ villages, which are a marked feature of the
Yangtze. Each boat carries enough men to pull her up against the strong
stream, but at a rapid she needs many more, and during the navigation
season coolies from long distances migrate to the river and put up mat
huts as close to it as possible, to which dealers in food, tobacco,
_samshu_, and opium at once gravitate, along with sellers of bamboo
tow-ropes. Nor are rough amusements wanting. Rough, dirty, noisy, these
temporary settlements are. Their population is from forty or fifty to
over 400 men. When the river rises the huts are removed, and the coolies
return to other avocations. At the Hsin-tan rapid my little boat
required seventy men, and some of the big junks took on 300 in addition
to their crews of 120.
The following day, after being hauled up the Kwa-tung rapid and enjoying
superb scenery for some hours, a turn in the river revealed walls of
perpendicular rock rising to a colossal height, estimated at from 1000
to 2000 feet, the stupendous chasm of the Niu-kan gorge, to my thinking
the grandest and most imposing of all, though a short one, and the same
afternoon, in exquisitely brilliant sunshine, we arrived at the foot of
the Hsin-tan rapid, then at its worst.
[Illustration: THE HSIN-TAN.]
This Hsin-tan in winter is the great bugbear of the Yangtze, the crux of
forthcoming steam navigation, a waterfall with a boiling cataract below,
a thing of awe and majesty, where the risks, turmoil, bargaining, and
noise of the Upper River are centred. This great obstacle, which I
wonder that any man even thought of surmounting, was formed about two
hundred and fifty years ago by the descent of a rocky mountain-side into
the river. It consists of what are three definite falls in the
winter-time, the first caused by a great fan-shaped mass of big boulders
deposited malignantly by a small stream which enters on the left bank,
and the two others by great barriers of rock which lie athwart the
river, above the higher of which, as is seen in the illustration, is a
stretch of deep, calm water in peaceful contrast—the Ping-shu gorge. The
cataracts extend for over a mile, and the fall is estimated at twenty
feet.
Above the Niu-kan gorge the mountains open out, and where their sides
are broken up into spurs, and where the spurs are most picturesque, the
romantic villages of Hsin-tan and Yao-tsai are scattered on carefully
terraced heights and bold, rocky projections, villages with good houses
and fine temples, and a pagoda among oranges and loquats. Many of the
houses have such handsome curved roofs that one can scarcely tell which
is house and which is temple, all looking as if some of the best bits of
the shores of Como had been dropped down in HUPEH.
Hsin-tan is a wild and beautiful village, and has an air of prosperity.
Many junk owners have retired there to spend their days, and the
comparative cleanliness and good repair are quite striking. One
orange-embowered village on a spur has a temple with a pagoda built out
over the edge of the cliff, without any obvious support. A village which
might claim to be a town, at a height of fully 400 feet, is not only
piled up on terraces, but the houses are built out from the cliff on
timbers, and the flights of steps leading from terrace to terrace are so
steep that I made no attempt to climb them. The colonnades in the street
of shops and eating-houses which projects over the cliff reminded me of
Varenna; indeed, there was a suggestion of Italy throughout, under an
Italian sky.
I sat on a ledge for two hours, every minute expecting to see my boat
move up to the foot of the cataract, but she was immovable. Then we went
into a low restaurant, and got some fourth-class Chinese food, and after
long bargaining three live fowls and three eggs. Crowds, more curious
than rude, pressed upon us, everywhere choking up the balconies and
entrances of the eating-house, and asking no end of questions. The men
asserted, as they did everywhere on the river, that with my binoculars
and camera I could see the treasures of the mountains, the gold,
precious stones, and golden cocks which lie deep down in the earth; that
I kept a black devil in the camera, and that I liberated him at night,
and that he dug up the golden cocks, and that the reason why my boat was
low in the water was that it was ballasted with these auriferous fowls,
and with the treasures of the hills! They further said that “foreign
devils” with blue and grey eyes could see three feet into the earth, and
that I had been looking for the root which transmutes the base metals
into gold, and this, though according to them I had the treasures of the
hills at my disposal! They were quite good-natured, however.
The whole of a brilliant afternoon was spent on that height, which looks
down on the deep-water channel by which big cargo boats ascend the
rapids, small junks and native house-boats like mine taking a channel on
the south side. During four hours, only two junks, which had partially
discharged their cargoes, effected the ascent, though each of them was
dragged up by 400 men. One big junk, after getting half-way up in three
hours, jibbed, and though the trackers were stimulated by gongs and
drums beaten frantically, she slowly slipped back to the point from
which she started, and was there two days afterwards.
At sunset, taking a boat across the still, strong water above the fall,
after having a desperate scramble over boulders of great size, we
reached my boat, which was then moored at the side of the cataract in an
eddy below the opposite village. The _lao-pan_ said we should go up at
daylight; and so we did, but it was the daylight of the third morning
from that night, and I had ample opportunities for studying the Hsin-tan
and its ways.
Miserable nights they were. It was as bad as being in a rough sea, for
we were in the swell of the cataract and within the sound of its swish
and roar. The boat rolled and pitched; the great rudder creaked and
banged; we thumped our neighbours, and they thumped us; there were
unholy sounds of tom-toms, the weather relapsed, the wind howled, and
above all the angry yells of the boat baby were heard. The splash of a
“sea” came in at my open window and deluged my camp bed, and it was very
cold.
The next two days were disagreeable, even in such majestic and exciting
surroundings. The boatmen turned us and our servants out at 10 a.m., and
we stood about and sat on the great boulders on the bleak mountain-side
in a bitterly cold, sunless wind each day till nearly five, deluded into
the belief that our boat would move. A repulsive and ceaseless crowd of
men and boys stood above, below, and behind us, though our position was
strategically chosen. Mud was thrown and stuck; foul and bad names were
used all day by successive crowds. I am hardened to most things, but the
odour of that crowd made me uncomfortable. More than 1200 trackers, men
and boys, notoriously the roughest class in China, were living in mat
huts on the hillside, with all their foul and ofttimes vicious
accessories. The crowds were coarse and brutal. Could these people ever
have come “trailing clouds of glory”? Were they made in the image of
God? Have we “all one Father”? I asked myself.
A glorious sight the Hsin-tan is as seen from our point of vantage,
half-way up the last cataract, a hill of raging water with a white
waterfall at the top, sharp, black rocks pushing their vicious heads
through the foam, and above, absolute calm. I never saw such exciting
water scenes—the wild rush of the cataract; the great junks hauled up
the channel on the north side by 400 men each, hanging trembling in the
surges, or, as in one case, from a tow-rope breaking, spinning down the
cataract at tremendous speed into frightful perils; while others, after
a last tremendous effort, entered into the peace of the upper waters.
Then there were big junks with masts lashed on their sides, bound
downwards, and their passage was more exciting than all else. They come
broadside on down the smooth slope of water above, then make the leap
bow on, fifty, eighty, even a hundred rowers at the oars and _yulows_,
standing facing forwards, and with shrieks and yells pulling for their
lives. The plunge comes; the bow and fore part of the deck are lost in
foam and spray, emerging but to be lost again as they flash by, then
turning round and round, mere playthings of the cataract, but by skill
and effort got bow on again in time to take the lesser rapid below. It
is a sublime sight. _Wupans_ and _sampans_, making the same plunge, were
lost sight of altogether in clouds of foam and spray, but appeared
again. Red lifeboats, with their smart turbaned crews, dodged in the
eddies trim and alert, crowds of half-naked trackers, struggling over
the boulders with their 1200 feet of tow-rope, dragged, yelled, and
chanted, and from each wild shore the mountains rose black and gaunt
into a cold, grey sky.
At this great cataract pilots are necessary. They are competent and
respectable, licensed by the authorities, and their high charges, half a
dollar for the half-hour which my small boat occupied in going up the
fall, and a dollar for the five minutes taken by a big junk on the
descent, enable them to live comfortably, and many of the pretty
whitewashed houses of Hsin-tan in the dense shade of orange groves are
theirs. They deserve high pay, for it is a most perilous business,
involving remarkable nerve and sleight of eye, for a single turn too
much or too little of the great bow-sweep, and all would be lost. Every
junk which took the plunge over the rock barrier into the furious
billows of the cataract below looked bound for destruction. A curious
functionary came on board my boat, a well-dressed man carrying a white
flag, on which was written, “Powers of the waters, give a lucky star for
the journey.” He stood well forward, waving this flag regularly during
the ascent to propitiate the river deities, and the cook threw rice on
the billows with the same object. The pilot was a quiet, well-dressed
man, giving orders by signals which were promptly obeyed. Indeed, the
strict discipline to which these wild boatmen submit in perilous places
is remarkable. The _lao-pan_ trusted neither his life nor his money to
the boat, and he even brought the less valuable possessions of wife and
children on shore.
My boat had the twenty-fifth turn, and on the third day of detention she
went up with seventy men at the ropes. It was an anxious half-hour of
watching from the rocks, but there was no disaster, and I was glad to
escape from the brutal crowd, as foul in language as in person, to the
quiet of my cabin and the twilight stillness of the Ping-shu gorge. The
whole ascent of the Hsin-tan rapids took my boat five hours and
forty-five minutes.
[Illustration: PING-SHU GORGE, HSIN-TAN.]
No description can convey any idea of the noise and turmoil of the
Hsin-tan. I realised it best by my hearing being affected for some days
afterwards. The tremendous crash and roar of the cataract, above which
the yells and shouts of hundreds of straining trackers are heard,
mingled with the ceaseless beating of drums and gongs, some as signals,
others to frighten evil spirits, make up a pandemonium which can never
be forgotten.
CHAPTER XII.
RAPIDS AND TRACKERS
A strong, fair wind took us swiftly and silently up the gorge of the
“Military Code and the Precious Blade,” in which the water is said to be
1200 feet deep (?), and with some tracking up minor rapids, and some
working round corners with poles armed with steel hooks which are
inserted into the crevices of the rocks, we passed through the sublime
Mitan gorge into a comparatively open reach abounding in vicious-looking
reefs and rocks, among very rocky mountains, villages on heights, and
superb temples on crags, and at sunset made fast below the picturesque
and nobly situated town of Kueichow, the first walled city on the Upper
Yangtze.
The Upper Yangtze is remarkable for the picturesque beauty of its cities
at a distance, and their situations, almost invariably on irregular
heights, backed by mountains, and with fine gardens and trees within
their crenelated stone walls, which follow the contour of the site
invariably, with one or more lofty pagodas denoting the approach, and
with _yamen_ and temple roofs dominating the mass of houses are very
imposing.
One is only slowly convinced by experience that the interiors are not
worth investigating. Dangerous reefs run out from below the walls of
Kueichow, and as the river, if not an actual rapid, was at that time at
least a _chipa_, it was not surprising not to find a single boat or junk
there. Very few people came to our moorings, and the place looked dead.
The next day we ascended one of the worst rapids, the Yeh-tan, of evil
fame at certain seasons, the Niu-kau-tan, nearly as bad, the
Heng-liang-tze, a minor rapid, and many _chipa_, only making ten miles
in eleven hours. At times the cliffs and rocks were quite impracticable
for people in European shoes, and I had reluctantly to stay in the boat
during ascents, but the _lao-pan_ declined to carry passengers up the
dreaded Yeh-tan.
[Illustration: THE MITAN GORGE.]
Above Kueichow there is a comparatively open reach with steep hills 1000
feet high, cultivated in patches to their summits, then tinged with
green, small villages with wooded surroundings occurring frequently.
Though not called a gorge, even that part of the Yangtze has high cliffs
with lateral openings, and there are numbers of small coal “workings” in
the hills, mere holes, shored up with timber, about three feet high, out
of which the glass showed strings of women and children creeping, with
baskets of coal dust on their backs. From this reach onwards the people
make “patent fuel” by mixing the coal dust with loam and clay and
forming it into small cakes. The boatmen made great use of it from that
point, and added clouds of smoke to the malodorousness of their cooking.
Again I admired the resourceful energy which has surmounted the
difficulties of the rapids. Narrow, steep flights of steps are in many
places cut in the rock to facilitate tracking, as well as rock paths a
foot or so wide, some only fifteen or twenty feet above the river,
others at a giddy height on which the trackers looked no bigger than
flies. The reader must bear in mind that all difficulties of getting up
and down are largely increased by the river varying in height forty,
fifty, and even sixty feet at different seasons, and there are water
lines even seventy feet above the winter level. When I came down many of
these paths and stairs were submerged several feet. On all of these, and
indeed for much of the upward journey, the life of the tracker is in
continual peril from losing his foothold owing to the slipperiness of
the rock after rain, and from being dragged over and drowned by the
backward tendencies of a heavy junk tugging at the end of 1200 feet of a
heavy bamboo hawser as thick as an arm.
The river at low water is thoroughly vicious above Kuei, and the pilot’s
task is a severe one, even before reaching the Yeh-tan. At low water
this is not so bad as the Hsin-tan; still, the hill of furious breakers
with a smooth, narrow channel in the centre and a fierce whirlpool at
the foot looked awful enough. The whole shore above the boulders, and
indeed upon them, is covered with the mat huts of trackers and those who
supply boats with provisions and bamboo ropes. A great bank covered with
frightful boulders projects from the north shore, narrowing the river to
a width of 150 yards. Mr. A. J. Little estimates the rush of the current
round the point of that bank at from eight to ten knots an hour. Forty
big cargo junks lay below it waiting their turn to ascend; and a
thousand trackers were filling the air with their yells, while signal
drums and gongs added to the din.
My attention was occupied by a big junk dragged by 300 men, which in two
hours made hardly perceptible progress, slipping back constantly, though
the drums were frantically beaten and the gangers rushed madly along the
lines of struggling trackers, bringing their bamboo whips down on them
with more sound than force. Suddenly the junk shivered, both tow-ropes
snapped, the lines of trackers went down on their faces, and in a moment
the big craft was spinning down the rapid; and before she could be
recovered by the bow-sweep she flew up into the air as if she had
exploded, a mass of spars and planks with heads bobbing about in the
breakers. Quick as thought the red lifeboats were on the spot; and if
the drowning wretches as they scrambled over the gunwales did not bless
this most efficient of the charities of China, I did most heartily, for
of the fourteen or fifteen souls on board all were saved but three. This
was one of two fatal disasters that I saw on the Yangtze, but, to judge
from the enormous quantity of cotton drying at the Yeh-tan and the
timbers wedged among the rocks, many a junk must have had a hole knocked
in her bottom. Our own ascent, which took three hours, was successfully
made.
I had then had this boat for my home for a week, and various
disagreeables grew apace. The _lao-pan_, the virago’s old husband, a
small, fearfully lean man, with the leanest face I ever saw, just like
very old, yellow, mildewed parchment strained over bones, sunken eyes,
no teeth, and in the bitterly cold weather clad only in an old blue
cotton garment, always blowing aside to show his emaciated form, was
craftiness, greed, and avarice personified. Though “sair hodden doun” by
his vigorous wife, he was capable of an attempt to repudiate his
contract. He bargained and battled with the trackers at the rapids for
hours to save a few _cash_, though by the delay he lost more than he
saved; he ground the boatmen down, and gave them inferior rice; he would
not spend a few _cash_ on patching his ragged sail; and at sunset near
Kueichow he put in mysteriously to a creek where he mysteriously met a
man with two big sacks, the contents of which were transferred with much
mystery and secrecy to the shallow hold in which our luggage was kept.
It turned out to be an investment in spurious _cash_, on which, if he
got it safely to SZE CHUAN, he might make a puny profit; and for this he
ran the risk, relying on a boat carrying foreigners not being searched
at Kuei Fu. His hawk-like face was a study of pure avarice.
[Illustration: TEMPLE NEAR KUEICHOW.]
The _tai-kung_ was a splendid fellow till he collapsed towards evening
with the pangs of the opium craving. With his eyes fixed on the perils
ahead, he never left the great bow-sweep except for the three meals a
day, gave his orders tersely and quietly, and was master of the crew and
the lean _lao-pan_. The trackers, who were troublesome from the first,
broke out into rebellion, using violent language, forcing themselves
into the front room, refusing to let us land (a breach of contract), and
being insolent. Some of them looked too low to be human, just such men
as would wreck and loot foreigners’ houses with violence. Mr. Stevenson
was powerless with them, I think because they mistook his quietness and
perfect self-control for weakness. They were absolutely masters, and
decided about everything with and without motive. In that week I never
saw a kind or good trait of character in them, and they misused a frail
old man who was working his passage up. New faces appeared daily, till
the number on board rose from sixteen to thirty-four (another breach of
contract), but I could not grudge the _lao-pan_ the few dollars he made
by it.
The trackers would not take the trouble to put a plank for me to land
by, which compelled me to land on a pole, and on one day this spar
turned over, and I fell into the water between the boat and the shore,
being extricated to live in wet clothes for the day in a windy
temperature of 38°. I must add, however, that by the end of three weeks
they became considerably humanised, so that I was able to show them my
photographs taken on the Yangtze. They recognised their own boat with
yells. They said pictures could only be seen with one eye, so they used
one hand for holding down one eyelid and made a tube of the other. I
told them not to touch, and they actually obeyed! To the end I landed
over the swift water on a pole, but latterly they held a bamboo for a
rail and gave me a rough haul when I got in!
Poor fellows! I learned to pity them very much. Their ignorance and
superstitions keep them in dread and terror of they know not what. They
are so piteously poor, and work so hard even to keep body and soul
together, and when the twelve hours day of dragging and risk is done
there is nothing for them on a winter voyage on the bitterly cold nights
but sleeping out of doors literally on a “plank bed.” They are rough and
brutal, yet I admit, and that not reluctantly, that not one of them was
ever drunk, that they worked hard, and that the cambric curtain which
was my only partition from the passage was never pulled aside.
After the great Yeh-tan, with its crowds and excitements, we ascended
various ugly rapids and had some minor disasters. The big junks are
attended by fine, smart tenders, in which they land and re-embark their
trackers, an operation which may be necessary thirty times a day, but my
small boat made up to the rocks for this purpose, the _lao-pan_ being
too penurious to spend two or three _cash_ in hiring the punts which are
available. We were landing the trackers at the foot of the “Cross Beam”
rapid when a heavy cargo boat, unmanageable in the strong wind, came
upon us and forced the bow-sweep, which projected twenty feet over the
bow, among the rocks, where it snapped short off, the side hamper of the
two boats at the same time locking them in an unwilling embrace.
Both crews seized the iron-spiked bamboos used for poling, and with
fearful yells and execrations and every sign of mad rage began a free
fight, but Mr. Stevenson succeeded in preventing actual bloodshed, and
after a delay of some hours the other boat repaired our steering spar
for the time. A Chinese fight is apt to be nothing more than “much cry.”
But our men insisted on going to law at the first convenient
opportunity, so for two or three days we were always following that
junk, hoping to be avenged on her at Kuei Fu.
The following day was decidedly what the Chinese call an “unlucky day.”
In China everything is ruled by a rigid etiquette. There are four things
to be attended to on getting into a cart, and rigid rules govern the
getting into a chair or boat. It is not only that one is regarded as an
unmannerly boor for breaking them, but one draws down the vengeance of
gods and demons. The day before I came off from the shore in a punt, and
just as I was getting into my own boat, and had one foot on her and the
other on the punt, the swift current carried the punt away, and in the
scramble which followed I violated one of these rules.
The first thing which happened was that the _lao-pan’s_ three-year-old
daughter fell overboard, and was carried fast away by the current. The
tender of a junk was being towed up astern of us, and a tracker, a
strong swimmer, jumped over, and after a hard struggle saved the child
and wrapped her in the clothes he had thrown off, warm with his vital
warmth, going naked himself in the biting air. The virago went into one
of those paroxysms which are common among the Chinese, and in which they
occasionally die. She stamped, jumped, beat everyone within reach,
execrated, raved, and foamed at the mouth.
Scarcely had this excitement subsided, when as we were sailing up with a
stiff breeze we struck on a rock, knocking two holes in the bottom of
the boat, and, as she began to fill, she was run ashore on a sandy
beach, and the rest of the day was spent in repairs. Miserable repairs
they were, owing to the stinginess of the _lao-pan_, and consisted
chiefly in ramming cotton wool and tallow into the holes and coating the
mixture with clay. After this, before she could be properly repaired, as
it was the Chinese New Year holidays, it took four men baling night and
day for forty-eight hours to keep the leakage down, and not only that,
but as the deck on which the crew slept had to be taken up, I had to
admit the trackers with their vermin and opium pipes into the “front
room” next to mine.
In this leaky condition we went up a very severe rapid, which took us
four hours of desperate dragging. Sitting shivering for that time on a
big boulder, I saw one of the many vicissitudes to be encountered in
ascending the Great River. A great cargo junk was being hauled up with
two hawsers, over 200 trackers, and the usual enormous din, the beating
of drums and gongs, the clashing of cymbals, and the incessant letting
off of crackers to intimidate the spirit of the rapid, when both ropes
snapped, the trackers fell on their faces, and four hours’ labour was
lost, for in a flash the junk was at the foot of the rapid, and the last
sight I had of her was far below twirling round in a whirlpool with a
red lifeboat in attendance.
CHAPTER XIII.
LIFE ON THE UPPER YANGTZE
At this point, before entering on the empire province of SZE CHUAN, it
is desirable to give a few facts and impressions regarding life on the
Upper Yangtze, my experiences of which extended over five weeks
altogether.
The Upper River, with all its peculiarities, lies above Ichang. It must
never be forgotten that it is the _sole_ highway for the vast commerce
of the richest province of the Chinese Empire, with an area about the
size of that of France, and a population estimated at from 50,000,000 to
70,000,000. The nature and risks of this highway may be gathered from
these and other descriptions of it. Except in the gorges and some few
quiet intervals, it is a series of rapids and races, which at present
are only surmounted by man force. Mr. A. J. Little’s success in 1898 in
getting a large steam launch up to Chungking proves that a steamer can
ascend, but not that steam navigation can be made commercially
profitable, or that if it were it would be the ruin of junk navigation.
A large up-river junk is from 80 to 120 feet long, from nine to twelve
broad, and from 40 to over 100 tons burden.
They are all alike in that they have low square bows, lofty sterns, flat
bottoms, and single masts from thirty to forty feet high, carrying huge
oblong sails, with which they can only sail with the wind aft. They are
very frequently built at Wan of a cypress which abounds in its
neighbourhood, and being stained with orpiment and oiled over that with
the oil procured from the _Aleurites cordata_, they look like varnished
pine, and have a very trim as well as picturesque appearance. The
planking is about an inch thick. The holds are only from three to seven
feet deep. A junk to carry fifty tons of goods can be built at Wan
complete for £125, and a first-class junk to carry 100 tons or more for
£200, about 2500 strings of _cash_. The holds are in compartments. The
forward part is uncovered in the daytime, and the cook does his
unceasing work in a well in the middle with a clay stove in it. At night
a framework covered with bamboo mats is erected, under which the crew
sleep. The high stern cabin is usually occupied by the _lao-pan_ and his
family. A junk of 120 tons carries a crew of 120 men.
In passage junks the open space forward is diminished as much as
possible, most of the deck being housed over, but in cargo junks less
than half is covered. In the big junks a sponson runs along each side,
which is used both for poling and communication. Junks carry a spare
mast and sweeps lashed outside. The helmsman stands inside, with his
head and shoulders protected by a raised “wheelhouse,” in which he works
with much skill and infinite patience a very long and clumsy tiller
attached to a huge rudder, which often projects four feet from the
stern. The roof of the housed portion is used for the monstrous coils of
bamboo rope, ofttimes three inches in diameter and 1200 feet in length,
which are used in tracking, and are coiled and uncoiled continually.
These ropes only last one voyage.
The lofty stern is frequently much decorated, and in all cases has a
fascinating picturesqueness. Its square windows are of ground
oyster-shell or paper, or even of stained glass. Occasionally it has a
carved gallery with flowering plants in pots. Altogether a SZE CHUAN
junk is an ingenious and noble construction, and the owners take great
pride in them. Their stately appearance and apparently large size are
deceptive as to their carrying capacity, which is small. I believe that
no junk on the Upper Yangtze draws over seven feet, which necessarily
gives a shallow hold, and the freeboard is of startling scantiness. The
large tenders smartly handled, which land and re-embark the trackers,
are really big _sampans_, and often have a curious rig—two masts like
sheers, forty feet high amidships, with the width of the deck between
them, the spar which carries the sail running on both.
We call the junks “lumbering craft,” but no craft anywhere are more
skilfully handled; none run such risks; no crews are better disciplined
to act together and at a second’s notice in cases of emergency; no men
work so desperately hard on such small pay and with such poor food; and
it remains to be seen if vessels of any other build and management can
supplant them in the carrying trade of the Upper Yangtze.
Large fortunes are not made in junks; the losses are too heavy. But,
judging from the comfortable houses of retired junk owners in many a
pleasant place, a moderate competence for old age is in sight of all
except the very unlucky. The wife and family usually live on board, and
these wives seem to have a speciality of strident and powerful voices,
which are heard above the roar of the rapids and the yells of the crews.
As to the risks, the Chinese say that one junk in twenty is annually
lost, and one in ten is stranded. Consul Bourne[23] states that
one-tenth of the foreign goods shipped at Ichang arrives damaged by
water, and Mr. A. J. Little estimates the loss of junks and merchandise
since the formation of the Hing-lung-t’an, or “Glorious Rapid,” in 1896
as eight per cent.[24] Consul Bourne, writing in December, 1896, says,
“A hundred junks and 1000 lives have been already lost, we are told,
_i.e._, since September 28th of the same year at that rapid.” Both the
upward and downward passages are full of tremendous risks. On the upward
passage in February I counted forty-one junks stranded at different
points between Ichang and Wan Hsien, some breaking up, others being
repaired, and all having to discharge their cargoes; and when I came
down like a flash on high water towards the end of June, though it was
impossible to count the stranded junks, they must have been nearly half
of that number, even with the much-reduced summer traffic, and I saw one
big junk strike a rock while flying down a rapid and disappear as if she
had been blown up, her large crew, at the height of violent effort the
moment before, with all its frantic and noisy accompaniments, perishing
with her.
Besides junks of various sizes, there are native house-boats, like mine,
and others running up to four times its size, which carry passengers
only, and _wupans_ and _sampans_—undecked boats with hooped bamboo
roofs; these carry passengers or cargo. I have already described the
arrangements of a house-boat. If the Upper Yangtze junks number from
7000 to 8000, the men employed on them at the lowest estimate must be a
quarter of a million, in addition to many thousands working in
house-boats and smaller craft.
Junks never anchor, and, indeed, carry no anchors, and choosing a
mooring ground is a most important matter—not that there are not very
many nooks and bays untouched by the current, but because of the
caprices of the river, which often rises or falls, as I experienced, six
or seven feet in a night, so that a careful watch must be kept in order
to pay out or haul in line according to circumstances.
Big junks sound their way towards the bank, rig out great wooden fenders
fore and aft to prevent their sheering into shoaler water than they
draw, and one of the “water trackers” plunges into the water with a
line, which he makes fast to a stake on shore, the fenders, which are
really massive poles or straight young pines, also being lashed to rocks
or stakes.
Junks bound west keep as close in shore as they can on the side freest
from rocks and easiest for the trackers. When the wind is fair and
strong they can stem the ordinary current with their huge sail only, and
they take their trackers on board; but if the fair wind is light, it
only gives the trackers an easier haul. At all rapids, races, and rocky
points, the tow-line is in requisition. Eastward-bound junks lash their
mast alongside at Chungking, and are rowed down, being steered by a
prodigious bow-sweep. It is absolutely necessary that their speed should
be in advance of that of the current, and at every rapid frantic efforts
are required from the crew.
Junks carry trackers in proportion to their tonnage, but a _lao-pan_, or
skipper, usually part owner, the steersman, the _t’au-t’ai-kung_, or
pilot, the _tai-kung_, or bowsman, the cook, and the _t’au-lao_, or head
tracker, are indispensable. The pilot and steersman never leave the
bow-sweep and rudder, except for meals, while the junk is in motion. The
skipper’s functions are chiefly to buy food, bargain for extra trackers,
pay wages, and stimulate the crew to frantic efforts in dangerous places
by yells and gesticulations.
The bowsman, or _tai-kung_, acting also as pilot in my small boat, is
the most important man in a junk. I never ceased to admire mine, a tall,
broad, well-made fellow, the personification of knowledge and
carefulness, silent, alert, never flurried, hand and head steady, all
that a pilot should be, until the moment when he collapsed with the
opium craving, after which he might nightly be seen in a state of
blissful vacuity lying beside his opium lamp. The work of the _tai-kung_
is to lead with his skilled touch the eight or ten men who, in a big
junk, work the bow-sweep, a timber, from thirty to forty feet long,
projecting over the bow, without which no boat could ascend or descend
rapids and races in safety. When this great spar is not in use he stands
at the bow sounding with a long iron-shod bamboo pole, giving the junk a
sheer-off from upstanding points or rocks, and signalling to the
steersman in which direction sunken rocks lie, which his trained eye
discovers by the eddies in the river. His responsibility for life and
property is enormous, and he bears it nobly. The sweep is used to shoot
the junk out into the current, and enable her to clear rocks which
cannot be avoided by the steersman and rudder.
Having slightly sketched the junks and the manner of navigating the
Great River, I will conclude with a brief description of the “inhuman
work” of the trackers, by far the worst of which is in the region of the
gorges and the most severe of the rapids, extending for a hundred miles
west of Ichang. Captain Blakiston, Captain Gill, and more lately Mr. A.
J. Little in his delightful book, _Through the Yangtze Gorges_, have all
expressed both sympathy with these men and their wonder at their
hardihood, industry, and good-nature, and with my whole heart I endorse
what these writers have said, and regard this class as typifying that
extraordinary energy of the Chinese which has made and kept China what
it is, and which carries the Chinese as thrifty and successful emigrants
to every part of Eastern Asia and Western America.
The crews, which in big junks number 120 men, are engaged at Ichang. For
the upward voyage, lasting from thirty to fifty days, they get about
four shillings and their food, which is three meals a day of rice, with
cabbage fried in a liberal supply of grease, and a little fish or pork
on rare occasions, and for coming down, which rarely takes more than ten
days (I did it in a _wupan_ in a little over four), about eighteenpence
and food, and indeed many crews work their passage down for food only.
For this pittance these men do the hardest and riskiest work I have seen
done in any country, “inhumanly hard,” as Consul Bourne calls it, week
after week, from early dawn to sunset. The opening of Chungking as a
treaty port and various other causes have tended however to raise their
wages.
[Illustration: TRACKERS HOUSES.]
The larger number of these trackers are usually on shore hauling, being
directed from the junk either by flag signals or drum beat, under the
_tai-kung’s_ direction; a proportion remain on board to work the huge
bow-sweep, at which I have seen as many as fifteen straining. A few
attend the trackers to extricate the tow-rope from the rocks, in which
it is constantly catching, and two or more _tai-wan-ti_, or water
trackers, specially expert swimmers, and without clothing, run ahead of
the tow-rope ready to plunge into the water and free it when it catches
among rocks which cannot be reached from the shore. If tracking and
sailing are both impossible, the trackers propel the junk by great oars,
each worked by two men, twenty at a side, who face forwards, and mark
time by a combined stamp and a wild chant.
In descending, in order to keep steerage way on the junk in a current
running from six to twelve knots an hour, every agency of progression is
brought into play. The slinging of the mast alongside gives a lumbering,
ungainly look. The deck is literally crowded with men, naked in summer,
and in winter clothed in long blue cotton coats. Some are rowing face
forwards; fifteen or more are straining for life at the bow-sweep;
others are working the huge oars called _che_ (wheel), each of which
demands the energies of ten men; others are toiling at _yu-lows_, big
broad-bladed sculls, worked over the stern or parallel to the junk’s
side—even women and children take part in the effort—the _lao-pan_ grows
frantic, he yells, leaps, dances; drums and gongs are madly beaten, and
yet, with all this frantic effort, it is all the junk can do to keep
steerage way enough to clear the dangerous places, and not always that,
as I saw on two occasions junks fly down rapids, strike rocks, and
disappear as unconnected masses of timbers, as if exploded by dynamite.
I saw over eighty big junks descend the great rapids, and it was such an
exciting sight, with its accompaniments of deafening din, that I not
only never wearied, but would have been glad to see eighty more.
Where it is impossible to sail—and even with a fair wind there are few
reaches except the gorges where it is possible—the trackers prefer the
“inhuman work” of tracking to the slow headway made by the severe and
monotonous toil of rowing, or of hugging the bank, and hooking the junk
along by seizing with hooks on rings with staples driven into the rock
for this purpose, or keeping her off with stout fenders while they pole
her along with iron-spiked bamboo poles, which they drive into holes
which have been made by this process in the course of ages in the hard
conglomerate or granite.
In small house-boats like mine the trackers are landed from the boat,
but in junks from the attendant _sampan_. Except the _tai-wan-ti_, they
wear short cotton drawers, and each man has a breast strap. The huge
coil of plaited bamboo, frequently a quarter of a mile long, is landed
after being passed over the mast-head, a man on board paying out or
hauling in as is required. Small boats pass under the loftier tow-ropes
of big ones, which often saves time, and often leads to noisy quarrels
and entanglements. The trackers uncoil the rope, each man attaching it
to his breast strap by a hitch, which can be cast off and rehitched in a
moment.
The drum beats in the junk, and the long string of men starts, marking
time with a loud yell—“_Chor-chor_,” said to mean “Put your shoulder to
it.” The trackers make a peculiar movement; their steps are very short,
and with each they swing the arms and body forward, stooping so low to
their work that their hands nearly touch the ground, and at a distance
they look like quadrupeds.
Away they go, climbing over the huge angular boulders of the river
banks, sliding on their backs down spurs of smooth rock, climbing cliff
walls on each other’s shoulders, or holding on with fingers and toes,
sometimes on hands and knees, sometimes on shelving precipices where
only their grass sandals save them from slipping into the foaming race
below, now down close to the deep water, edging round a smooth cliff
with hardly foothold for goats, then far above, dancing and shouting
along the verge of a precipice, or on a narrow track cut in the rock 300
feet above the river, on which narrow and broken ledge a man
unencumbered and with a strong head would need to do his best to keep
his feet. The reader must sympathetically bear in mind that these poor
fellows who drag our commerce up the Yangtze amidst all these
difficulties and perils, and many more, are attached to a heavy junk by
a long and heavy rope, and are dragging her up against the force of a
tremendous current, raging in billows, eddies, and whirlpools; that they
are subject to frequent severe jerks; that occasionally their burden
comes to a dead stop and hangs in the torrent for several minutes; that
the tow-rope often snaps, throwing them on their faces and bare bodies
on jagged and rough rocks; that they are continually in and out of the
water; that they are running many chances daily of having their lives
violently ended; and that they are doing all this mainly on rice!
Their work is indicated from the junk either by the rapid beating of
drums and gongs when they are to haul hard, or a slow rat-a-tat when
they are to cease hauling, or by flag signalling, one man being told off
on shore to watch the signals and communicate them to the trackers. An
error would be as fatal as if within a ship’s length of a reef ahead an
engineer were to mistake the order “Full speed astern” for “full speed
ahead.”
Occasionally rough steps help the men up and down spurs, and rock paths
made by the pickaxe occur frequently. Many of these were thirty feet
above the river when I went up, and were submerged when I came down.
There is, however, one noble rock path, four feet broad, running for
many miles at an even height, built, I believe, by a private individual
as an act of benevolence to the trackers and for the “accumulation of
merit.”
At some points where the rapids are bad and the shores are big broken
rocks, only fitted for goats to climb, and the junks hang or slip back,
and the men give way, and several big junks, each with from 200 to 300
trackers, are all making the slowest possible progress, gongs and drums
are beaten frantically; bells are rung; firearms are let off; the
hundreds of trackers on all-fours are yelling and bellowing; the
overseers are vociferating like madmen, and rush wildly along the
gasping and struggling lines of naked men, dancing, howling, leaping,
and thrashing them with split bamboos, not much to their hurt. A
tow-rope breaks, and the junk they are tugging at gyrates at immense
speed to the foot of the rapid, the labour of hours being wasted in two
or three minutes, if there is not a worse result.
Among the many perils encountered by junks and trackers are the _chipa_
or races, which are usually caused by a projecting point or spur of rock
below which there is a smooth eddy. Arrived at the point and landing the
trackers, the _tai-kung_ throws the boat’s head out into the current to
get her clear of the point, with the bow-sweep, and with the strongest
line in use, seventy or eighty trackers haul on it with all their force,
men work with long poles to fend her off the rocks, and with her head on
to the current the water foams and rages under her bow, but if all goes
well, after a period of suspense she is dragged by main force round the
point into smooth water, and then it is often the case that the cliffs
are inaccessible; the trackers come on board and “claw” the junk along
in deep water with claws on long boathooks, which they hook into the
rocks, others fending her off.
Things do not always go smoothly. I went up these races in my boat many
times, and such small incidents happened as thumping a hole in the
bottom on a small rock, the rope catching on a rock in the water and a
bold swimmer having to go overboard to detach it, and the tow-rope
holding fast round some point of rock or getting entangled in a crevice
which looked inaccessible. It was horrible to see the poor fellows climb
with bare feet up apparently smooth precipices, “holding on with their
eyelids,” while the drum beat “Cease hauling,” and the junk hung tugging
and quivering in the torrent and fraying the rope which was her one
salvation. On two occasions where there was absolutely no foothold for a
cat, a man was let down over the precipice by a rope under his arms to
free the fast-fraying tow-line. These lines, hardened by the silica in
the bamboo, have cut channels two, three, and four inches deep over many
of the points, neat, smooth grooves in which they run easily.
There is much more to be said about the trackers and their work, but the
reader is weary, and I forbear. No work is more exposed to risks to limb
and life. Many fall over the cliffs and are drowned; others break their
limbs and are left on shore to take their chance—and a poor one it
is—without splints or treatment; severe strains and hernia are common,
produced by tremendous efforts in dragging, and it is no uncommon thing
when a man falls that his thin naked body is dragged bumping over the
rocks before he extricates himself. On every man almost are to be seen
cuts, bruises, wounds, weals, bad sores from cutaneous disease, and a
general look of inferior rice.
These trackers may be the roughest class in China—for the work is
“inhuman” and brutalising—but nevertheless they are good-natured in
their way; free on the whole from crimes of violence; full of fun,
antics, and frolic; clever at taking off foreigners; loving a joke; and
with a keen sense of humour.
Those who crowd in hundreds to the great rapids in the season for the
chance of getting a few _cash_ for a haul are a rougher lot still. They
bargain for the price of haulage with the _lao-pan_ through gangsmen,
and very often where there is much competition, as at the Hsin-tan, get
only about a penny for four hours’ hard work. Their mat camps are very
boisterous at night. At the lesser rapids the _lao-pan_ goes ashore,
dangling strings of _cash_, and as there is usually a village close by,
he secures help, after some loud-tongued bargaining and wrangling,
engaging even women and boys to tug at his ropes, and occasionally a
woman with a baby on her back takes a turn at the dragging!
That so vast a traffic is carried on under such difficulties is a
marvel. Many of these are created on the upward passage by the necessity
which hauled junks are under of taking the shallow inshore water, with
its rocks, obvious and sunken, reefs, broken water, and whirlpools.
Full-powered steamers, with suitable steering arrangements, ascending
the smooth deep-water channel used in the descent, might escape the
majority of the risks run by junks; but then a complete survey of the
Upper Yangtze is required. So far as I could judge of the Great River
between Sui Fu, at the junction of the River of Golden Sand and the Min,
and Ichang, leaving out the gorges, there are very few reaches in which
rapids, races, and rocky broken water are not to be met with. Indeed, it
may be said that there is no tranquil water, and Admiral Ho, the
superintendent of police for the Upper Yangtze, is probably not
exaggerating when in his official _Yangtze Pilot_ he enumerates about a
thousand perils to navigation. When I returned I realised that Mr.
Endacott’s remark concerning occupation had much truth in it: “You’ll
have enough to do looking after your life.”[25]
CHAPTER XIV.
THE YANGTZE AND KUEI FU
On February 7th we entered the solemn Wushan gorge, twenty miles long, a
grand chasm from 330 to 600 yards in width, and walled in by
perpendicular cliffs ofttimes 1000 feet in height, with lofty mountain
spires and pinnacles then touched with snow above them. The “Witch’s
Mountain Great Gorge” is uncanny, and the black gloom of a winter day,
clouds swirling round the higher summits, and the long yells with which
the boatmen besought the river god for a wind, with many vows and
promises to pay, did not enliven it. Nor does the name “Iron Coffin
Gorge,” given to a reach above, where iron chains are bolted into the
cliffs fifty feet above the winter level of the river for the use of the
junks bound west, cheer the situation.
We were two days in this “dowie den,” and tied up for a third on Sunday,
near the last inhabited village in HUPEH, Nan-mu yurh, “Cedar Garden,”
situated on both sides of a deep glen apparently closed by a high
mountain, a covered bridge connecting the two halves. It is a romantic
place, quite worth the toilsome ascent of 517 steep stone steps which
form the terraced street. The houses are surrounded by loquats, orange,
and pomegranate, their dark, shining foliage with a background of snow.
The people of this mountainous province are said to be poor, hardy, and
industrious. A respectable merchant asked if we had heard when peace was
going to be made? Such ignorance was phenomenal on this great highway of
commerce! Some boatmen asked ours what we were doing tied up there when
there was such a good wind, and the reply was that they had foreign
devils as passengers, who, though they did no work and were always
eating, must sleep one day in seven!
Above this glen the walls of the gorge approach again; they are still of
limestone with sandstone above, caverned at great heights, worn in
places into colossal terraces, and singularly fluted by means of deep,
vertical potholes, the outer halves of which have given way. Two narrow
glens on each side of the river are the boundary between HUPEH and SZE
CHUAN, but it was not till some hours later that we passed the first
village of the empire province, Pei-shih, “Back to the Rock,” a long,
straggling street, on an imposing limestone ledge, and possessing a fine
Taoist temple. There is a small but nasty rapid below it, which took two
hours to ascend. While scrambling along the shore I picked up a piece of
pink granite, which at once raised a clamour, the people saying that a
foreigner with blue or grey eyes not only sees three feet into the
ground, but can look inside the stones, and that I had seen a jewel in
this one. I threw it down, and they broke it open; and then, not finding
anything, said that I had spirited it out of the stone by foreign magic.
The current at the upper end of the Witch’s Gorge produced so much
tedious delay that I was glad when we reached Wushan, the first city in
SZE CHUAN, to which, for a considerable distance, we were _clawed_ along
by hooks attached to the boatmen’s poles. Opposite Wushan is a small
tributary, which brings down salt from brine wells near Ta-Ling, a
district city, in boats which Mr. Little regards as exact copies of
Venetian gondolas. Wushan is grey and picturesque, its walls following
the contour of the hills on which it is built, enclosing fields,
orchards, and beautiful trees. A fine temple to the God of Literature in
a grove of evergreens on a steep mountain cone 1500 feet in height, and
a lofty pagoda on the same peak are striking objects, but the town,
though fairly clean, has no look of prosperity, and so far was
disappointing.
Toiling up the “Kitten” and “Get-down-from-horse” rapids, we reached the
Feng Hsiang, or “Bellows,” or “Wind-Box” gorge, the last and one of the
grandest of the great gorges, where the Great River is narrowed in
places to 150 yards, by vertical walls of rock from 1500 to 2000 feet in
height. There are both rapids and dangerous whirlpools, the presence of
red lifeboats, as usual, denoting risk. My boat was dragged up inch by
inch against a tremendous current, _clawed_ up in places where there was
no foothold for trackers, and so terrible was the straining of these
poor fellows on the rough and jagged rocks that I welcomed the opening
out of the stupendous chasm, and our entrance upon a beautiful
mountainous country, through which the Yangtze rolls through a valley
covered, even in February, with all manner of crops in their freshest
green. Just at the mouth, creating two channels—one 100 feet and the
other 200 feet in width—lies a black, polished, square mass of rock
known as the “Goose-tail” rock; it was fully forty feet above the water
when I went up, but when I came down in June it was only just visible.
When it is quite covered, the authorities at the city, five miles above,
do not allow any junks to descend till it reappears. A remarkable rock
ladder connected with early Chinese military history, a grand white
limestone peak which curves majestically over the gorge, a fine temple
on a cliff with gardens and courtyards—and then the almost painful
drafts on the capacity for admiring and wondering which the previous
eleven days had made came to an end.
The scenery above the Wind-Box gorge, though less grand, is very varied,
the valley and the lateral valleys for ever narrowing and broadening;
the distant mountains forest-covered or snow-slashed; the spurs crowned
with grand temples, below which picturesque villages cluster, and
whitewashed, black-beamed, several-gabled, many-roofed, orange-embowered
farmhouses; and every slope and level is cultivated to perfection, the
bright yellow of the rape-seed blossom adding a charm to greenery which
was never monotonous.
After ascending some troublesome but minor rapids, much bothered all the
time by a big cargo boat with seventy trackers of its own, which kept
close behind us, always trying to pass its rope over the top of our
mast, a quarrel being the inevitable consequence, we arrived in sight of
what looked like a smoky manufacturing town, the first time I saw such a
sight in China. Really the appearance was produced more by great jets
and ebullitions of steam than by smoke, for the “manufacturers” were
burning a local coal, much resembling anthracite. At low water there are
great sand-banks below the city of Kuei Fu, or Kuei-chow Fu, where a
number of salt boilers establish themselves for the winter months, who
dig great brine pits in the sand and evaporate the product with coal.
The process is rude, and the salt is a bad colour, but the product of
this and many other similar wells is one of the chief exports of SZE
CHUAN and a great source of revenue.[26]
A great bank of boulders, a strong _chipa_, a highly cultivated region,
the pleasant valley slopes of which rolled up into hills, pleasant
farms, a general sunny smile, a grey-walled city of much
picturesqueness, a great fleet of junks moored below it, a mat town to
supply their needs, and we were at the city of Kueichow Fu.
Ever since leaving Ichang we had been goading the _lao-pan_ to hurry, so
that we might reach Wan by the Chinese New Year, which was quite
possible, but he and all his trackers were determined that we should
spend it at Kuei Fu, a favourite place with junkmen, so we had the bad
luck of being detained there four days till noisy and gluttonous
celebrations of the great festival were past. Not that we were honestly
detained, or that the _lao-pan_ claimed this holiday, but he resorted to
mean Oriental dodges to keep us. We arrived on February 10th, the New
Year fell on the 13th, so one day the boat required serious repair,
another stores must be laid in, the third the _lao-pan_ moved a few
hundred yards and then said he must go to some village for a new
tow-rope, and another day must be devoted to paying debts! Fortunately
it was brilliant weather, though so cold that I had to sit wrapped in
blankets with my feet in the bed. But then at home people do not usually
sit in what is practically the open air with the temperature at 39°!
Kuei Fu is a large city, with a very fine wall and noble gate towers,
and imposing roofs of _yamens_ and temples are seen above the
battlements. At that time it was very hostile to foreigners, and I made
no attempt to enter its stately gates, but walked in the beautiful
surroundings among large farmhouses, all _en fête_ for the season, with
many wolfish dogs, aggressive and cowardly, and crops of wheat and
barley already showing the ear stalks, and root crops with much juicy
leafage, a farming paradise. Good paths bordered with the yellow
fumitory, already in blossom, intersected the country, and owing to the
recent dry weather, there was an agreeable aspect of cleanliness
everywhere. I photographed a suburban temple with a porcelain front,
where the priests, as is their wont, were quite polite, but on the way
back we were “rushed” by a crowd of men and boys howling and shouting,
and using the term _yang-kwei-tze_, “foreign devil,” very freely. No
Protestant missionaries, and I was told no Roman either, have yet
effected a lodgment in this city. Two Chinese telegraph clerks, both
Christians, and speaking good English, paid us a visit, and told us that
feeling had become so very much more hostile since the “disturbances”
that there would certainly be a serious riot if we went into the town.
Outside the walls little is to be seen except the salt boileries on the
sand-banks; the manufacture of briquettes; the loading of junks for the
low country with big lumps of anthracite coal, which sells for 9_s._
6_d._ a ton at Kuei Fu, and is much used by the blacksmiths; the
ceaseless procession of water carriers, each making the long steep
trudge from the river to the city with two buckets for half a farthing;
and the aqueduct, a great work of former days, about three miles long,
which brings a supply of pure water down a stone channel from a strong
spring which spouts from a hole in the rock at a height of 1500 feet or
thereabouts. This good gift is not _pro bono publico_; the magistrate
who constructed the work was ambitious only to have a private water
supply. The paved path leading to the source passes over a steep hill
which for more than a mile is a vast city of the dead, occupied by
graves some of which are handsome stone structures closed by inscribed
slabs of stone, standing on carefully-kept grass platforms, as in Korea,
while the majority are circular grassed mounds held together by rubble.
Kuei Fu or Kwei Hwan (_i.e._ “The Barrier of Kueichow”) is a decaying
city, bolstered up into an appearance of grandeur by its position and
its stately wall and gate towers. There all goods going up or down the
Yangtze paid _likin_, a transit tax of about 5 per cent. on their value.
As (according to Mr. Little) over 10,000 junks go up and down in the
year, and each one is delayed for examination three or four days, a
large extra-mural population made a living by supplying their needs.
Some years ago the Kuei Fu Likin Office was the most valuable in China
next to that of Canton, and the likin duties were the great source of
SZE CHUAN revenue. The grand houses, with fine pleasure grounds, of
which many can be seen from a height above the wall, testify to the
fortunes made by officials in the days when they had the right to levy 5
per cent. on a trade worth possibly £2,000,000 sterling.
But we have “changed all that” by securing the opening of the treaty
port of Chungking with the transit pass and chartered junk systems, to
which all foreign imports can be carried on payment of duty to the
Imperial Maritime Customs at Shanghai. Thus these rich dues go to
Peking, and the “Four Streams Province” is the sufferer, and Kuei Fu
really can only exact legal dues from junks carrying local merchandise
and from salt junks. The reader will at once perceive the reason for the
strong provincial hostility which is roused by the opening of new treaty
ports, for each one, to a greater or less extent, enriches the Imperial
Government at the expense of the provinces, and deprives a great number
of officials of their “legitimate” perquisites or “squeezes,” in favour,
as the people think, of highly salaried foreign customs employés.
On two days, owing to the crowds on the shore, I did not leave the boat.
In the bright sunshine, “light without heat,” the view was always
delightful, as it changed from hour to hour, and disappeared at sunset
in a blaze of colour—distant snow peaks burning red after the lower
ranges had passed into ashy grey. The picturesque grey city, the
magnificent opening of the Feng Hsiang, or “Wind-Box” gorge, the hill
slopes in the vividness of their spring greens and yellows, the rapid,
with its exciting risks and the life on the water, made a picture of
which one could never weary.
Yet five days of crouching and shivering in a six-foot square room,
really a _stall_, with three sides only and no window, taxed both
patience and resources, especially as the virago and the boat baby were
more aggravating than usual, and the trackers ignored the existence of
passengers. The _lao-pan_ gave himself up to the opium pipe, and was
consequently obliterated. Be-dien, my servant, whose temper and pride
were unslumbering, made himself unpleasant all round. It would require
some very old-fashioned Anglo-Saxon words to describe the smell of the
cooking of the New Year viands. Yet somehow I did not feel the least
inclined to grumble, and my slender resources held out till the end.
I had Baber’s incomparable papers on Far Western China to study and
enjoy, a journal to “write up,” much mending and even making to
accomplish, and, above all, there were photographic negatives to develop
and print, and prints to tone, and the difficulties enhanced the zest of
these processes and made me think, with a feeling of complacent
superiority, of the amateurs who need “dark rooms,” sinks, water “laid
on,” tables, and other luxuries. Night supplied me with a dark room; the
majestic Yangtze was “laid on”; a box served for a table: all else can
be dispensed with.
I lined my “stall” with muslin curtains and newspapers, and finding that
the light of the opium lamps still came in through the chinks, I tacked
up my blankets and slept in my clothes and fur coat. With “water, water
everywhere,” water was the great difficulty. The Yangtze holds any
amount of fine mud in suspension, which for drinking purposes is usually
precipitated with alum, and unless filtered, deposits a fine, even veil
on the negative. I had only a pocket filter, which produced about three
quarts of water a day, of which Be-dien invariably abstracted some for
making tea, leaving me with only enough for a final wash, not always
quite effectual, as the critic will see from some of the illustrations.
I found that the most successful method of washing out “hypo” was to
lean over the gunwale and hold the negative in the wash of the Great
River, rapid even at the mooring place, and give it some final washes in
the filtered water. This chilly arrangement was only possible when the
trackers were ashore or smoking opium at the stern. Printing was a great
difficulty, and I only overcame it by hanging the printing-frames over
the side. When all these rough arrangements were successful, each print
was a joy and a triumph, nor was there disgrace in failure.
[Illustration: AUTHOR’S TRACKERS AT DINNER.]
The day before the New Year was thoroughly unquiet. The population of
the boat was excited by wine and pork money, and was fearfully noisy,
shouting, yelling, quarrelling, stamping overhead, stamping along the
passage outside my cambric curtain, stamping over the roof, sawing,
hammering, and pounding rice. A mandarin’s boat tied up close to my
window had engaged a “sing-song” boat, and I had all the noise from
both, and many glimpses of the mandarin, a good-looking young man, in
fur-lined brocaded silk. Like all others that I have seen of the higher
official class, he looked immeasurably removed from the common people.
The assumed passionlessness of his face expressed nothing but aloofness
and scorn. One of the servants died in his boat after a few hours’
illness, during which the beating of drums and gongs, and the letting
off of crackers to frighten away the demon which was causing the
trouble, were incessant and tremendous. We sailed in company, and
shortly after leaving Kuei Fu one of the mandarin’s trackers, in a very
minor rapid, was pulled into the river and drowned.
I had an opportunity of taking an instantaneous photograph of my
trackers at dinner. Their meals, which consist of inferior rice mixed
with cabbage or other vegetables fried in oil, with a bit of fish or
pork occasionally added, are worth watching. Each man takes a rough
glazed earthenware bowl and fills it from the great pot on the fire. All
squat round the well, and balancing their bowls on the tips of the
fingers of the left hand close under the chin, the mouths are opened as
wide as possible, and the food is shovelled in with the chopsticks as
rapidly as though they were eating for a wager. When the mouth is
apparently full they pack its contents into the cheeks with the
chopsticks and begin again, packing any solid lumps into the cheeks
neatly at once. When mastication and swallowing took place I never quite
made out, but in an incredibly short time both bowls and cheeks were
empty, and the eaters were smoking their pipes with an aspect of
content. The boats, unless sailing, tie up for meals. The Chinese never,
if they can help it, drink unboiled water, which saves them from many
diseases, and these men drank the water in which the rice was cooked.
On three such meals the poor fellows haul with all their strength for
twelve hours daily, never shirking their work. They are rough, truly,
but as the voyage went on their honest work, pluck, endurance,
hardihood, sobriety, and good-nature won my sympathy and in some sort my
admiration. They might be better clothed and fed if they were not opium
smokers, but then where would be their nightly Elysium?
CHAPTER XV.
NEW YEAR’S DAY AT KUEI-CHOW FU
New Year’s Day arrived at last, as cold and brilliant as if it were not
belated by six weeks. I took a beautiful walk among prosperous farms
where the people were all in gala dress. The houses were decked with
flags and streamers, and even the buff dogs had knots of colour round
their necks. From above the wall the grey city could be seen brilliantly
decorated, and sounds of jubilation came up from it. The suburbs and the
mat town on the river bank were gay and noisy, and much money was spent
on crackers and explosives generally. The junks were decorated, and the
“sing-song” boats blossomed into a blaze of colour. Everyone except my
trackers appeared in new clothes, and threw off the old ones with
rejoicing.
This was my second New Year in China, and I had seen its approach as far
back as Ichang, where, as everywhere, tables appeared in the streets a
month beforehand, and all sorts of tempting articles were displayed upon
them in a tempting manner. This is the time when things can be had
cheap, and many articles of _bric-à-brac_ and embroidered dresses are
for sale which are not obtainable at any other time. For in order to pay
debts, a sacred obligation worthily honoured in the observance, many
families are obliged to part with possessions long cherished. The crowds
in the streets in gala dresses are enormous; children are gaily dressed,
their quaint heads are decorated with flowers, and they receive presents
of toys and _bon-bons_. The toy-shops drive a roaring trade.
Red paper appears everywhere in long strips pasted on the lintels and
doorposts of houses, emblazoned with the characters for happiness and
longevity, and with formal sentences suitable for the festive occasion,
many of which are written on tables in the streets which are provided
with ink-brushes and ink-stones. Every shop is brilliant with these red
papers pasted or suspended, and with _kin hwa_, or “golden flowers,”
much made in Shao Hsing, being artificial flowers and leaves often of
great size, of yellow tinsel on wires, making a goodly show. The
“sing-song” boats were profusely decorated with these, and they are much
used for the New Year offerings in temples, and for the annual
redecoration of the household tablets. Thousands of vegetable wax
candles, with paper wicks, varying in size from the thickness of a man’s
leg to that of his finger, coloured vermilion, and painted with humorous
and mythical pictures, and many other things used for offerings in the
temples, and ribbons and streamers of all descriptions made the streets,
even the mat streets outside Kuei Fu, gay.
[Illustration: A CHINESE PUNCHINELLO.]
For the three previous days unlimited scrubbing of clothes, persons,
doors, chairs, shutters, and all woodwork went on; and though boats were
not as universally turned out and cleaned as at Canton, where I spent a
previous New Year, a good many of the smaller craft were beached and
cleansed inside and out. Even the trackers scrubbed their faces, and
appeared a paler yellow.
Towards the evening of that day, between the din of gongs and the
constant explosion at every door of strings of fireworks intended to
expel evil spirits and prevent others from entering, the noise became
exciting. This idea of expelling evil spirits and preventing their
entrance at the incoming of the year is the same as is carried out in
Korea by the burning in a potsherd at the house door of the hair of all
the inmates, which, when cut off or falling out, is preserved for this
purpose. The Chinese, like the Koreans, believe themselves surrounded by
legions of demons, mainly malignant, who must either be frightened or
propitiated.
Religion plays a most conspicuous part in visits to the temples, and
offerings. At all the farms near Kuei Fu, trees, fences, barns, and
farming implements, as well as houses, had prayers pasted upon them. The
junkmen, though not nearly to the same extent as in Kwantung, pasted
paper prayers on oars, sweeps, mast, and rudder, and hung them over the
boats’ sterns; and every house was purified by a religious ceremonial.
New Year’s Day is kept as the birthday of the entire population, and a
child born on the previous day enters his second year upon it. In the
houses of well-to-do people such birthdays are great occasions; and
abbots, monks, and priests assemble to do them honour, with much noise
and many prayers, some read and others chanted from memory, after which
the written prayers are burned and libations are poured out. It is the
family and social ceremonies connected with idolatry and demonism at
this season which are a special difficulty in the way of Christians.
Among other religious duties, some persons, both men and women, burdened
with the weight of the sins of the year, employ priests to intercede for
them with the unseen powers, and fast, and give away much to the poor.
The temples outside Kuei Fu were thronged for the days preceding the New
Year with men and women, old and young; and in the midst of clouds of
incense rich and poor prostrated themselves before the gods, burning
gold and silver tinsel paper, while gongs, bells, drums, and cymbals
kept up a ceaseless din.
In the midst of the general winding up of all affairs, spiritual and
temporal, and starting on the New Year clear, the great matter of debt
is not forgotten. The paying of debts and settling of accounts is a
highly praiseworthy custom, and one which we might introduce among
ourselves with advantage. Although only a custom, it has all the force
of law. If it can be avoided by any sacrifice, no debt is carried over
New Year’s Day without either an actual settlement or an arrangement
regarded as satisfactory by the creditor. To do otherwise would be to
secure a blasted reputation. If men owe more than they can pay, custom
compels them at this season to put all they have into the hands of their
creditors and close their business concerns; and one among the causes of
suicide is when men have not enough to pay their debts with. Interest on
loans rises, the pawnbrokers’ warehouses are choke-full, and most kinds
of commodities fall in value, while second-hand clothing and many other
personal possessions are to be bought cheap. The future to a Chinese
often consists of little more than his funeral and the New Year! People
dread the difficulties, expense, and delays of resorting to law for the
recovery of debts; and all are agreed on maintaining this wholesome
custom, which has a great tendency to weed out from among traders the
shifty and dishonest. I have heard that one method of compelling an
unwilling debtor to pay his debts is to remove the door from his house
or shop, so as to allow of the ingress of evil and malignant demons.
This last resort is said never to fail!
All the ceremonies which are to welcome the New Year, with the
garnishing of the house with red paper, tinsel flowers, streamers, and
the pictures, ornamenting of the ancestral shrine, and the general
“redding up,” occupy much of the previous night; and the stillness of
the first hours of the great day reminds one of an old-fashioned Scotch
Sunday.
Towards noon the streets begin to fill, as in America, with men with
card-cases paying visits. All are well dressed, even to the coolies, for
those who have not grand clothes hire them. Inside Kuei Fu sedan chairs
were _en règle_; outside, men made their calls on foot, in many
instances cards sufficing, inscribed with a device suggesting the three
good wishes of children (_i.e._ sons), wealth or rank, and longevity.
Men meeting in the streets greeted each other with profound respect, and
with the good wish, “May the new joy be yours,” which reminded me of the
Syrian salutation on the feast of the Epiphany, or with the words, “I
respectfully wish you joy.” Universal politeness and good behaviour
prevailed, and not a tipsy man was to be seen during the day or evening.
Mourners remain within doors, and strips of blue paper mixed with red
denote houses into which death has entered during the previous year.
Be-dien told me that in the city, where there are many _literati_ and
rich men, there were houses with all their woodwork covered with
gold-sprinkled red paper, and on the lintels five slips expressing the
desire of the owner for the “five blessings”: riches, health, love of
virtue, longevity, and a natural death. Over some shops was a decorated
slip, “May rich customers ever enter this door,” and in many stately
vestibules, in which handsome presentation coffins were reared on end,
there were costly scrolls inscribed with aphorisms and other
sentences.[27]
On New Year’s Day gods and ancestors receive prostrations, and are
presented with gifts in the temples and in the clan or family ancestral
halls. It would be a gross breach of etiquette and an unthinkable
outrage if inferiors were not to pay their respects to superiors, pupils
to salute their teachers, and children to prostrate themselves before
their parents.
When evening came, lanterns, transparencies, and fireworks appeared, and
very effective coloured fires reddened the broad bosom of the Yangtze.
Hilarious sounds proceeding from closed doors showed that, as in Korea
at the same hour, sacrifices were being offered to departed parents, and
that families were gathered at the final feast of the day. My trackers
hung coloured lanterns from the matted roof and feasted on pork with
wine, but there was no excess, and it was a real pleasure to see them
get one good meal with time to enjoy it. Owing to the moderate use of
intoxicants, and that chiefly with food, the three holidays of this
universal festival pass by without turmoil or disgrace, and the
population goes back to trade and work out of debt and not demoralised
by its spell of social festivity.
So the most ancient of the world’s existing civilisations comports
itself on its great holiday, while our civilisation of yesterday,
especially in Scotland, what with “first-footing,” “treating,” and
general sociability, is apt to turn the holiday into a pandemonium.
CHAPTER XVI.
KUEI FU TO WAN HSIEN
The following morning my trackers, having no fumes of liquor to sleep
off, were astir early. There was one long and strong rapid, Lao Ma (“Old
Horse”), and a minor one, Miao Chitze “Temple Stairs”), where the water
rushes furiously over a succession of steps with a clear but very rapid
channel in the centre. Passenger boats turn out their fares there, and
it was piteous to see the women with their bound feet hobbling and
tumbling among boulders, where I, who am not a very bad climber, was
glad to get the help of two men. Of course, the fathers and husbands
gave them no assistance. The fierce cataract of Tung Yangtze, remarkable
for a vigorous attempt which was made not very many years ago to
overcome its difficulties by building a fine stone breakwater, now in
decay, and a succession of _chipas_ and eddies, intervened between Kuei
Fu and Yun-yang Hsien, or “Clouded Sun City,” on the bank of a fine
gorge, its grey walls extending far up the mountain on the slope of
which the city stands, high above the winter level of the river.
These cities on the Yangtze are captivating to the eye, and the touches
of colour given by the glazed green and yellow tiles of the curved roofs
of their many fine temples relieve the otherwise monotonous grey. The
“City of the Clouded Sun” is not lively, and has very little trade, but
it is stately and clean, and its temples are well kept and imposing,
specially the Temple of Longevity, which has a wall richly decorated in
high relief, in which fine bronze tablets are inlaid.
The glory of the city is, however, on the opposite bank—the Temple of
Chang-fei, a warrior who died fighting for his country. The whole scene
is beautiful, and it was most mortifying that the crowd which gathered
round my camera, looking in at the lens and over my shoulder under the
focussing cloth and shaking it violently, prevented me from getting a
picture of it. Nature and art have combined in a perfect
picturesqueness. On the flat vertical surface of a noble cliff rising
from the boulder-strewn shore of the Yangtze are four characters—and
what can be more decorative than Chinese characters “writ large”?—which
are translated “Ethereal bell, one thousand ages.” This bell is believed
by the people to ring of its own accord in case of a fire in the
district.
[Illustration: TEMPLE OF CHANG-FEI.]
Above it, and approached by a fine broad flight of 100 stone stairs, is
a magnificent temple in perfect repair, and with its gorgeous
decorations lately restored. It has three courts, one three-storeyed and
two two-storeyed pavilions, their much-curled roofs tiled with glazed
tiles of an exquisite green. Corridors, also roofed with green tiles and
composed of elaborate and beautiful wooden fretwork with the peony for
its motive, connect the courts. On one side of the temple is a deep
narrow glen with fine trees and a waterfall, and over this a beautiful
stone bridge has been thrown from the temple door. There are some noble
specimens of the _Ficus religiosa_. There were large numbers of
visitors, and a ferry-boat is continually crossing. A lovelier place for
a religious picnic could not be found.[28]
At Yun-yang we took in a relation of the _lao-pan_, a Romanist, employed
by the French priest resident in the city as doctor to a dispensary.
According to him, there are 300 Roman Christians in Yun-yang, who are
quite free from molestation. There is no Protestant missionary there or
in the country we passed through during the previous eighteen days. On
the river bank, after Mr. Stevenson had been talking with a number of
men about Christianity, an old man said to him, “Teacher, you say what
is good, but it is not all true. You say we have never seen God. Then we
can’t have injured Him, and so don’t need His forgiveness.”
Above Yun-yang the country opens out, and the verdure and fertility are
most charming. The bright red of the soil, the fresh green of the grain
crops and sugarcane, and the brilliant yellow of the rape made a
charming picture. Every now and then a noble specimen of the _Ficus
religiosa_, with an altar and incense-burner below it, lent the contrast
of its dark green foliage, and substantial farmhouses of “Brick Noggin,”
each in a clump of bamboo, and fine temples in groves of evergreens gave
an air of prosperity to the scene. I was not surprised at the encomiums
which previous travellers have bestowed on this province.
Rape is universally grown for the oil. The people have neither butter
nor grease for cooking, and their diet would be incomplete without
abundance of some oily substance. Imported and native kerosene may take
its place as an illuminant, but for cooking purposes it will be always
grown. In such a fertile and beautiful region the absence of animal life
is curious. There is no pasturage, the roads are not made for draught,
and the cheerfulness of horses, cattle, and sheep about a farmyard is
unknown. Buff dogs, noisy and cowardly, and the hideous water buffalo,
which looks like an antediluvian survival and has a singular aversion to
foreigners, represent the domestic animals.
[Illustration: PAGODA NEAR WAN HSIEN.]
We were delayed considerably by head winds, involving much tracking and
rowing, and thumped a hole in the boat’s bottom for the second time, on
which she filled so fast that she had to be run ashore with all
despatch, and the miserable attempts at repair delayed us for some
hours, as no carpenter would work during the New Year holidays. For the
next twenty-eight hours it took four men baling night and day to keep
the water down.
At a distance of nearly 1300 miles from its mouth the Yangtze is still a
noble river, nobler yet when the summer rise covers the grand confusions
of its rocky bed. The “Gorge of the Eight Cliffs,” a singular freak of
nature, with perpendicular cliffs fluted like organ pipes, through which
the river has cut a channel, said by the boatmen to be fathomless, about
six miles long, through a bed of hard grey sandstone, detained us for a
long time, and was bitterly cold and draughty. Above in a recess in the
rock are carved three divinities in full canonicals, painted and gilded,
called “The Three Water Guardians.” It is said that the reason that no
boatmen will move in the dark is that these genii only guard the river
by day.
Tiresome rapids detained us again, and I climbed a height to look at
some queer erections, which are seen at intervals of about three miles,
on elevations along the river from Ichang to Chungking, making a goodly
show. They are white towers, with a red sun painted on the front of
each, and stand five in a row. The boatmen say that they are to mark
distances, but, according to better authorities they are _yen-tun_, or
“smoke towers,” and have served the purpose of giving alarm in unsettled
times by fires of dry combustibles within. Apparently they have not been
repaired for many years.
On Ash Wednesday, February 19th, in the afternoon, a fine, white,
nine-storeyed pagoda on a bank, and another on a high hill, announced
the approach to a city. The river was narrowed by an insignificant
gorge, then came a broad expanse of still water resembling a mountain
lake, and then Wan appeared. That was one of the unforgettable views in
China. The “Myriad City,” for position and appearance, should rank high
among the cities of the world. The burst of its beauty as we came round
an abrupt corner into the lake-like basin on which it stands, and were
confronted with a stately city piled on cliffs and heights, a wall of
rock on one side crowded with refuges and temples, with the broad river
disappearing among mountains which were dissolving away in a blue mist,
was quite overpowering.
Its situation on a sharp bend of the Yangtze, backed at a distance of
thirty miles by a range of mountains—built on cliffs, and in clusters
round temple and pagoda-crowned hills, and surrounded by precipitous,
truncated peaks of sandstone, from 700 to 1500 feet in height, rising
out of woods through which torrents flash in foam, and from amidst
garden cultivation, and surmounted by the picturesque, fortified refuges
which are a feature of the region—is superb and impressive. Wan is the
first of the prosperous cities of SZE CHUAN that I saw. It has doubled
its population and trade in twenty years, and its fine streets and
handsome shops, stately dwellings within large grounds, thriving
industries, noble charities, and the fringe of junks for over two miles
along its river shore, indicate a growing prosperity which is
characteristic of nearly every city in SZE CHUAN which I afterwards
visited.
We tied up in a crowd of large junks lying in three tiers. Hundreds of
coolies were loading and unloading them, and the noise was deafening.
Leaving the furious babel of the boatmen, who were dissatisfied with
their “wine money,” I walked the mile up to the China Inland Mission
house, partly by a flight of 150 steep stone stairs, and up back
streets, and being bareheaded and in Chinese dress, escaped a very great
crowd. No European woman had walked up through Wan before, for it and
its officials had been notoriously hostile to foreigners, and Dr.
Morrison, of the _Times_, had been ill-treated there only six months
before. I was much impressed by the good paving and cleanliness, and the
substantial stone dwellings _en route_.
Arriving at a fine Chinese gateway, with a porter’s lodge and an outer
court, along which are servants’ quarters and cow stables, we passed
into what is a truly beautiful paved inner court, one side a roofed-in
open space used as a chapel, the other a lofty and handsome Chinese
guest-room, as shown in the illustration, with an open front, and the
living-rooms of the family. A third side is the women’s guest-room, and
on the fourth are various rooms. Projecting upper storeys and balconies,
all carving and fretwork, latticed and carved window-frames with paper
panes, tall pillars, and irregular tiled roofs, make up a striking _tout
ensemble_, in the midst of which Mr. and Mrs. Thompson and three ladies,
all in Chinese dress, stood to welcome me. It was all so trim and
handsome that there was a distinct unseemliness in bringing in my shabby
travelling equipments, much the worse for two years’ hard wear, and I
hurried them into retirement as soon as possible.
[Illustration: GUEST HALL, C.I.M. WAN HSIEN.]
The house is beautiful inside, the walls, roofs, and pillars of planed,
unvarnished wood of a fine grain, all dovetailed or put together with
wooden bolts. Downstairs the large fretwork windows, opening on pivots,
are above a man’s head. All the furniture, with the exception of some
presents, is Chinese, and is at once simple and tasteful. Upstairs are a
number of low, irregular, quaint rooms. The one allotted to me was a
large one, with a great fretwork window into the court, and another with
a superb view of the city and down the river. It had access by a steep
step-ladder to an open wooden tower with a pagoda roof and seats for use
in the hot weather. This overlooks the houses of many neighbours, and is
overlooked. From it are to be seen all the refuges on the surrounding
hilltops, the circuit of the city wall, _yamens_, temples, and pagodas,
the broad brown fringe of junks, and the gleaming silver of the Great
River.
From 9 a.m. till dusk there was a continuous stream of Chinese visitors,
the men entering at one door and the women at another, and passing into
their guest-rooms, where they were separately received by Mr. Thompson
and Miss Ramsay. A Chinese is a dignified and sensitive man, and likes
to be master of the situation. He is miserable in a foreign house, with
its promiscuous oddities, and has no idea where or on what to sit, what
position to take, and to what etiquette he is to conform himself, and
has all the discomfort of a fish out of water. In a Chinese guest-room,
on the contrary, there is an ordered and rigid stateliness. A few
handsome scrolls from the classics or pictures decorate the walls. A
handsome carved black wood table stands against the wall opposite the
open front, and on both sides of it are ranged heavy black wood chairs,
the highest being next the table. Elaborate lamps hang from the roof.
No matter what the position of a Chinese is, whether he be mandarin,
merchant, shopkeeper, or writer, he is absolutely certain which chair
etiquette entitles him to take, and when tea and pipes are produced he
is as serene and comfortable as in his own house.
At that time, though missionaries had been settled at Wan for some
years, and had been able to rent this beautiful house, there was not a
Christian in the city. The ladies had only lately arrived, as it had
been thought not a safe place for them. Even a month before my visit,
when a deep well ran dry, a mob assembled outside the mission house
threatening to burn it and to kill all the “foreign devils,” for they
had tapped the well and had stolen the golden crab which was the “luck”
of the city. The mob was eventually compelled to withdraw, but the
mandarin, who only left as I was arriving, came to the house with the
serious charge that the inmates had killed children in order to get
their eyes, and that their bodies were in the tanks at the back!
Mr. Thompson took him to the back, and the tanks were probed with a long
pole, but the accusation was not disposed of by the resultlessness of
the search, for foreign magic is believed to be equal to anything. The
same official concerted the murder of the missionaries with the elders
of the city, and Mr. Davies, who was then in Wan, was severely beaten.
Compensation, however, was given him, which he bestowed on the local
charities. A new chief magistrate had just arrived, with orders to treat
the foreigners well, and all was changed. When Mr. Thompson called at
the _yamen_ the mandarin conducted him to the seat of honour, escorted
him to his chair on leaving, and returned the visit with a large retinue
the next day. Of course the Chinese everywhere take their cue from the
officials.
So it came about that for several days I was able actually to walk about
and to photograph with no worse trouble than the curiosity of the people
in masculine crowds of a thousand or more. Four months before I was told
that this would have been impossible. My camera would have been smashed,
my open chair would have produced a riot, and I should have been stoned
or severely beaten.
The streams of visitors to the beautiful guest-halls never ceased by
daylight. Miss Ramsay often received forty women at a time. All SZE
CHUAN women have bound feet, and all wear trousers very much _en
evidence_, those of the lower class women being wrapped round the ankles
and tied, those of the upper class being wide and decorated. They asked
hordes of questions about domestic and social matters from their own
grotesquely different standpoint, and wanted to hear what the “Jesus
religion” was like, and were quite unable to understand how people could
pray “unless they had a god in the room.” One day Miss Ramsay, who had
been for some years in China, explained to her guests various things
concerning our Lord’s life and teachings, and an upper class woman, who
seemed intelligent and interested, explained it in her way to the
others. As she left, Miss R. said, “You’ll not forget what I have told
you,” and she said very pleasantly, “Oh, no, I won’t; our gods are made
of mud, and yours are made of wood!”
The ignorance which many men of the literary class show is wonderful,
and it comes out freely in conversations in the guest-hall. A very grand
military mandarin asserted not only that Lin and the Black Flags had
driven the Japanese out of Formosa, but that the Straits of Formosa had
yawned wide in answer to vows and prayers addressed to the gods by Lin,
and that the navies of Russia, England, France, and Japan had perished
in a common destruction in the vortex! A picture representing this
catastrophe was for sale in Wan.[29]
They think that the Queen of England is tributary to China, that our
Minister is in Peking to pay the tribute, and that the presents which
the Queen sent to the Empress Dowager on her sixtieth birthday were the
special tribute for the occasion.
They also believed that the American commission which had lately been at
Chengtu for the purpose of assessing the damage done to the property of
Americans in the previous riots was sent to congratulate the new Viceroy
on his appointment!
Also many of the _literati_ say—and I had heard the same thing in the
north—that outside of China there are five kingdoms united under one
emperor, Jesus Christ, who rose from a peasant origin, that one is
inhabited by dog-faced people,[30] and that in another, where each woman
has two husbands, she has a hole in her chest, and that when they travel
the husbands put a pole through it and carry her! They also say that the
missionaries come and live in distant places like Wan and Paoning in
order to find out the secret of China’s greatness and the way to destroy
it by magic arts. A map of Asia hangs in the guest-hall, and Mr.
Thompson overheard some of the guests saying to each other at different
times, “Look at these ‘foreign devils’” (_yang-kwei-tze_); “they put
China small on the map to deceive their god!”
It is impossible to have patience with their ignorance because of their
overweening self-conceit. It is passable in Africa, but not in these men
with their literary degrees, and their elaborate culture “of sorts,” and
two thousand years of civilisation behind them.
Wan Hsien has a very large trade. Its shops are full of goods, native
and foreign, and the traffic from the interior, as well as by junk, is
enormous, but there are no returns, as it is not an open port. The
actual city—_i.e_., the walled city—which contains the _yamens_ and
other public buildings, is small, steep, and handsome. It has extended
itself into large suburbs five miles in extent, of which the true city
is the mere nucleus. They straggle along the river, high up on the
cliffs above it, and two miles back, where they are arrested by a rocky
barrier at a height in which is excavated and scaffolded a celebrated
“Temple of the Three Religions,” at the top of 1570 fine stairs, a great
place of pilgrimage. This back country, in which are few level acres, is
exquisitely cultivated, and is crossed in several directions by flagged
pathways, carried over ascents and descents by good stairs. These
usually lead to lovely villages, built irregularly on torrent sides,
among a great variety of useful trees.
The city is divided into two parts by a river-bed, then nearly dry, but
when I saw it in summer it contained a very respectable stream, which
serves as the public laundry. I have never seen so beautiful a bridge as
the lofty, single stone arch, with a house at the highest part, which
spans the river-bed, and which seems to spring out of the rock without
any visible abutments.
Graceful pagodas and three-storeyed pavilions guard the approaches. The
Feng Shui of Wan is considered perfect. Rich temples on heights above
the river and the handsome temple called Chung-ku-lo (Drum and Bell
Lodge), overlooking the small gorge below, with a large stage, under a
fine three-storeyed pavilion, for the performance of the religious
dramas, show that “The Three Religions” retain their hold on the people.
The wealth of vegetation is wonderful. Not a barren or arid spot is to
be seen from the water’s edge to the mountain summits which are the
limits of vision. The shiny orange foliage, the dark formal cypress, the
loquat and pomegranate, the gold of the plumed bamboo, the deep green of
sugarcane, the freshness of the advancing grain crops, and the drapery
of clematis and maidenhair on trees and rocks all delight the eyes. But
the uniqueness of the neighbourhood of Wan consists in the number of its
truncated sandstone hills, each bearing on its flat top a picturesque
walled white village and fortification, to be a city of refuge in times
of rebellion. These, rising out of a mass of greenery, with a look of
inaccessibility about them, are a silent reference to unpleasant
historic facts which distinguish Wan from other cities.
[Illustration: BRIDGE AT WAN HSIEN.]
It is not alone that junks fringe the shores, but they are very largely
built at Wan, for the passage of the rapids, of a convenient
material—the tough, formal cypress which grows on the adjacent hills.
They must be at once light and strong, and more disposed to bend than to
break. Many of their fittings have a local origin, and many rich junk
builders and junk owners live at Wan.
Foreign goods go up the river to Chungking, the westernmost treaty port,
from twelve to twenty days higher up the river, and come down again to
Wan. “The Province of the Four Streams” does not produce much cotton;
and cotton yarn from Japan and India comes in large quantities into Wan
to be woven there. In 1898 there were about 1000 handlooms. The cotton
is woven into pieces about thirty feet long and sixteen inches broad,
which take a man two days’ labour, from daylight till 9 p.m., to weave.
A weaver’s wages with food come to about 600 _cash_, at present about
1_s._ 6_d._ per week of six days. Can Lancashire compete with this in
anything but the output?
CHAPTER XVII.
CHINESE CHARITIES[31]
As Moslems regard almsgiving as one of the “gates of heaven,” and
practise it to a very remarkable extent, so the Chinese have placed
benevolence foremost on the list of the “Five Constant Virtues.” The
character which denotes it is said by the learned to be composed of the
symbols for _man_ and _two_, by which is somewhat obscurely indicated,
on the principle of the spark being the result of the contact of flint
with steel, that benevolence should result from the contact of two human
beings.
That this is so in China is not the impression which the facts of daily
life produce, and the popular view taken of Chinese character in this
country is that it is cruel, brutal, heartless, and absolutely selfish
and unconcerned about human misery. Among supporters of foreign missions
this opinion would be found nearly universal; and, indeed, I have heard
the non-existence of benevolence in the vast non-Christian empire of
China brought forward as an argument in favour of such missions. So
saturated is our atmosphere with the belief that the only charitable
institutions in China are those founded by Protestant and Catholic
missionaries, that nothing surprised me more than to find that the
reverse is the case. Among the many intelligent and frivolous questions
which have been put to me since I returned, the one, “Have the Chinese
any charities?” has not been among them. It has been reserved for
missionaries, and specially the late Rev. D. Hill, of Hankow, and the
Rev. W. Lawton, of Chinkiang, to bring this most interesting subject
under the notice of readers. The Rev. Arthur Smith gives a chapter of
his clever and attractive book, _Chinese Characteristics_, to the same
subject, and Dr. Wells Williams glances at it very briefly in _The
Middle Kingdom_; but few out of the many lay writers on China have
touched upon it. On my first visit in 1878, Dr. Henry, of Canton,
pointed out to me asylums or almshouses for the blind, and for aged
persons without sons; and on my recent visits, following this lead, I
made such inquiries as were practicable on this subject, and now venture
to present my too scanty notes to my readers.
I have already remarked that the facts which lie on the surface of
Chinese daily life do not give the impression of strong benevolent
instincts. Wounded men are stripped of their uniforms and are left to
perish on battlefields, because “wounded men are no use.” The ablest
Chinese general in the late war wished to buy machine guns without the
protective “mantle” at the consequently reduced price, and on being told
by the German agent that this would risk a great sacrifice of life
coolly replied, “We’ve plenty of men.” Yet this same man was most
generous to the poor, established soup-kitchens in Mukden, his city,
every winter, supplied the hospital with ice for the patients, and, even
in the hurry of the last evening before he started with his brigade for
the fatal field of Phyong-yang, arranged that the hospital should be
supplied with ice during his absence.
I have known a number of coolies refuse to get water from a river a few
yards off to assuage the burning thirst of an apparently dying man of
their number, who had carried a burden by their side for a fortnight,
and had shared their hardships, on the ground that he was “no more any
good,” and several similar instances, and what they do not practise
themselves they fail to understand in others. I have been jeered at as a
fool for laying a wet cloth on the brow of a man who had served me for
some time and fell out on the road seriously ill, and yet more for
having him carried in my chair rather than leave him to die on a
mountain-side. On another occasion in SZE CHUAN, when I left my chair
and walked up a part of the colossal staircase by which the road is
carried over the Pass of Shen Kia-chao, my bearers showed the
construction they put on my doing so by asking, “Does the foreign woman
think us not strong enough to carry her?” Men of the lower class
interpret ordinary humanity and consideration as arising from dread of
them, and the traveller is daily coming across instances which look very
like brutality, and most foreign residents speak of the Chinese as cruel
and brutal.
Some writers, especially the author of _Chinese Characteristics_, while
admitting the existence of charities on a large scale, detract from the
admiration which such works of benevolence would naturally command by
pointing out that they are regarded as “practising virtue,” and are
considered to be a means of “accumulating merit,” and in fact that the
object generally in view is “not the benefit of the person on whom the
‘benevolence’ terminates, but the extraction from the benefit conferred
of a return benefit for the giver.” The Chinese are perhaps the most
practical people on earth, and a curious system of moral bookkeeping
adopted by many shows this feature of the national character in a very
curious light. There are books inculcating the practice of “virtue,” and
in these a regular debtor and creditor account is opened, in which an
individual charges himself with all his bad acts and credits himself
with all his good ones, and the balance between the two exhibits his
moral position at any given time.
Mr. A. Smith is a very acute observer, and has had lengthened
opportunities of observation, and his conclusions as to the motives for
benevolence must be received with respect. May it not, however, be
hinted that an equally acute observer setting himself to dissect motives
for largesse to charities after a residence of some years in England
would consider himself warranted in referring a very considerable
proportion of our benevolence to motives less worthy than the desire to
“accumulate merit”?
The problem of “the poor, and how to deal with them,” has received, and
is receiving, various solutions in China, and probably there is not a
city without one or more organisations for the relief of permanent and
special needs. Foundlings, orphans, blind persons, the aged, strangers,
drowning persons, the destitute, the dead, and various other classes are
objects of organised benevolence. The methods are not our methods, but
they are none the less praiseworthy.
The care of the dead is imperative on every Chinese, but poverty steps
in, a coffin is an unattainable luxury, and without help a proper
interment is impossible. Hence in all cities there are benevolent guilds
which supply coffins for those whose relations are too poor to buy them,
and bury such in free cemeteries, providing, according to Chinese
notions, all the accessories of a respectable funeral, with suitable
offerings and the attendance of priests. Human bones which have become
exposed from any cause are collected and reburied with suitable dignity,
and bodies which have remained for years in coffins above ground waiting
for the geomancers to decide on an auspicious day for the funeral, until
all the relations are dead and the coffins are falling into decay, are
supplied with new ones, and are suitably interred.
A Chinese is all his life thinking of his burial and the ancestral
rites. Among a people to whom a creditable interment means so much, the
generous way in which these benevolent obsequies are conducted does more
than we can understand to remove the bitterness of mourning. The
accompanying illustration shows a neat “chapel” with a well-kept
cemetery, where bones have been gathered, those of individuals being
placed together, so far as indications allow of it, under neat coverings
of concrete.
In the great city of Chinkiang there are an orphan asylum and benevolent
institute for girls, with five receiving offices, and a boarding-out as
well as an asylum system, a benevolent institute with eighty boys above
six, who are apprenticed when old enough, with five teachers in charge,
and twenty free day schools for about three hundred boys, whose harsh
voices, pitched high, may be heard twanging at the wisdom of the Chinese
classics.
Among the Chinkiang benevolent plans for adults there is one, well
managed, of inestimable advantage to the struggling farmer or
merchant—“The Bureau for Advancing Funds.” From it a poor man with
security can borrow from 1000 to 5000 _cash_ ($1 to $5), which must be
repaid in one hundred days by payments made every five days. He can
borrow again up to a fourth time.
[Illustration: A CHINESE BURIAL CHARITY.]
There are two free dispensaries, with nine doctors in charge. They are
open without fees every day, treating about 200 patients, who are not
required to pay for their medicines. The Life-saving Institution, with a
head office and two or three minor offices, has six well-equipped,
well-manned boats always on the river near the port, and ten others
dodging about above and below. I was in the steamer _Cores de Vries_
when she cut down the s.s. _Hoi-how_ to the water’s edge abreast of
Chinkiang, and I can answer for the trained alacrity with which several
of these boats were at once on the spot, remaining by the _Cores de
Vries_ even after she was run ashore. Their work is not only to save the
drowning, but to remove dead bodies from the water, and these are
afterwards buried with seemly rites by the Society in a well-kept
private cemetery on the hill in which it has interred 175 rescued
corpses within the last ten years. There is a free ferry, with thirteen
big boats, for crossing the ofttimes stormy and dangerous Yangtze, which
saves many lives of those who would otherwise be drowned by ferrying in
cheap and unseaworthy craft. This is the richest of the benevolent
institutions.
It is interesting to learn how the actual beggars, who trade upon
sympathy by their filthiness, deformities, and sores, are treated. A
_Beggars’ Refuge_ and a _Home for the Aged_ exist for the same class.
The Beggars’ Refuge was begun by a former Taotai. Of its ninety inmates
about nine are women. It is not to be expected that it should be clean
or sweet. I have seen one in another city which receives five hundred.
The beggars are required to bring their clothes and wadded quilts with
them, but all else is furnished, and in winter outsiders also receive
rice there. Most of the inmates, unless disqualified by age or disease,
spend their days begging in the streets.
The rich merchants subscribe to keep up a winter “_soup kitchen_,” which
feeds about a thousand people daily with rice, at a cost of thirty
dollars a day, during the three coldest months. Besides this the General
Benevolent Institution dispenses medicines during the summer, and rice
tickets during the winter, and has charge of the “Invalid Home,” and
also provides coffins for the dead poor. This society is richly endowed
with land, owning 3000 _mow_.[32] The original 280 _mow_ came from the
priests on Golden Island.
Widows are not forgotten. Two associations take them in charge: the
_Widows’ Relief Society_ and the _Widows’ Home_. The former has only
funds sufficient for 300 pensioners, the lists being filled up as deaths
occur. The latter is connected with the _Boys’ Orphanage_, and provides
a home, food, and clothes for 200 widows. After once entering they are
not allowed to go out unless offered a respectable home by a friend, or
unless a son has grown to man’s estate. Any results of the sale of plain
or fancy needlework are returned to the worker. This care of widows
marks a great advance in China on the practice in India and some other
Eastern countries.
There are several free cemeteries outside the city, and one of recent
origin for children, with a wall six feet high surrounding it, and a
keeper in charge, in which 2000 children have been buried in the last
four years. In Mukden I first became familiar with the custom, the
growth of a superstitious belief, not of lack of maternal feeling, of
rolling up the bodies of children in matting and “throwing them away,”
_i.e._, putting the bundle where the dogs can devour the corpse, as a
sort of offering to the “Heavenly Dog,” which is supposed to eat the sun
at an eclipse. When foreigners began to settle in the Yangtze treaty
ports it came to be currently believed that they asserted a claim
against the dogs for these bodies, of which they “take out the eyes and
the hearts to make medicine.” This was too much; hence this well-walled
cemetery was provided. This accusation against foreigners, which is a
frequent cause of anti-foreign riots, is current everywhere in the
Yangtze Valley. I met with it in its worst form so far west as Kuan
Hsien, on the Upper Min, and an angry cry of “Another child-eater!” was
frequently raised against myself as I passed through the towns of SZE
CHUAN. This goodly list does not exhaust the native charities of the
first treaty port on the Yangtze.[33]
I have dwelt in detail on the charities of Chinkiang because they are
typical of those of other great cities; but the variety throughout the
country is infinite, and includes many associations merely for the
relief of suffering. In Wuhu a _Life-saving Association_ was established
in 1874, with which have been associated, under the same managing staff,
a gratuitous _Coffin Association_, to help the very poor to inter their
relatives decently, and a _Free Ferry Association_, with big, well-found
boats, to prevent the poor from risking their lives by crossing the
Yangtze in small _sampans_. Large and substantial offices indicate the
generous support given to the _Lifeboat Association_, with which are
united a _Humane Society_ for restoring life to persons rescued from the
water, and other kindred benevolent associations. This society, which
has societies affiliated to it, and apparently under the same rules, at
many of the riverine towns, has four lifeboats at Wuhu, about fifty feet
long, ten broad, and fourteen tons burden, well manned and handled, able
to face any weather, with crews under strict discipline, and ready to
sally forth at a signal. They cruise up and down the river aiding junks
in distress, rescuing the drowning, and recovering bodies for burial.
If a rescued man is a stranger and destitute, he receives the loan of
dry clothing, and shelter for three days; if he is ill, he has shelter
and medical attendance so long as he requires them. Such destitute
rescued persons are supplied with twenty cents for each thirty-three
miles of their journey home. A recovered corpse is reported by the
society to the authorities, who take charge of any property recovered
with it until the relations are found. It is decently buried, and the
usual ceremonial for the dead is provided at stated seasons.
This society publishes its rules and accounts annually for general
information. Its offices were built by donations from merchants. It
receives a subscription of fifty taels a month from the inland customs,
and its other funds are subscriptions, rentals of donated lands, and
contributions of rice. The society has always a good balance in hand.
Besides wages, it pays at Wuhu and the different sub-stations to the
boatmen a reward of 1000 _cash_, or about a dollar, for every life
saved, and from 300 to 500 _cash_ for every corpse.
Another charity also provides coffins for destitute persons, and
mat-shelters, often sadly needed, for burned-out families, and medical
aid for the sick. This is supported chiefly by subscriptions from
shopkeepers and gifts of coffin wood.
A few years ago the Taotai, with the leading “gentry” and merchants,
established an asylum for foundlings and the children of destitute
parents, which has gradually come to include a charity school, an
almshouse for aged and invalid poor, and a free hospital.
Kukiang has several similar institutions, including a _Humane and
Life-saving Institution_, established by the tea and opium merchants
with the funds of their guilds. In Hankow there are more than twenty
charities, supported at a cost of about 100,000 dollars annually. At Wan
Hsien, above the gorges and the worst rapids, there are very noble
charities, some of them carried on by the Scholars’ Guild and the head
men of the city, and others by private individuals. Among these are soup
kitchens and large donations of rice to the poor in the winter, and in
the first month (February) allowances of rice and money to about fifty
old people, and gifts of 1600 _cash_ each to about 100 poor widows. The
Scholars’ Guild also supports a foundling hospital. I cannot overlook
the noble benevolences of Hsing-fuh-sheo, a Wan merchant, not
exceptionally wealthy, who, at a cost of over 8000 dollars a year,
supports two dispensaries and a drug store, forty free schools, five
preachers of the Sacred Edict, and besides, provides clothing and
coffins for the dead poor, and wadded garments for the destitute in
winter.[34]
Among many other ways of showing benevolence is the provision of free
vaccination to all who will apply for it; drugs and plasters are given
by some to all applicants, and books known as “Virtue Books” are given
away by others, or are exposed for sale at less than cost price. There
are small associations for providing the neat, canopied, stone furnaces
which are seen in all cities and many country places, for the burning of
paper on which are written characters. Originally no doubt this practice
was established to prevent any defilement of the sacred names of Buddha
and Confucius, but a sanctity has come to attach to all written paper
owing to the great reverence of the Chinese for literature, and paper is
no longer collected by the priests, but by men paid by these societies
for the purpose, who go round with bamboo tongs and bottle-mouthed
baskets, rescuing the characters from desecration. The benevolence is
not apparent to me, although the societies which undertake this work
bear the name _Mutual Charitable Institutions_.
Among other good works are the charitably aided provincial clubs for the
care of those who become destitute at a distance from home, and who
without such aid could not return, or who, having died afar from
relatives, could not otherwise be taken home for burial. Among temporary
charities partly Government-aided, but very much supported by private
liberality, are the vast soup kitchens, very completely organised,
which, on occasions of flood or famine, extend their benevolent and
often judicious work over the whole afflicted region, and save thousands
of lives. Then there are large donations of wadded winter clothing and
wadded sleeping quilts made every year to the destitute; and societies,
something in the nature of charitably aided savings banks, for the twin
objects of enabling men to marry and to bury their parents creditably.
Much kindness of a kind is shown to the streams of refugees who in bad
years swarm all over parts of China in allowing them to camp with their
families in barns and sheds, often giving them an evening meal. Enormous
gifts are made to beggars, who, in all the large cities, are organised
into such powerful guilds that they can coerce rather than plead, and
can ensure that a steady stream of charity shall flow in their
direction. In the case of both refugees and beggars, a prudent dread of
the consequences of refusal is doubtless answerable for much of what
poses as charity, and in this the Chinese and the Englishman are
probably near of kin.
In concluding this chapter, which brings additional evidence of the
strong tendency to organise which exists among the Chinese, I will
mention a few of the methods in which individuals carry out benevolent
instincts or seek to “accumulate merit.” A Buddhist on a river bank pays
a fisherman for the whole of the contents of his plunge-net, and returns
the silver heap to the water; another buys a number of caged birds, and
lets them fly. Some build sheds over roads, and provide them with seats
for weary travellers; others make a road over a difficult pass, or build
a bridge, or provide a free ferry for the poor and their cattle. A few
men club together to provide free soup or tea for travellers, and erect
a shed, putting in an old widow to keep the water boiling; or two or
three priests, with the avowed object of securing merit, do the same
thing at a temple; others provide seats for wayfarers on a steep hill.
Some provide lamps glazed with thin layers of oyster shells fitted into
a wooden framework, and either hang them from posts or fit them into
recesses in pillars to warn travellers by night of dangerous places on
the roads.
I put forward my opinion on the subject of Chinese benevolence with much
diffidence, laying the motive of the accumulation of merit on one side.
The Chinese obviously fail in acts of unselfishness and of _personal_
kindliness and goodwill. Their works of merit are very much on a large
scale, for the benefit of human beings in masses, the individual being
lost sight of. They involve little personal, wholesome contact between
the giver and receiver, out of which love and gratitude may grow, and no
personal self-denial, and in these respects place themselves on a par
with much of our easy charity by proxy at home.
It was a great surprise to me, as it will be to the more thoughtful
among my readers, to find that organised charity on so large a scale
exists in China. Among its defects, in addition to the lack, before
mentioned, of kindly individual contact, are the neglect to foster
independence by painstaking methods, and the system of peculation from
which even benevolent funds do not escape, though it must be added that
many Chinese gentlemen give much valuable time to securing their honest
and efficient management.
I have not been able to learn whether the benevolent instincts of
Chinese women find any outlet. I have been asked by one to give some
straw plaiting to a poor widow to do, and by another lady to employ an
indigent woman in embroidering satin shoes. I have heard of ladies
inviting old and poor women to tea once a week, and even oftener; and
Mr. A. Smith narrates one such instance.
It must be remarked that in China certain serious consequences may
befall a man who performs an act of kindness individually, and that a
dread of such a mishap renders men exceedingly reluctant to give aid and
to save life under some circumstances. This possibility is apt to make
the Chinese wary as to doing kindnesses personally. A missionary tells
how a medical missionary living in one of the central provinces was
asked by some native gentlemen to restore the sight of a beggar who was
totally blind from cataract. The operation was successfully performed,
but when the man regained his sight the same gentlemen came to the
operator and told him that, as by the cure he had destroyed the beggar’s
sole means of livelihood, it was then his duty to compensate him by
taking him into his service!
In conclusion, the Chinese classics teach benevolence: charity is
required as a proof of sincere goodness; the Buddhist religious writings
inculcate relief of sick persons and compassion to the poor, and the
worship of the Goddess of Mercy, an increasingly popular cult in China,
tends in the same humane direction. It must be remembered also that the
divinities worshipped in China are not monsters of cruelty and
incarnations of evil, but, on the contrary, that they may be credited
with some of the virtues, and among them that of benevolence.
CHAPTER XVIII.
FROM WAN HSIEN TO SAN TSAN-PU
Finding that it was impossible for any European to accompany me, I
decided to venture on the journey of 300 miles to Paoning Fu alone, and
to buy my own experience. The land journey developed into one of about
1200 miles, and was accomplished with one serious mishap and one great
disappointment. It was interesting throughout, and taught me much of the
ways of the people, and the scenery alone would have repaid me for the
hardships, which were many. My greatest difficulty consisted in having
to disinter all information about the route and the industries and
customs of the people, through the medium of two languages, out of the
capacities of persons who neither observed nor thought accurately, nor
were accustomed to impart what they knew: who were used to telling lies,
and to whom I could furnish no reasons for telling the truth, while they
might have several for deceiving me on some points. This digging into
obtuseness and cunning is the hardest part of a traveller’s day. So far
as I could make out before or since my journey, no British traveller or
missionary has published an account of the country between Wan Hsien, on
the Yangtze, and Kuan Hsien, north of the Chengtu Plain, nor can I find
among the very valuable consular reports, to which I cannot too often
express my debt, one which has done for this region of Central SZE CHUAN
what Mr. Litton, of the consular service at Chungking, has lately done
so admirably for Northern SZE CHUAN. Consequently on the greater part of
my four months’ journey I had nothing by which to estimate the value of
the facts which I supposed myself to have obtained.[35]
The longer one travels the fewer preparations one makes, and the smaller
is one’s kit. I got nothing at Wan except a large sheet doubly oiled
with boiled linseed oil, and some additional curry powder, kindly
furnished by my kind hosts from boxes of tinned eatables, sauces,
arrowroot, and invalid comforts, which had just arrived, and the like of
which were annually delivered, carriage free, at the door of every China
Inland missionary, however remote, sent by the late Mr. Morton, of
Aberdeen, a thoughtful gift, of great value to the recipients. The
reader may be amused to learn the singular monotony of my diet. I had a
cup of tea made from “tabloids,” and a plate of boiled flour, every
morning before starting, tea on arriving, and for 146 days, at seven,
curried fowl or eggs with rice. I got another Chinese cotton costume and
some straw shoes, and for any other needs trusted to supplying them on
the way.
My servant had made himself persistently disagreeable from the
beginning, and though a superior, fairly educated, and handsome man, he
seemed helpless, useless, lazy, unwilling, and objectionable all round.
The impression of my hosts and myself was that he wished to annoy me
into sending him back from Wan, and Mr. Thompson thought that he would
make my journey very difficult and unpleasant; but the choice lay
between giving it up on the threshold and taking him, and I chose the
latter.
As the guest of a European, all the difficulties of arranging,
bargaining, and paying are lifted off one and put upon a teacher or
servant who is used to them, and after much chaffering a bargain was
concluded by which three chair-bearers and four coolies were to take me
and my baggage to Paoning Fu in nineteen days, a halt on Sundays being
paid for at the rate of 25,000 _cash_. These men were not dealt with
directly, but were engaged by contract with the manager of a transport
_hong_, who is responsible for their good conduct and honesty. I may say
at once that they behaved admirably; made the journey in two days less
than the stipulated time; trudged cheerfully through rain and mud; never
shirked their work; and were always sober, cheery, and obliging. I never
met with other than the same behaviour on all the occasions when my
coolies or boatmen were engaged from a _hong_.
My light, comfortable bamboo chair had a well under the seat which
contained my camera, and, including its sixteen pounds weight, carried
forty pounds of luggage in addition to myself. It had bamboo poles
fourteen feet long, and a footboard suspended by ropes. Rigid laws of
etiquette govern the getting out and in. An open chair in SZE CHUAN,
being a novelty, is an abomination, and accounts for much of the
rudeness which I received. For some time past the provincial authorities
have insisted on all travellers, missionaries included, being attended
by two or more “_yamen_ runners,” (_chai-jen_) or soldiers, who are
changed at every prefecture, where they deliver up the official letter
which they carry. They were never of any use, and except once, whether
soldiers or civilians, always ran away at the first symptoms of a
disturbance, but neither were they any nuisance, and they were always
apparently satisfied with the trifle I gave them.
These _yamen_ runners are attached in great numbers to every magistracy,
in large cities to the number of 1000 or more. They are “the great
unpaid,” but manage to pick up a living, lawsuits being their great
harvest, and the serving of writs one of their great occupations. They
squeeze litigants, and are about as much detested by the people as
bailiffs were by the men of Clare and Kerry.
Thus equipped and wearing Chinese dress, which certainly blunts the edge
of curiosity and greatly diminishes the intolerable feminine picking and
feeling of one’s garments when they are of foreign material and make, I
left the shelter and refinement of the hospitable mission house for a
solitary plunge into the interior, Be-dien on foot, as sullen and
disobliging as could be.
Mr. Thompson kindly accompanied me for the first day’s journey to see
that things worked smoothly, and we left early on a fine February
morning, the air as soft and mild as that of an English April, passing
through the very good-looking town and into the pretty open country on a
good, flagged road, which was carried up and down hill by stone stairs.
During most of the day we met a continuous stream of baggage coolies,
each carrying a bamboo over his shoulder with a burden depending from
either end, shifted frequently from one shoulder to the other. Those
coming in—and the inward traffic did not slacken for some days—carried
from 80 to 140 pounds each of opium, tobacco, indigo, or paper; and
those going out were loaded with cotton yarn, piece goods, and salt, all
carefully packed in oiled paper made from macerated bamboo, which is
very tough and durable. These men, carrying the maximum load mentioned,
walk about thirteen miles a day, and chair and luggage coolies about
twenty-five. Occasionally I made thirty miles in a day, as my men were
carrying only seventy pounds each.
[Illustration: BAGGAGE COOLIES.]
(_From a Chinese Drawing._)
The coolies choose their own place for breakfast and the midday halt of
one hour. The first day, even with Mr. Thompson to make things smooth
for me, I wondered if I could endure it, and I never took kindly to it.
The halting-place is a shed projecting over the road in a town or
village street, black and grimy, with a clay floor, and rough tables and
benches, receding into a dim twilight; a rough cooking apparatus and
some coarse glazed pottery are the furnishings. On each table a bunch of
malodorous chopsticks occupies a bamboo receptacle. An earthen bowl with
water and a dirty rag are placed outside for the use of travellers, who
frequently also rinse their mouths with hot water. One or more
exceptionally dirty men are the waiters. Bowls of rice and rice water or
weak tea are produced with praiseworthy rapidity, and the coolies shovel
the food into their mouths with the air of famished men, and hold out
their bowls for more. My chair that day and always was set down in front
of the eating-house. I went inside and had some lunch, but the dirt,
discomfort, and general odiousness were so great that I did not inflict
the penance on myself a second time.
People intending to be kind sometimes take pork, rice, or fish out of a
common bowl and put it into yours, and to ensure cleanliness draw the
chopsticks with which they perform the transference through their lips,
giving them an energetic suck!
SZE CHUAN is famous for the number and splendour of what are usually
called “widows’ arches,” though they are also erected to pious sons or
patriotic mandarins, specially military mandarins. At times the approach
to a city is indicated, not only by pagodas, but by passing under
several of these, and occasionally even a rambling, squalid village is
entered by passing under an exceptionally handsome one, as was the case
on my first day’s journey. I attempted to photograph it, and the
_chai-jen_ made the crowd stand to right and left by a series of
vigorous pushes, shouting the whole time, “In the name of the
mandarin.”[36] But the people had too much curiosity to be anything but
mobile.
These arches, or _pai-fangs_, are put up frequently in glorification of
widows who have remained faithful to the memory of their husbands, and
who have devoted themselves to the comfort and interests of their
parents-in-law and to good works. Through various channels the
neighbourhood presents the virtues of the meritorious person to the
Throne, and the Emperor’s consent to the erection is obtained. The whole
affair lends some _éclat_ to the town or village. Many of these arches
are extremely beautiful. Chinese carving in stone has much merit, even
in such an intractable material as granite. The depth and sharpness of
the cutting and the undercutting are remarkable, and the absolute
_realism_. I never saw a bit of sculpture which showed a trace of
imagination. The superb friezes which constantly decorate the
superstructure of these arches represent in a most masterly fashion
mandarins’ processions, mandarins administering justice, rich men’s
banquets, interiors of rich men’s dwellings, and many other scenes of
official and stately life, all rendered with photographic accuracy, and
with a wonderful power of catching the expressions of the various faces.
It is impossible not to admire the skill of the artists, and at the same
time to wish for a trace of ideality in their art. In some places a
superb arch enriched with marvels of sculpture straddles across a road
which is nothing better than a disgraceful quagmire or a stone causeway
in which some of the blocks are tilted up on end, while others have
disappeared in the mud. The incongruity does not seem to afflict anyone.
[Illustration: A PAI-FANG]
But I must return from this digression on bad roads to the road on which
I travelled on that and two or three subsequent days, which has the
reputation of being one of the finest in China. It was built fifty-four
years ago, and is in splendid repair. It was to lead from Wan Hsien to
Chengtu Fu, but I failed to learn whether it fulfils its promise. It is
never less than six feet wide, paved with transverse stone slabs,
carried through the rice-fields on stone causeways, and over the bridges
and up and down the innumerable hills by flights of stone stairs on
fairly easy gradients, with stone railings and balustrades wherever
there is any necessity for them. Streams are crossed by handsome stone
bridges, with sharp lofty arches, and the whole is a fine engineering
work.
My journey began auspiciously with a dreamily fine day, which developed
into a red and gold sunset of crystalline clearness and beauty. The
scenery is entrancing. The valleys are deep and narrow, and each is
threaded by a mountain torrent. The hills are truncated cones, each one
crowned by a highly picturesque fortified village of refuge, and there
were glimpses of distant mountain forms painted on the pale sky in
deeper blue. Everything suggested peace and plenty. The cultivation is
surprising, and its carefulness has extirpated most of the indigenous
plants. It is carried up on terraces to the foot of the cliffs which
support the refuges; it renders prolific strips on ledges only eighteen
inches wide. Except on the road itself, there was not a vacant space on
that day’s journey on which a man could lie down.
The first crops, on soil which in that climate produces three and four
annually, were in the ground: broad beans with a black and purple
blossom with a white lip; rape for oil then in blossom grown on a large
scale; opium encroaching on the rice lands, barley and wheat; various
root crops, and peas in bud, though it was only February 24th. Even the
tops of the narrow dykes separating the rice-fields were planted with
single rows of beans.
My coolies stopped several times for a drink and smoke, but did
twenty-seven miles. Chair travelling is, I think, the easiest method of
locomotion by land. My one objection to it is the constant shifting of
the short bamboo carrying pole on which the long poles hang, from one
shoulder of each bearer to the other. It has to be done simultaneously,
involves a stoppage, occurs every hundred yards and under, and always
gives the impression that the shoulder which is relieved is in
unbearable pain. Chair-bearing is a trade by itself, and bearers have to
be brought up to it. It is essential to keep step absolutely, and to be
harmonious in all movements. Of my three bearers the strongest went
behind. Two were opium smokers, and the third a vegetarian, who
abstained from opium, tobacco, and _samshu_, and was on his way to be
rich! There was ceaseless traffic, and as we penetrated further into the
country, in addition to the goods before mentioned, the loads consisted
of baskets of oil, bean cake, and coal and ironstone, showing that the
sources of supply of the latter were not far off. About every half-mile
the road passes under a roof with food booths on each side. There were
many travellers in shabby closed chairs with short poles, hurried along
by two men at a shambling trot. There are so many temples that the air
is seldom free from the odour of incense. We met two dragon processions,
consisting each of 100 men, and the undulating tail of the dragon was
fifty feet long.
Towards evening the hills became more mountainous, and were wooded with
cypress and pine, and it was very lovely in the gold and violet light.
We halted for the night at the large village of San-tsan-pu, where,
though I had travelled for seven months in China, I had my first
experience of a Chinese inn, and I did not like it, specially as I
regarded it as the type of four or five coming months of similar
quarters. I am not ashamed to say that a cowardly inclination to
abbreviate my journey tempted me the whole evening. The SZE CHUAN inns
have a good reputation; but I was not making the regular stages, and at
all events they are inferior on that route, the one which gave me such a
shock being one of the best. They are worse than the Persian ordinary
_caravanserai_, or the Kurdistan _khan_, or even the Korean hostelry. I
felt that I had degenerated into a sybarite, and must summon up all my
pluck, and many a hearty meal and ten hours’ sleep I afterwards came to
enjoy in dens which at first seemed foul and hopeless.
[Illustration: GRANITE DRAGON PILLAR.]
In the best inns there is a room known as the mandarin’s room, which can
be had by paying for it, with a high roof, a boarded floor, a window,
and a solemn-looking table and chairs; but these very rarely came my
way. My introduction to the amenities of Chinese travelling was on this
wise, and, as Mr. Thompson was with me, I was much better off than
usual. I was carried through the open “restaurant,” fitted with rough
benches and tables, into a roughly paved yard behind it, where, in the
midst of abominations, was the inn well. Several rough doors round this
yard gave admission into as many rooms without windows, several of which
were already full. My chair was set down, and, after extricating myself
from it according to the rules of etiquette, I was attempting to see it
unpacked, when I was overborne by a shouting crowd of men and boys,
which surged in after me, and I had to retire hastily into my room.
It was long and narrow, and boarded off from others by partitions with
remarkably open chinks, to which many pairs of sloping eyes were
diligently applied; but I was able to baffle curiosity by tacking up
cambric curtains brought for the purpose. The roof was high at one side
and low at the other, and fortunately the wall did not come up to within
two feet of it, though the air admitted could not by any euphemism be
called “fresh.” The floor was a damp and irregular one of mud, partly
over a cesspool, and with a strong tendency to puddles. On the other
side of the outer boarding was the pigsty, which was well-occupied,
judging from the many voices, bass and treble. There were two rough
bedsteads, on which were mats covered with old straw, on which coolies
lay down wadded quilts, and sleep four or more on a bed. It is needless
to say that these beds are literally swarming with vermin of the worst
sorts.
The walls were black and slimy with the dirt and damp of many years; the
paper with which the rafters had once been covered was hanging from them
in tatters, and when the candle was lit beetles, “slaters,” cockroaches,
and other abominable things crawled on the walls and dropped from the
rafters, one pink, fleshy thing dropping upon, and putting out, the
candle!
I had arranged my plan of operations after my Korean experience, but
sullen, disobliging, and apparently stupid Be-dien left me very much to
carry it out myself. Between two of the bedsteads there was just space
enough for my camp bed and chair without touching them. The oiled sheet
was spread on the floor, and my “furniture” upon it, and two small oiled
sheets were used for covering the beds, and on these my luggage, food,
and etceteras were deposited. The tripod of my camera served for a
candle stand, and on it I hung my clothes and boots at night, out of the
way of rats. With these arrangements I successfully defied the legions
of vermin which infest Korean and Chinese inns, and have not a solitary
tale to tell of broken rest and general misery. With absolute security
from vermin, all else can be cheerfully endured.
A meal of curry, rice, and tea was not despicable, though I was
conscious that my equipments and general manner of living were rougher
than they had ever been before, and that I had reached “bed-rock,” to
quote a telling bit of American slang.
The inn, which was very full of travellers, quieted down before eight,
when the slighter noises, such as pigs grunting, rats or mice gnawing,
crickets chirping, beetles moving in straw, and other insect
disturbances, made themselves very audible, and informed me that I was
surrounded by a world of busy and predatory life, loving darkness; but
while I thought upon it and on the solitary plunge into China which was
to be made on the morrow I fell asleep, and never woke till Be-dien came
to my door at seven the next morning with the information that there was
no fire, and that he could not get me any breakfast! That was the first
of five months of nights of solid sleep from 8 p.m. onwards. I only
allowed myself half a candle per day, and after my journal letter was
written there was no object for sitting up.
CHAPTER XIX.
SZE CHUAN TRAVELLING
The following day was misty, grey, and grim, and several of its
successors were much like it. One of the local names of SZE CHUAN is
“The Cloudy Province.” Kind, capable Mr. Thompson returned to Wan after
giving the coolies various instructions intended for my benefit; and
from thenceforth I depended on myself. The great event of the day was
the complete change in Be-dien as soon as I was bereft of Europeans. His
pride and temper always remained, and were liable to flare up, or die
down into a mephitic state of sullenness, but from that morning till I
left China he was active and attentive, was never without leave out of
hearing of my whistle, was always at hand to help me over slippery and
difficult places, showed great pluck, never grumbled, arranged and
packed up my things, interpreted carefully, improved daily in English,
always contrived to get hot water and food for me, and on the whole made
a tolerable travelling servant.
The travelling was without fatigue. I walked when it suited me, and for
the rest might have been in an easy-chair in a drawing-room. The
chair-bearers were energetic, and their “boss,” a great wag, kept them
constantly laughing. Their good-nature never failed. One day when, to
relieve them, I walked up a long flight of stairs over a pass, they
asked, “Does the foreign woman think we are not strong enough to carry
her?” The idea of a wish to be kind to them never entered their heads,
yet we gradually came to understand each other a little; and I found my
cloak put over my shoulders for me, a wooden stool brought for my feet,
sundry little comforts attended to, and a growing interest in
photography, reaching the extent of pointing out objects at times “to
make pictures of”! By the end of the second day they had all shaken into
my “ways,” and things went very smoothly.
The day’s routine was a cup of tea and some flour stirabout at seven;
but, though I was always ready and eager to start at eight, it was
usually half-past, and often nine, before we got off. The coolies’ first
breakfast was often late, and there was the haggling about the bill,
neither side liking to give in. It was only a shilling for the board and
lodging for myself and my servant! This included his supper and
breakfast, my rice, and a room to myself, his share of the coolies’
room, an iron lamp fixed on the wall, with an oil well and a wick in a
spout encrusted with the soot and grime of years, and if I had a
charcoal brazier, the charge was a farthing more. My other travelling
expenses came to 4_s._ 6_d._ a day; 5_s._ 6_d._ covered everything,
including a fowl for curry every third day.
My bearers trudged along at an even pace, stopping two or three times
for a drink and smoke at tea shops where others congregated, until the
halt for dinner at a restaurant of more pretensions, outside of which I
sat in my chair in the village street, the unwilling centre of a large
and very dirty crowd, which had leisure to stand round me for an hour,
staring, making remarks, laughing at my peculiarities, pressing closer
and closer till there was hardly air to breathe, taking out my hairpins,
and passing my gloves round and putting them on their dirty hands, on
two occasions abstracting my spoon and slipping it into their sleeves,
being in no wise abashed when they were detected. For at first I ate a
little cold rice, but wearying of being a spectacle, and being convinced
that as a general rule our insular habit is to eat too much, I gave up
this moderate lunch, and contented myself with a morsel of chocolate
eaten surreptitiously. On the rare occasions when the villagers wearied
of their entertainment, even of gloves, which they thought were worn to
conceal some desperate skin disease, and dropped off, small black pigs,
with upright rows of bristles on their lean, curved spines, timidly took
their place with expectations which were not realised, picking about,
even under the poles of the chair, for fragments which they did not
find, and even nibbling my straw shoes, and ancient and long-legged
poultry were as odiously familiar.
When they had fed and smoked, the men shouldered their burdens, and
trudged on till about sunset, stopping, as in the morning, for smokes
and drinks, I walking and photographing as it suited me. Sometimes we
put up at a wayside inn, without even the privacy of a yard; this was in
very small places, where the curiosity was not so overwhelming.
In towns the case was different. The inn yard was often enclosed by
planking and a wide door, within which there might be one, two, or three
courts, possibly with flowers in pots and a little gaudy paint. Some of
these inns accommodate over 200 travellers, with their baggage. Every
room is full, and between money-changing, eating, “sing-song,” and
gambling, and half-naked waiters rushing about with small trays, and
numbers of men all shouting together, it is pretty lively. At the
extreme end of the establishment is the “_kuan’s_ room,” with one for
attendants on each side. The crowd which always gathered during my
passage down the street rolled in at the doorway, blocking up the yard,
shouting, ofttimes hooting, and fighting each other for a look at the
foreigner. Fortunately doors in Chinese inns have strong wooden bolts,
and when my baggage and I were once ensconced I was secure from
intrusion, unless a few men and boys had run on ahead to take possession
of the room before I entered it, or forced themselves in behind Be-dien
when he brought my dinner. If it were merely a boarded wall, a row of
patient eyes usually watched me for an hour, and with much
gratification, for these rooms are dark with the door shut, and my
candle revealed my barbarian proceedings.
But worse than this was the slow scraping of holes in the plaster
partition, when there was one, between my room and the next, accompanied
by the peculiarly irritating sound of whispering, and eventually by the
application of a succession of eyes to the hole, more whispering, and
some giggling. It was always a temptation to apply the muzzle of a
revolver or a syringe to the opening! Occasionally a big piece of
plaster fell into my room and revealed the operators, who were more
frequently well-dressed travellers than ignorant coolies. I used to
whistle for Be-dien to hang up a curtain over the holes, after which
there was peace for a time, and then the scraping and whispering began
again, and often on both sides, till, tired and irritated, I used to put
out the candle and lie down, frequently awaking in the morning to find
myself in my travelling dress still, clutching my interrupted diary.
When one arrived tired after being stared at and pressed upon several
times in the day, beginning with the early morning, the fearful hubbub
in the courtyard, lasting an hour or more, followed by these grating and
rasping processes, was exhausting and exasperating.
Also the landlord’s wife, and often a bevy of women with her, used to
come in and pick over my things, which fortunately were few, and ask
questions, beginning with, “What is your honourable age?” “Have you many
sons?” When I confessed that I had none they expressed pity, and a
contempt which Be-dien did not scruple to translate. “Why have you left
your honourable country?” etc. But they soon tired of the trouble of
interrogating me and talked to Be-dien, and when I asked what they were
saying, I heard such remarks as these: “What ugly eyes she has, and
straight eyebrows!” “Yes, but they see into the ground and where the
gold is hid.” “Has she come for gold?” “What big feet she has!” (Their
own were about three inches long.) “Why is her hair like wool?” and so
on.
These people had never seen lead pencils or fountain pens, and
everywhere these and the foreign writing, and the fact that a woman
could write, (for the gazers were more or less illiterate) attracted
great attention. A pronged fork, which they thought must “prick the
mouth and make it bleed,” was in their eyes a barbarism. I wore straw
sandals over English tan shoes to avoid slipping, and this they regarded
as a confession of foreign inferiority. I was wearing a Chinese woman’s
dress with a Japanese _kurumaya’s_ hat, the one perfect travelling hat,
and English gloves and shoes, and this _olla podrida_ was an annoyance
to them. Their questions were very trivial, and their curiosity appeared
singularly unintelligent, contrasting, in this respect, with that of the
Japanese. It showed prodigious apathy for adults to spend hour after
hour in focussing a stolid stare upon a person whose occupations offered
no novelty or variety, being limited to eating and writing. The
curiosity of the common people, though boorish, was not rude, but that
of the class above them, and above all of men of the literary class, was
brutal and insulting, and generally tended to excite hostility against
the foreigner.
I developed my negatives in my room at night, as it was almost always a
perfect “dark room,” and the greatest of my annoyances was when a flash
of white light showed that my neighbours had successfully worked a hole
in the wall, and that my precious negative was hopelessly “fogged.”
The indispensable _yamen_ runners are changed at every prefecture, and
the passports are examined and copied. These runners are a queer lot.
For this duty they get their travelling expenses and something over, and
the _douceur_ which the traveller bestows. A formal official letter is
their warrant. But on many occasions I found myself not with the escort
I left the prefecture with, which truly was shabby enough, but with a
couple of ragged beggars, to whom the letter with its advantages had
been sold by the runners, who thus saved themselves a journey.
Occasionally these substitutes strutted in front of my chair down a
street waving the magistrate’s letter, the wind blowing their rags
aside, showing the neglected and repulsive sores by which they excite
the compassion of the charitable. The only useful purpose which the
_yamen_ runners served was occasionally when it was growing late to run
on ahead and engage “rooms,” and always to take the passport to the
_yamen_. I write “the passport” because it deserved the definite article
from its size, the grandeur of its seals, and the consideration it
claimed for me, besides which it allowed of unlimited travel in the
eighteen provinces, as well as in Mongolia and Manchuria, and was of
such a nature as to produce an immediate change of manner in every
official who read it! Besides this I had a correct and prosaic consular
passport issued at Hankow, which I only once had occasion to use.
The compulsory _chai-jen_ are, I think, a speciality of SZE CHUAN, and
the compulsion rose out of unpleasant circumstances. I never learned
that they forced the innkeepers to take less than the usual payment;
indeed, I think that Chinese innkeepers are far too independent a class
to be forced, nor, though they have the reputation of being brutal and
truculent, did I see them maltreat anyone, but I much objected to being
sold to the beggars and to being deserted on critical occasions. When
soldiers were sent, and any trouble was threatened, they usually slipped
off their brilliant coat cloaks and disappeared, and in reply to my
subsequent remonstrances said, “What are four against two thousand?” a
specious way of excusing themselves, for the mandarin’s letter is
all-powerful even in a beggar’s hand.
Money annoyances began early, and never ceased. Before leaving Wan Hsien
I bought 10,000 _cash_, brass coins, about the size of a halfpenny,
inscribed with Chinese characters, and with a square hole in the middle.
By this they are threaded a hundred at a time on a piece of straw twist,
and at that time (for the exchange fluctuates daily) the equivalent of
two shillings weighed eight pounds! The eighteen shillings in _cash_
with which I started weighed seventy-two pounds, and this had to be
distributed among the coolies, the boss, or _fu-tou_, being responsible
for the whole. But no reliance is to be placed on the _cash_ shop. There
may be _cash_ wanting, small _cash_, spurious _cash_; consequently every
string must be counted, and this operation frequently took more than an
hour. A few _cash_ in each hundred are claimed for the “string.” On
nearly every string small _cash_ used to be found, and the haggling and
the counting occupied one of the best morning hours. This process, in
common with everything which has to do with money, is intensely
interesting to every Chinese, and the dullest wits are bright on the
subject. Some villages would only receive small _cash_; others rejected
it altogether.
The silver was a greater nuisance than the brass. The silver shoes I got
in Hankow had been broken up into four pieces each, but even then they
were unmanageably big and had to be chopped again, usually by the
village blacksmith with his heavy tools, and weighed again to make sure
that all had been returned. Then the man to whom you pay over a fragment
of your broken _sycee_, for which the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank was
responsible, puts it first into the palm of one hand, then into the
other, looks at it askance, and then says the “touch” is bad, it is
inferior silver, and so on. This is after you have agreed to pay a
certain weight in silver for an article, say half an ounce. Then it
appears that not only is the “touch” inferior, but the ounce of that
town is a heavier ounce than the ounce of the last, and that your scale
is a bad one, and that the silver must be weighed in a “good scale,”
_i.e._, the seller’s own; and between the “touch” and the varying
weights, and the differing values of taels, and the charges for breaking
and weighing and possibly for assaying the _sycee_, the bewildered
traveller, who has three things always to think of—the number of _cash_
to the tael, the quality of the silver, and the weight of the tael—would
gladly compound by paying a much larger percentage than all this
botheration really costs. One of the greatest aggravations is when the
_cash_ strings break just as one is starting, and a thousand _cash_ roll
over the inn yard and lose themselves in heaps and holes. Then the
innkeeper exerts himself and clears the yard of the crowd, and a
diligent search is instituted. It is useless to say “Never mind if a few
are left behind,” for it is a point of honour with the _fu-tou_, who is
responsible for everything, that not a _cash_ shall be missing.
In this chapter I have endeavoured to glance at the most salient
features of SZE CHUAN travel, leaving others to emerge _en route_.
CHAPTER XX.
SAN-TSAN-PU TO LIANG-SHAN HSIEN
The first two days passed uneventfully. I was set down to be stared at
seven times a day, but the village people were inoffensive. We passed
through rich and cultivated country, with many noble farmhouses with six
or eight irregular roofs, handsome, roofed, entrance gates, deep eaves,
and many gables of black beams and white plaster, as in Cheshire. Next
pine-clothed hills appeared, and then the grand pass of Shen-kia-chao
(2900 feet) lifted us above habitation and cultivation into a solitary
mountain region of rock, scrub, torrents, and waterfalls. The road
ascends the pass by 1140 steps on the edge of a precipice, which is
fenced the whole way by granite uprights two feet high, carrying long
granite rails eight inches square. Two chairs can pass along the whole
length. The pass is grand and savage. There were brigands on the road,
and it was patrolled by soldiers, small bodies of whom I met in their
stagey uniforms, armed with lances with long pennons and short bows and
arrows. These bows need a strong man’s strength to string them, and
bow-and-arrow drill is a great military exercise. The price of rice had
risen considerably, _cash_ was scarce, and as in some parts even of this
prosperous province men do little more than keep body and soul together
by their labour, even a slight rise means starvation and death, and it
is fierce, cruel want which turns men into robbers in China, many of the
stouter spirits preferring to prey on their neighbours in this fashion
to depending on their charity. At one point on the pass where there were
some trees, three criminals were hanging in cages with their feet not
quite touching the ground. The _chai-jen_ said that they were to be
starved to death. Not far off were two human heads which looked as if
they had been there for some time, hanging in two cages, with a ghastly
look of inquisitive intelligence on their faces.
[Illustration: PASS OF SHEN-KIA-CHAO.]
All had been robbers. Chinese justice is retributive, and takes little
account of human life. We met a number of chained prisoners on their way
to Wan, all with that peculiarly degraded and brutish look which a
lavish growth of unkempt hair on the usually smoothly shaven head of a
Chinese invariably produces. It was impossible not to pity these poor
fellows, specially as they were most likely driven to their crimes by
hunger, remembering as I did, and that vividly, the judgment-seat of the
Naam-hoi magistrate at Canton, with a row of shivering prisoners
kneeling on pounded glass on the stone floor in front of it, with their
foreheads an inch from the ground. At this time China, with its crowds,
its poverty, its risks of absolute famine from droughts or floods, its
untellable horrors, its filth, its brutality, its venality, its
grasping, clutching, and pitiless greed, and its political and religious
hopelessness, sat upon me like a nightmare. There are other and better
aspects which dawn on the traveller more slowly, and there is even a
certain lovableness about the people. I only put down what were my
impressions at the time.
From the rugged summit of the Shen-kia-chao pass we dropped down into
cultivated land, and at a large village I put up at an inn where I had a
mandarin’s room, very shabby and ruinous, and with a leaky roof, which
compelled me to shift my bed several times in the night, but as it had a
window-frame from which all the paper had been torn off, it was airy,
and with a bunch of incense sticks I overpowered the evil smells. The
next morning there was a great row before I left, about _cash_ as usual,
accusations of theft being freely bandied about. I was in my chair in
the yard when it began, and soon a crowd of men were brandishing their
arms (I don’t think the Chinese possess fists) in my face, shouting and
yelling with a noise and apparent fury not to be imagined by anyone who
has not seen an excited Chinese mob. They yelled into my ears and struck
my chair with their tools to attract my attention, but I continued to
sit facing them, never moving a muscle, as I was quite innocent of the
cause of the quarrel, and at last they subsided and let me depart. I
doubt much whether this and many similar ebullitions would have occurred
if I had had a European man with me.
It was a pleasant region through which we passed in the grey mist, of
small rice-fields step above step in every little valley, the broadest
steps at the bottom, of large, handsome farmhouses, large stone tombs in
the hillsides, fine temples, wayside shrines, and _pai-lows_ or
_pai-fangs_. These erections are finer and more numerous in SZE CHUAN
than I have seen them elsewhere in China. Some villages on that day’s
journey were approached under six stone portals, remarkable for their
dignity and artistic perfection. Von Richthofen remarks upon some of the
SZE CHUAN _pai-fangs_ as being “masterpieces of Chinese art.” I learned
that some of them commemorate, as in Korea, the administrative virtues
of local officials, but the genuine value of the tribute is dubious.
[Illustration: WAYSIDE SHRINE.]
I have no hard and fast theory regarding these portals. They would be an
interesting subject for investigation. It is quite possible that the
Chinese _pai-fang_ is an accretion on such primitive structures as the
triliths of Stonehenge, the _coran_ of India—still, according to
Fergusson, used in its ancient timber form at Hindu marriages—the
_torii_ of Japan, still mostly of wood, and the slighter but nearly
similar structure which marks the entrance to royal property in Korea.
It is probable that the simpler forms in China are the most ancient, and
that superb decoration of many examples belongs to the later centuries.
I cannot see any reason for connecting the _pai-fang_ with the
introduction of Buddhism into China. The _torii_ in Japan, the simplest
existing form of the structure, is connected with Shinto, which existed
centuries before Buddhism travelled to Japan from Korea.
I always objected to halt at a city, but arriving at that of Liang-shan
Hsien late on the afternoon of the third day from Wan, it was necessary
to change the _chai-jen_ and get my passport copied. An imposing city it
is, on a height, approached by a steep flight of stairs with a sharp
turn under a deep picturesque gateway in a fine wall, about which are
many picturesque and fantastic buildings. The gateway is almost a
tunnel, and admits into a street fully a mile and a half long, and not
more than ten feet wide, with shops, inns, brokers, temples with highly
decorated fronts, and Government buildings “of sorts” along its whole
length.
I had scarcely time to take it in when men began to pour into the
roadway from every quarter, hooting, and some ran ahead—always a bad
sign. I proposed to walk, but the chairmen said it was not safe. The
open chair, however, was equally an abomination. The crowd became dense
and noisy; there was much hooting and yelling. I recognised many cries
of _Yang kwei-tze!_ (foreign devil) and “_Child-eater!_” swelling into a
roar; the narrow street became almost impassable; my chair was struck
repeatedly with sticks; mud and unsavoury missiles were thrown with
excellent aim; a well-dressed man, bolder or more cowardly than the
rest, hit me a smart whack across my chest, which left a weal; others
from behind hit me across the shoulders; the howling was infernal: it
was an angry Chinese mob.[37] There was nothing for it but to sit up
stolidly, and not to appear hurt, frightened, or annoyed, though I was
all three.
Unluckily the bearers were shoved to one side, and stumbling over some
wicker oil casks (empty, however), knocked them over, when there was a
scrimmage, in which they were nearly knocked down. One runner dived into
an inn doorway, which the innkeeper closed in a fury, saying he would
not admit a foreigner; but he shut the door on the chair, and I got out
on the inside, the bearers and porters squeezing in after me, one
chair-pole being broken in the crush. I was hurried to the top of a
large inn yard and shoved into a room, or rather a dark shed. The
innkeeper tried, I was told, to shut and bar the street-door, but it was
burst open, and the whole of the planking torn down. The mob surged in
1500 or 2000 strong, led by some _literati_, as I could see through the
chinks.
There was then a riot in earnest; the men had armed themselves with
pieces of the doorway, and were hammering at the door and wooden front
of my room, surging against the door to break it down, howling and
yelling. _Yang-kwei-tze!_ had been abandoned as too mild, and the yells,
as I learned afterwards, were such as “Beat her!” “Kill her!” “Burn
her!” The last they tried to carry into effect. My den had a second
wooden wall to another street, and the mob on that side succeeded in
breaking a splinter out, through which they inserted some lighted
matches, which fell on some straw and lighted it. It was damp, and I
easily trod it out, and dragged a board over the hole. The place was all
but pitch-dark, and was full of casks, boards, and chunks of wood. The
door was secured by strong wooden bars. I sat down on something in front
of the door with my revolver, intending to fire at the men’s legs if
they got in, tried the bars every now and then, looked through the
chinks, felt the position serious—darkness, no possibility of escaping,
nothing of humanity to appeal to, no help, and a mob as pitiless as
fiends. Indeed, the phrase, “hell let loose,” applied to the howls and
their inspiration.
They brought joists up wherewith to break in the door, and at every
rush—and the rushes were made with a fiendish yell—I expected it to give
way. At last the upper bar yielded, and the upper part of the door caved
in a little. They doubled their efforts, and the door in another minute
would have fallen in, when the joists were thrown down, and in the midst
of a sudden silence there was the rush, like a swirl of autumn leaves,
of many feet, and in a few minutes the yard was clear, and soldiers, who
remained for the night, took up positions there. One of my men, after
the riot had lasted for an hour, had run to the _yamen_ with the news
that the people were “murdering a foreigner,” and the mandarin sent
soldiers with orders for the tumult to cease, which he might have sent
two hours before, as it can hardly be supposed that he did not know of
it.
The innkeeper, on seeing my special passport, was uneasy and apologetic,
but his inn was crowded, he had no better room to give me, and I was too
tired and shaken to seek another. I was half inclined to return to Wan,
but, in fact, though there was much clamour and hooting in several
places, I was only actually attacked once again, and am very glad that I
persevered with my journey.
Knowing that my safety was assured, I examined what seemed as if it
might have been a death-trap, and found it was a lumber-room, black and
ruinous, with a garret above, of the floor of which little remained but
the joists. My floor was in big holes, with heaps and much rubbish of
wood and plaster, and became sloppy in the night from leakage from the
roof. There was just clear space enough for my camp bed. It was very
cold and draughty, and after my candle was lighted rows of sloping eyes
were perseveringly applied to the chinks on the street side, and two
pairs to those on the other side. I should like to have done their
owners some harmless mischief!
The host’s wife came in to see me, and speaking apologetically of the
riot, she said, “If a foreign woman went to your country, you’d kill
her, wouldn’t you?” I have since quite understood what I have heard:
that several foreign ladies have become “queer” and even insane as the
result of frights received in riots, and that the wife of one British
consul actually died as the result. Consul-General Jamieson truly says
that no one who has heard the howling of an angry Chinese mob can ever
forget it.
The next morning opened in blessed quiet. There was hardly the usual
crowd in the inn yard. Carpenters were busy repairing the demolished
doorway. A new pole had been attached to my chair by the innkeeper.
There were many soldiers in the street, through which I was carried in
the rain without my hat. Not a remark was made. Hardly a head was
turned. It was so perfectly quiet and orderly that after a time the
_fu-tou_ suggested that I might put on my hat! The events of the day
before would have appeared a hideous dream but that my shoulders were
very sore and aching, and that two of the coolies who had been beaten
for serving a foreigner bore some ugly traces of it. My nerves were
somewhat shaken, and for some weeks I never entered the low-browed gate
of a city without more or less apprehension.
Liang-shan is an ancient and striking city. In the long, narrow main
street, the houses turn deep-eaved gables, with great horned
projections, to the roadway. There are many fine temples with their
fronts profusely and elaborately decorated with dragons, divinities, and
arabesques in coloured porcelain relief, or in deeply and admirably
carved grey plaster, the effect of the latter closely resembling stone.
The city manufactures paper from the _Brousonetia papyrifera_, both fine
and coarse, printed cottons, figured silks, and large quantities of the
imitation houses, horses, men, furniture, trunks, etc., which are burned
to an extravagant extent at burials.
CHAPTER XXI.
LIANG-SHAN HSIEN TO HSIA-SHAN-PO
It was a relief to get out into the open country, though for some time I
felt shaken by the two hours’ tension of the day before. The drizzle in
which I started soon developed into heavy rain, which lasted for nine
hours, turning every rivulet into a tawny torrent. It was a very
interesting journey even in the downpour. Liang-shan is on the western
slope of one among a cluster of ranges, the steep eastern side of which
I climbed the day before, and after passing through the town the road
dips down into a rolling plain, extending widely in every direction, at
that time a great inundated swamp of rice-fields of every size and
shape, threaded by a narrow stone road, and abounding in small islands,
frequently walled round, on which the large farmhouses stand, screened
by bamboo and cypress groves, or temples, ofttimes red, with magnificent
trees and priests’ dwellings surrounding them.
A background of tall pines, cypresses, and bamboo threw into striking
relief a temple of unusual appearance, with a fine canopy roof of glazed
green tiles, the front rising from the water, the rest of the “island”
enclosed by a wall of imperial red. I reached it by wading a hundred
yards in very chilly water, and found a plain, square, open building of
red sandstone, surrounded by a broad, stone platform. In the centre are
two fine palms, in stone vases, and a severe _pai-fang_, on the north
platform a plain stone altar, and a tablet with an incised inscription,
and behind this a wall with incised inscriptions divided by pilasters;
all is severely handsome and absolutely plain. It is a temple of
Confucius, and the simplicity of the few which I was able to enter
contrasts boldly with the crowded and grotesque monstrosities of the
Buddhist and Taoist temples. Truly the “Great Teacher” was one of the
greatest of men, for he has cast into a mould of iron for two thousand
years the thought, social order, literature, government, and education
of 400,000,000 of our race.
Passing Sar-pu, a village composed almost entirely of fine temples, and
through Chin-tai, where the temples are of great size, and the carved
stone front of one of them of great beauty, under many highly decorated
_pai-fangs_, and past some Chinese Chatsworths and Eatons, and large
“brick noggin” farmhouses, we re-entered hills and afterwards mountains,
crossing the beautiful pass of Fuh-ri-gan by a fine stone staircase of
over 5000 broad, easy steps, with a handsome kerbstone, all in perfect
repair! These stairs begin at the bridge and inn of Shan-rang-sar, more
Tyrolese than Chinese in aspect. Indeed, every day I dropped some
preconceived ideas of what Chinese scenery and buildings must be like,
and I hope that my readers will drop theirs, if they are of willow plate
origin, before they have finished this volume.
I had now entered on the fringe of one of the richest coal regions in
the world, seams of coal, practically inexhaustible, apparently
underlying the whole surface of Central SZE CHUAN. Limestone mountains
and cliffs, and caverned limestone with an infinite variety of ferns,
had suggested the probable neighbourhood of coal, and in these mountains
it is to be encountered everywhere. It crops out even in the redundant
vegetation by the roadside, and near the mountain hamlets the children,
with small baskets, hack it daily with rough knives, for cooking
purposes. It appears in lumps along the beds of streams, in the sides of
the tanks in which bamboo is macerated for paper, and in the
mountain-sides, where small collieries, with most primitive “workings,”
exist.
My attention was several times attracted by sheds among the trees, and
by men and boys crawling out of holes in the cliff side with baskets,
the black contents of which they deposited in these. Also, occasionally
scrambling up to a black orifice in the limestone, I came upon a
“gallery,” four feet high, down which Lilliputian wagons, holding about
one hundredweight each, descend from “workings” within along a tramway
only twelve inches wide. From some holes boys crept out with small
creels, holding not more than twenty-five pounds, roped on their backs,
and little room to spare above them. All these “workings” between
Liang-shan and Wen-kia-cha, sixty _li_,[38] were at a considerable
height above the torrent, which dashed down what was frequently only a
ravine, and all that could be seen were small borings just large enough
to admit a man crawling, or, in some cases, the small trollies before
mentioned.
[Illustration: A CHINESE CHATSWORTH.]
In that mountain region, in which I gathered from many symptoms that the
people are specially superstitious, the coal seams are only worked on a
level, not downwards, for fear of grazing the Dragon’s back and making
him shake the earth, but they cannot say whether it is a universal
dragon, the curves of whose tremendous spine are omnipresent, or a
provincial or a local dragon! On the plain from which I had ascended
fuel is scarce and dear, and strings of coolies, each carrying two
hundredweight, supply it with coal from these mountains. Lump coal,
burning with but little smoke or ash, is worth 2_s._ 6_d._ per ton at
the “pit’s mouth,” and is retailed at from 4_s._ to 5_s._ per ton,
according to distance, in the low country. Later I saw many collieries
worked with some skill and with a very large “output.”
Though it rained heavily all day, the atmosphere was fairly clear. That
pass of Fuh-ri-gan is as beautiful as the finest parts of Japan, which
it much resembles—lonely, romantic, shut in by high-peaked, fantastic
mountains, forest-clothed to their summits, and cleft by deep ravines,
with tumbling torrents, fern and lycopodium-fringed. In the forest there
were six varieties of coniferæ, oaks, chestnuts, walnuts, the
_Cunninghames Sinensis_ (?), a tree of great beauty and much utility,
the fine evergreen _Hoangho_ (_Ficus infectoria_), the _Xylosma
japonica_, with laurel-like leafage, and many others, including a
leafless tree which was a mass of pink blossoms. Of evergreen shrubs and
trailers I counted thirty-seven near the roadside!
But the speciality of these passes is the bamboo. There are high hills
forested to their summits with different varieties, a singular and
beautiful sight, with an infinite variety of colour. There are the
golden-plumed bamboo, with its golden stems and the golden light under
its golden plumes, the plumed dark green and the plumed light green,
full-plumed things of perfect beauty, as tall as forest trees of average
height. There is also a feathery bamboo with branches pointing upwards,
a creation of exquisite grace, light and delicate, with its stem as
straight as an arrow, and attaining a height of fully seventy feet, all
forming a dense but not an entangled mass. At one point, 1400 straight,
broad “altar stairs, slope through darkness up to God,” a majestic
sight, for from either side the great green and golden plumed bamboos
droop gracefully to meet each other, and the staircase mounts upward in
a golden twilight. Altogether that pass is a glory of trees, ferns, and
trailers, mostly sub-tropical, and is noisy with the clash of torrents,
though silent as to bird-life. During the whole day the only birds I saw
were some blue jays.
But not sub-tropical was the raw, damp, penetrating wind, which blew
half a gale at the top of the pass, and pretty miserable was the inn in
the fertile, green, malarious hole to which we made an abrupt descent of
1500 feet. My stout “regulation” waterproof, which had withstood the
storm and stress of many Asiatic journeys, had given way; the waterproof
covers of most of the baggage, torn by rough usage, let the water
through; and my cushions were soaked. I had only six inches to spare on
either side of my stretcher in the absolutely dark and noxious hole in
which I slept. The candle-wicks were wet, spluttered, and went out, and
I had to eat in the darkness rendered visible by the inn lamp.
But in such country places the people are quiet and harmless, and I sat
for a long time in the open public space, where the black rafters
dripped black slime. The attempt at a fire was in the centre of the clay
floor, over which a big black pot hung from the roof. My drowned coolies
huddled up in their wadded quilts, and I in a blanket, and two wretched,
ragged, hatless, shoeless, half-clad _chai-jen_, were all trying to
light the end of a green sapling with some damp straw. It was truly
deplorable, squalor without picturesqueness, and failing to get warm, I
went shivering to bed.
The following morning was dry and fair, with a little feeble sunshine.
Crossing the Sai-pei-tu Pass, at a height of 1720 feet, on which, as on
the Fuh-ri-gan, there were several collieries, all respectful to the
dragon’s back, we passed through very interesting country all day, at
times fascinating from its novelty.
[Illustration: BRIDGE AND INN OF SHAN-RANG-SAR.]
Cities of refuge crowded on nearly inaccessible rocks can be seen miles
away, one a special marvel, built anywhere and everywhere on an isolated
rock, resembling Mont St. Michel, another with a striking temple of
enormous size for its centre, with monastic buildings, fortifications,
“brick noggin” houses, clinging as they can to the rock, piled one on
another round it, the whole surrounded by an embattled wall following
the contour of the rock. They are second in picturesqueness only to the
lama-serais of Tibet.
As the country became more open, besides these fortified refuges on
rocky heights, which suggest possible peril, while the frequency with
which solitary houses occur tells of complete security, there are great
solitary temples with porcelain fronts in rich colouring, mandarins and
landowners’ houses rivalling some of our renowned English homes in size
and stateliness, distilleries, paper and flour mills; and every town and
large village has its special industry—silk weaving, straw plaiting, hat
making, dressing hides, iron or brass work, pottery and china,
chair-making and bamboo furniture generally, indigo dyeing, carving and
gilding idols, making the red paper enormously used for religious and
festive purposes, and the imitation gold and silver coins and “shoes”
burned as offerings to ancestors, etc.
The weather became so grim that of the large mansions, splendid from a
distance, I was only able to get a very poor photograph of one. The
mandarin proprietor with many attendants came out to the high road, and
asked me to “take” his family. I said I could not, for I could not
finish the portraits in such weather in less than three or four days;
and then he asked me to be his guest for those days, and he would give
me a large room. I did not wish to pose as an itinerant photographer,
and had grave doubts as to what my reception might really be in the
women’s quarters, and I dreaded the stifling curiosity succeeded by the
stagnation of dulness, so I excused myself.
The stone bridges on the road are very fine, with piers terminating in
bold carvings, frequently of dragons, but occasionally comically
realistic, such as a man carrying an oil basket, a man yawning, a dog
with his head between his legs, a woman combing a girl’s hair, and the
like. Three and four arches with a bold spring are frequent; the
parapets are decorated; and though the road may be only six feet wide,
on the roadways of some of the bridges three carriages can drive
abreast. There are other and older bridges in which the piers are heavy
uprights of stone supporting stone flags occasionally twenty-five and
even thirty feet long. The new, arched bridges, of which the province
may well be proud, are sometimes built by subscription, but are often
the public-spirited gift of a local magnate, whose name and good deed
are recorded in stone. The wooden bridges, which I found always in good
repair, are like those of Switzerland, and, like them, have substantial
roofs frequently double and occasionally treble-tiered, often covered
with glazed ridge and furrow tiles. Some of these roofs are lined with
highly polished carnation-red lacquer, in which the names of the donors,
with complimentary sentences, are deeply incised in gold. In some
bridges the row of pillars supporting the roof is also lacquered and
polished. There are several bridges which I crossed in SZE CHUAN of from
eight to twelve lofty stone arches each, which for stability, beauty,
span, height, and spring of the arches might compare, and scarcely
unfavourably, with some of our finest English structures. In China I
never once had, as in Persia, Korea, and Kashmir, to ford a stream
because the bridge was either ruinous or too shaky to venture upon.
The industries of the towns and villages produce a large amount of
traffic on the roads. Strings of coolies going at a dog trot, carrying
paper, salt, tobacco, dyed cottons, hats, and rush piths for lamps,
passed us incessantly, but no beasts of burden, and only one saddle
pony, which tripped rapidly down one of the longest flights of stairs
with ease and agility. The woods are silent; the call of the handsome
pheasant to his dowdy mate was the only bird note I heard. There is a
great paucity of such animals as make our farmyards cheerful. I did not
see horses or mules anywhere between Wan Hsien and Paoning Fu, or sheep.
Fowls, geese, and ducks there were in abundance, a few cats, and many
old dogs, the young ones having been mostly eaten early in the month.
[Illustration: A PORCELAIN TEMPLE.]
The water buffalo ploughs, harrows the rice swamps, turns the grain and
oil mills, and does many other useful turns. I never saw him used as a
beast of burden. It is hard to become reconciled to the appearance of
the great “water ox,” with his mostly hairless, blackish-grey skin, in
places with a pinkish hue, and his flat head, carried level with his
uncouth, unwieldy body, his flat nose and curved flat horns, looking
altogether like a survival from antediluvian days. Buffaloes are
uncertain in their tempers, though usually very docile, and, like their
owners, are liable to frenzies of fury when frightened.
[Illustration: THE WATER BUFFALO.]
On this route it was amusing to see very small children leading them out
to feed on the grass which grows on the edges of the rice dykes, the
children clambering on their backs and sitting there while they fed
because there was no other dry land to sit on. They are extremely
sensitive to the bites of insects, and, for this and other reasons,
spend much of their leisure time lying in muddy pools which are dug for
their benefit. A group of their grotesque, flat heads appearing above
the water is truly comical. They are credited with a great aversion to
what the Chinese call the “odour” of Europeans, and I have seen a herd
of them “go for” a foreigner in such an unmistakably vindictive fashion
that he took to his heels. The buffalo cow gives a small quantity of
very rich milk with a peculiar flavour. The beef obtainable in SZE CHUAN
is mostly buffalo, and is often the flesh of an animal which has
rendered man many years of service.
On that day’s journey the heralds of the short and glorious procession
of the flowers appeared: plum, peach, and cherry blossom; violets grew
in shady places; a clematis lighted up the margins of woods with pendent
clusters of bright yellow bloom; pink and white fumitories made the
roadside hedges gay; and there were a few others.
The dampness was incredible, and as I had then made nearly two degrees
north from Wan Hsien, the temperature had fallen, and the mercury hung
at about 44°. I never knew so damp an atmosphere even in Japan. Ferns,
mosses, trailers, and all the beauteous vegetation which revels in damp
abounded. The leafage of the root crops was lush and succulent. There is
no winter, and though only the last of February, the opium crop, which
over much of the day’s journey was the principal crop, with maize sown
between the rows, was eight inches high, and its lower leaves, which are
used as food by the people and taste like spinach, were served to me
that night for the first time as a vegetable. Travelling all day in such
a damp, chilly atmosphere in wet clothes was a little trying. It is
impossible to dry anything in the small, poor country inns.
We passed through the town of Yun-i, with a street half a mile long, in
which every house is given up to the making or staining of red and
yellow paper, which is enormously used, especially at the New Year,
which was just over. Everyone nearly was more or less smeared with these
brilliant colours, and the stream outside the town was as red as blood.
Hundreds of coolies were travelling both north and south with bales of
this paper.
I had various qualms as I passed through the low, dark gateway,
specially when I saw men running ahead to collect a crowd, calling in at
the shops and houses “A foreigner!” or “A foreign devil!” but though the
crowd completely filled the street and was noisy, it was neither hostile
nor a mob. One cause of the trouble at Liang-shan was that the
_chai-jen_, instead of keeping with me, went off to the _yamen_. After
that I insisted that one of them, when we reached a town or large
village, should walk in front of my chair. At Yun-i a runner went before
me striding fiercely, a ragged, scrofulous, shoeless, hatless, wretched
little fellow, but as he carried the mandarin’s letter, when the people
crowded and progress was impeded, he waved his arms and pushed them
right and left, shouting the Chinese equivalent of “In the _kuan’s_
name.”
[Illustration: ORDINARY COVERED BRIDGE.]
One great feature of that day’s journey was coal. Coal cropped up
everywhere, and any cutting revealed a seam of coal. Over a
hundredweight—100 catties—sold for forty _cash_ (about five farthings),
picked lumps burning with a clear flame. Miners earn twenty _cash_ per
100 catties, and can get 600 in a day. There is iron in the
neighbourhood. From one hill I saw a considerable smoke, and the
_chai-jen_ said it proceeded from large smelting works, but I only give
this as hearsay. I observed that many articles which I had elsewhere
seen made of wood are in this region made of iron, and that iron is
liberally used on household and agricultural implements. In the
peasants’ houses coal is burned in a hole in the middle of the floor,
and the smoke finds its way out anywhere, as it used to do in Highland
hovels.
After a very varied day’s journey the damp cold became so paralysing,
and the mist so thick, that I halted earlier than usual at the small
mountain hamlet of Hsai-shan-po, where the wayside inn was new, indeed
not finished, and consisted only of a central shed with a fire of
bituminous coal burning with heavy smoke in a hole in the middle of the
floor, and a room on either side, one occupied by the host, a “decent
man,” and his well-behaved family. The partitions are lath and plaster,
the walls beginning a foot from the ground and ending two feet from the
roof, allowing the entrance of some light, much draught, many hens, a
few young pigs, and great clouds of smoke.
CHAPTER XXII.
HSAI-SHAN-PO TO SIAO-KIAO
It was partly to get Sunday’s rest in peace and quietness that I put up
at this mountain hamlet. I could see to read and write without opening
the door, and could move round my bed, and the smells were not so awful
as usual. The central shed was full all day, and occasionally the women
who came sent a polite request that I would exhibit myself to them, to
which I always cheerfully responded.
The “enormous size” of my feet, though my shoes are only threes,
interested them greatly. I was much surprised to find that in SZE CHUAN,
except among the Manchu or Tartar women and those of a degraded class,
foot-binding is universal, and that the shoe of even the poorest and
most hard-worked peasant woman does not exceed four inches in length.
Though in walking these “golden lilies” look like hoofs, and the women
hobble on their heels, I have seen them walk thirty _li_ in a day, and
some have told me that they can walk sixty easily! Two women came to
Hsia-shan-po from a village twenty-seven mountain _li_ away, merely out
of curiosity to see me, and returned the same afternoon. The hobble
looks as if it must be very painful, and is a sort of waddle also.
So great an authority as Dr. Wells Williams writes, “The practice ... is
more an inconvenient than a dangerous custom,” but I have never seen a
hospital in China without some case or cases not only of extreme danger
to the foot or great toe, but of ulcers or gangrene, involving absolute
loss by amputation. It is fashion, of course. Hitherto a Chinese woman
with “big feet” is either denationalised or vile; a girl with unbound
feet would have no chance of marriage, and a bridegroom finding that his
bride had large feet when he expected small ones, would be abundantly
justified by public opinion in returning her at once to her parents.[39]
It is essentially a native Chinese custom of extreme antiquity, and it
is remarkable that the Manchu conquerors, who successfully imposed the
“pigtail” and narrow sleeves on the conquered, have totally failed even
to modify this barbarous custom.
There is no definite age for beginning to bind the feet, but rich
people’s girls usually have it done between four and five years, and
poor people’s either at betrothal or between seven and nine years,
according to local custom. The process is very much more painful at the
latter age, and the treatment of the big toe is different. In the case
of the younger child, four of the toes are doubled under the foot, the
big toe is laid on the top, and the deformity is then tightly bandaged.
In both cases in adult life, when the process is complete, there is a
deep cleft across the sole of the foot between the heel and toes, which
are forced close together. If skilfully bound, this cleft ought to be
deep and narrow enough to hold a Mexican dollar. The foot-binding
process is too well known to need any description.
I saw the initial stage both at Canton and Hsia-shan-po. In the last
case the girl was nearly ten, and was just betrothed to an elderly rich
man. She suffered agonies, the toes were violently bent under the foot
and bandaged in that position, and from the sounds I think that some of
the tendons were ruptured. Yet both she and a small child at Canton
consented willingly in order to get “rich husbands.” The lot of the
women of the lower class is rough and severe, and it is not surprising
that girls long to escape from it by making rich marriages, even though
the escape be by such a path of pain. Then again the weak feminine
nature desires to secure the admiration which in poetry, prose, and
common speech is bestowed on the “golden lilies.”
A woman has to bandage her feet every day of her life, or the “beauty”
of the shape is lost, and the whole process of deforming them is carried
out by carefully regulated bandaging. The Chinese women greatly object
to show their uncovered feet. I have only twice seen them. They are very
painful objects and the leg, the development of the muscles of the calf
having been checked, tapers from the knee to the foot, and there are
folds of superfluous skin. The bandages are not covered by stockings.
The shoes worn are very soft, and where possible are of embroidered
silk, with soles of stitched leather. The women make their own, and the
peasant women sit outside their houses in the evenings stitching or
embroidering them.
As a set-off against the miseries of foot-binding is the extreme comfort
of a Chinese woman’s dress in all classes, no corsets or waist-bands, or
constraints of any kind, and possibly the full development of the figure
which it allows mitigates or obviates the evils which we should think
would result from altering its position on the lower limbs. So
comfortable is Chinese costume, and such freedom does it give, that
since I wore it in Manchuria and on this journey, I have not been able
to take kindly to European dress.
But in SZE CHUAN it varies from women’s dress, either Manchu or Chinese,
as I had previously seen it worn. All Chinese women wear trousers, but
they show very little, often not at all, below the neat petticoat, with
its plain back and front and full kilted sides. But in SZE CHUAN (and it
may be elsewhere) the feminine skirt is discarded, and the trousers,
either of a sailor cut, or full and tightly swathed round what should be
ankles, are worn with only the ordinary loose, wide-sleeved garment
fastening at the side, reaching only to the knees above them. It is a
hideous dress. The petticoat is only worn by outcasts, and this has
compelled some of the missionary ladies, who wear Chinese dress, to
adopt the wide trousers. I never became reconciled to them. The loose
upper garment and half jacket, half sleeved cloak, is most convenient,
as for changes of seasons only easily carried changes of underclothing
are needed.
After the disturbance at Liang-shan I took my revolver, which I had
previously carried in the well of my chair, “into common wear,” putting
it into a very pacific looking cotton bag, and attached it to my belt
under this capacious garment, hoping devoutly that its six ball
cartridges might always repose peacefully in their chambers. It is most
unwise to let firearms be seen in Chinese travelling.
From Hsia-shan-po onwards the country is less romantic. We had
previously left the main road, and encountered Chinese roads at their
worst, narrow dykes passing through flooded rice-fields, or through
farms where the farmers gradually nibble the road away, or convey it
tortuously through their own farmyards, or in a few cases absorb it
altogether. The mud for days was deep. It was impossible to walk unless
equipped with an arrangement which attached three spikes to the heel of
the boot or sandal. The width of the road was usually twelve inches,
enough for single file, but when two strings of men carrying chairs or
burdens met, the difficulties were great, as there was always the risk
of slipping off the road into two feet of chilly water and slime. So
when my chair-bearers saw another chair in the distance they yelled as
loud as they could, expecting the other chair to give place, and edge
off where the strip of _terra firma_ happened to widen a little.
On one occasion, however, we met a portly man in a closed chair,
travelling with only two bearers, and, in spite of yells, he came
straight on till our poles were nearly touching. The clamour was
tremendous, my seven men and his two all shouting and screaming at once,
as if in a perfect fury, while he sat in supercilious calm, I achieving
the calm, but not the superciliousness. In the midst of the _fracas_ his
chair and its bearers went over into the water. The noise was
indescribable, and my bearers, whom I cannot acquit of having had
something to do with the disaster, went off at a run with yells and
peals of laughter, leaving the traveller floundering in the mire, not
breathing, but roaring execrations.
There are roads “of sorts” to every village and hamlet. The one I was
travelling on was called by courtesy a main road. There was nothing
“main” about it but the bridges, which were always in good repair, and
four or five times its width. Had it been reduced to its present
dimensions by successful nibblings, or were the bridges built in a
glowing prophetic instinct, I wonder? The magistrate of the district is
nominally responsible for keeping the roads in order, but responsibility
is an elastic term in China. As in Korea, he has the power to order men
out to work at repairs, but he rarely does so unless he gets notice of a
forthcoming visit of a high official, for the people hate work without
pay, and he avoids this method of becoming unpopular.
Nothing could be worse than the road which I travelled for some days. To
walk was to slide, wade, slip, and fall in the deep mud; to “ride” gave
me the unpleasing spectacle of my coolies doing the same, exposing me to
sundry abrupt changes of position, and the difficulty of passing chairs
and laden porters on the road made progress slow and tiresome. Yet much
produce was on the move, giving the impression that traffic would
increase largely if there were better means of communication. One of the
many needs of China is good roads. There are many rivers in SZE CHUAN,
but its physical configuration usually prevents the linking of these by
canals, as in the level eastern provinces, and these infamous roads
hamper trade very considerably.
Raw, cold, drizzling hours succeeded Hsia-shan-po. The country is less
peopled, and the dwellings decidedly poorer; the corries with their
large farmhouses disappeared, and there was even a stretch of gravelly,
desolate scenery. Wherever the land is unfitted for rice culture the
population becomes thin, as the price of this staff of life is so much
enhanced by land carriage as to render it unattainable.
I crossed the pretty pass of Kyin-pan-si, and ferried the Kiu Ho, a
clear, bright stream. There is very much opium grown in that region, and
some sugarcane, as well as all the usual cereals and root crops. “Small
_cash_” appeared, and continued for three days the currency of the
region, increasing the exasperation of all transactions. The Kiu Ho is
navigable for fair-sized junks considerably above the point at which I
crossed it, and there was much traffic in coal at Kiu Hsien, a
prefectural city finely situated on the cliffs and hills above it.
Incredible filth, indescribable odours, which ought to receive a strong
Anglo-Saxon name, grime, forlornness, bustle, business, and discordant
noises characterise Chinese cities, and the din of Kiu Hsien was
deafening. I was carried from the river up a fine, new, broad flight of
stone stairs, at the top of which a great crowd was in readiness to
receive me, but the _chai-jen_, whose rags hardly covered them, and who
turned out to be beggars to whom the right of escorting me had been
sold, cleared the way, and turning aside at the deep, dark city gate,
along a narrow street running under the wall, I was landed among the
crowds and horrors of the yard of a Chinese city inn by no means of the
first class. However, I got a room, which, though small, dirty, and
tumbling to pieces, had an opening upon the roof of a lean-to, used for
the malodorous purpose of drying vegetables, overhanging the river, and
as I had both air and light I felt in Elysium.
While I was eating my curry, as usual from a piece of millboard on my
lap, with a Jaeger sheet pinned round my shoulders—for it was very
cold—two _yamen_ officials, in rich brocaded silks and satins, entered,
and asked to see my passport, which they copied, using my camp bed for a
table. Be-dien was much offended, for it is outrageous, according to
Chinese etiquette, for men to enter a woman’s room. They asked me why my
passport gave me “rank,” and made me “equal to the consuls,” and how a
woman could “belong to the _literati_,” to which questions, as at that
time I was ignorant of the contents of the document, I could give no
intelligent replies.
They told me that Kiu Hsien has 100 schools (in China numbers are always
round), and is the centre of a large trade in opium, tobacco, packing
paper, and straw hats.
Rooms in Chinese inns usually have good bolts, but this had none, and
after dismissing Be-dien it cost me much time and labour to barricade
the door. There was an instance of superstition on the day’s journey. I
got out of the chair the wrong way, and the bearers were scared. They
said it would cause them to die within a year, and they offered incense
sticks at the next shrine to avert the calamity. In the morning I was in
the family room at the inn when the morning devotions were performed to
some gilded strips of paper inscribed with characters. The householder
put before them some lighted incense sticks, and bowed three times.
The circumstances of the next day’s journey were decidedly unfavourable.
We had ten hours of an infamous road in a torrent of rain with a very
cold wind. I could scarcely ease the bearers at all, for my leather
shoes slipped so badly on the mud, that, even with a stout stick and
Be-dien’s help, I could not keep on my feet. The road, which was a dyke
between flooded rice-fields, never reached two feet in width. It had
once been flagged, but some of the stones had disappeared altogether,
some were tilted up, and others were tilted down, and it was truly
horrible. The Chinese hate rain, and, above all, getting their feet wet,
and I admired the jolly, manly way in which my poor fellows in their two
thin cotton garments trudged through the driving rain and slippery slush
till they had done twenty-two miles. When they reached at dusk, quite
exhausted, the wretched village of Ching-sze-yao, there was no inn, and
it was only after I had sat in the rain in the village roadway for an
hour that the _chai-jen_ induced a man to take us into a deplorable
place.
Shelter it was not. The roof dripped from fifty points, and the walls,
having shrunk from the joists, let in the cold wind all round. There was
no fire but the fire-pots used for cooking, for the use of which there
was much squabbling, and no light, except from a clay saucer of oil,
over the rim of which some rush pith projected. I was wet to the knees,
my canvas bed was soaked, and all else, from the spoiling of waterproof
bags and covers by the hot sun of the two previous summers, but when I
saw the coolies lying on damp straw in their undried garments, each with
a fire-pot between his knees, and not a quilt to cover him, I felt very
Mark Tapleyish, specially when the house-_frau_ brought me a fire-pot
with which to warm my hands. The poverty and discomfort of this house
typified the condition in which thousands of the Chinese peasantry live.
They were good-natured people, not over-curious, and the children, who
were eaten up by skin diseases, were gentle and docile.
The next day, March 4th, was one of clear, grey twilight, without either
wind or rain. In the last fifty miles the country had changed very
considerably, and for the worse. The passes over the mountain ranges had
brought us into the “Red Basin” of Richthofen, which is estimated as
embracing about two-thirds of the province in extent, and, perhaps,
eight or nine tenths of its wealth and population. It is supposed to
have an area of about 100,000 square miles, and a population of from
40,000,000 to 54,000,000. The soil everywhere is of a deep, bright,
rich, red colour, and contrasts with the charm of the varied greenery
which, in the absence of winter, the “Red Basin” produces during the
whole year.
Probably no part of China supports so large a population to the acre,
and it is increasing so fast that thousands of men by unremitting toil
only keep themselves and their families a little above starvation point,
coolie labour being so redundant as to depress wages to the lowest
level. The soil is most carefully cultivated, the soft, red rock being
easily crumbled down by the peasants’ simple implements, and the whole
surface is treated by the methods which we term “garden cultivation,”
which in that beneficent climate, and with the Chinese habit of
carefully preserving the refuse of towns and villages and spreading it
on the land, so that the whole, both from plant and animal life, is
returned to the soil, two, three, and sometimes even four crops are
produced within the year!
Within a few days’ journey lie the depopulated but fertile valleys of
YUNNAN, a noble field for SZE CHUAN emigration; but it has not occurred
to the Government to bear the considerable expense of deporting a few
millions of the toilers of the “Red Basin” to the good lands calling for
population, supplying them with seed, and supporting them for six
months! The move would tax the resources of a better-organised
administration.
SZE CHUAN is a rich and superb province of boundless resources, and I
believe, from what I saw and heard, that the trading and farming classes
are very well off, and are able to afford many luxuries, but I certainly
saw several overcrowded regions of the “Red Basin,” where the condition
of the people deeply moved my sympathy and pity, for a docile, cheerful,
industrious, harmless population, free, as rural poverty is apt to be,
from crime and gross vice, is giving the utmost of its strength for a
wage which never permits to man, wife, or child the comfortable
sensation of satiety, and which when rice rises in price changes the
habitual short commons into starvation.
There were no more grand porcelain-fronted temples, large country
mansions, and rich farmhouses, and instead of parallel ranges cleft by
fine passes in the grey limestone, there is a singular formation, red
sandstone hills and hummocks all more or less naturally terraced, as are
also the sides of the many pear-shaped dells which lie among them; red
cliffs, one above another, from fifteen to thirty feet high, supporting
narrow strips of red soil about two feet deep; circular hills, also of
some height, diminishing into truncated cones, with natural circular
terraces, more or less aided by art, running regularly round them, and
usually a single tree, tops what one is tempted to call the “erection.”
There is a fatiguing conventionality about that part of the Red Basin.
One may, indeed, regard the whole of this vast basin as a mass of low
terraced hills and valleys of no width, destitute of any plains but the
great Chengtu plain, free from floods owing to its configuration, and
drained by fine navigable rivers, with many navigable ramifications,
while coal, both hard and soft, is believed to underlie the whole. Salt,
petroleum, and iron abound, and copper, silver, gold, and lead are found
on the western border, as well as enormous quantities of nitrate of soda
and sulphur.
This great depression may be regarded as a sort of winter garden, over
much of which the mercury rarely falls below 45°, and a canopy of clouds
hanging over it all the winter keeps in the moist heat.[40] It is said
that winter sunshine is so rare in Chungking that the dogs bark at the
sun when they see it. For all the rich productions of this Red Basin,
which have kept the balance of trade for years in favour of SZE CHUAN,
there is, let me repeat, but the one outlet: the Yangtze.
CHAPTER XXIII.
SIAO-KIAO TO HSIEH-TIEN-TZE
The whole country is an undulating sea of green, patterned with red—in
truth, rather monotonous for five days of journeying. The mud was
abominable all the time, but with straw shoes and grippers I managed to
do a good deal of walking. On several days my well-paid chairmen
travelled “like gentlemen,” for labour is so abundant and cheap that
they found plenty of coolies to carry my chair for forty _cash_ for four
miles (about a penny), and even for less! Every house has its opium
field, its bamboo and palm groves, fruit trees and cedars, while the
_Rhus vernicifera_, or varnish tree, the _Aleurites cordata_, or oil
tree, and the _Cupressus funebris_, which it is impossible to avoid
calling “the Noah’s ark tree,” abound. The cultivation, except the
ploughing for rice, is entirely by hand, and is so careful that it is
easy to see that most of the indigenous plants have become extinct.
Violas, fumitories, and the _anemone Japonica_, all of which grow
profusely, but solely along the margins of the roads, were all that then
or later I saw in the Red Basin; in fact, husbandry has made a clean
sweep of “weeds.”
The farmhouses in that region are of mud, with thatched roofs, and look
poor. Straw plaiting and the making of the very large straw hats which
the coolies wear in summer are the great industries. Bad, nay infamous,
roads and small _cash_ for three days showed their power of crippling
trade. Small villages were numerous, but on a journey of 185 _li_ the
picturesque little town of King-mien-sze, on the rocky, picturesque,
non-navigable King-Ho, which I ferried, was the only approach to a
centre of population.
When I reached the small town of Siao-kiao I found it greatly crowded
with traders, and the innkeepers so unwilling to receive a foreigner
that I had to urge my treaty rights, and then was only grudgingly
accommodated. There was a very ugly rush, and then a riot, which lasted
an hour and a half, at the very beginning of which my _chai-jen_ ran
away. My door was broken down with much noise and yells of “Foreign
devil!” “Horse-racer!” “Child-eater!” but an official arriving in the
nick of time, prevented further damage. He ought to have appeared an
hour and a half before. These rows are repulsive and unbearably
fatiguing after a day’s journey, and always delayed my dinner
unconscionably, which, as it was practically my only meal in the day,
was trying. The entry in my diary for that evening was, “Wretched
evening; riotous crowd; everything anxious and odious; noises; too cold
to sleep.” My lamp sputtered and went out, and my matches were too damp
to strike. It is objectionable to be in the dark, you know not where,
with walls absolutely precarious, and in the midst of the coarse shouts
of rough men to hear a feeble accompaniment of rats eating one’s few
things. I object strongly to a mixed crowd blocking up my doorway or
breaking in my door, for every one of the crowd knows better; even the
most ignorant coolie knows well that to intrude into a woman’s room or
in any way violate the privacy which is hers by immemorial usage and
rigid etiquette is an outrage for which there is no forgiveness, judging
from a Chinese standpoint.
The mannerless, brutal, coarse, insolent, conceited, cowardly roughs of
the Chinese towns, ignorant beyond all description, live in a state of
filth which is indescribable and incredible, in an inconceivable
beastliness of dirt, among odours which no existing words can describe,
and actually call Japanese “_barbarian_ dwarfs”! I wondered daily more
at the goodness of people who are missionaries to the Chinese in the
interior cities, not at their coming out the first time, but at their
_coming back, knowing what they come to_. The village people are quite
different, and doubtless have attractive qualities; and it must be
admitted that Christianity does produce an external refinement among
those who receive it, which is very noticeable. Having relieved my
hoarded disgusts by these remarks, I will proceed with my narrative.
The days, though cold and very wet, were a great rest. There was not
even the guiding a horse and preventing him from fighting, to distract
the thoughts from dwelling on any topic I chose to concentrate them
upon. My possessions, except my camera and plates, had been spoilt long
ago, so there was nothing to be anxious about; and a few rolls more or
less in the red mud did not matter, for my clothes were thickly
plastered days before. I could not fare worse than I had done, so I was
not anxious about the night’s halt; so during the day I revelled in
freedom, leisure, and solitude; but when night came, and I sat shivering
in some fœtid hole, not fit for a decent beast, with only a bamboo
railing between it and the pigsty, I often thought Chinese travelling an
utter abomination![41]
Even the most monotonous part of the route had many interests and some
novelties. It is a marvel how the intense homogeneity of China, its
apparent inflexibility, and its actual grooviness, are incessantly
disturbed by local custom. The race, it is true, is always the same, and
the general features of the costume; every Chinese not a convict has a
shaven head and a long queue, and every woman hobbles on deformed feet;
but when it comes to environments they differ from day to day, and
sometimes from hour to hour. Here in SZE CHUAN house architecture varies
almost from day to day; each river has its own form of boat; in one
district all loads are slung from the bamboo over the shoulder; in
another they are carried in wicker creels fitted on wooden pack-saddles
on human backs. In one prefecture the purse is a skin bag attached to
the waist; in another it is a stout wooden cylinder tapering at both
ends carried across the back, and so with many other things. Food varies
with the locality, and crops with the soil. One district rejects large
_cash_, and others small, while some use a mixture. Headgear varies
greatly. Blue turbans are much worn. The shape of the straw hat
indicates the district from which the wearer comes, and local fashion
tyrannises even over baggage coolies. I wanted to give to each of mine
one of the noble straw hats made near Kiao, but they “could not” wear
them in Wan Hsien and its neighbourhood, any more than a fashionable
English girl “could” wear a last season’s hat.
In bridges the varieties are endless, and in _pai fangs_ and temple
fronts. This ceaseless diversity in unity is very attractive in Chinese
travelling, but it has its drawbacks, for on many occasions when, owing
to weather or hurry or some other tyranny, I did not photograph some
striking peculiarity I never met with it again. It also exposes the
veracity of travellers to suspicion. One may describe some peculiarity
which is universal in one region, such as the graceful circular or
pointed arches of its bridges, while another, whose sole idea of a
Chinese bridge is stone uprights carrying flat stone slabs such as the
huge lumbering structure “which, with its wearisome but needful length,
bestrides” the Min at Foo-chow, accuses him of having drawn upon his
imagination for his facts.
For three days of cold, grim, drizzly, or incredibly damp weather, in
which natural terraces gave way to artificial, and hills to rolls, and
roads occasionally disappeared altogether, and the dull green of the
sugarcane at times overspread the country, and the scarcity of rice
lands now and then involved a corresponding scarcity of people, we
travelled so awful a road that it mattered little when it was altogether
lost. It had long since degenerated into the slimy top of a rice dyke a
few inches wide, with a flagstone tipping up now and then to show what
it once claimed to be. The bad weather put a stop to traffic. The only
chair we met in three days came to grief close to us. The bearers fell,
the chair was smashed into matchwood, and its occupant, a somewhat
pompous-looking merchant, was deposited in three feet of slush alive
with frogs, a disaster which afforded my men cause for unbounded
hilarity for the rest of the day.
The road is so narrow because the farmers grudge every inch taken from
their fields. As one is carried along, the chair hangs over the flooded
rice land on either side, and when anyone is seen in the distance he is
warned by a series of simultaneous yells to turn off on an intersecting
dyke. On one of these days nearly eleven hours of hard travel only
produced a result of eighteen miles! My men, though always wet to the
skin and often falling as well as slipping, never flagged or grumbled,
and trudged along joking and laughing, splendid “raw material”!
The people were not hostile in this country region, and the rain
repressed the curiosity which I found specially irksome during the hour
I spent twice daily sitting in a village street while my men breakfasted
and dined. I became daily more convinced that the mandarins have it in
their power to repress any overt expression of anti-foreign feeling. At
Kiao, when I left the inn yard where the riot occurred the evening
before, though it was crowded, the people were perfectly orderly, and
though the long, narrow street was lined with men standing three and
four deep on each side, just leaving room for the chair to pass, no one
spoke or moved.
That same day the _chai-jen_ were changed at the neat little city of
Ying-san Hsien, in the centre of a region where the chief industries are
making bamboo baskets, and straw plait for hats, and I sat for an hour
near the _yamen_ entrance, considering the extraordinary amount of
business which custom imposes on a Chinese mandarin.
We have a habit, partly warrantable—for the official class in China is
the worst of “the classes”—of speaking of “the mandarins” as we might
speak of “the wolves” or “the vultures,” a rough classification which,
like similar methods, is by no means trustworthy. Mandarins are good and
bad. The system under which they hold office has a strong tendency to
make them bad. Nevertheless there are some good, just, honest men among
them, who do the best they can for their districts during their terms of
office, earn the esteem and gratitude of the people, and leave office as
poor as they entered it. With regard to the bad, their opportunities for
squeezing and oppressing are not so enormous as is often supposed, being
limited by what I am inclined to call _the right of rebellion_. When an
appeal to law comes to involve wholesale bribery, and taxation becomes
grinding, then a local rebellion on a small or large scale occurs, the
offending mandarin is driven out, the Throne quietly appoints a
successor, and peace prevails once more.
A system in which official salaries are not a “living wage” opens the
door to large peculation, but withal China is not a heavily taxed
country, and the people are anything but helpless in official hands. In
spite of all the monstrous corruption which exists, general security and
good order prevail, and China has been increasing in wealth and
population for nearly two centuries.
What we call mandarins (_kuans_) are all the magistrates subordinate
through the intendants of circuits (_Taotai_) to the _Tsung-tuh_ of a
province or provinces, the Governor-General, whom we call a Viceroy.
They are prefects or head magistrates of departments, and magistrates
for the subdivisions of departments. Under these, but not known as
_kuans_, are mandarins’ secretaries, often very powerful persons,
clerks, registrars, and an army of subordinates, for whom their
superiors are responsible. The Chinese call the last “rats under the
altar,” and fear them greatly. Indeed, it is said that the dread of
getting into their clutches has a more deterrent effect on evil-doers
than any prospect of punishment. Every mandarin, down to the smallest
magistrate, has office secretaries for investigating cases, recording
evidence, keeping accounts, filing papers, writing and transmitting
despatches, and other formal functions.
Theoretically the relation between magistrate and people is strictly
paternal. Some degree of what we call corruption is inseparable from
Oriental officialism, and when kept within moderate bounds does not
disturb the filial feeling. The whole of a mandarin’s time is nominally
at the service of the people of his district. Of some, perhaps of a
goodly number throughout China, this devotion to local interests may be
literally true. Access to his tribunal may ensure a fair trial, and
probably in a majority of cases little injustice is done when a case
once comes before him.
A gong was hung up at the _yamen_ gate, where I have so long kept my
readers shivering in the damp east wind. I am told that such a one hangs
up at every similar gate, and that on hearing it the magistrate is bound
to come out and attend to the complaint. But in practice a man has to
bribe his way from the gate to the judgment-seat, and from the
gatekeeper to the private secretary, and would be likely to be beaten if
he touched the gong. Though the mandarin may be willing to decide
justly, the underlings through whom alone approach to the judicial chair
is possible do not share his scruples. A man who can afford to grease
copiously the palms of runners, clerks, and secretaries, men unpaid or
underpaid, is sure to see his petition on the top of the pile on the
magistrate’s table, while the poorer litigant finds his delayed _sine
die_.
[Illustration: A GROUP OF _KUANS_ (MANDARINS).]
It is chiefly on the underpaid and hard-worked magistracy of China that
the existence of government depends. No men in mercantile positions work
so hard as these officials, and if they are conscientious, all the worse
for them. Their duties are most multifarious, and are both defined and
undefined, executive, fiscal, judicial, and at times even military. They
are responsible, not only for the taxes of their districts, but for
their order and quietness, depending for much on subordinates whom they
cannot trust, and during war, rebellion, and the floods and famines
which occur with painful frequency are compelled to an almost sleepless
vigilance, lest anything should go wrong, and they should be reported to
the Throne. It is said truly that on the Hsien or Fu magistrate the work
of at least six men devolves. He is at once tax commissioner, civil and
criminal judge, coroner, treasurer, sheriff, and much besides, and he is
supposed to have an exhaustive knowledge of everything within his
bounds. And withal he must so dexterously regulate his squeezes as that
it shall be possible for him to exist, for on his salary, attenuated as
it is by forfeitures, he cannot.
Into the midst of this amount of responsibility, multifarious duties,
and overwork, comes the foreigner with his treaty rights, a new and
difficult element to deal with, and who may be an arrogant, bullying,
and ignorant person. I am not apologising for the crimes of mandarins. I
have suffered much from the violence of Chinese mobs, permitted, as I
believe, if not instigated, by officialism. But I have on several
occasions declined to make a formal complaint and hamper a magistrate
because of my sympathy with his difficulties. On the one side there are
orders from Peking sent down through the Viceroy that foreigners
travelling are to be protected, and that their rights under the treaties
are to be secured to them; on the other there is the anti-foreign
feeling which has been inflamed for years past by agitators, certain of
the secret societies, and what are known as the “Hunan Tracts,” and
which may be provoked into an explosion by any unintentional
indiscretion of a foreigner, or, as in my case, by such an outrage on
custom as travelling in an open chair! The riot occurs; the foreigner
suffers in his person or goods; he lodges a complaint, is backed up by
his consul; and the mandarin, who may have been miles away from the
scene of the occurrence, is held responsible, and is possibly degraded.
The large number of European and American missionaries who have become
residents in SZE CHUAN during the last twelve years have also increased
the evil considerably. So far as I saw and learned, these men and women,
with a very few exceptions, are slaves to the scrupulosity of their
observance of Chinese custom and etiquette so far as they know them, and
to their anxiety to avoid giving offence in the country in which they
live.
But, to begin with, they are foreigners, “foreign devils”; their eyes,
their complexions, their ways of sitting and carrying their hands are
repulsive, and the belief, sometimes piteous, that they are
“child-eaters,” and use the eyes and hearts of children in medicine, is
now spread universally. Then they have come, if not, as many believe, as
spies and political agents, to teach a foreign and Western religion,
which is to subvert Chinese nationality, to wreck the venerated social
order introduced by Confucius, to destroy the reverence and purity of
domestic life and the loyalty to ancestors, and to introduce abominable
customs.
This is, I think, a faithful view of missionary aims from a Chinese
standpoint, and, bearing in mind the extreme ignorance and intense
conservatism of the Chinese, it is not wonderful that there should be
continual small disturbances, or that these should have culminated in
the great anti-missionary riots in SZE CHUAN in 1895, in which a large
number of the missionaries had to fly, and many more owed their lives to
the protection given them by the mandarins in their _yamens_.
_I_ would not hold the mandarins responsible for the whole of these
outbreaks, though they are and must be held so, but the difficulties of
their position are much complicated by the presence within their
jurisdictions of aliens whose aims are obnoxious to the majority of the
people, and who are slowly creating, under the protection of treaties,
societies with views at variance with established custom.
Yet so great is the potency of a word from headquarters that I believe
the SZE CHUAN mandarins are now doing their best to protect the
missionaries, and wherever I went, and very specially at Paoning Fu, I
heard of efficient protection given, even where the means at the
magistrates’ disposal were very limited, and of consideration and
friendliness shown, far in excess of any claims which could be made, and
which went to the extreme verge of a prudent regard for official
position.
[Illustration: LADY’S SEDAN CHAIR (CHINESE PROPRIETY).]
Some of my readers and friends will consider that in the above remarks I
have played in another than the Vatican sense the part of “devil’s
advocate.” So be it. I intended, as a matter of honesty and fair play,
to “give the devil his due.” I am fully aware of the manifold iniquities
of the mandarins, and regard the official system as the greatest curse
of China, if for no other reason than that it makes it nearly impossible
for an official to walk on a straight path. But I wished to note briefly
a few extenuating circumstances, and to protest against that
rough-and-ready and very misleading system of classification which lumps
all mandarins together as an irredeemably bad lot. The system is
infamous, but a traveller who has spent some years in travelling in
Turkey, Persia, Kashmir, and Korea, is astonished to find that the
Chinese are very far from being an oppressed people, and that even under
this system they enjoy light taxation in spite of squeezes, security for
the gains of labour, and a considerable amount of rational liberty. It
is when a Chinese, either through his own fault or that of another,
becomes a litigant that his misfortunes begin.
In the hour I spent at the entrance of the _yamen_ of Ying-san Hsien 407
people came and went—men of all sorts, many in chairs, but most on foot,
and nearly all well dressed. All carried papers, and some big
_dossiers_. Within, secretaries, clerks, and writers crossed and
recrossed the courtyard rapidly and ceaselessly, and _chai-jen_, or
messengers, bearing papers, were continually despatched. Much business,
and that of all kinds, was undoubtedly transacted. There was nothing of
the lazy loafing of a horde of dirty officials which distinguishes a
Korean _yamen_. I was quite unmolested. Successive coolie crowds stood
for a time regarding me with an apathetic stare, said nothing, and moved
silently away. At last a very splendid person in brocaded silks and
satins came out and handed me my passport, and we were able to proceed.
One among my reasons for not making the regular stages was that in town
inns a woman-traveller must shut herself up rigidly in her room from
arrival until departure unless she desires to provoke a row, while in
the small villages and hamlets, where I was frequently the only guest,
when the coolies had had their supper I was able to spend an hour in the
“house place” with the family, and at a very small expense become
friendly with them, and the village headman and one or two more often
dropped in, and, under the influence of tea and tobacco and the sight of
some of the nearest local photographs, became quite conversational.
Be-dien, whose knowledge of English was very fair, improved daily, and
was, I think, painstaking; at all events, I made him so!
On such evenings I heard a good deal about mandarins, taxes, industries,
prices, carriage of goods, foreigners, missionaries, and other things,
all purely local. Occasionally the consensus of opinion about a mandarin
was that he was a very bad man, took bribes, exacted more than the
“legitimate squeeze” in tax-collecting, decided cases always in favour
of the rich, etc. Such must have been very bad cases on which all had
reason to be agreed, or the men, owing to the strong distrust and
suspicion of each other which prevail, would not have dared to speak out
before each other. This is an element which must always be taken into
consideration in judging of the probabilities of the accuracy of any
statement which is made. On the whole, however, there were not many
complaints uttered, and these were usually of the delays of law. Some
mandarins were spoken of with something akin to enthusiasm. One had
built a bridge, another had made a good road, a third had restored a
temple, a fourth was “very charitable to the poor,” and in the last
scarcity had diminished the luxury of his own table by a half that he
might feed the poor, and so on.
Anything like an enlightened idea on a subject not local was not to be
hoped for. Few of these headmen had heard of the war, or of the peace of
Shimonoseki, and those who had, believed that the “barbarian rebels” had
been driven into the sea or into fiery holes in the ground. The immense
indemnity paid to the Roman Catholics for their losses in “the riots”
touched them more closely, and I heard a good deal said regarding the
Roman missions which I will not repeat, and I will also “keep dark” the
various criticisms, some of them most trenchant and amusing, which were
made on our own missionaries, only wishing that
“The giftie were gi’ed us
To see ourselves as others see us.”
The attempt to hammer out facts on these evenings was fatiguing and
often disheartening, as, for instance, to decide which of six varying
statements on one matter had the greatest aspect of probability, and was
worth stowing away in my memory, but the interest of mixing in any
fashion with the people far outweighed the discomfort of peasant
accommodation, even when it was pretty bad. One night Be-dien, after
surveying the inside of a very poor hovel, came out looking rueful, and
said, “You won’t like your room to-night, Mrs. Bishop; _it’s the pigs’
room!_” and truly seven pigs occupied a depression railed off in one
corner of it.
The second day after leaving Kiao we had heavy rain all day, and the
road, which was a barely legible track, mostly on slippery mud hills,
was so infamous that, as the bearers were constantly slipping and even
falling, I had to do a good deal of being hauled and lifted along;
walking it was not, for my feet slipped from under me at nearly every
step. We passed through one vacant, forlorn city of refuge, and spent
most of the day in a desolate, treeless, sparsely inhabited, red region,
slithering along the side of a high, bleak, mountain ridge, the summit
of which (an altitude of 2140 feet) we gained at dark to find a small
and most miserable hamlet astride on the top of it. The houses were all
shut, and the pouring rain kept everyone indoors. No wonder! The slush
was over my ankles, and very cold.
A broad gleam fell across the road, and we made our way to it, as wet as
it was possible to be, and took, rather than asked, shelter in a big
shed with a loft or platform at one side, fitfully lighted as well as
filled with smoke by some branches which were being burned in a great
clay furnace, apparently used for the making of iron pots. Several men
were shovelling coal into the same, and there was a prospect of warmth.
This shed was the front of the mouth and workings of a coal-pit. I was
guided into some workings which appeared disused, where there were some
pigs, a sunk water-trough in the sloppy clay floor, and an excavation
two feet six inches wide by six feet long, into which my stretcher, six
feet six inches long, was backed, and projected six inches outside!
After a hot supper, I rolled myself, in my wet clothes, in a dry rug,
and slept soundly till the torrent of rain slacked off at eight the
following morning, when we got on the road again.
CHAPTER XXIV.
HSIEH-TIEN-TZE TO PAONING FU
The weather continued grim, cold, and damp, with a penetrating east
wind. I felt the cold more than on any previous journey, even when for
weeks at a time the mercury had registered 20° below zero, and on this
occasion it never fell below 40° above, and on some of the “coldest”
days was as high as 45°. Men who had them were wearing their handsome
furs up to March 12th.
After leaving the coal-pit and the bleak hillside, we descended to a
region where the natural terrace formation of the hills was extensively
aided by art, and the country looked as if it were covered with Roman
camps.
At the risk of wearying my readers, I must again remark on the
singularity of the formation of this large portion of the Red Basin,
which is continued in its most exaggerated form at least as far south as
Shien Ching, on the Kialing, fully 270 _li_ south of Paoning. Looking
down from any height, it is seen that the red sandstone has been
decomposed into hundreds of small hills, from 200 to 300 feet high, with
their sides worn into natural and very regular terraces, of which I have
counted twenty-three one above another, while the actual hilltop is
weathered into a most deceptive resemblance to a fort or ruined castle.
Much of SZE CHUAN is remarkable for the scarcity of villages, but, on
the other hand, it is dotted over both with large farmhouses, where the
farmer and his dependants live in patriarchal style, surrounded by a
roofed wall with a heavy gateway, and with large cottages, the walls of
which, with their heavy black timbers and whitewashed walls, have a most
distinct resemblance to the old Cheshire architecture, while the roofs,
with a nearly even slope from the ridge-pole to the extremity of the
deep eaves which form broad verandahs, have more kinship with that of
the Swiss _châlet_ than with the typical Chinese roof, curving upwards
at the corners.
If the tradition be true which declares that in the early days of this
dynasty people were sent in chains to colonise this fair province, it
may be, as Mr. Baber suggests, that they had not the family and clan
ties which lead men to herd together in the communities which are also a
necessary element of safety in many circumstances. It was not till the
Taiping outbreak that these scattered settlers, who had lived and
multiplied for nearly two centuries under conditions of security, found
it necessary to combine for mutual protection. It then occurred to them
that the numerous precipitous, rocky hills of the region, if walled
round near the top, would be impregnable refuges, and they subscribed
money and labour, and carried out their idea, sprinkling the country
with picturesque _chai-tzu_, or redoubts, to which they ascended in
times of dread. It did not occur to them to build permanent dwellings
and remain at these altitudes.
In the purely agricultural parts of the province, where there are no
local industries requiring concentration of population, such villages as
are to be met with elsewhere, in which tenants, labourers, innkeepers,
and proprietors, with shopkeepers and artisans, live in communities, are
rarely met with. Out of the system of scattered dwellings and minute
hamlets, trading arrangements for supplying the wants of the
agricultural population have grown up, the like of which I have not seen
elsewhere. These are the markets (_ch’ang_).
In travelling along the roads one comes quite unexpectedly upon a long,
narrow street with closed shop fronts, boarded-up restaurants, and
deserted houses, and possibly a forlorn family with its dog and pig the
only inhabitants. The first thought is that the population has been
exterminated by a pestilence, but on inquiry the brief and simple
explanation is given, “It’s not market day.”
A few miles further, and the roads are thronged with country people in
their best, carrying agricultural productions and full and empty
baskets. The whole country is on the move to another long, narrow street
closely resembling the first, but that the shop fronts are open, and
full of Chinese and foreign goods; the tea shops are crammed; every
house is full of goods and people; from 2000 to 5000 or 6000 are
assembled; blacksmiths, joiners, barbers, tinkers, traders of all kinds,
are busy; the shouting and the din of bargaining are tremendous, and
between the goods and the buyers and sellers locomotion is slow and
critical. Drug stores, in which “remedies for foreign smoke” are sold,
occur everywhere.
The shops in these streets are frequently owned by the neighbouring
farmers, who let them to traders for the market days, which are fixed
for the convenience of the district, and fall on the third or fifth or
even seventh day, as the need may be. The gateway at each end of the
street is often very highly decorated. Theatrical entertainments
frequent these markets, and if the actors are well known and popular,
4000 or 5000 people assemble for the play alone. The markets are the
great gatherings for all purposes. If anything of public opinion of a
local character exists, it is manufactured there. There official
notifications are made, and bargains regarding the sale or rent of land
are concluded. Family festivals even are often held there, and after
marriage negotiations on the part of heads of families have been
concluded the preliminaries are drawn up and ratified at the market.
There the cottons of Lancashire undergo a searching criticism, and are
weighed, handled, held up to the light by men who cannot be deceived as
to the value of cotton, and are often found wanting. Into the vortex of
the market is attracted all the news and gossip of the district. It is
much like a fair, but I never saw any rowdyism or drunkenness on the
road afterwards, and I never met with any really rough treatment in a
market, though the crowding and curiosity made me always glad when it
was not “market day.”
On the afternoon of March 7th there was some hazy sunshine, and the
effect was magical. The route lay partly along the Shanrang Ho, an
affluent of the Ku-kiang, itself navigable up to, and for sixty _li_
above Sing-king-pa Hsien, so report said.] Considerable fleets of
colliers lay at different points, vessels carrying from ten to
twenty-five tons, flat-bottomed. They were loading, in one case, from a
coal-yard of half an acre at least in extent, fenced strongly and
carefully with bamboo, in which the coal was piled in big, oblong blocks
weighing two hundredweight each, to a height of seven feet, each block
being carried from the pit by two men. The colliers are built in
compartments, and very strongly, as there are severe rapids both above
and below Sing-king-pa Hsien.
[Illustration: A SZE CHUAN FARMHOUSE.]
After ferrying this river, along with a number of Buddhist priests, we
gradually attained high ground, and secured the granary of a new inn for
my room. Being new, the place was clean and dry, and promised well for
the next day’s halt, and most of the unpacking was done, when the trim,
young hostess requested us to “move on.” She said her father-in-law was
away, and he would be angry with her for receiving a foreigner. I did
not care to assert “treaty rights” against the obvious anxiety of so
prepossessing a young woman, and we repacked, and slithered along six
more _li_ of bad roads till we came to a lone farming cottage on the top
of a windy ridge, with a most extensive view, where I was very glad to
remain for the next day, as I had had rather a severe week. From
Sing-king-pa Hsien my _chai-jen_ were two young soldiers in the most
brilliant of stagey uniforms, and I think that they must have been the
reason of my exclusion from the previous inn. Among the many curious
proofs of superstitious beliefs one occurred many times on the last days
of the journey: a small arch made of bamboo stuck into the slush of a
rice-field. This is done in cases of the illness of the owner, and it is
believed that the offering will restore him.
On this windy ridge of King-kiang-sze I slept in the granary, which I
should have considered extreme luxury, as it was not dark when the door
was shut, had it not been that it was only just built, and the mud on
the walls was quite wet. The granary was detached from the house, open,
as fortunately many Chinese rooms are, for two feet below the roof, and
in several other directions, being in fact so draughty that no candle
would keep alight in it.
I stayed in bed all the next morning owing to severe chills, the
consequence of living in wet clothes, but had to get up in the afternoon
to gratify the curiosity of fully thirty women, who had hobbled in from
the adjacent hamlets, some of them twenty _li_ away, to see “the foreign
woman.” I feared that they would be greatly disappointed to see me in
Chinese dress, but I found that they did not know that foreigners wore
any other! My hair, “big feet,” shoes, and gloves were all a great
amusement to them, and, above all, my light camp bed, which they were
sure would not bear any weight, so they sat down on it back to back to
the number of twelve!
Of course they asked many questions, among others did we in our country
make away with baby girls? I could not anywhere learn that infanticide
prevails in any part of SZE CHUAN in which I travelled, and when I told
these women of the extent to which it is practised in some parts of
KWANTUNG, the remark was, “Couldn’t they sell them for a good price?”
Undoubtedly many SZE CHUAN girls are sold to traders from Kansuh. These
mothers mostly had large families. The children are not weaned till they
are three, and often not till they are four and even five, years old. Of
“bringing up by hand” they know nothing—condensed milk has not reached
that primitive region. If a mother dies at the birth of her babe, the
mothers of the hamlet take the joint responsibility of supplying the
orphan with maternal nourishment. They asked me if I had many sons, and
when I confessed that I had none, they expressed great sympathy, because
there would be no one at my death to perform the ancestral rites. It is
quite customary, on hearing of the absence of sons, for women to pump up
tears as a conventional requirement, and this propriety was not
neglected on this occasion. It occurred to them that I could not have a
daughter-in-law, which in their thinking was a great deprivation, not on
sentimental, but on purely practical grounds, the daughter-in-law being
equivalent to the mother-in-law’s slave.
Few of them had been to Paoning Fu, only two days’ journey off, and none
to Wan Hsien. The markets of the neighbourhood were the boundaries of
their horizon, and, the festivals of the divinities of their hamlets
their gaieties. I like the Chinese women better than any Oriental women
that I know. They have plenty of good stuff in them, and backbone. When
they are Christianised they are thorough Christians. They have much
kindness of heart; they are very modest; they are faithful wives, and
after their fashion good mothers. I gave my visitors tea and sweetmeats
all round, and they departed, having taught me far more than they
learned from me.
During the afternoon men with large shields slung across their backs,
and carrying red staves, appeared, and there was at once a considerable
fuss and a demand for my passport, the big seals of which made a
salutary impression upon them. These officials were “census men,” and
were engaged in numbering the houses. The taking of a census has not
been a popular matter from time immemorial, and in the East an idea of
increased taxation is always associated with it.
[Illustration: A SZE CHUAN MARKET-PLACE.]
Like many Chinese systems, the census system is admirable in theory, but
frauds, lapses, and neglect render it inefficient. Every city and
village is divided into “tithings,” or groups, of ten families each, and
on every doorpost hangs, or ought to hang, a tablet, _mun-pai_,
inscribed with the names of all the inmates of both sexes. If the head
of a family omits to make an entry, or fails to register correctly the
males of his household who are liable to public service, he may receive
from eighty to a hundred blows. If the system were carried out,
suspicious strangers could be easily caught, and local responsibility
for any crime fixed without any trouble, but a householder finds it
convenient to escape filling up the schedule by bribing the “shield men”
with _cash_ equivalent to twopence-halfpenny.
The next day, for a considerable distance, every house had blossomed
into a brand-new _mun-pai_, which indicated the arrival of a new
magistrate determined to enforce the law. The talk of the inn was that
it heralded additional taxation.
The next day’s journey to Heh-shui-tang was through varied and pretty
country, much more populous, and with abounding water communication
supplied by the Chia-ling, often in that region called the Paoning
river, and its branches. The main traffic down the river is coal and
salt. There are very many salt wells at a good height on the river bank.
The brine is drawn by being pumped once a day, and that only when the
river is low, and is evaporated by coal fires, the heavy yellow smoke
giving the aspect of manufacturing industry. Salt is a Government
monopoly. The Government buys all the salt which is produced, at a rate
fixed by itself, and sends it all over the country for sale, making an
enormous profit. It is said that the salt produced in SZE CHUAN brings
in to the Government a revenue of £2,000,000 sterling! In some places
the borings for salt extend to depths of nearly 3000 feet, as the result
of the continuous operations of ten or twelve years, two feet a day
being very satisfactory progress. “Fire wells” are often found near salt
wells, and the “fire” is used for evaporating the salt. The product of
the wells seen on that day’s journey is small, but fifty boats of about
twelve tons were loading with it.
At the pleasant and thriving little town of Nan-pu, which produces a
very white salt, the mandarin was polite, and sent four gaily uniformed
soldiers with me, who, however, shortly turned themselves into rather
shabby civilians, showing, as on several other occasions, that the love
of mufti is not confined to English officers. The mandarin’s secretary
asked if I would like to see anything in Nan-pu. I could think of
nothing in the little, quiet, trading town, but for the sake of
politeness I said I should like to see a school.
My men were at their midday meal, but bearers were provided, and I was
soon deposited in the courtyard of an unpretending building, followed by
a great crowd, which was kept from pressing on me by the mandarin’s
“lictors.” The schoolroom contained several tables, some heavy benches,
a teacher’s chair, a number of “ink-stones,” and thirty-three boys, from
the ages of seven up to fourteen, who were all learning to read and
write.
Near the roof a Confucian tablet, surrounded by inscribed strips of red
paper, stood in a niche, and on one side of the schoolroom there was a
life-size figure of the God of Literature, with a wooden box half full
of ashes in front, in which some incense sticks were smouldering. The
teacher was a kindly-looking old man in conventional goggles. He had
probably repeatedly failed to pass his literary examinations, and being
unfit for manual labour, had become a pedagogue. He held something very
like “taws” in his hand, but his pupils had no unwholesome awe of him.
The boys were writing when I went in, _i.e._ tracing printed ideographs
placed below thin paper with brushes filled with Chinese ink, which they
rubbed on the ink-stones as required. The teacher went round, pointing
out faults, and showing them how to hold their pens.
After this they studied, as everywhere in the East, aloud, shouting
their lessons at the top of very inharmonious voices, an audible
assurance relied upon to convince the teacher that they were giving full
attention to their tasks. As soon as any boy had mastered his lesson, he
came up to the master and stood with his back towards him while he
recited, so that the master might be sure that he was not glancing at
the book which he held in his own hand. Mispronunciations were
corrected. What I saw constitutes education in such a school, together
with formal instruction in proprieties: bowing before the tablet of
Confucius on entering the room, saluting the teacher, etc. Such a school
may be called a primary school, and the larger proportion of scholars
never go any farther. In villages and small towns the parents pay from
three to six dollars a year to the teacher, to which are added small
presents of food at stated intervals. The hours are long—from sunrise
till ten and from eleven till five. Evening schools are occasionally
opened for those who are occupied in the day. A pedagogue must be a man
of good repute, “grave, learned, and patient,” and well acquainted with
the Chinese classics.
[Illustration: PEDAGOGUE AND PUPILS.]
(_From a Chinese Drawing._)
The monotonous reading and writing lessons and the tedium of memorising
unmeaning sounds are continued for about two years, and when the pupils
have become familiar with a few thousand forms and sounds, then the
actual work of teaching begins; and the pedagogue, with the help of a
commentary, explains the meaning of the words one by one, taking due
care that they are all understood.
This system, as pursued in the humble school at Nan-pu, is the basis of
that vast fabric of education which has made China for two thousand
years what she is, and has produced among the Chinese a greater
veneration for letters than exists in any country on earth, letters and
literary degrees, absolutely apart from the accidents of birth or
wealth, being the only ladder by which a man, be he the son of prince or
peasant, can attain official employment, honours, and emoluments, China
being in fact the most truly democratic country in the world.
It is easy to laugh at an education which for boys of all ranks consists
solely in the knowledge of the ancient Chinese classics, and there is no
doubt that it stunts individuality, belittles genius, fosters conceit,
and produces incredible grooviness. But, on the other hand, there is no
education, unless it might be one strictly Biblical, which furnishes the
memory with so much wisdom for common life, and so many noble moral
maxims. Whatever of righteousness, virtuous domestic life, filial
virtue, charity, propriety—and just dealing exists among the Chinese,
and they do exist—is owed to the permeation of the whole race by the
teaching of the classics.[42]
The six school books (classics in themselves) which are introductory to
the study of the classics are, _The Trimetrical Classic_, arranged in
178 double lines, the first of which contains the much-disputed
doctrine, “Men at their birth are by nature radically good.” It
inculcates filial and fraternal duties, and much besides, as the
following extract shows: “Mutual affection of father and son; concord of
man and wife; the older brother’s kindness, the younger one’s respect;
order between seniors and juniors; friendship among associates; on the
prince’s part regard, on the minister’s true loyalty; these ten moral
duties are for ever binding among men.” This classic concludes with a
number of fascinating incidents and motives for learning taken from the
lives of ancient sages and statesmen. If a boy never goes farther than
this, his memory is stored with excellent examples and principles.
The second book is the _Century of Surnames_. The third is unique in the
world, the _Millenary, or Thousand Character Classic_, which consists of
exactly 1000 characters, no two of which are alike in meaning or form.
It treats of many important subjects, and, like the _Trimetrical
Classic_, abounds in praises of virtue and exhortations to rectitude.
Its text is absolutely familiar to all the people, and a Christian
preacher who shows himself acquainted with it is sure of an interested
audience.
The fourth school classic is called _Odes for Children_, and contains
thirty-four stanzas of four lines each, chiefly in praise of literary
life, such as this:—
“It is of the utmost importance to educate children;
Do not say that your families are poor,
For those who can handle well the pencil (pen),
Go where they will, need never ask for favours.”
In all the school classics many examples are given of intelligent youths
entering on life without advantages, who by application, virtuous
conduct, and industry, have raised themselves to the highest offices in
the empire.
The fifth school classic is the _Canons of Filial Duty_, a book of 1903
characters only, purporting to be a report of a conversation between the
_Great Teacher_ (Confucius) and Tsang Tsan, a disciple. Whether it is
actually what the Chinese believe it to be or not, its influence has
been and is enormous, extending unweakened through a period of many
centuries, and laying by its principles and maxims the foundations of
the social order which prevails, not only in China, but in Japan and
Korea. This paramount teaching begins with the sentence, “Filial duty is
the root of virtue, and the stem from which instruction in the moral
principle springs.” It contains an axiom which has great weight: “With
the same love that they” (scholars) “serve their fathers, they should
serve their mothers.” Many books have been written to illustrate these
_Canons_, one a toy book, _The Twenty-four Filials_, containing
twenty-four quaint and delightful stories of filial devotion. This is a
most popular collection of tales, and the examples embroidered on satin,
or painted on silk, or coarsely daubed on paper, are to be seen
everywhere.[43]
The sixth and last is the _Siao Hioh_, or _Juvenile Instructor_, a book
whose influence is estimated as enormous. It has had fifty commentators,
one of whom writes of it, “We confide in the _Siao Hioh_ as we do in the
gods, and revere it as we do our parents.” It is in two books, divided
into twenty chapters and 385 short sections. The first book treats of
the elementary principles of education, of the duties we owe to
ourselves in regard to demeanour, dress, food, and study, and of the
duties which we owe to our kindred, rulers, and fellow-men, and it gives
illustrative examples of the good results of obeying these maxims, taken
from ancient history as far down as B.C. 249!
The second book seems somewhat of a commentary on the first, or an
elaboration of it. It gives a collection of virtuous and wise sayings of
great men who lived after B.C. 200, and these are followed by a number
of examples of conduct in distinguished persons, showing the effect of
good principles and the advantage of following the teachings of the
first book. The most elaborate rules of etiquette are laid down with a
view of promoting mutual reverence, and the Chinese of to-day receives
his guests at his outer door and conducts them, with the most careful
attention to elaborate rules of precedence, through courts, and up
flights of steps to his guest-hall, he and they moving their feet and
accepting or declining attention in slavish accordance with the rules of
this ancient classic.
The Chinese of to-day, in thought, action, and etiquette, are the
product of these school books. I see no possibility of spontaneity so
long as education is _solely_ on these lines. In reading the
translations of these classics, in spite of a certain insistence upon
trifles, and perhaps of exaggeration of unimportant points, I have been
enormously impressed by their admirable moral teaching as a whole.
Virtue is inculcated by precept and example on every page, and with the
solemn sanctions of antiquity. Deficiencies there are, but there is not
a single thing in this curriculum which a man ought not to be the better
for learning, or one thing which it would be desirable for him to
forget. If he is unable to go farther, he is possessed of what may be
called the kernel of the best literature of his country, and his
national feeling is fostered by the fact that the noble truths and
examples impressed on his mind are not of foreign origin, but have
originated within the frontiers of the Middle Kingdom. The missionaries
show at once their appreciation of the _Chinese classics_, as well as a
judicious desire to conserve Chinese nationality and keep the pathway to
official employment open, by giving great prominence to this classical
teaching in their schools.
“Villages had their schools, and districts their academies,” says the
_Book of Rites_ (B.C. 1200), and I looked with reverence on the dirty,
cobwebby walls of the little private school at Nan-pu as their
historical successor.
I asked the teacher how many of his thirty-three pupils were likely to
go on with their education and compete at the examinations, and he
replied, “Three,” holding up three fingers, on one of which was a
carefully-tended nail an inch and a half long, that there might be no
mistake. The parents of the pupils were poor, and would not be able to
keep them at school for more than three years at the outside, while
shopkeepers, farmers, and country gentlemen would not keep them there
more than five years unless they meant to go on to the literary
examinations. In the case of these well-to-do persons, several families
living in the same street hire a well-qualified teacher at a stipulated
salary to teach their boys, and the instruction is given in light,
well-aired rooms. In such a school as I spent an hour in, the teacher
provides and furnishes the room according to the number and position of
his pupils. On a boy entering a school he receives his _shu-ming_, or
“book name,” by which he is known during his future life.
If I have conveyed what I wish to convey, clearly, it will be evident
that Chinese education in the primary schools is limited to the teaching
of virtue, duty, and etiquette. There is no provision for developing the
intellectual powers, nor has general learning any place. There is a
complete want of symmetry in the mental training, but if it fails to
form broad and well-balanced minds, it must be admitted that the
exaggeration is in the best direction in which distortion could occur.
That night I felt profound regret at concluding the first stage of my
journey, and the soft, dreamy sunshine of the next day increased it. The
country is soft in its features, and very pretty and prosperous-looking,
abounding in industries, and consequently in villages and small towns,
and produces everything that is good for food. The road adheres pretty
closely to the valley of the Chia-ling, which we ferried twice. Its
water is translucent, and of an exquisitely beautiful peacock green. It
is one of the great arteries of commerce of the Yangtze Valley, and
though, like the Yangtze, obstructed by rapids and given to the
production of great sand-banks, specially below Paoning Fu, it and its
affluents afford invaluable means of communication.
This river, uniting with the Yangtze at Chungking after receiving such
fine tributaries as the Ku, the Fu, and the Pai-shui, is navigable for
boats of 5000 catties up to the flourishing little town of
Pai-shui-Chiang, actually over the border of KANSUH, and over 500 miles
by water from Chungking. These big boats trade chiefly with Nan-pu,
which produces salt, taking salt up and bringing coal down. There are
smaller boats carrying 2000 catties, of which I saw many, which go right
down to Chungking, carrying KANSUH tobacco, sheepskins, furs, and
medicines. Mr. Litton, of H.B.M.’s Consular Service, saw seventy boats
at one time moored off the city of Kuang Yuen, near the frontier of
KANSUH.
The country is much affected by the great sand-banks formed by the
river, which become bound together by the fibrous roots of a
sword-grass, and alter the channel, forming, after a few years of
deposit, fine arable land. The road I travelled from Heh-shui-tang,
after skirting the Chia-ling at a great height for many miles, under
cliffs abounding in recessed temples, in which groups of divinities
carved in the rock receive hourly worship from wayfarers, enters Paoning
Fu by a pontoon bridge about 130 yards long.
After the treelessness of much of the region I had traversed, and the
comparatively poor soil and inferior dwellings, the view of Paoning and
its surroundings was most charming in the soft afternoon sunshine. Built
on rich alluvium, surrounded on three sides by a bend of the river, with
temple roofs and gate towers rising out of dense greenery and a pink
mist of peach blossom, with fair and fertile country rolling up to
mountains in the north, dissolving in a blue haze, and with the
peacock-green water of the Chia-ling for a foreground, the first view of
this important city was truly attractive.
In the distance appeared two Chinese gentlemen, one stout, the other
tall and slender, whose walk as they approached gave me a suspicion that
they were foreigners, and they proved to be Bishop Cassels, our youngest
and one of our latest consecrated bishops, and his coadjutor, Mr.
Williams, formerly vicar of St. Stephen’s, Leeds, who had come to
welcome me. We ferried the Chia-ling, and passing through attractive
suburbs, either green lanes with hedges, trees, and vegetable gardens,
or narrow flagged roads, very clean, bounded by roofed walls and
handsome gateways of private houses, we reached the China Inland Mission
buildings, consisting of a neat church, very humble Chinese houses for
the married and bachelor missionaries, guest-rooms, and servants’
quarters, all cheerful, but greatly lacking privacy. This was a pleasant
halt after a journey of 300 miles without a really untoward incident,
except the riot at Liang-shan.
[Illustration: RECESSED DIVINITIES, CHIA-LING RIVER.]
CHAPTER XXV.
PAONING FU AND SIN-TIEN-TZE
Paoning Fu, where I spent a week, is, in spring at least, a very
attractive city. There is a pleasant sleepiness about it. Trade is
neither so active or so self-asserting as usual. There is obviously a
leisured class with time to enjoy itself. Large fortunes are not made;
45,000 taels is looked upon as wealth, and there are no millionaires to
overshadow the small traders. Junks of eighteen tons and over can ascend
to Paoning during much of the year. There is a considerable coal trade
on the Tung river, and the city being in the centre of an important silk
region, there is a degree of activity about the silk trade. There are
such small industries as dyeing cottons, making wine and vinegar, and
the export of pigs’ bristles and hides, but nothing is pursued very
energetically. Among the population of about 20,000 there are a small
number of Mohammedans, and wherever they exist beef and milk are
attainable luxuries. In Paoning they cure and spice an excellent salt
beef, which I found an agreeable variation from fowls on my further
journey.
Officially, Paoning Fu is an important city, having a _Taotai_, a
prefect, and a hsien, and many of its beautiful “suburban villas” are
the residences of retired and expectant mandarins. Its suburbs are quite
charming, and its suburban roads are densely shaded by large mulberry
trees and the _Aleurites cordata_. Farther outside, are several fine
temples in large grounds, and the public library. Paoning proper, with
the _yamen_ and other official residences, streets of shops, and private
dwellings with large wooded gardens, is surrounded by a wall twenty feet
high, in good repair, with a flagged walk, ten feet broad, on the top of
it. From this the aspect of the city was idealised by a coloured mist of
pink and white—peach, plum, apricot, and cherry blossom, flecked with
crimson from the double flowers of hardy, decorative peach trees. There
are four fine but dilapidated gateways.
[Illustration: TEMPLE OF GOD OF LITERATURE, PAONING FU.]
One of the gates was securely shut, and all persons who desired to enter
or leave the city on that side were compelled to make a long _détour_.
This closing of the north gate against the God of Rain is by a
ceremonial act of the mandarin. Rain was in excess, and this was a
significant hint to the rain god. Elsewhere I had seen the south gates
of cities closed in drought against the God of Fire, who can only enter
a city from that quarter. Fires are much dreaded during drought, when
the timbers of houses are baked into a condition of perilous
inflammability.
Outside the walls of Paoning Fu, which supply a delightful walk, are
fine clean turf banks, and a turfed trench or moat, and fine trees; and
the river front on the west side is truly grand, a terrace twenty-five
feet broad being supported by a noble stone wall in twenty-five tiers,
with broad stone staircases descending from the terrace to the river,
short green turf, clean white sand, and clear green water below.
The finest of the suburban temples is dedicated to Went-zu, the God of
Pestilence. I visited this with Mr. Williams. It was not possible to get
any point of view on the level, for a photograph, and the chair-bearers
suggested my taking one from the stage of an open temple theatre
opposite, and brought a ladder to help me up with. In going back, a man
of the literary class attacked Mr. Williams for this, and the next day
the servants of the missionary ladies begged them not to go outside
their house, for nothing was talked of in the streets and tea houses but
this “outrage,” and the probable indignation of the gods, and the people
were saying they would “kill all the foreigners.” Mr. Williams said that
he had never heard such cries of “foreign devil,” and “foreign dog,” as
at that time, and that it is observed that these cries and the hatred
which prompts them increase the longer foreigners remain in a city.
Paoning, so far as its population goes, is unfriendly to foreigners, and
the mission houses were wrecked a year previously, and the missionaries,
some of whom were married women with young children, escaped to the
_yamen_, where they received shelter and protection for some time, the
mandarins then and since having shown much friendliness and desire for
their safety. It is a complex situation on both sides.
Paoning is a great centre of China Inland Mission work. The directors of
this body, which is undenominational, endeavour so far as is possible to
group the missionaries of each ecclesiastical body together, and in this
part of SZE CHUAN they all belong to the Church of England. Outside of
the “sphere of interest” of the C.I.M. the Church Missionary Society has
several mission stations, chiefly to the north and west of Paoning, and
altogether in that region there are about sixty Anglican missionaries,
several of them being university men, working on much the same lines.
Dr. Cassels, who was one of the pioneers, and formerly well known as an
athlete at Cambridge, had recently been consecrated bishop, and came
from the splendours of his consecration in Westminster Abbey to take up
the old, simple, hardworking life, to wear a queue and Chinese dress,
and be simply the “chief pastor.” The native Christians gave him a
cordial reception on his return, and presented him with the hat of a
Master of Arts and high boots, which make a very seemly addition to the
English episcopal dress, giving it the propriety which is necessary in
Chinese eyes, and in mine the picturesque aspect of one of the marauding
prelates of the Middle Ages, the good bishop having a burly, athletic
physique! Since his return, several of the lay missionaries have been
ordained deacons.
The church, or cathedral, of which an illustration is given, was built
almost entirely with Chinese money and gifts. It is Chinese in style,
the chancel windows are “glazed” with coloured paper to simulate stained
glass, and it is seated for two hundred. The persons represented as
standing outside are Bishop Cassels, Mr. Williams, and the Chinese
churchwarden. There are both churchwardens and sidesmen.
[Illustration: THE RIGHT REV. BISHOP CASSELS, D.D., PAONING FU.]
I witnessed a Chinese service at which nineteen persons of both sexes
who had been confirmed on the previous Sunday received the Holy
Communion. At matins, which followed, the church was crammed, and crowds
stood outside, where they could both see and hear, this publicity
contrasting with the Roman practice. The understanding that all should
be silent during worship was adhered to. A Christian, formerly a
Mohammedan of some means, and another, who had been a Taoist, read the
lessons. The Bible, an Oriental book both in imagery and thought, is
enjoyed and understood by Orientals, but I doubt much if it will be
possible or even desirable to perpetuate the Prayer Book as it stands.
It is so absolutely and intensely Western in its style, conceptions,
metaphysic, and language of adoration, and, I think, is partly
unintelligible as a manual of devotion. It contains any number of words
which not only (as is to be expected) have no equivalents in the Eastern
languages, but the ideas they express are unthinkable by the Eastern
mind. Already many Eastern Christians are claiming an “Oriental Christ,
not a Christ disguised in Western garb”—it may be that they will claim
too a form of worship which shall be Oriental both in thought and
expression, instead of one which represents to them in their most sacred
moments an exotic creed.
[Illustration: CHINESE PROTESTANT EPISCOPAL CHURCH. PAONING FU.]
The China Inland Mission has some very humble Chinese houses built round
two compounds, in which two married couples, three bachelors, and, in
the bishop’s house, two ladies were living, and at some distance off
there is a ladies’ house, then occupied by five ladies. There are
several guest-halls for Chinese visitors, class and school-rooms,
porters’ and servants’ rooms. The furniture is all Chinese, and the
whitewashed walls are decorated with Chinese scrolls chiefly.
I never saw houses so destitute of privacy, or with such ceaseless
coming and going. Life there simply means work, and work spells
happiness apparently, for the workers were all cheerful, and even jolly.
Studying Chinese, preaching, teaching, advising, helping, guiding,
arranging, receiving, sending forth, doctoring, nursing, and befriending
make the mission compounds absolute hives of industry. It was a great
drawback that medical help was nearly 300 miles off, and that the one
trained nurse in the two missions was not ubiquitous. Much needless
suffering and risk to life were the results. Happily in one of the
beautiful suburbs, a noble Chinese mansion, a palace in size and
solidity, was for sale for an old song, the half of which was purchased,
and after undergoing alterations was opened a few months after my visit
with a mandarin’s procession and great ceremony as the “Henrietta Bird
Memorial Hospital”—the men’s department under Dr. Pruen, a physician of
ten years’ Chinese experience, and the women’s under Miss Gowers, who
also had considerable experience. The other half and a separate
courtyard adjoining have been bought for a dwelling for the bishop,
where he may carry on his work with fewer interruptions.
The ladies of this mission lead what I should think very hard lives,
owing to their painful deference to Chinese etiquette, and their great
desire to avoid doing anything which can give offence. As for instance,
they never walk out without an elderly Chinese woman with them, or are
carried except in closed chairs.
I left this hive of industry, and devoted lives, and glowing
hospitalities with Mr. and Mrs. Williams and their children for a few
days at Sin-tien-tze, where the China Inland Mission has obtained a
large farmhouse for a sanitarium and centre of country work at a height
of 2870 feet. Paoning is only 1520. This, in lat. 31° 55′, was my
farthest point north on my SZE CHUAN journey.
Shortly after leaving Paoning the road mounts the northern hills, and
keeps along a high barren ridge, or _liang-tsu_, for 130 _li_, the air
becoming more bracing and delicious every hour. I have observed that in
Western China an altitude of 3000 feet is equivalent, in the dryness and
bracing qualities of the air, to 7000 feet in Japan.
We stayed for a night in a large, rambling inn in a market-place when it
was not market day, and were quiet. Long flights of stairs conduct
travellers to the top of the ridge, which is often less than ten feet
broad, and falls down in natural rock-supported terraces to the valleys
below. At the close of the second day’s journey the cultivation nearly
ceased, the hills were bare and rocky, the road a mere straggle; and
where two or three ridges meet, on turning a corner round a pine-clothed
knoll, we came upon a large, lonely house with a dead, blank wall round
it, and were heartily welcomed by its inmates, three ladies, who for
some time past have conducted a mission to the scattered houses and
hamlets of the neighbourhood with remarkable success.
A great gateway gives admission successively into two courts with their
surrounding rooms. The common “sitting-room,” or, to use an Americanism,
“living-room,” is extremely tasteful and pretty—pre-eminently a “lady’s
room,” furnished with bamboo tables, chairs, a lounge, and foot-stools,
and a folding screen covered with blue cotton, on which Christmas cards
are prettily arranged. Blue cotton table-cloths, embroidered in white
silk, covered the tables. The floor was matted. Chinese red scrolls hung
on the whitewashed walls; there were books and flowering plants; and the
room combined daintiness with solid comfort. Doors, with elaborate
fretwork filled in with tissue paper, take the place of windows. The
woodwork of all the rooms is varnished.
[Illustration: C.I.M. SANITARIUM, SIN-TIEN-TZE.]
I expressed admiration and some wonderment that “at such a distance”
(possibly from civilisation) such pretty furniture could be procured. It
may be that my hostess thought she read in my remark some hint at
“missionary luxury,” for she very kindly offered to enlighten me as to
the cost of furnishing in Western China. The substantial and
good-looking chairs cost fourpence each, the lounge two-and-sixpence,
and the rest in proportion; the whole coming to a trifle under nineteen
shillings, and all was produced in the neighbourhood, material and
labour costing almost nothing. During my five days’ visit the weather
became bitterly cold, and snow fell for the greater part of two days,
but did not lie. No efforts brought the temperature of my room up to
40°, which was low for the 21st March, in lat. 31° 55′.
CHAPTER XXVI.
SIN-TIEN-TZE TO TZE-TUNG HSIEN.
On this second long journey, involving a distance of three hundred and
thirty miles, I was persuaded into a slightly more luxurious style of
travelling, _i.e._, I took an additional man, well acquainted with the
province and its ways, who went on first, towards evening, cleaned out a
room, and had hot water ready for tea. I got new oiled sheeting and an
apron for the chair, and with some unleavened bread, curry for three
days, a supply of Paoning smoked beef and some chocolate for lunch, I
felt myself in luxury. Yet, with eight men, my expenses were only seven
shillings per day.
At Sin-tien-tze I had to quit my companions, who are as full of
brightness, intelligence, and culture as they are of goodness. Mr.
Williams walked with me through thawing snow the first eight miles to
the great market-place of Shang-wa-li-tze, where, not being market day,
the only living creature was a deformed cat. I had excellent cooking,
and we made long journeys, accomplishing thirty miles on some days. The
snow soon disappeared, and though the roads were slimy, straw shoes,
grippers, and the cold, keen air enabled me to walk a good deal, which
was very pleasant.
At the first midday halt there was considerable confusion, for a young
married woman had committed suicide with opium, and was lying apparently
dead. In great fear of something—I know not what—the villagers appealed
to me for remedies, which I succeeded in forcing down her throat, and
also put plasters of hot vinegar and cayenne pepper behind her ears. I
was proceeding to put them on the soles of her feet, but there were no
soles, only a crumple of deformed toes, a cleft, and a heel. Then I
tried for the calves of the legs, but there were no calves, only a bone,
a few muscles, and a great bag of crinkled skin. I was more fortunate in
finding that she had a back to her neck! I was told that it was a
quarrel with her mother-in-law which had driven her to suicide. I had a
bad quarter of an hour before she became conscious, for, had she died,
the opium would have been acquitted, and the blame would have been laid
on the foreigner. When she came sufficiently to herself to be herself,
she was demented with rage, and tore and scratched everybody near her. I
did not think that her husband was interested in her recovery.
[Illustration: ENTRANCE TO A MARKET-PLACE.]
An idea, though possibly only a local one, is, that when a person
commits suicide by opium, the spirit is refused entrance at the gate of
Hades, because it has not completed its natural term of life, and it
seeks, by inducing another to do the same, to transfer its crime to that
person.
The relations showed me the courtesy of offering me food, which I
reluctantly ate out of coarse, unglazed basins: a strip or two of fat
pork, some bean curd floating in grey sauce, some black beans, tasting
like rotten cheese, some small onions, pickled dark brown, some rice,
mixed with chopped cabbage, and some chopped capsicum.
I had previously eaten bean curd, and old eggs which are an expensive
delicacy, and formed part of a Chinese dinner given to me at the English
Legation at Seoul. At the next village I saw the process of preparation.
Ducks’ eggs alone are used, and they must be quite fresh. They are
steeped in a solution of lime, with the addition of salt. The lime
penetrates the shell and turns the white into a dark, bottle-green
jelly, while the yolk becomes hard and nearly black. After this the egg
is wrapped up in clay, which is dried by gentle heat. It will then keep
a year or more. Such eggs are very good, indeed they are one of the few
Chinese delicacies which I can eat with equanimity. The variety of food
eaten by all classes in China is amazing. It would require four or five
pages to put down what I have myself seen in the eating-houses and food
shops on this journey.
After leaving Sin-tien-tze, I entered a richer and more prosperous
region, with a very productive soil, much mineral wealth, and important
industries both in towns and villages; and the food shops reflected the
prosperity. There was fresh pork everywhere. Every village seemed to
have killed a pig that morning. In most places bread made of wheaten
flour was to be got in the form of dumplings, leavened, but steamed, not
baked. These make good toast. Bean curd is everywhere also, and is
universally liked. It is pure white, as if made with milk, and resembles
in insipidity unflavoured _blanc mange_, made with Carrageen moss. There
is scarcely a hamlet in which it is not sold. The beans are ground
between two millstones, the upper one having a hole in the centre. Into
this the beans are poured along with water, and the thick white cream
which results from the grinding is caught in a trough below. Plenty of
gypsum and some salt are added, the cream is boiled, the froth is thrown
away, and the residue, after undergoing considerable squeezing in a
cloth, is poured into flat, deep trays to set; when cold it is cut up
into bricks. Every traveller in China, Japan, and Korea makes
acquaintance with this preparation. Beans are enormously used, fresh,
and made into patties, and preserved in equal parts of brine and syrup,
when they taste like hazel nuts.
Patties, or pies, are universal, and the itinerant pieman frequents all
markets and places where men congregate. Vegetable patties of beans,
chopped cucumbers, vegetable eggs, and sweet potato are much liked, and
so are patties of pork, and salt fish, and frog, but the last are
somewhat of a luxury. Then there are cakes of wheaten flour containing
chopped and fried onion, or a spoonful of treacle, and cakes of ground
millet, with sugar-candy or scorched millet on the top, and the same
pieman often sells bags of popcorn, melon seeds, and pieces of
sugarcane.
Water-melon seeds ought rather to be classed with amusements than with
food. As in Persia, they are enormously used; it is difficult to write
consumed. They descend to the poorest class, but chiefly on holidays.
Their use implies leisure and sociability. I never saw a man eating them
alone, except on a journey. They are a national custom. Where our men
would enjoy themselves drinking wine or spirits, the Chinese play with
melon seeds. Eating them seems a masculine amusement, and the higher a
Chinese is in rank the more melon seeds he consumes. One dare not
speculate on what the consumption of the Son of Heaven must be.
Doubtless they serve the useful purpose of helping to supply the system
with fatty matter.
In some parts of SZE CHUAN water-melons appear to be grown entirely for
their seeds. I have seen the cooling, delicious pulp thrown on the road,
while the seeds are carefully preserved, and, as in Tibet the
proprietors of apricot orchards allowed me to eat as many apricots as I
liked, provided that I returned them the stones, so I have been allowed
to eat melons, if I returned the seeds. Huc writes that on the rivers
“huge junks may be seen loaded entirely” with these “deplorable
futilities.” I do not pretend to such a remarkable vision, but at good
inns I have seen parties of six or eight well-dressed merchants, with
carefully-tended, pointed finger-nails an inch long, spending three or
four hours in cracking melon seeds, plate after plate rapidly
disappearing. Piles of shells of melon seeds some inches high often
greeted me in inn rooms. Every wayside restaurant sells them. Groups of
children sit apathetically in village streets eating them. They are
served before, with, and after every meal, with tea and wine, and at all
social gatherings. Men crack and eat them while they are bargaining or
discussing business, or are travelling in sedan chairs. And the
dexterity and rapidity with which they extract the small kernel from the
tough shell is worthy of squirrels and apes. This consumption of melon
seeds is a feature of the whole empire, and I really believe is, as a
pleasure, second only to “foreign smoke.”
Our ideas as to Chinese food are, on the whole, considerably astray. It
is true that the rich spend much in pampering their appetites, that the
foolish extravagance of providing meats, fruits, and vegetables, out of
season at “dinner parties” prevails among them as among us, and that
such delicacies as canine cutlets and hams, cat fricassees, bird’s-nest
soup—a luxury so costly that it makes its appearance on foreign
tables—stewed _holothuria_, and fricassee of snails, worms, or snakes
are to be seen at ceremonious feasts. I have been myself in dog and cat
restaurants in Canton, but they are only frequented by the extravagant.
I think in addition to the enormous variety in Chinese articles of diet,
multiplied a hundredfold by culinary art, the food is wholesome and well
cooked, and that the cooking is cleanly, steaming being a very favourite
method. Cleanly cooking and wholesome and excellent meals are often
produced in dark and unsavoury surroundings, and those foreigners who
travel much in the interior learn to find Chinese food palatable. My
chief objection to it is the amount of vegetable oil used, and the
prevalent flavour of garlic. The bulb well applied is an excellent
condiment, but it is startling to meet with it in unexpected places, and
everywhere.
Rice, wheat, Italian milled and maize are the grains chiefly eaten, but
rice is the staff of life, and is regarded as absolutely indispensable.
But it is not eaten by itself, even by the poorest, but mixed with fried
cabbage, or with such dainty relishes as rotten beans, or putrid
mustard, or soy, or Chili sauce. Among common expressions, to “take a
meal” is “to eat rice,” and the salutation equivalent to “How do you
do?” is literally “Have you eaten rice?”[44]
The Chinese list of culinary vegetables about quadruples ours, and with
the exception of rice they are the great result of garden cultivation
and heavy manuring, some of the root crops receiving individually at
stated intervals a supply of liquid manure. Cucumbers, melons, and
radishes weighing a pound each, are produced in enormous quantities.
More than twenty sorts of peas and beans are cultivated—one monstrous
bean being eaten with its soft squashy pod. Leaves are important
articles of diet, beginning with the opium leaf. There are pig weed
(_Chenopodium_), sow thistle (_Sonchus_), ginger, radishes, mustard,
clover, shepherd’s purse, succory, sweet basil, lettuce, celery,
dandelion, spinach, purslane, artemisia, amaranthus, tacca, and
numberless others which have no English names. In addition to carrots,
turnips, parsnips, Jerusalem artichokes, sweet potatoes, enormously
used, and “Irish potatoes” increasingly grown, they have aquatic edible
roots, among others the big root of the _Nelumbium_, water-caltrops, and
water-chestnuts.
Onions, garlic, leeks, scallions, and chives are consumed both by rich
and poor, and it is seldom possible to be out of their odour. Cabbage,
broccoli, kale, colewort and cress are eaten enormously, both fresh and
preserved, as well as musk and water-melons, pumpkins, squashes, gourds,
tomatoes, and brinjals, besides many eccentric pods, of the names of
which I have not a notion. One of the most delicious of all Chinese
vegetables is the young shoot of the bamboo, which looks like huge
asparagus, and is eaten boiled. The Chinese consume enormous quantities
of pickled cabbage and onions, as well as candied roots and fruits, and
others preserved in syrup. Even the common potato is dignified by this
treatment.
In the absence of butter and oily foods, the use of much oil in cooking
is a physical necessity, but the European palate would require a long
education before it could enjoy the strong flavours of some of the
vegetable oils, such as castor oil, sesamum, and ground nut. Lard and
pork fat are used also.
Very little land in the Yangtze Valley is used for the rearing of
animals for food. Pork is the principal meat used, and I suppose that
every family possesses a pig. Beef is rarely obtainable, except where
there are Mohammedans. I never saw mutton west of Ichang, or, indeed,
sheep till I reached the mountains. Pork, fowls, geese, and ducks really
represent animal food over much of SZE CHUAN. If young cats and dogs are
bred for the table they are fed on rice. Locusts, grasshoppers,
silkworms and grubs are eaten, being fried till they are crisp. In some
cities human milk is sold for the diet of aged persons, great faith
being placed in its nutritive qualities.
Undoubtedly much of the grain, especially millet, which is grown between
Sin-tien-tze and Mien-chuh is used for the distillation of spirits.
There are no vines in SZE CHUAN, so what we call wine is unknown. There
are water-white spirits distilled from both millet and barley, and a
sort of beer like the Japanese _sake_ made from rice, from which spirits
can be distilled. I never saw a drunken man in fifteen months of Chinese
travelling, or heard mirth of which strong drink was the inspiration.
Men take spirits in very small quantities, and almost invariably with
their food. They never drink anything cold, which safeguards them from
the worst results of the abominably contaminated water. They drink plain
hot water, the water in which rice has been boiled, tea, and decoctions
of various leaves.
I have dwelt so long upon food, because for two hours of every day I had
nothing to do but study it and inferior cooking as well, for several
months, and saw infinite varieties of food in the different parts of the
province at different seasons during my long journey. On the whole,
except in times of scarcity, the Chinese is a fairly well-fed person.
The journey of March 23 was along the top of a ridge over rocky ground,
and along limestone terraces incapable of cultivation. There were no
villages, and few houses, but we passed through two market-places of
large size. The country, as seen from the ridge, is all low, undulating
ranges, sprouting up now and then into conical protuberances, till
suddenly, from an altitude of 2300 feet, there is a view of a narrow
valley and an extraordinary bend of the Chia-ling. Then comes an abrupt
and difficult descent of 800 feet, on ledges of rock and steep flights
of broken stairs, and at its foot the small town of Mao-erh-tiao, with a
very fine temple lately restored. Boats of twenty tons, salt laden, were
lying in the clear, blue-green water along the bank. It was a delightful
day’s journey, the sky very blue, the air dry and as keen as a knife,
and I reached a fairly good inn where the curiosity was not
overpowering. The coolies were, if possible, cheerier and better than
those from whom I had reluctantly parted, and as they were not opium
smokers they were able to feed themselves well, and thought nothing of
travelling thirty miles a day at a good pace.
[Illustration: AUTHOR’S ARRIVAL AT A CHINESE INN.]
Other halcyon days followed, of keen air, light without heat, and
country which, if not actually pretty, led one continually to believe
that it was about to become so. The plumed bamboo and orange and
pommeloe groves had vanished, and on the high altitudes which the road
pursues, which are very barren and rocky, there was almost no
cultivation, and on one day’s journey of twenty-three miles we only met
four people, and passed eight houses and a small market-place.
Whenever the elevation was lower, as at times where the road runs along
the edges of limestone cliffs, there are deep valleys well wooded and
cultivated, but the upland soil is very poor and bears scanty crops.
What is called a road is only a narrow footpath, winding along the edges
of wheat fields, through rocky clefts or ferny defiles, so narrow that
the chair continually bumped both sides, or under cedars or other big
trees, over the tops of which trailing red and white roses have grown,
sending down streamers, then in the pink flush of their spring leafage,
over the road. This beautiful climber, which grows with prodigious
rapidity, also flourishes in Korea.
There were pretty little bits, sweet, restful, rural scenes, great
breezy sweeps, and freedom; no calling of “Foreign devil” and “Foreign
dog.” The people were quite disposed to be friendly. On arriving one
afternoon at a specially lofty hamlet, having learnt much caution as to
the use of my camera, I asked if I might “make a picture” of a mill
worked by a blindfolded buffalo-cow, as we had not any such mills in my
country, and they were quite willing, and stopped the cow at the exact
place I indicated. They were friendly enough to take me to another mill,
at which two women grind, turning the upper stone by means of poles
working in holes. The Chinese use a great deal of wheat flour; it can be
purchased at all markets and large villages, and I never used any other.
It is not a good colour, and owing to some defect in the millstones one
is apt to be surprised by grits. After seeing the mills I showed the
people a number of my photographs taken _en route_, to show them that I
was not doing anything evil or hurtful, but they said, though quite
good-naturedly, that it was “foreign magic.”
At the same hamlet I got a room in a new inn which, though on the
road-level on one side, was two storeys above a winding stream and some
undulating agricultural country on the other. On that side it actually
had a window and a view. The boards were new, and though the chinks were
wide and the air which entered was keen, I congratulated myself heartily
on such unusually pleasant surroundings. This was premature. When the
bustle of unpacking was over, noises all too familiar made me look
through the chinks of the floor, and I saw that I was over a pigsty the
size of my room, inhabited by nine large, black sows.
[Illustration: AN OX MILL.]
It was the only night of my journey on which I had no sleep, and my
servant, who had the next room to mine, said that he did not sleep after
eleven, for the groaning, grunting, routing, and quarrelling were
incessant. I had shared a room with pigs twice on the journey, but they
were quiet by comparison. Looking through my floor at daylight, I saw
that eighteen young pigs had been added to the family. This sleepless
night was a bad preparation for an early start, and a long and very cold
day’s journey.
The road leaves Tien-kia-miao, a remarkably clean and attractive
village, by a level bridge on twelve stone piers, and soon rises again
to barren altitudes, looking down on well-cultivated valleys wooded with
cedars. Along every rocky path men were crowding with their wares to a
neighbouring market, bamboo hats and baskets, sugarcane, fowls, and
straw shoes being the principal wares. It was some time since I had seen
any foreign cottons exposed for sale in these markets.
[Illustration: A HAND MILL.]
The soil of the region I had traversed for a fortnight, except in the
basin of Paoning, is poor and unfitted for rice, and the people are
chiefly hardworking peasant farmers and coolies. Without having any
mission from associated or dissociated Chambers of Commerce, my interest
in the subject led me to make continual inquiries into the local trade
and the requirements of the people, and something as to the latter was
to be learned in conversation with the women.
Apart from the general question of weight and make, the general verdict
was that the widths of our cottons are wrong, and that widths above
fifteen inches cut to waste in making Chinese clothing. Another
complaint was that our goods, put up as they are in wrappers intended to
impose on “semi-civilised” people, constantly make a display of colours
which in China are “unlucky.” Another was that the printed cottons,
besides offending in this respect, are coarse in pattern, colouring, and
style, more fitted for outside barbarians than for the refined tastes of
a civilised people! If these, which may appear minor matters, were
attended to, there is probably an opening for both our white and printed
cottons among the _middle and upper classes of Western China_. But I am
not a convert to the roseate views which many people take of the
enormous potentialities for our trade in SZE CHUAN if the means of
communication are improved by steam on the Yangtze and other methods. It
is not that our cottons are too dear, but that the great majority of the
people don’t want them at any price. That is, that the strong, heavy,
native cottons woven by hand, wear four times as long, and even when
they are reduced to rags serve several useful purposes. A coolie will
not buy a material which will only last a year, when, for the same price
or less, he can get one which will last three, or even four years.
[Illustration: THE TA-LU.]
Coolies dispense with all clothing but cotton drawers in summer, and
these must be strong to resist hard wear; and they say that our cottons
are too cold for winter. This is obvious, for a yard of Chinese
home-spun cotton cloth, fifteen inches wide, weighs over twice as much
as a yard of British calico over thirty inches wide, and resists the
wear and tear of hard manual labour and the ofttimes profuse
perspiration of the labourer. More than two millions sterling worth of
raw cotton and Sha-shih heavy home-spun cottons are supposed to be
imported into SZE CHUAN annually, just because the wear requires, and
must continue to require, the heavy make. Later, in Sin-tu Hsien, a
prosperous town of 15,000 inhabitants, twelve miles north of Cheng-tu, I
saw some Japanese cotton goods, fifteen inches wide, made on looms,
which the alert cotton-spinners of Osaka had adapted for the Korean
market, and which were of an equally heavy make with the Sha-shih goods,
and scarcely to be distinguished from home-spun cloth. The shopkeeper
highly approved of these goods, and said that if he could get them there
would be a large demand for them. Possibly British “workhouse sheeting”
of the same width might meet with similar approbation.
At the hamlet of Lu-fang, where I was stopped by an official with a card
from the district mandarin, who kept me waiting an hour while he copied
my passport on a stone and provided fresh runners, the by-road by which
I had journeyed for some days joined the Ta-lu, the great Imperial road
from Pekin to Cheng-tu. I travelled along this westwards to Mien-chow. A
thousand years ago it must have been a noble work. It is nominally
sixteen feet wide, the actual flagged roadway measuring eight feet. The
bridges are built solidly of stone. The ascents and descents are made by
stone stairs. More than a millennium ago an emperor planted cedars at
measured distances on both sides, the beautiful red-stemmed, weeping
cedar of the province. Many of these have attained great size, several
which I measured being from fourteen to sixteen feet in circumference
five feet from the ground, and they actually darken the road.
The first ascent from Lu-fang under this solemn shade is truly grand,
nearly equalling the cryptomeria avenues which lead up to the shrines of
Nik-ko, Japan. Each tree bears the Imperial seal, and the district
magistrates count them annually. Many have fallen, many have hollow
trunks, and there are great breaks without any at all. Still, where they
do exist, the effect is magnificent. This road, like much else in China,
is badly out of repair, many of its great flagstones having disappeared
altogether. There was a great deal of traffic on it, and not a few
saddle horses and mules were tripping easily up and down its stone
staircases. It was quite cheerful to be once more on a travelled highway
abounding in large villages and towns, with good inns and much
prosperity.
These were days of delightful travelling without any drawbacks. The
weather was beautiful, the air sharp, and the people well-behaved. There
was no fatigue or annoyance, the accommodation was fair, and there was
literally nothing to complain of; the travelling was fit for a Sybarite.
The soil is rich, and enormous quantities of opium were grown; indeed,
in some long valleys there was no other crop. Wu-lien, where I slept one
night, is the cleanest and prettiest little Chinese town that I
saw—prettily situated, with a widish main street, good inns, fair shops,
and singular cleanliness, and the people were very mannerly. It has a
level stone bridge, supported on twelve stone piers decorated with
finely-carved dragons’ heads.
On the road from Wu-lien to the large town of Tze-tung Hsien there is
some very pretty country, rich in agricultural wealth, and growing much
opium, which unfortunately in good years pays better than any other
crop, and is easy of transit. Wheat, which was only two or three inches
above the ground on the high ridges, was bursting into ear in the
valleys, and peas and beans were in their fragrant beauty. There was
much pink and white mistiness of peach and plum, and yellow fluffiness
of mimosa, and the people were astir and alert, performing spring
pilgrimages to popular shrines, men and women in separate companies.
There are two very fine and ancient temples of brown cedar to the gods
of Literature and War in a cedar wood on the road, with most picturesque
hilly surroundings, a lovely spot, and the tides of pilgrimage set
strongly towards them. The God of War there as elsewhere is very
attractive to women, as may be seen any day in his great temple in the
native city of Shanghai. Perpetual incense burns on these altars, and
the priests claim the round-numbered antiquity of two thousand years for
the temples.
There were very many companies of from ten to thirty well-dressed women
on the road, some of whom had hobbled on their crippled-looking feet for
fifteen miles, and were going back the same day; and many large bands of
men, each led by a man with a gong, carrying a small table with incense
sticks burning on it, the procession followed by another coolie loaded
with red candles, large and small, with thick paper wicks, incense
sticks, and red perforated paper for the God of War. His temple was
crowded, and dense clouds of incense rolled from the open front into the
atmosphere of heavenly blue. The God of Literature is chiefly worshipped
by the _literati_, and there were only a few sedan chairs with their
occupants and attendants at his splendid shrine.
The Ta-lu failed to keep up its reputation. Its great flags were tilted
up or down, in mud-holes, or had disappeared; its noble avenue was
spasmodic and often non-existent for miles, leading to the prophecy that
it would disappear altogether, as it did. But the vanished grandeur was
made up for by the extraordinary traffic—baggage coolies, chair-bearers,
sedan chairs, passengers on foot and on horseback, varied at times by
marriage and funeral processions, or batches of criminals tied together
by their queues, being led to justice. Of the numbers of weight-carrying
coolies, divested of the upper garment, on the road, there were very few
free from hard tumours or callosities on both shoulders, and many of
them have deep, cracked wounds in their heels. A man carries a load five
miles before he earns a bowl of rice.
At intervals there were small huts, each sporting a military flag, and
with halberds or lances with silk pennons leaning up against them.
Sometimes these were in a village, but occasionally the flag, which is
very showy, having a pennon end, and seen afar off, was only supported
by a heap of stones on the roadside. There were no soldiers in uniform,
but possibly the two or three peasants lying by every flag were men in
mufti. Sometimes boys were carrying firearms of an ancient type, bows
and arrows, or heavy swords. The people said that the flags were to
frighten the rebels, and that the men were watching for them, but the
region seemed in a state of profound peace.
The peasants’ coffins on the road were those of the poorest class, and
were carried at a run, merely wrapped up in blue cotton. A mandarin’s
coffin on its way to Mien-chow was draped with blue kilted silk,
tasselled at the four corners, and was carried by twenty men in
red-tasselled hats, slung on a heavy beam, with a boldly carved dragon,
an emblem of official position, at both ends. The coffin was surmounted
(as were those of the peasants) by a tethered live cock. A cheap coffin
costs from five to ten dollars, and from that up to two thousand. There
is much trade done on the Chia-ling in coffin wood and coffins. I saw
many junks loaded with both.
At one place in China, where there was no inn, I slept in a room with a
coffin which had been unburied for five years, because the geomancers
had not decided on a lucky site or date for the interment, and for the
whole time incense had been burned before it morning and evening. Of
course if there is a family burial-place the services of the geomancer
are seldom required except for the date of burial.
The coffin of the mandarin on the Ta-lu was not on its way to interment,
therefore the usual procession was dispensed with, but nearer Tze-tung
Hsien we met a large funeral for which we had to leave the road.[45] On
this occasion the corpse of a well-to-do merchant, unburied for a year,
was being borne to the grave.
In order to prevent any disagreeable consequences from interment being
delayed for months or years, the coffin-boards are three or four inches
thick, the body is covered with quicklime or is laid on a bed of lime or
cotton, and afterwards the edges of the lid are closed with cement, and
if the body is to remain in a dwelling-house, the whole is made
air-tight by being covered with Ning-po varnish. A coffin is sometimes
retained in a house by a defaulting tenant to prevent an ejectment for
rent, and it is occasionally attached by creditors, in order to compel
the relations to raise money to release it. So strong is the feeling in
China regarding suitable burial, that a son if he has no other means
will sell himself into slavery to provide the expenses, and burial clubs
and charitable societies for providing the destitute with seemly
funerals are numerous.
On this occasion a band of music came first, then the monstrous coffin
on a bier carried by at least forty men in red coats and scarves,
covered by a canopy embroidered in gold thread, on which was tethered a
living fowl. Behind came the ancestral tablet in a sedan chair, the
sacrifice, and some red tablets, on which were inscribed in gold the
offices held by the deceased, followed by the male mourners dressed in
white. The eldest son, apparently sinking with grief, though it was a
year old, was supported by two men. Women and children followed, wailing
at intervals. A man preceded the whole, strewing paper money on the
ground to buy the goodwill of such malignant or predatory spirits as
might be loafing around.
One man was loaded with crackers, another carried the libations which
were to be poured out, and the rear of the procession, which was ten
minutes in passing, was brought up by a great concourse of friends and
neighbours, and a great number of bamboo and paper models, admirably
executed, and many of them life-size, of horses with handsome saddles
and trappings, mules carrying burdens, sedan chairs, houses, rich
clothing, beds, tables, chairs, and all that the spirit can be supposed
to want in the shadowy world to which it has gone. These, with a
quantity of tinsel money, are burned at the grave, the tablet and
sacrifice are carried back, the former to be placed in the ancestral
hall, the latter to be feasted on or given to the poor. The ceremonies
of the interment, as my readers are aware, only initiate the long years
of ceremonial with which the dead are honoured in China.
CHAPTER XXVII.
TZE-TUNG HSIEN TO KUAN HSIEN
An hour after leaving the great temples of Ta-miao, with their throngs
of pilgrims and the remarkable friendliness of the people, we came upon
the walls, gates, and towers of Tze-tung Hsien, the approach to which is
denoted by a graceful eleven-storeyed pagoda on a neighbouring hill. I
had not been through a large walled city since the riot at Liang-shan,
and I had to brace myself up for entering this one, which has a reputed
population of 27,000 people. The inhabitants were very orderly however,
and though the streets were greatly crowded, the people looked pleasant.
The Liang-shan riot is known to all the mandarins, and obviously they
have no wish for a repetition of it, and I adhere to my belief that they
are in most, if not in all cases, able to prevent attacks on foreigners.
Tze-tung Hsien is a clean and prosperous-looking city, with wide streets
lined by good shops, in which the goods are more displayed than is
usual. It is surrounded with well-cultivated country, and good country
houses, and trades in vegetable oils, cottons, and raw and spun silk,
some of the strong, coarse “oak silk” being brought in for manufacture.
Oil is made from the seeds of the _aleurites cordata_, rape seed, pea
nuts, and opium seed. Opium oil bears the highest price. The town has a
stirring aspect, and its walls and gateways are in good repair. Outside,
the Fou River is crossed by a noble stone bridge of nine arches with
fine stone balustrades, carrying a flagged roadway eighteen feet broad.
The centre arch is thirty feet high. It is the finest bridge that I had
then seen in China. A grand temple outside the walls, and an elaborately
carved triple-storeyed _pai-fang_, complete the attractions of this
thriving city.
[Illustration: WOMAN REELING SILK.]
On the western route from Tze-tung Hsien the country becomes
increasingly fertile, and the road more dilapidated. The cedars have
disappeared, and the pavement is only four feet in width. The traffic in
oil, cotton, and tobacco was great, and crowds of pilgrims, very
respectable looking, with gongs, incense tables, and offerings, were
trudging to the Ta-miao temples. They said that they were making
offerings to the God of War for having driven the “barbarian rebels”
into the sea! There were funerals, too, and a train of twelve led
horses, each carrying a red flag, with on it a mandarin’s name and
official titles. These were heavily laden with luggage, and in front
there was the mandarin’s coffin, with a live cock upon it, carried by
forty men.
The prevalent impression left by this great road is that of toil and
poverty. Rice had risen considerably in the previous three weeks, which
meant to many millions that they would never get a full meal. The region
I had entered is one of the most crowded parts of the Red Basin and of
China, and I often asked myself, “Why are there so many Chinese?” They
seem to come into the world just to bury their fathers. That night again
I slept in a room with a huge coffin, which had been waiting interment
for some years, and incense was regularly burned before it.
On March 28th I reached Mien-chow, a city of about 60,000 souls, the
largest that I had yet seen in SZE CHUAN. The journey from Paoning Fu
had been most propitious in all respects, and the fine weather had come
at last. I entered the city by a bridge of boats over the Fou, a great
tributary of the Chia-ling. Mien-chow has a curious geographical
situation. The Fou basin, in which it stands, though north of Chengtu
and nearer the water parting, is on a lower level than the basin of the
Min, from which it is divided by a low ridge. So Mien-chow is actually
250 feet below Chengtu, its altitude being 1350 feet.
It is a well-built and clean town, with a fine wall, and a river front
well protected by a handsome bund of cobbles and concrete, with eight
slanting faces. The Fou is navigable, and when the water is high, boats
can descend to Chungking in six or seven days. There is an enormous
wheelbarrow traffic from Mien-chow to the capital, principally of sugar
and tobacco. The busy and crowded streets are lined with shops, in which
every conceivable article in iron is displayed, from surgical
instruments, to spades, ploughshares, and articles in wrought iron.
There are fully half a mile of such shops. The great trade of Mien-chow,
however, is in silk, and much cotton is woven in its neighbourhood. The
shops display German and Japanese knick-knacks, foreign yarns, and
printed cottons, besides Kansuh furs, brocades, silks, temple furniture,
and drugs. The shops, with their varied, and in many cases costly,
contents show that the neighbourhood has great purchasing power.
The passage through the thronged streets took nearly an hour, but all
was quiet. I was not allowed to go to an inn, but was most kindly
received at the Church Mission House, a dark and not agreeably situated
house in a crowded Chinese quarter, inhabited by the two ladies who,
after four years of patience and difficulties, have effected a permanent
lodgment in what is well known as a hostile city. They spent the first
two years at an inn, and so little were they thought of, that the
mandarin, when urged to take some action against them, replied, “What
does it matter? they are only women!”
During this time all their attempts to rent a house failed, because the
officials threatened to beat and imprison anyone letting a house to a
foreigner; but a fortnight before my visit a man ruined by opium smoking
let them have for ten years the place into which they had just moved,
close to the great temple of Confucius. Access to it is through an area
inhabited by Chinese—a forlorn, dirty yard—and through an inner yard
full of Chinese, who seemed to be always gambling or smoking opium, a
third yard being the newly-acquired property, from which some of the
Chinese had not yet cleared out. The two last courts are rented by the
Church Missionary Society, and have subsequently been improved and made
habitable, and “The Emily Clayton Memorial,” a dispensary with a
surgical ward under Dr. Squibb, a qualified English doctor, has been
opened in the outer of the two compounds.
It was interesting to see what missionaries in China have to undergo in
the initial stage of residence in a Chinese city. The house was utterly
out of repair—dirty, broken—half the paper torn off the windows, and the
eaves so deep and low that daylight could scarcely enter. There was an
open guest-hall in the middle used constantly for classes and services;
endless parties of Chinese passed in and out all day long, poking holes
in the remaining windows, opening every door that was not locked, taking
everything they could lay hands on; and the noise was only stilled from
four to six a.m.—men shouting, babies screaming, dogs barking, squibs
and crackers going off, temple bells, gongs, and drums beating—no rest,
quiet, or privacy.
[Illustration: THE REV. J. HEYWOOD HORSBURGH, M.A., IN TRAVELLING
DRESS.]
There were two services in the guest-hall on Sunday, conducted by Mr.
Heywood Horsburgh, the superintendent of the Mission, and several
classes for women also, but all in a distracting babel—men playing cards
outside the throng, men and women sitting for a few minutes, some
laughing scornfully, others talking in loud tones, some lighting their
pipes, and a very few really interested. This is not the work which many
who go out as missionaries on a wave of enthusiasm expect, but this is
what these good people undergo day after day and month after month.
The place where the two ladies spent two years, consisted of a
guest-room at an inn in one of the most crowded of the city streets, a
living-room through it, a kitchen through that, and for a sleeping-room,
a loft above the living-room, reached by a ladder, just under the
unlined tiles. There was no light in any room, except from a paper
window, into the semi-dark passage. The floors were mud; wood, water,
charcoal, and all things had to be carried in and out through the
living-room; no privacy was possible; the temperature hung at about 100°
for weeks in summer; there were the ceaseless visits of crowds of
ill-bred Chinese women, staying for hours at a time; and without and in
the inn, seldom pausing, there was the unimaginable din of a big Chinese
city. Under these circumstances their love and patience had won twelve
women to be Christians.
Mr. and Mrs. Cormack, of the China Inland Mission, and a thirteen
months’ baby, arrived before I left, he very ill of malarial fever. They
were swept out of Chengtu in the riots, losing all their possessions,
and with this infant had been moving for seven months, having lastly
been driven out of Kansuh by the Mohammedan rebellion. During the whole
seven months they had never been in one place more than twelve days. It
is a grave question whether married men and married women ought to be
placed in regions of precarious security. Mr. Heywood Horsburgh’s house
at Kuan Hsien had just been attacked and bored into by a number of
burglars, and between the terror caused by this, and the hostile cries
in the streets, which they understood too well, his delicate, sensitive
young daughters, one of them twelve years old, had become so thoroughly
nervous that the only possible cure was to take them home. I saw several
ladies in Western China who, after escaping from mobs with their young
children, were affected in the same way.
Mr. and Mrs. Horsburgh and I left Mien-chow on March 31st, a grey, dull
day, but clear. We left the Ta-lu and travelled by infamous roads, often
only a few inches wide, frequently on the top of rice dykes. Great
mountains, snow-crested, spurs of the Tibetan ranges, loomed through the
clouds to the north-west, while we journeyed through the eastern portion
of the great Chengtu plain, the rich, well-watered soil green with
barley and opium, and beautiful with miles of rape, largely grown for
oil, rolling in canary yellow waves before a pleasant breeze. Large
farmhouses had reappeared, farming hamlets, and big temples, all
surrounded by fine trees. There are frequent water-mills of a very
peculiar construction, said by experts to be the oldest form in the
world, the wheel being placed horizontally just above the lower level of
the water.
Before we left the Ta-lu, the great highway to the capital, the
wheelbarrow traffic was enormous. These “machines,” with a big wooden
wheel placed so near the centre of gravity as to throw the weight of the
load as little as possible on the driver’s shoulders, carry goods on
platforms on either side and behind the wheel, which is solid. One man
can propel five hundredweight. Heavy loads have one man to propel and
another to drag them. They move in long files, their not altogether
unmelodious creak being heard afar off, and the stone road is deeply
grooved by their incessant passage.
[Illustration: WATER MILL, CHENGTU PLAIN.]
After two pleasant days’ journey we reached Mien-chuh Hsien, a town of
50,000 people, according to the statement of the magistrate’s secretary.
It is not a handsome town, but it has a beautiful modern bridge over a
branch of the Fou, of six stone arches, a fine roof, iron balustrades,
and a central roofed tower. It is a busy and prosperous city, with many
fine temples and grand mountain views. The production of paper,
especially coloured paper, is its speciality, but it also manufactures
largely wood and horn combs, indigo, and fine wheaten flour. Much salt
is made in the neighbourhood, and in the hills thirty _li_ off there are
coal mines, producing coal which burns with a clear white flame, and
little ash. There, as elsewhere, the missionaries have introduced
English articles of utility, which have “caught on” among the Chinese.
[Illustration: BRIDGE AT MIEN-CHUH.]
A cordial welcome awaited us at the Church Missionary Society’s house.
The initial stage, as I saw it at Mien-chow, was passed, and we were
received into as trim a little home as one could see anywhere, or wish
to see. Turning from the street, where the people did not molest even by
curiosity, down a narrow alley and through a door, down a passage on one
side of which is the guest-hall, we entered a small and very bright
compound, cheery with pots of primulas and chrysanthemums, with five
small cottage rooms round it, with paper windows, but light, cheerful,
and homelike, with simple daintinesses, and a bright coal fire in a
quaint corner fire-place. The place is just a few Chinese cottages,
formerly used as a gambling den. Mr. and Mrs. Phillips, who have
transmogrified it chiefly by their own handiwork, had only lately been
able to rent it owing to the opposition of the mandarins, who can bring
many threats and much pressure to bear on persons who would otherwise be
willing to lease property to foreigners.
The anti-Christian element everywhere seems a feeble one in the
opposition. It is to foreigners, simply as such, that the objection is
made, as “child-eaters” pre-eminently; and in Mien-chuh the people said
that the missionaries wanted the houses for hellish purposes, and that
they would dig under them and make a way to England, and that foreign
soldiers would come by it and take their lands, and that they wanted
lock-up rooms in which to hide the golden cocks which they dug out of
the mountains by night!
I left Mien-chuh with Mrs. Horsburgh on a somewhat unlucky journey,
still travelling over the Chengtu plain in a westerly direction. The
time of year for theatricals, which are a great passion with the
Chinese, had begun. There is a large temple outside Mien-chuh, with the
usual adjunct of a stage, richly decorated, with a massive canopy roof,
for the “religious drama.” But on this day, being the festival of the
god to whom the temple is dedicated, this was supplemented by temporary
theatres and booths covering fully half an acre of the temple grounds,
and the great court was crammed with a closely-wedged mass of Chinese,
and the adjacent grounds and the road were such a crush of people that
our chairs could hardly get through. There must have been from twelve to
fifteen thousand present.
These plays are got up by the priests, who send the neophytes round with
a subscription paper, afterwards pasting the names of the donors,
inscribed on red sheets, on the walls of the temple. The priests let the
purlieus for the occasion for the sale of refreshments, and also for
gambling tables and other evil purposes, and usually make a profit out
of what is professedly a religious celebration. When the subscription
list has been filled up, the priests engage the best talent that their
funds will allow of.
Theatrical companies in China retain their original strolling character,
and there are few permanent theatres, the erection of the great sheds,
in which several thousand can be accommodated, being a separate branch
of the carpenter’s trade. A play usually lasts for three days, and the
periods for sleeping and eating are wonderfully minimised. Business is
suspended in the neighbourhood, and the people act as if the drama were
the only thing worth living for. It is not etiquette for women of the
upper classes to frequent the theatre, and private theatrical
performances are given in rich men’s houses, but women of the lower
classes, generally carrying babies, attend in large numbers and usually
sit in the galleries. Lads perform the female parts, with grotesque
success, transforming their feet into excellent representations of
“golden lilies,” and hobbling and tottering to perfection.
I have only been present at two Chinese plays. They interest me greatly,
and it is on the stage alone that the gorgeous costumes of brocaded and
embroidered silk of former dynasties are to be seen. The scenery is
simple and imperfect. The orchestra fills up all pauses vigorously, and
strikes a crashing noise at intervals during the play to add energy or
fury to the performance. Ghosts or demons appear from a trap-door in the
stage. The scenes are not divided by a curtain, and the play proceeds on
its lengthened course with only intervals for sleep and eating. The
imperfect scenery makes it necessary for the actor to state what part he
is performing, and what the person he represents has been doing while
off the stage. There are comic actors who have only to appear on the
boards to convulse an audience with laughter, and tragic actors who are
equally successful in making men (or women) weep. There is no applause
in a Chinese theatre. Admiration is expressed by a loud and prolonged
sigh, as if indicating that the tension had been too great, or by an
utterance between a sigh and a groan. A crowd absorbed with theatricals
is usually peaceable, and the police are always at hand, but in country
places a play is apt to assemble the roughs of the neighbourhood, as I
learned the next day to my cost.
Chinese theatricals are very clever, for without anything which can be
called scenery, and without a curtain, and with my own complete
ignorance of the language, the actors by their admirable acting
presented to my mind very distinct stories, in the one case of political
intrigue, and in the other of military patriotism and self-sacrifice.
The morals of the Chinese stage, so far as the sentiments of the plays
are concerned, are said by severe critics to be good; the acting was
quite unobjectionable when I was present, but I have understood that it
is not invariably so. The earnestness of attention, and the delight on a
sea of yellow faces at one of these theatrical representations are most
interesting.
As we journeyed westwards, the plain became more and more luxuriant, and
the aspect of wealth and comfort more pronounced. The great farmhouses
are enclosed by high walls, and are shaded by cedars or cypresses,
bamboo groves and fruit trees, the latter in early April in all the
beauty of blossom. Groves of superb timber failed to conceal the gold
and colour of grand temples. There were water-mills, canalised streams
with many branches,—from which everywhere peasants, with fans and
umbrellas, were pumping water by the contrivance shown in the
illustration on next page—and rivers with broad winter beds, two of them
spanned by very fine roofed bridges, rafters and supports lacquered red,
and decorated with tablets in black and red lacquer, bearing the names
incised in gold of the public-spirited men who had restored them.
In the afternoon an incident occurred which goes to show that the
Chinese need a gospel of civilisation as well as of salvation. The road
had left the rich and populous part of the plain, and had reached a
broad and completely dry river-bed, full of round water-worn stones,
crossed by a long covered bridge leading into the small town of
Lo-kia-chan, at which, at the top of the sloping shingle bed of the
river, a theatrical performance was proceeding before a crowd of some
six thousand people. Mrs. Horsburgh proposed that we should not cross
the bridge into the town, but should continue along the river bank
opposite to it and cross the bed lower down. My idea usually is, and was
then, to take “the bull by the horns,” but I deferred to her long
experience, and she went on at some distance in front in a closed chair
and in scrupulously accurate Chinese dress, I following in my open chair
and in my _olla podrida_ costume—Chinese dress, European shoes, and a
Japanese hat.
[Illustration: TREADMILL FIELD-PUMP.]
The crowd caught sight of my open chair, which, being a novelty, was an
abomination, and fully two thousand men rushed down one shingle bank and
up the other, brandishing sticks and porters’ poles, yelling, hooting,
crying “Foreign devil,” and “Child-eater,” telling the bearers to put
the chair down. In the distance I saw my runners proving their right to
their name. When I afterwards remonstrated with them, they replied,
“What could two men do against two thousand?” but a resource of power
lay in the magistrate’s letter. Then there were stones thrown,
ammunition being handy. Some hit the chair and bearers, and one knocked
off my hat. The yells of “Foreign devil,” and “Foreign dog,” were
tremendous. Volleys of stones hailed on the chair, and a big one hit me
a severe blow at the back of my ear, knocking me forwards and stunning
me.
Be-dien said that I was insensible for “some time,” during which a
“reason talker” harangued the crowd, saying it had done enough, and if
it killed me, though I was only a woman, foreign soldiers would come and
burn their houses and destroy their crops, and worse. This sapient
reasoning had its effect. When I recovered my senses, the chair was set
down in the midst of the crowd, which was still hooting and shouting,
but no further violence was offered, and as the bearers carried me on,
the crowd gradually thinned. I had a violent pain in my head, and the
symptoms of concussion of the brain, and felt a mortifying inclination
to cry. The cowards, as usual, attacked from behind.
After three very painful hours, in which I should have been glad to lie
down by the roadside, we reached the great, walled, district city of
Peng Hsien, with wide, clean streets, fine shops, temples, and
guildhalls, a flagged roadway curved in the centre, and stone sidewalks,
and what is regarded as a great curiosity, a lofty pagoda riven in
twain, each half standing up perfect. The city, the population of which
is officially stated at 28,000, manufactures brass and iron goods, iron
being mined in the neighbourhood, and coal not far off.
Here, again, there was a display of rowdyism. “The city ran together,”
and for half a mile I was the subject of insult, though not of actual
violence. The street was nearly impassable from the crowds beating on my
chair with sticks, hooting, yelling “Foreign devil,” “Foreign dog,”
“Child-eater,” and worse, yelling into my ear, kicking the chair, and
spitting. We were carried into a very fine inn, which ran very far back,
its courtyards ending in a guest-hall, with oranges and lilies in pots
in the middle, and a mandarin’s room of much pretension beyond.
A masculine crowd filling the courts surged in after us, keeping up a
frightful clamour. The innkeeper put me into the mandarin’s room, and
begged me not to show myself; and Be-dien went to the _yamen_ to make a
complaint regarding the outrage at Lo-kia-chan. As soon as he left, the
crowd began to hoot and yell and thump the door. I got up and barricaded
it with the heaviest furniture I could drag. Then they got a spade, or
wedge, and began to force it open. I deplored my helpless
condition—faint, giddy, and with a cracking headache, and an unmannerly
crowd of men ready to burst in. The bolt and barricade were on the verge
of yielding, when the mandarin’s secretary and another official arrived,
and at once produced order.
They interviewed Mrs. Horsburgh, who was really able to tell very
little, and then I was unearthed, and gave my evidence with a bandaged
head and a sense of unutterable confusion in my brain. The mandarin sent
an apology for the rudeness in Peng Hsien, but partly excused the
people, as they, he said, had never seen an open chair or a foreign hat
before. The secretary said that they had sent to arrest the ringleaders
of the disturbance at Lo-kia-chan, which I did not believe, but was glad
of his courtesy. It was difficult for him to understand that I could be
so severely hurt when there was no effusion of blood. Soldiers were
posted in the courtyard for the night, and in the morning, besides
runners, there were four soldiers at my door, who marched, two before
and two behind my chair for the day’s journey to Kuan Hsien. I had a
very bad night, and felt very ill the next day, with everything wavering
before my eyes. I suffered much for a long time from this blow and the
brain disturbance which followed, but I will dismiss the unpleasant
subject from these pages by saying that I did not get over the effects
for a year, and that it was my last experience of violence in China.
Perfect quiet prevailed in the crowded street of Peng Hsien. The Chengtu
plain grew richer and richer, the plumed bamboo and the cedars and
_cupressus funebris_ round the great farmhouses grander, and towards
afternoon snow-peaks, atmospherically uplifted to a colossal height,
appeared above the clouds in the north, with craggy and wooded spurs
below them, descending abruptly to the magnificent plain. Everywhere
living waters in their musical rush echoed the name of the great man who
before the Christian era turned the vast plain into a paradise. There
was a covered bridge over a wide rushing river; a dirty, narrow suburban
street, a narrow alley, and then a cheerful compound, in which a brown
spotted _dendrobium_ was blooming profusely, shared by three Scotch
missionaries of the China Inland Mission, and six of the Church
Missionary Society, women predominating.
[Illustration: WOODEN BRIDGE. KUAN HSIEN.]
At the back of the house the clear, sparkling Min, just released from
its long imprisonment in the mountains, sweeps past with a windy rush,
and the mountain views are magnificent, specially where the early sun
tinges the snow-peaks with pink. Why should I not go on, I asked myself,
and see Tibetans, yaks, and aboriginal tribes, rope bridges, and
colossal mountains, and break away from the narrow highways and the
crowds, and curiosity, and oppressive grooviness of China proper?
CHAPTER XXVIII.
KUAN HSIEN AND CHENGTU
Kuan Hsien (2347 feet, Gill) is one of the best-placed cities in China,
at the north-west corner of the Chengtu plain, immediately below the
mountains which wall it in on the north, and, indeed, scrambling over
their spurs just at the fine gorge of the Couching Dragon, from whence
the liberated Min bursts in strength to gladden the whole plain. The
Mien-chuh road has not a fine entrance into the city—the Chengtu road,
which I travelled three times, approaches Kuan under six fine
_pai-fangs_, elaborately, and, indeed, beautifully decorated with
carvings in high relief in a soft grey sandstone.
Apart from its situation, it is an unattractive town, with narrow, dirty
streets, small lifeless-looking shops, and a tendency to produce on all
occasions a dirty crowd, which hangs on to a foreigner, and which on my
arrival greeted me with—“Here’s another child-eater.” It has an outpost
air, as if there were little beyond, and this is partly true. It has a
possible population of 22,000. It is not a rich city, and its suburbs do
not abound in rich men’s houses. But it is distinguished, first for
being the starting point of the oldest and, perhaps, the most important
engineering works in China; and secondly, as being a great emporium of
the trade with Northern Tibet, which is at its height during the winter,
when as many as five hundred Tibetans, with their yaks, are encamped
outside its walls. The Tibetans exchange wool, furs, hides, musk,
hartshorn, rhubarb, and many other drugs for tea, brass ware, and small
quantities of silk and cotton. Tibetan drugs are famous all over China.
The Tibetans, as I learned from personal observation in Western Tibet,
are enormous tea drinkers. The tea churn is always in requisition, and
Tibet takes annually from China 22,000,000 pounds. The wool, which helps
largely to pay for the tea, and which is so abominably dirty that
fifteen per cent. of it has to be washed away, comes from pasturages
from 9000 to 12,000 feet in altitude.
Musk is a most lucrative import. The small deer (_cervus moschus_), of
which it is a secretion, is said to roam in large herds over the plains
surrounding the Koko Nor. A single deer only produces a third of an
ounce, and it sells for eighteen times its weight in silver at
Chung-king, and is largely smuggled. Chengtu reeks with its intensely
pungent odour. Rhubarb, the best quality of which grows not lower than
9000 feet, is also a very valuable import, and other drugs are estimated
at £95,000 annually, and are quintupled in value before they reach the
central and eastern provinces. Aconite, a root largely used for
poisoning in Western Tibet, is imported into China as a medicine,
singular to say, criminal poisoning being very little known. Deer horns
in the velvet, for medicinal uses, are also largely imported.
Much of the trade is done at Matang, in the mountains, a savage hamlet
which I afterwards visited, in the month of August; and very much more
comes down from Sung-pan ting, about 570 _li_ to the north of Kuan,
where it is chiefly in the hands of Mohammedan merchants, who act as
go-betweens. Wool brought from Sung-pan to Chung-king has to pass six
_likin_ barriers; so I understood from Mr. Grainger, of the China Inland
Mission at Kuan Hsien, to whom I am much indebted for carefully gathered
information on this and other local points of interest.
The glory of Kuan is the temple in honour of Li Ping, a prefect in the
aboriginal kingdom of Shu, the ancient SZE CHUAN, the great engineer,
and his son, whose work has redeemed the noble plain of Chengtu from
drought and flood for two thousand years. Just above Kuan Hsien there is
a romantic gorge with lofty grey cliffs, down which one branch of the
Min, a cold, crystal stream, rushes wildly; but still, rafts and boats,
carrying lime and coal from above, make the passage, often to their own
destruction. On the right bank, high on the cliff, is a picturesque
temple in a romantic situation, with a beautiful roof of glazed, green
tiles, erected in honour of Li Ping or his son, whose name has been so
completely lost out of history that he is known only as “The Second
Gentleman.”
Above this perilous gorge the Min is about two hundred yards wide, with
more or less mountainous banks heavily wooded, and at the point where
the Tibetan road crosses it, on a very fine bamboo suspension bridge
about 200 paces long, the grandest temple in China stands, on a wooded
height finely terraced, and adorned with stately lines of cryptomeria
and other exotic trees, one teak-tree in a courtyard being eighteen feet
in circumference. These noble shrines, with their fine courtyards and
the exquisitely beautiful pavilions and minarets which climb the cliff
behind the temple, and are lost among the cryptomerias of the summit,
are the most beautiful group of buildings that I saw in the far East,
combining the grace and decorative witchery of the shrines of the
Japanese Shoguns at Nikko, with a grandeur and stateliness of their own.
This noble temple is scrupulously clean and in perfect repair.
Magnificent objects of art, as well as tanks surrounded with exotic
ferns, decorate its courtyards; living waters descend from the hill
through the mouths of serpents carved in stone; noble flights of stone
stairs lead to the grand entrance and from terrace to terrace; thirty
Taoist priests keep lamps and incense ever burning before the shrines;
an Imperial envoy from Peking visits the temple every year with gifts;
and tens of thousands of pilgrims, from every part of the plain and
beyond, bring their offerings and homage to these altars.
The temple left on my memory an impression of beauty and majesty, which
nature and art have combined to produce. Outside, glorious trees in
whose dense leafage the lesser architectural beauties lose themselves,
gurgling waters, flowering shrubs with heavy odours floating on the
damp, still air, elaborately carved pinnacles and figures on the roofs,
even the screens in front of the doors decorated with elaborate tracery;
while the beauty of the interior is past description: columns of highly
polished black lacquer, a roof, a perfect marvel of carving and lacquer,
all available space occupied with honorary tablets, the gift of past
viceroys, while the shrines are literally ablaze with gorgeously
coloured lacquer and painting, and the banners presented by the emperors
wave in front. The galleries facing the effigies of the great engineer
and his son are carved most delicately with lacquered fretwork; and on
pillars, galleries, and everywhere, where space admits of its decorative
use, is Li Ping’s motto incised or inscribed in gold, “_Shen tao t’an ti
tso yen_”—“Dig the bed deep, keep the banks low.”
[Illustration: ROOF OF ERH-WANG TEMPLE.]
Although there is a shrine to Li Ping in this splendid “Erh-Wang”
temple, it was possibly erected in honour of “The Second Gentleman,” the
temple to the father being (believed by Mr. Grainger) the more recent
erection above the gorge of the Couching Dragon. Every Chinese Emperor,
from the Tsin dynasty, 246 B.C., downwards, has conferred the posthumous
title of _Wang_, or Prince, upon Li Ping and his son. A stone tablet in
one of the temples records the story, which I learn from Mr. Grainger,
who has translated the inscription.
The Chengtu plain, which these deservedly honoured engineers may be said
to have created, is the richest plain in China, and possibly in the
world. It may be about 100 miles by seventy or eighty, with an area of
about 2500 square miles. It produces three and even four crops a year.
Its chief products are rice, silk, opium, tobacco, sugar, sweet
potatoes, indigo, the paper mulberry, rape and other oils, maize, and
cotton, along with roots and fruits of all kinds, both musk and
water-melons being produced in fabulous quantities. From any height the
plain looks like a forest of fruit trees, while clumps of cypress,
cedar, and bamboo denote the whereabouts of the great temples and fine
farmhouses with which it is studded.
It has an estimated population of 4,000,000, and is sprinkled with
cities, and flourishing marts, and large villages, Chengtu, the capital,
having at least 400,000 people. Along the main roads the population may
be said to constitute a prolonged village. The abundance of water power
produces any number of flour and oil mills, the plain is intersected in
all directions with roads which are thronged with traffic, and boats can
reach the Yangtze from Kuan Hsien, Chengtu, and Chiang Kou.
Oranges reappear in splendid groves, mixed up with the vivid foliage of
the persimmon; mulberry trees are allowed to grow to their full height
and amplitude; spinning and weaving are going on everywhere; the soil,
absolutely destitute of weeds, looks as if it were cultivated with
trowels and rakes, “tilled,” as Emerson felicitously said of England,
“with a pencil instead of a plough.” There are frequent small temples,
or rather shrines, to the God of the Soil, of solid masonry, the image
being enclosed by open fretwork, in front of which the incense sticks
smoulder ceaselessly, the long-drawn creak of the wheelbarrow is never
silent during the daylight hours, agricultural energy and activity
prevail, and the plain is a singular and, perhaps, unrivalled picture of
rustic peace and security.
[Illustration: OIL BASKETS AND WOODEN PURSE.]
This population of four millions depends not only for its prosperity,
but for its existence, on the irrigation works of Li Ping and “The
Second Gentleman,” carried out long before the Christian era. Without
these, as has been truly said, “the east and west of the plain would be
a marsh, and the north a waterless desert,” and this great area with its
boundless fertility and wealth, and its immunity from drought and flood
for two thousand years, is the monument to the engineering genius of
these two men, whose motto, “_Dig the bed deep, keep the banks low_,”
had it been applied universally to rivers of insubordinate habits, would
have saved the world from much desolation and loss.
[Illustration: BARROW TRAFFIC, CHENGTU PLAIN.]
With a faithfulness rare in China, Li Ping’s motto has been carried out
for twenty-one centuries. The stone-bunded dykes are kept low and in
repair, and in March the bed of the artificial Min, created by Li Ping,
by cutting a gorge a hundred feet deep through the hard rock of the
cliff above Kuan Hsien, and which has been closed by a barrier since the
previous November, with its subsidiary channels, is carefully dug out,
till the workmen reach two iron cylinders, sunk in the bed of the
stream, which mark its proper level. The silt of the year, which is from
five to six feet thick, is then removed. The whole plain contributes to
this expensive work, and a high official, the _Shui Li Fu_, or “Prefect
of the Waterways,” is responsible for it.
In late March, or early April, there is a grand ceremony, sometimes
attended by the Viceroy, when the winter dam is cut, and the strong
torrent of the Min, seized upon by human skill, is divided and
subdivided, twisted, curbed by dams and stone revetments, and is sent
into innumerable canals and streams, till, aided by a fall of twelve
feet to the mile, there is not a field which has not a continual supply,
or an acre of the Chengtu plain in which the musical gurgle of the
bright waters of the Tibetan uplands is not heard—waters so abundant
that though drought may exist all round, this vast oasis remains a
paradise of fertility and beauty.
At Kuan Hsien, where I spent some little time recovering from the
assault at Lo-kia-chan, and in projecting a further journey, the feeling
of the people towards foreigners was definitely hostile. It had been
originally opened to Christian teaching by a lady, who, after living
alone there for a considerable time (but that was before “the riots,”
the modern landmark in SZE CHUAN history), left for England during my
visit, much regretted; but since the riots “the Jesus religion” had made
very slow progress. Slanders against the missionaries were circulated
and believed, and the special one that they stole and ate infants, or
used their eyes and hearts for medicines, was disagreeably current in
Kuan Hsien.
The foreign ladies, four of whom had been hidden for eleven weeks of the
hottest part of the previous summer, during the disturbances, in a room
without a window, were very nervous, as was natural, starting when
shouting was heard, not knowing what it might mean, and even those men
who were hampered by wives and young families, at times looked anxious.
No one who has heard the howling of a Chinese mob can forget it—it seems
to come up direct from the bottomless pit! One of these young wives,
during the disturbances, escaped through a window with her three infants
to a ledge above the river while her husband kept the mob at bay.
So when I left for Sin-tu Hsien and Chengtu I escorted a lady, whose
nerves had received such a shock in the riots that she was afraid to
travel alone. My escort was of little value, for the people of the
villages were lavish of their infamous epithets, pulled away the blinds
of her chair, pulled out her hairpins and terrified her, while I was
ignored.
It was a very long day, and when we reached Sing-fang Hsien, a busy
town, long after dark, we had a pilgrimage from inn to inn, finding them
all full, and the people hooted us all along the street till we found
refuge in a hostel by no means “first-class.” The heat had set in
fiercely, and the mercury was 83° in the shade. The following day, after
a short journey in intense heat over the glorious and busy plain, we
reached the house of Mr. Callum of the Church Missionary Society, at
Sin-tu Hsien, a thriving town of about 15,000 people, with a pleasant
promenade on its walls, and a very fine temple just outside them. The
industry of this town, as of Kuan Hsien, is chiefly the making of straw
sandals.
The third day’s journey with Mr. and Mrs. Callum was still over the
glorious plain, which became yet richer and more densely populated as we
neared Chengtu, the restaurants, always crowded with coolies and
travellers, almost lining the road, and the wheelbarrows making a nearly
ceaseless procession.
[Illustration: POPPY FIELD IN BLOSSOM. [_F. Mayers._]
If one could disabuse oneself of the belief that opium is the curse of
China and is likely to sap the persistent vitality of the race, there
could have been nothing but unstinted admiration for the wonderful
beauty of the crop in blossom, as I saw it in its glory on that sunny
April day on the Chengtu plain, which in some places seemed to have no
_raison d’être_ but its growth. The season had been without a drawback,
and every leaf and flower had attained to its full maturity of
loveliness. The blossoms were white—white fringed with rose-pink, white
with white fringes, ruby-red, carmine, dark purple, pale mauve, and
rose-pink. Waves of colour on slope and plain rolled before the breeze.
Houses were almost submerged by the coloured billows. Far and near,
along roads and streams, round stately temples and prosperous
farmhouses, rippled and surged these millions of corollas, in all the
glory of their brief and passionate existence—the April pulse of Nature
throbbing through them most vigorously,—the poppy truly in the
ascendant.
[Illustration: THE WHITE OPIUM POPPY.]
There is a remarkably fine stone bridge on that route to Chengtu, with
dragons surmounting each pier, and very emphatic abutments. I had heard
very much of Chengtu as being among the finest cities, “a second
Peking,” etc. On entering it by the west gate, and the gates are very
imposing, green glades lead into the Tartar quarter, a region of large,
walled gardens, well wooded, and good-sized houses, frequently much
decayed. In a street of shops several of the signs are written in
Manchu. In this quarter it was refreshing to see the tall,
healthy-looking women with “big feet,” long outer garments, and roses in
their hair, as in Manchuria, standing at their doorways talking to their
friends, both male and female, with something of the ease and freedom of
Englishwomen.
It was some distance along wide cleanly streets and through charming
“residential suburbs,” as I must call them, though they are within the
walls, to the “palatial residence” in which the members of the China
Inland Mission have been quartered by the Viceroy at a low rent since
the absolutely complete destruction of the mission premises in the
riots, a destruction which was also complete in the case of the houses
and hospitals of the various other missions, even the bricks of which
the buildings were constructed being carried away. This house, in which
I was most hospitably received, had been assigned by the Government to
the American Commission which came from Peking to assess the losses
incurred by their “nationals,” and there was glass in the windows and
matting on the floors, and dainty muslin blinds and curtains everywhere.
There is a large Romish mission, and American and Canadian missions
besides the China Inland Mission, the Protestant missionaries living and
working in much harmony, though in some respects, chiefly externals, on
differing lines. Things had never settled down comfortably since the
riots, and the official class at least was much embittered by the
enormous damages claimed and obtained by the Roman mission. Stories of
child-eating were current, and I am sure that the people believe that it
is practised by the missionaries, for in going through Chengtu on later
occasions I observed that when we foreigners entered one of the poorer
streets many of the people picked up their infants and hurried with them
into the houses; also there were children with red crosses on green
patches stitched on the back of their clothing, this precaution being
taken in the belief that foreigners respect the cross too much to do any
harm to children wearing the emblem.
I see little or no resemblance to Peking in Chengtu. Without emphasising
the other essential points of difference, Chengtu is neat and clean, and
a comparison of its odours with those of Peking is impossible, for those
of musk overpower all else! Indeed, along with the tea, silk, opium, and
cotton, which it imports from the rest of the province, its great trade
is in the numerous wild products of Tibet—rhubarb, drugs, furs, and
above all, musk.
[Illustration: THE AUTHOR IN MANCHU DRESS.]
It is a very prepossessing city; and its noble wall in admirable repair,
the successor of one built in the third century B.C., is about fourteen
miles in circuit, sixty-six feet broad at the base, forty at the top,
and thirty-five feet high, while what may be regarded as a somewhat
formidable “earthwork”—an inner embankment almost the width of the
wall—supports it along almost its whole circuit. This structure, the top
of which is a superb promenade, is faced with hard and very fine brick,
and has eight bastions, which are pierced by four fine gates, rigorously
guarded, for the purpose of exacting the native customs and _likin_,
which are very hard on foreign imports.
A stream, banked by stone revetments, runs through Chengtu from east to
west, frequently bridged, and in one place spanned by three stone
bridges, each of a single arch, close together. There are many moats and
broad pieces of water, and the main river, about a hundred yards wide,
is crossed by many bridges, one of them roofed, and lined on both sides
by the stalls of hucksters; but the great stone bridge, half a mile
long, with “a richly painted roof supported on marble pillars,”
described by Marco Polo, has ceased to exist! Canals and streams abound,
and are crowded with shipping of small size, chiefly plying to
Chung-king and the ports west of it, cargo and passage junks, and
_wupans_ with hooped bamboo roofs, in one of which I afterwards made the
downward passage, and _sampans_. The waters were very low, and the craft
much jammed together.
The city has wide, well-paved streets, crossing each other at right
angles, and the handsome shops make far more display than is usual in
China, the jewellers’ shops specially, with their fine work in filigree
silver, and even rich silk brocades are seen gleaming in the shadow in
the handsome silk shops, as well as _pongees_, both of local
manufacture, and costly furs, and the snowy Tibetan lambskin can be seen
from the streets exposed for sale. Within, respectable, richly-dressed
shopkeepers await customers, and serve them with due dignity, but make
no attempt to ensnare them. Farther back, in the obscurity, is the
representation on a large scale, frequently taking up the whole end of
the shop, of _Dzai-zen-pusa_, the God of Wealth, the Japanese _Daikoku_,
and the British Mammon, with an altar and incense before him. To him, as
the “luck of the shop,” the merchant, his apprentices, and all his
employees must offer worship morning and evening, and no cult is so
universal.
Chengtu has many scent shops, and most articles of Chinese manufacture
are exposed at the shop fronts, but there was a very small display of
foreign goods.
The strange, wild figures of the trading Tibetans in the streets, the
splendour of the trains of officials and _literati_, who ride horses
almost concealed by expensive trappings, or are carried at a rapid run
in carved and gilded sedans, with poles bent up high in the middle, so
as to raise the magnate above the heads of the plebeian herd, and the
air of prosperous business which pervades the streets, are all
noteworthy. It is a city which owes absolutely nothing to European
influence. The commercial arrangements by which its business
arrangements are run, its posts, banks, and systems of transferring
money are all solely Chinese. There, without difficulty, I cashed the
draft I brought from a Chinese merchant at Hankow. Chengtu owes nothing
to Europe, except a grudge for the excessive indemnity she has had to
pay for indulging in the luxury of riots.
The Viceroy, or Governor-General, is a very important official, and
lives in great state, with a large military force at his disposal, as
befits a man who represents Imperial power in a province as large as
France and more populous, and who coerces or administers all Tibetan
countries, and the wild borderland which I afterwards visited, which is
neither Chinese nor Tibetan—and even the decennial tribute mission from
distant Nepaul is allowed or forbidden to go on to Peking much at the
Viceroy’s pleasure. A request was made to this great man for a letter
which would further my journey, and it was promised by a fixed time, but
I never got it.
The crowded, busy streets of Chengtu fringe off into truly charming
intra-mural suburbs, green and quiet, where deep gateways admit into
beautiful gardens bright with flowers and shady with orange and other
fruit trees. There are tanks full of water-plants brightened by the
gleam of goldfish; the cool drip of falling water is heard;
trellis-work, green with creepers or bright with the blossoms of
scarlet-runners, shades the pathway; the scent of tea-roses floats on
the sunny air; and all these groups of pleasant residences tell of
affluent ease and the security in which it is enjoyed.
The view from the city wall of the plain, with its beauty and fertility,
with suggestions of snow peaks far away, is very striking. Some of the
temples are very fine, specially the Wen-shu-yuan (literary college),
situated near the north gate.[46]
This grand building, dating at the latest from the thirteenth century
(A.D.), has been rebuilt by several dynasties, and has gone on
increasing in wealth and magnificence till its priests and monks are
justly proud of its splendours, of which the severe heat, even in the
green shades of its grandly timbered surroundings, on the day of my
visit prevented me from seeing more than a half. They may be proud of
its exquisite cleanliness, too. By the time I reached Chengtu I had come
to think that Chinese temples are much maligned on this score, but
certainly the Wen-shu-yuan and the “Prince’s Temple” above Kuan Hsien
excel them all in this virtue, which is said to approach so closely to
godliness. All the more remarkable is it here, because the temple is a
“theological college” as well as a monastery, a large number of students
for the priesthood bringing up the number of the inmates to one hundred
and fifty.
All the interstices between the smooth and well-laid flagstones of the
courtyards are kept clean and free from grass; stonework, woodwork,
gilding, paint and lacquer are all in perfect repair, and the fine roof
is kept from the injuries caused by sparrows by a man who walks about
the court with a cross-bow. The refectory opening from the court, with
twenty-five tables set with tea, vegetables, and rice bowls for six
each, for the vegetarian community, is as clean as all the rest; the
wooden tables, chopsticks, and bowls all having that attractive look of
well-scrubbed wood which we associate with an old-fashioned English
farmhouse.
It is not possible to say whether the course of study and devotion
prescribed for both priests and students produces equal purity of soul.
In the Chapel of Meditations, resembling those which I saw in the
monasteries of Western Tibet, both orders must spend some hours of every
day in front of the Buddhist images, striving by all means known to them
to reach a state of holy ecstasy, in which they are blind to all
impressions from the seen. It may be possible that the prolonged
watching of the curling and ascending clouds of incense produces a
condition approaching hypnotism.
Severe guest-rooms, furnished according to the most rigid Chinese
etiquette, chapels, some filled with costly gifts and curiosities, or
with tablets to munificent donors, resplendent in gold on black lacquer,
libraries of the religious classics, and picture galleries containing
portraits of the deceased abbots, vestries for vestments, and
dormitories occupy this fine pile of buildings. In the entrance portico,
the idol photographed as an illustration recalled me to the fact that
China is a stronghold of idolatry. On the other side the divinity looks
like a douce, respectable English squire of the days of George III.
[Illustration: DIVINITY IN WEN-SHU YUAN TEMPLE, CHENGTU.]
CHAPTER XXIX.
KUAN HSIEN TO SIN-WEN-PING
Before I left Kuan for Chengtu I had decided on extending my journey up
the Siao Ho, a western branch of the Min, on which the mountain town of
Li-fan Ting is situated, into the mountainous borderland which lies
between China proper and Tibet, the country of some of the reputed
aboriginal tribes which concurrent rumour said were under the rule of a
woman. At Kuan and Chengtu no information could be got regarding the
country west of Li-fan, except that Tibetans trading to Kuan said that
“everything could be got at Somo,” which appeared to be the residence of
the ruler. As there was little use in undertaking such a journey without
a more efficient interpreter than Be-dien, Mr. Horsburgh kindly
suggested that Mr. Kay, a lay member of the Church Missionary Society,
who has a considerable knowledge of colloquial Chinese, should accompany
me. I had a hazy intention if things went well of attempting to get down
to Ta-lien-lu by the Chin-chuan and Tatu river, returning to the Yangtze
by Ya-chow and Chia-ling Fu, but the season was late for this.
When I went to Chengtu I left my travelling arrangements to be made in
my absence, simply indicating what they were to be, and that they were
to be in writing. A favourite axiom of mine is the late General Gordon’s
saying, “I am my own best servant,” and as a general rule I attend to
the smallest details of a journey in advance myself, down to every
strap, buckle, and horseshoe. On this occasion the suffering following
the blow on my head and my journey to the capital had induced me to
trust to others, who, however kind, were without travelling experience;
and on returning I found that the travelling arrangement was the exact
opposite of the one I had indicated, and that, instead of the coolies
having been engaged from a hong with a written agreement, a servant had
been allowed to make up a family party on indefinite lines!
Two days of hot, heavy rain delayed the start, and gave ample
opportunity for the exercise of those innumerable acts of thoughtful
kindness which these small, isolated communities delight in showing to
strangers, and which can never be forgotten. There were two
disagreeables. Be-dien had been in a shocking sulky fit for two days,
and would not answer anyone who spoke to him; and instead of the
promised letter from the Viceroy came an indignant note from Mr. Vale,
of Chengtu, saying that at the last moment it had been refused.
On the third day the rain became a quiet downpour, tailing off at midday
into a misty drizzle which continued; and as further waiting was
undesirable, I started, in my three-bearer chair, with five porters, two
_chai-jen_, Mr. Kay, his servant, and Be-dien. As my European clothing
had fallen to pieces, I was dressed as a Chinese and wore straw shoes.
My baggage was all waterproof, and instead of oblong Japanese baskets
and bundles protected by oiled paper, I had two deep, square bamboo
baskets as better fitted for the mountains, and no loose packages but my
camera. Unfortunately, as preventing accurate observations, a year
before I had sent home the instruments lent to me by the Royal
Geographical Society; a pony had rolled on my hypsometer, and an aneroid
barometer kindly lent to me was not reliable, and I had no means of
ascertaining the amount of its unreliability before I left China.
The beautiful gorge outside the city, and the grand Prince’s Temple were
drowned in mist, out of which heavy odours of gardenia drifted. All the
vegetation, under the genial influences of heat and moisture, was in
full beauty, and there, as everywhere, vigorous plants of the Japanese
anemone bordered the road. The climbing roses were in blossom, and,
weighted with moisture, hung almost down to our heads. Rocks were matted
over with the _hymenophyllum Wilsonianum_, as thick as the fleece of a
sheep, and the hare’s-foot fern began to make its appearance along with
the familiar _polypodium vulgare_.
[Illustration: ENTRANCE TO GROUNDS OF CITY TEMPLE, KUAN HSIEN.]
We left Kuan by the west gate, near a very fine temple, to which the
picturesque mass of lacquered pillars and roofs in the illustration is
only the outer entrance. Passing above the divided waters of the Min,
and Li Ping’s simple contrivances for preserving the banks, which
consist far more frequently of long cylindrical baskets of bamboo
network containing stones as big as a man’s head than stone revetments,
we crossed the Min by a very fine bamboo suspension bridge, which
scarcely vibrated more under our tread than did the old Menai bridge
under a carriage.
These bamboo bridges are a feature of the Upper Min, and are remarkably
graceful, specially when thrown across at a considerable height. In the
better class there is a covered bridge-house at each side and stone
piers. Six bamboo ropes each as thick as a man’s arm are stretched very
tightly across the river by strong windlasses firmly bedded, which are
used for re-tightening the ropes as they “give.” These ropes are kept
apart by battens of wood laced vertically in and out. The plank roadway
is laid across the lower of the ropes, and follows their curve, which
owing to the use of the windlasses for tightening up is not great. These
bridges are renewed always once, and sometimes twice, a year, an
operation taking two days and under. Owing to the extreme width of the
river at the Kuan bridge, there are three or four spans with stone
piers. Usually these suspension bridges are carried right across. The
roadway is sometimes trying to the nerves, for planks tip up, or tip
down, or disappear altogether, or show remarkable vivacity when the foot
is placed upon them, and many a gaping hiatus, trying to any but the
steadiest head, reveals the foam and fury below.
The road follows the river at a height and dives into the mountains,
which are at first of sandstone, with curious strata running up at right
angles to the valley, and then of limestone. The valley is populous,
smoky, and trafficky. Lime-kilns abound, and a considerable population
is employed in working the coal seams, which occur chiefly in the
sandstone; while hundreds of coolies, carrying both coal and lime, were
moving towards Kuan, and many more were loading vessels and rafts,
which, if they escape the risks of the gorge below, can reach Lu-chow on
the Yangtze.
At the end of nine miles, turning by a short cut up a romantic tributary
of the Min, through a gorge of entrancing beauty, where forest trees and
flowering shrubs were linked by an entanglement of flowering trailers,
crossing a river by a covered bridge, we arrived at Fu-ki, where there
was a quiet, pleasant inn, one of several of the same character on this
route, where, instead of evil odours, the scent of syringa from the hill
behind entered my room. It was very quiet and peaceful. There was no
crowding or boring holes in the plaster, the river hummed monotonously
below, the mercury was under 60°, and altogether it was a delightful
change from the crowding, curiosity, noise, and blazing heat of the
Chengtu plain.
Again the next day we started in a steady downpour, which ceased at the
top of the very pretty temple-crowned pass, over four thousand feet in
altitude, of Niang-tze-ling, after which it was fine and cool. The road
drops down from the pass to the deep canyon of the Min, which bifurcates
at Weichou, and the river and mountain scenery become increasingly
stupendous, reminding me greatly of the road from Kashmir to Tibet after
it reaches the Indus. Two fine bamboo suspension bridges near the foot
of the pass, others higher up, and a number of rope bridges of Tibetan
pattern give both easy and difficult access to the other side. There was
a decided Tibetan influence in the air, which I welcomed cordially. Red
lamas passed us on pilgrimage to Omi Shan, and numbers of muleteers in
sheepskins and rough woollen garb, their animals laden with Tibetan
drugs, and, better than these, some “hairy cows” (yaks), which had not
yet lost the free air of their mountain pastures, and executed many
rampageous freaks on the narrow bridle path. Lamas and muleteers were
all frank and friendly, asked where we were going, how long we had been
on the road, enlightened us on their own movements, and cheerily wished
us a good journey. Most of the mules had one or more prayer-flags
standing up on their loads, for the Tibetans are one of the most
externally religious peoples on earth.
The Min[47] from the pass of Niang-tze-ling assumes the character which
it retains more or less to the source of the Siao Ho or lesser branch.
It is a fine, peacock-green river; then, though at low water, of
considerable volume, booming, crashing, and foaming through canyons and
gorges in a series of cataracts, hemmed in by cliffs and mountains so
precipitous as rarely to leave level ground enough for a barley patch.
The bridle track, a very good one on the whole, though there are some
shelving rock slithers, has been cut, not blasted, in the rock, at times
on steep declivities and at times on precipices, and follows the up and
down left bank of the Min ascents and descents at a height with great
fidelity. It is not broad enough for a loaded mule to pass a chair, and
the sight of a caravan in the distance always caused much agitation and
yelling, the Tibetan muleteers invariably drawing off on the first
margin they could find, and greeting us with courtesies and good wishes
as we passed them. I envied them the altitudes and freedom to which they
would return from the cramping grooviness of China.
Now and then the road is scaffolded, or steps are cut in the rock, or it
passes under an arch of rock, or a bridge carries it across a lateral
chasm down which a crystal torrent dashes, after turning two, three, or
four rude mills placed in dizzy positions one above another. It is so
severe that we only did thirteen miles in nine hours, and I saw plainly
what I had suspected from the first, that one of the scratch team of
bearers was not up to his work.
The whole of the first fortnight’s journey was along the deep, wild
gorge of the greater or lesser Min. It differs widely from ordinary
Chinese travelling, and has a strong resemblance to the wild gorges of
the Yangtze. The mountains rise from the river to a height of over 3000
feet. Ghastly snow-cones look over them, their slopes, always steep,
often break up into cliffs 400 or 500 feet high; the river has often not
a yard of margin, and hurries along, crashing and booming, a thing of
purposeless power and fury, which has never been tamed of mankind, its
sea-green colouring a thing of beauty, and its crests and stretches of
foam white as the snows which give it birth.
These mountain-sides, as far as Weichou, are completely covered with
greenery, dwarf ashes, oaks, chestnuts and beeches, big enough for use
by the charcoal-burners. Coarse grasses, thistles, yellow roses, a very
pretty yellow cistus, bryony, brambles, yellow jasmines and flowering
creepers in abundance, all dwarf, with the barberry in blossom, covered
the stony, broken hillsides. Three species of warm-scented artemisia and
fuzzy brown balls of uncurling fronds of ferns were expanding in the
crevices of the rocks, and the rocks themselves were often tinged
rose-pink with the early leaves and delicate clasping fingers of
Veitch’s _Ampelopsis_.
It was a clear escape from the crowds of China. The traffic on the road
was mostly Tibetan. There is little room for crops; an occasional patch
among the rocks near the river, and small fields, then growing rape, and
later starved barley, terraced great heights, where the mountain slope
is less steep than usual. Small as the population is, it does not grow
enough for its wants, so many of the men hunt the deer and wild boars on
the mountains and sell the carcases in Kuan in the winter, and others
trap the fur-bearing animals, which appear to be an inferior sable and
marten.
[Illustration: DOUBLE ROOFED BRIDGE.]
There are a few hamlets on the road, which subsist chiefly by supplying
the needs of travellers, but the restaurant was usually hidden away, and
made no display on the “street.” Rice is scarce and not always
attainable, and wherever we halted, instead of the appetising displays
of ready-cooked viands which tempt the coolie appetite, there was rarely
even a fire, and it was always an hour before anything was cooked. The
inns, though much better than any I had been accustomed to, and often
built of new boards, do not provide any fire in the mornings unless by
special arrangement, and till this was understood I started without tea.
Their stock of food was soon exhausted, even at the larger villages
where we halted for the night, and the descent upon them of twelve
hungry persons was manifestly unwelcome. Some of the hamlets are built
at great heights, and are accessible by rugged paths and steps cut in
the rock. The people are hardy, rough, and fairly friendly. The Chinese
are, to my thinking, men of plains and rivers and slimy paths—a
rice-eating people, associating with the water buffalo. Here they are
abruptly metamorphosed into hardy mountaineers, hunters, maize and
millet fed. Even the women, though still binding the feet, are
independent in their air and movements, and perform feats in crossing
rivers. The country is a cross between China and Tibet. However, there
are no temples, and few shrines or other signs of religion.
Fully one-third of the population is on the west side of the Min, cut
off from the high road with its business and gaieties by a furious
torrent, and in most cases too poor to construct bamboo suspension
bridges. Their strong nerves enable them to get over the difficulty. I
know of no sight in China which fascinated me so much as their rope
bridges, which we met with on the second day, and which occur sometimes
at frequent intervals, as far as Weichou, from which point I saw no more
of them.
The mountaineers stretch a plaited bamboo cable at a great height across
the gorge, tighten it as well as they can, and secure each end round a
round stone or a convenient rock. Sometimes a shed is built over the
terminus and a shrine close by. Every mountaineer provides himself with
two semi-cylinders of hard wood, often hinged, about a foot long. With
perfect _sang-froid_ he places these on the cable, and binds them
together with a rope. As if it were the most natural thing in the world,
he proceeds to suspend himself from the cylinder by ropes passed under
his knees, his waist, and the back of his neck; some dispensing with the
last.
He is then hanging under the rope, and, gripping it fast by the slide,
he gives the solid earth a shove and casts off. No matter how tightly a
long rope is strained, it must still “sag” considerably in the middle,
and down the passenger rushes at tremendous speed, head foremost, down
hill across the chasm, with an impetus which sends him a little way up
the other slope. Then, letting go the cylinder, he puts his hands on the
rope above his head, and hauls himself up hand over hand, slowly and
laboriously. When he reaches land he detaches the cylinder, packs it and
the rope into his basket, shoulders his burden—and both men and women
continually carry small sacks or bundles of wood across—bows at the
shrine, and goes his way.
[Illustration: TIBETAN ROPE BRIDGE.]
I saw a woman cross carrying a load on each side. It took her ten
minutes to ascend from the middle of the rope, which must have been
ninety feet above the torrent, to land. Her face was purple with the
effort, and her hands must have been pretty sore, for she spit upon them
several times during the crossing. Even children are trusted to these
arrangements, which need considerably more nerve than the _Jhulas_ of
the Himalayas. In some places to minimise the difficulty there are two
rope bridges, each descending from a high to a low level.
It is only occasionally at the mouth of one of the grand lateral gorges
which open on the valley that there are any trees, and then they are
very fine, specially walnuts and the exotic Zelkowa, and the _Salisburia
adiantifolia_, with a few sturdy conifers, and the villages are
surrounded by peaches, apricots, and the Japanese _loquat_ (_Eriobotrya
Japonica_).
It was a delightful day’s journey to Sin-wen-ping, and the keen mountain
air and the novelty and freedom were full of zest. Solitary grandeur,
the deafening din of the Min, the green crystal affluents which descend
upon it down glorious gorges, the precipices rising a thousand feet from
the water, the abrupt turns where progress seems blocked, and each
mountain barrier is grander and loftier than the last, and then the
majesty of the day’s journey culminates at a mountain village with a
fine suspension bridge, beyond which the road looks only a thread along
the side of a precipice.
When the bearers reached Sin-wen-ping they said they would go no
farther, for there was a “big wind” farther on, which would blow the
chair into the river, and the porters said they could not carry the
loads against it. Then it came out that Be-dien had left behind the
lanterns which I bought a few days before; so the men carried their
point of making a day of thirteen miles. Again I urged that the
agreement with them should be put in writing; but it was not done, and I
found later that it was on quite different lines from those I had laid
down. I saw grave difficulties ahead, and should have been glad to ride
and be rid of the men, but I had left my saddle in Korea.
It was very cold in the inn, only half my room being roofed, and the
mercury, which was 83° on the Chengtu Plain, was only 40°. It was
invigorating and delicious. The people, too, were very friendly, and did
not manifest their curiosity rudely. A runner arrived from the capital
with a big official envelope addressed to me, containing letters with
the Viceroy’s seal; but as they were addressed to the mandarins of Pi
Hsien where I did not halt, and Kuan Hsien which I had left, and made no
reference to the regions beyond, they did not promise to be useful. On
the _yamen_ at Chengtu refusing the promised letters, Mr. Vale
telegraphed to H.B.M.’s Consul at Chungking, and this was the result.
The letters stated to the mandarins that at Liang-shan and Peng Hsien
the mob had attempted by violence to break in my door, and that I had
been attacked with stones, all within the Viceroyalty, and the Viceroy
directed the _kuans_ to take efficient measures for my protection.
[Illustration: HAND SLIDES FOR TIBETAN ROPE BRIDGE.]
CHAPTER XXX.
SIN-WEN-PING TO LI-FAN TING
After leaving that quiet place, where the temperature was only 52° at
7.30 a.m., we plunged at once into a wild part of the gorge, very thinly
peopled and desolate, on which grim snow-peaks looked down from the head
of every lateral cleft. The traffic on the road was altogether Tibetan,
partly accounted for by the junction of the road to Mou-Kung Ting, a
thousand _li_ away, with the Sung-pan Ting road, which we were
following. There were large caravans of very big, powerful mules, loaded
either with wool or with medicinal roots, and with a merry inclination
to lunge at us with hoofs or teeth as we passed them; the rough, uncouth
muleteers always cheerful and friendly as they exchanged with us their
national salutation _zho_.
One man at least in each caravan—every man having charge of four
mules—can shoe his own beasts, and I had the luck, in consequence of a
mule kicking off his shoe as we passed him, to see that the method is
the same as in Western Tibet. They tie the fore and hind legs of the
animal together, cast him, put a pole through the lashings, the ends of
which are held by two men, and cold shoe him, paring the hoof only very
slightly, using very long nails with tacket heads.
The Mou-Kung Ting road is one of the great routes of Tibetan traffic, of
which we saw much less after passing the junction.
The gorge is very narrow, so narrow that at times the road is scaffolded
over the water, or is carried by rough steps cut in the face of the
precipices. We ascended 800 feet during the day. The traces of spring
diminished, the hills were brown and bare, the apricots were hardly in
blossom, the few trees were leafless, the people still wore their wadded
clothes, and it was pleasant to walk a good deal. Yet here and there
were thick carpets of a sky-blue dwarf iris, a fragile thing, looking
misplaced among its rough surroundings, and patches of a blue bugloss,
and dwarf shubberies of a barberry in blossom.
[Illustration: HUMAN PACK SADDLE FOR TIMBER.]
Things had changed. Thatched roofs had given place to thin slabs of
stone, or rough boards held down by big stones. All ornament had
disappeared. China seemed left behind at such a great distance, that
every Chinese I saw looked as if he must be like myself, a foreigner.
The men were hardy mountaineers, and carried their loads on pack
saddles, striding like men, rather than at a dog trot, on the swinging
bamboo. Even the women can shoulder packs and dangle from rope bridges,
and the children have an air of freedom.
A short day’s journey ended at the hamlet of Shuo-chiao, where the gorge
opens out, and for a brief period the Min is vulgarised into various
branches clattering and boiling among beds of Brobdingnagian shingle. It
is a wild place, among high mountains, a single village street, a fine
suspension bridge, a mill or two on the shingle, and goats on the ledgy
slopes. The inn at the end of the street, where I spent two nights, was
new, and hung over a branch of the river. My room, having no ceiling,
was lofty. The boards were clean, and there were no bad smells. The
noise of the river was tremendous. Besides the roar of the water, there
was a sound of paving stones being thumped on paving stones, and a
perpetual clatter of shingle. I had to shout as loud as I could to make
my servant hear. But it was very restful. I was entirely ignored. No one
intruded into my room, and when I took a walk unattended no one followed
me.
Food was scarce, and an inroad of twelve travellers involved much
arrangement. Shuo-chiao is not a usual halting-place, and the stocks
were low. The people fell back on making macaroni, and sandwiches with
chopped garlic between layers of steamed paste. Macaroni is made of a
very close dough of barley meal, very much kneaded, and rolled out on a
clean table over and over again till it attains the desired toughness
and thinness, when the operator cuts it into long and narrow strips,
which are hung over a string to dry. When wanted these strips are
boiled, and are eaten with chopped capsicum or onion.
The following day’s journey to Weichou was novel and interesting. The
sky was grey and threatened rain, and the snow-peaks loomed grimly
through flurries of dark clouds. We ascended to a height of over 4300
feet into a barren region, where winter lingered. The few villages have
characteristics of their own; each consists of a long, clean, paved,
narrow street, the houses built of stone, the walls with more or less of
an inward slope, as if under Tibetan influence—all dwellings
two-storeyed, the upper storey of dark wood, with carved, overhanging
balconies with supporting beams also carved, and with very deep eaves
with long and elaborately carved wooden pendants. Such villages are
usually by torrent sides, with fruit trees, cedars, and poplars
clustering about them, and are approached by picturesque bridges. The
street terminates at either end with a decorative gateway, often with a
small tower and wind bells.
In many places where the Min has a narrow bank, there are ruined
villages with only ruinous walls standing; and in each house there are
one, two, or three graves. On one larger open space there are great
numbers of graves, said to be those of soldiers who died fighting; and
the whole of the slaughter and destruction is attributed by the
villagers to the Taiping rebellion. This is plausible, but doubtful.
In crevices there were minute fronds of the silver fern, which grows
profusely all along the canyon; but nature was still asleep. Limestone
and grey sandstone predominate, and the curiously marked strata are
occasionally vertical. Basalt, however, appears in some of the lateral
ravines, and pink granite; and the torrents which tumble over the latter
are exquisite in their sparkle and purity. A traveller who, except on
one day’s journey from Wan, has not tasted unboiled water for more than
two years, would wish to be thirsty to drink of these icy and living
waters.
At Wen-chuan Hsien, a small prefectural town packed among high
mountains, with a very poor but clean street, a picturesque entrance,
and a fine Confucian Temple, I sat in the grey street while the _yamen_
officials copied my passport at a table, and an old man, who seemed
influential, kept the dirty and too often leprous crowd of men and boys
from pressing on me too closely. Nothing is ever done privately in the
East, and several men leant over the scribes, reading the
imposing-looking document, when one exclaimed, with an air of
consternation, “She is given rank!” Others exclaimed incredulously, “A
woman can’t have rank!” But the scribes settled the point in my favour;
and then there was a discussion as to how I had got rank—if it were
literary rank, or if I were the wife of a great mandarin in my own
country—a suggestion combated on the ground that I wore poor cotton
clothing, and had no jewels. Wen-chuan is the most hopelessly dull
official town that I saw in China.
The night before, at Shuo-chiao, I was told that after passing Wen-chuan
we should see the villages of the “Barbarians,” on the heights; and I
heard a tale with which travellers bound for the aboriginal tribes have
been plied from Marco Polo down to Captain Gill. The innkeeper said that
these people would offer hospitality, but it was dangerous to eat with
them, for they believed that if they poisoned a rich man his wealth
would come to them without violence, and that they would think that I
was rich (in spite of my poor cotton clothing), and would put poison in
my food, and that in about three months I should die of a disease akin
to dysentery! He also said that these tribes are ruled by a very great
queen, who will not let any stranger enter her territory—obviously the
same woman of whom I had heard rumours at intervals for some months
previously.
At last, and for fifteen _li_ before reaching Weichou, the objects of
interest became novel and plentiful, startling in their novelty.
Singular dwellings made their appearance, crowning hilltops or poised on
ledges—isolated or in clusters. The earlier specimens have high, dead,
stone walls, flat roofs, and an upper storey covering a third of the
roof, but without a front wall. Before long such houses aggregated
themselves into villages on great heights, and without any apparent
means of access, though that they were inhabited was obvious from the
patches of cultivation about them. Among them appear tall towers,
sometimes to the number of seven; they are picturesque and fantastic
beyond all imagination. Of course these are the dwellings of the Man-tze
(Barbarians), supposed by most ethnologists to be the aborigines of
Western China; and it was not a little disappointing, on turning the
glass upon them, to see nothing but Chinese with their queues and blue
cotton, and hobbling women loafing round such extraordinary habitations.
I use the word _loafing_ advisedly. It is usually quite inapplicable to
a Chinese, and among these mountains, as elsewhere, he has plenty of
grit, but population is scanty, and competition has ceased to be keen,
so he has leisure for a lounging study of the welfare of his crops and
his pigs.
So, among villages crowning rocky mountain-tops or clinging to scarcely
accessible mountain-sides, some of them very Tibetan, others with
definite characteristics of their own, the road finds itself at the
small prefectural town of Weichou, at the junction of the Ta Ho and the
Siao Ho (the Great and Little rivers), in a superb situation, much
embellished by the unconscious art of the builder, with _yamens_ on
rocky heights, and the grey city wall following the steep contours of
the hills which surround the town. The north road on the left bank of
the Ta Ho leads to Sung-pan Ting, and the west road, mostly along the
right bank of the Siao Ho, to Li-fan Ting and beyond. Weichou is the
town called by Captain Gill on his map Hsin-Pu-Kuan.
At this point mules for the farther journey should have been engaged.
It is a good sixty-five _li_ from Weichou to Li-fan Ting, and we left at
6 a.m. My expectations were high, but they were more than fulfilled.
From Weichou to Somo there is only one dull bit of about three miles. As
far as Li-fan Ting the scenery is colossal and savage, Tibetan in its
character, resembling somewhat the wild gorges of the Shayok; and,
beyond Tsa-ku-lao, the westernmost official post of China in that
direction, the grandeur and beauty exceed anything I have ever
seen—Switzerland, Kashmir, and Tibet in one.
Outside Weichou there are two suspension bridges, over which I had to
walk. They were “on their last legs,” and were taken down when I came
back. They vibrated, the wind swayed them unpleasantly, and as the loose
planks were only laid at intervals, and some had disappeared, and the
swinging structures hung like inverted arches over boiling surges, the
crossing was not agreeable, and it is as little so when on this road the
chair turns a corner of the narrow path on the edge of a precipice 500
or 600 feet in depth, and hangs for an appreciable interval over the
abyss below.
The day was the most brilliant for three months, and the journey from
first to last was magnificent, but the wind, which I found such a
merciless foe in Central Asia, rose at the same hour, 9 a.m., and blew
half a gale till near sunset, reaching its maximum of force at 2 p.m.,
making photography impossible, several times nearly overturning the
chair and its bearers, and filling eyes, nose, and mouth not only with
gritty dust, but with irritating alkalis. This is the daily routine in
these mountain valleys. On crossing the bridges we entered at once the
gorge of the Siao Ho, or Li-fan River, in which we remained for twelve
hours—a river flashing in cataracts, eddying in rapids, with never a
quiet reach—a deep, clear, olive-green stream, its grand course
accompanied by a deep undertone of a heavy booming in its caverned
depths. Its career is through a rift among mountains, seven, eight, and
nine thousand feet in height, broken up by stupendous chasms and
precipices, and into red-brown, but seldom grey, peaks—the higher like
needles, the lower crested by villages, to all appearance inaccessible;
the mass riven asunder, laterally, in many places in so remarkable a
manner as to show on one side the rock corresponding to the cleavage on
the other, so that if the sides could be brought together they would be
an exact fit.
[Illustration: BAMBOO SUSPENSION BRIDGE, WEICHOU.]
Occasionally the mountains and precipices recede sufficiently from the
river to give scanty space for villages at their feet, with poplars and
scanty crops of bearded wheat on sandy soil, and at the lateral openings
alluvial fans occur, bearing fair crops of wheat and maize, as well as
pear and apricot trees, just providing a scanty subsistence for a scanty
population. Limestone, grey and red sandstone, and a very hard
conglomerate are the predominant formations, but a granite with a pink
tinge makes an occasional innovation, and the potholes in the river,
where it was possible to investigate them, were found to be fashioned of
grey granite. One remarkable feature of the region is the enormous
quantity of nitrate of soda. Its efflorescence in places whitens the
mountains as if with snow, and so checks vegetation as to reduce it to
coarse plants of strong constitutions, with tough fibres and woolly
leaves. Sulphur abounds also, and fragments of an iron ore, which I
afterwards learned is brown hematite. There are nitre works at Weichou,
and sulphur is supplied in small quantities for making powder, but the
cost of land carriage is great, and it is chiefly used locally for
tipping matches.
The road is a great work of modern origin, and must have cost a large
sum. It is in excellent repair. It is cut, not blasted, for much of the
way out of solid rock. In places it is necessary to carry it out over
the river on a wooden framework, supported on timbers driven into the
river-bed, or to “scaffold” it by carrying it out on stakes driven
horizontally into the rock. In one place a fine gallery, decorated with
stone tablets to the man who presented the road to his district, has
been cut through the rock, and wherever steps are necessary, they have
been carefully made. At this distance of 2000 miles from the coast, and
half that from the capital, it is somewhat surprising to find so marked
a sign of civilisation as an excellent road in thorough repair.
I cannot attempt to convey to the reader any idea of the glories and
surprises of that long day’s journey. It was a perfect extravagance of
grandeur of form and beauty of colouring, and the sky approached that of
Central Asia in the brilliancy of its bright pure blue. Every outline
was sharp, but the gorges were filled with a deep blue or purple
atmosphere; the sunlight was intense. There was no dawn of spring on the
bare rock faces of the mountains, no gloom of pine in any rift—grandeur
and vastness are the characteristics of the scenery—peaks and precipices
are piled on each other, and through the rare openings there were
gleamings far away of sunlit cones of unsullied snow.
There are villages on hilltops, on rocky peaks, reached by stairs cut in
the rock, on ledges of precipices, into which the back rooms are
excavated without obvious means of access, and villages where the houses
are three, four, five, and even seven storeys high, clinging to steep
mountain-sides, or hanging on to cliffs above tempestuous streams. These
villages are on heights five, seven, and even nine thousand feet above
the sea—barley and bearded wheat ripening in July at eleven thousand—and
from one to three thousand feet above the Siao Ho. All are built of
stone, all look more or less like fortifications, all have flat roofs,
and most have brown wood rooms or galleries, much decorated with rude
fretwork, supported on carved beams projecting from their upper storeys.
Most of these villages possess mysterious-looking square stone towers,
sloping very gently inwards from base to summit. These are from forty to
ninety feet high. The bases of some of them are thirty feet square; the
sides are pierced by narrow openings, wider, however, than loopholes.
The doors are fifteen feet and upwards from the ground, and I did not
see any with any present means of access. Some have lost many feet of
their height, I suppose from age and weather, but many are perfect, and
have projections near the roofs, which on a small scale are like the
projecting rooms of the modern villages. Three and four in a single
village is not an uncommon number, and occasionally there are as many as
seven. At a distance they give the romantic villages in the ravines the
prosaic aspect of smelting works, but they add a singular dignity and
picturesqueness to those on the heights. They are built without mortar
of blocks of undressed stone, “well and truly laid,” in spite of the
difficulty of the inward slope, and the stones are of sufficient size to
suggest an inquiry as to how they were elevated to their present
positions. Those towers which are still perfect are roofed, which may
account for their preservation. There are great numbers of them between
Weichou and Li-fan Ting, after which they occur but rarely till the
head-waters of the Chin-shuan are reached.
As the Man-tze say that “their fathers and their fathers’ fathers never
remember a time when they were free,” so they cannot remember any
legends regarding the use of these towers, except that in “old times”
fires were lighted on their roofs to recall absent villagers to the
defence of their homes against an approaching enemy. Some think that
they were granaries, but the so-called thinking of people in their stage
of mental development is of little value.
[Illustration: ANCIENT TOWERS AT KANPO.]
Perhaps mine, in the absence of a greater array of facts, is not worth
much more! It appears certain, from a consensus of testimony, that these
buildings have two and three floors, reached by steps, _i.e_. notched
timbers, like those which at this day lead up to Man-tze roofs. Very
large, rough, earthen jars, which might have contained water, were shown
to me as having been found in one of them. It is quite possible that at
a late date the roofs were used for beacon fires, but from certain
indications in a few cases I am inclined to believe that
easily-removable approaches of stone and earth led up to the doors, by
which stores could be taken up and cattle driven in, the final entrance,
after the removal of these slopes, being made by means of notched
timbers, easily drawn up into the building; and that the towers were
refuges, in which the cattle were below and the people above, food for
man and beast being stored in the same building. This theory accounts
for the number of towers often found in the same village. It is quite
possible that the chief or headman and each of the richer villagers
possessed such a refuge. The style of building is far beyond the
capacities of a “barbarous” people.
Along the lower waters of the Siao Ho, all the Man-tze villages which
have not been more or less destroyed—with the exception of a few which
have been deserted, and are ready for occupation to-morrow, with the
lands belonging to them, have been taken possession of by the Chinese,
and evidently with much slaughter, for the number of graves is very
great. Even the villages on the heights above that part of the river
have not escaped Chinese absorption.
At one time, and that not long ago, the aboriginal population must have
been large, both to the south and west of Weichou, but not a Man-tze was
to be seen within forty _li_ of it. Many a blackened ruin of a once
happy Man-tze hamlet stirs the travellers’ wrath, and it is hardly less
aggravating to find Chinese families comfortably living in the
picturesque dwellings of the slaughtered or expatriated aborigines.
There were many tales told of the treachery of the “Barbarians,” and of
the necessity of extirpating them—such tales as are to be heard in
America, Australia, and every land in which the stronger race has ousted
the weaker one. When at Li-fan Ting my farther progress was vehemently
opposed, I had some reason to think that the officials feared that when
I was once fairly among the Man-tze I should hear other versions of
these stories.
About forty _li_ from Weichou, where the lateral clefts in the
precipices are dark and savage, and rocky peaks crowned with fantastic
lama-serais rise abruptly from rocky spurs, the villages on the heights
become more numerous, and the presence for the first time of Man-tze
inhabitants (who are rigid lamaistic Buddhists like the Tibetans) is
denoted by long flags inscribed with Sanskrit characters on tall poles
fluttering gaily in the strong east wind which blows down the canyon all
day long. Occasionally a wooden bridge on the cantilever principle, like
the Sanga bridges in India, of which many specimens are seen between the
Zoji-la and Leh in Ladak, crosses the furious torrent. Most of the
Man-tze villages are on the left bank of the Siao Ho, and by the
destruction of these bridges, which are much out of repair, they could
be rendered impregnable.
These villages are indescribable. The cattle and fodder are kept below,
and the windows and loopholes only begin from fifteen to twenty feet
from the ground. Brown projecting rooms and balconies at a great height,
the gay flutter of red and white prayer-flags, notched timbers giving
access to roof above roof, fuel-stacks on roofs, towers suggesting peril
and defence, and not seldom a headman’s house above, as large as a
feudal castle, which it much resembles; while high above that, looking
like an outgrowth of the rock, and only attained by flights of steep
rock steps, crowning the peak which dominates every village, are almost
invariably the piled-up temples, towers, and buildings of a lama-serai,
with their colour and gloom, the flutter of their prayer-flags, and the
sound of the incessant wild music of horns, drums, and gongs. An air of
mystery pervades the whole, for with all this cheerful flutter of flags
and the sound of music and the signs of industry it was very rarely that
any inhabitants were to be seen, just the glint of a woman’s red
petticoat now and then, or the red frock of a lama in relief against the
grey rock.
These tribes are not Tibetan, though they are down on most maps as
“Tibetan tribes,” but in the extraordinary picturesqueness of their
lama-serais and villages they reminded me vividly of the Shayok, and the
fantastic monasteries of Deskyid and Hundar in the Tibetan Nubra Valley.
It is a temptation to linger on that day’s journey. I did actually
linger on it, for one of my bearers, as I expected, was quite unequal to
his work, and I had to walk a good deal and allow of many halts for
rest. The halting-places were magnificent, but food was scarce and dear,
as every cattie of rice must be brought up from the low country.
Although we ascended on that day 988 feet, the climate became
perceptibly milder, and from what I observed later, it appears quite
possible that in temperature each degree west is equal to a degree
south. Grain crops, poplar, apricot, and pear trees were in their first
vivid green, the silver fern was in its beauty, the golden fern was well
advanced, the bugloss was in bloom, and in places where the canyon
opened a little there were narrow lawns of the finest turf, on which the
Tibetan traders camp in the season, on which red roses with coarse,
woolly calices were already in blossom. There was no traffic, and even
an unloaded pedestrian, unless he were a red lama telling his beads, or
twirling his prayer-cylinder, was a rarity.
In the late afternoon, at an abrupt and superb turn of the river, we
crossed a cantilever bridge high above the torrent, on the other side of
which is a fine village of extraordinary Man-tze houses, clinging to
ledges of a conical peak crowned by a small temple and a very large and
fantastic lama-serai. A tower, ninety feet high, very ancient, and in
good repair, gives dignity to the picturesqueness of Ta-fan. The road
attains the village by a steep, winding stairway of steps cut in the
rock, and passes through a gateway into cool shadow created by high,
massive, stone houses on either side. So massive are they, and so high
are the windows above the ground, that they suggest memories of villages
in the Engadine.
I rested in a large house in which, as in the others, a Chinese was
living with his family. These aborigines had grand ideas of habitations.
I entered into a guest hall panelled with brown wood, with two rooms on
each side and a large room behind. A gallery of brown wood, with rooms
opening from it, runs round the hall at a height of about eight feet
from the floor. It was very cool and clean, and I sat in a Chinese
easy-chair, glad to be out of the bluster. My host, who was the headman,
was a very courteous Chinese, and offered me wheaten cakes, honey, and
tea. He said that all the houses in the canyon were built by “Tibetans,”
though Chinese live in the lower villages; that if a Chinese builds a
new house he builds it after the same fashion, for that nothing but
Tibetan building—specially the inward slope of the very thick walls—can
stand the tremendous winds. The village subsists less by agriculture,
for which there is not sufficient irrigation, than by the Tibetan
traffic in the trading season.
The headman asked me why I was travelling to be murdered by the
“Barbarians,” and evidently attached no value to my statement that it
was to see the country. I wished then and elsewhere that I had been able
to say that it was in order to write a book, for that would have given
me “rank,” and would have been an intelligible explanation.
[Illustration: KAN-CHI.]
After leaving this village the mountains closed in again upon the pass,
their forms growing in wild majesty; there were glimpses of snow-peaks
with pines on their skirts, and where the shadow was bluest and deepest,
and the peaks are loftiest and sharpest, on a small patch of partially
level ground, separated from a very high and bare mountain, with
precipices which Captain Gill estimates at 3000 feet in height, by the
roaring river, stands the wild mountain town of Li-fan Ting, the
residence of a small magistrate, though only possessing a population of
five hundred.
Before we actually reached it waves of sunset gold rolled down the pass,
distant snow-cones blushed red, every peak took on purple or
amethyst—there was a carnival of colour. The wind fell to a dead calm,
there was a touch of frost in the dry air, when suddenly the whole glory
of mountain and chasm died out, and the colour vanished, leaving only
the distant snow-peaks burning red against a sky of tender green.
This small, grey city, on whose expansion Nature places her veto, looks
the final outpost of Chinese civilisation—the end of all things. A
well-built, narrow, crenelated wall runs between Li-fan Ting and the
river, hems it in, and then in a most fantastic way climbs the crests of
two mountain spurs, which wall in a ravine behind the town, bare and
rocky as all else is, looking like great flights of uncannily steep
stairs, following the steep and irregular contour of the ground.
A clear blue torrent, tumbling down at the back, thunders through the
town, and is utilised for many Lilliputian water-mills, mostly with
horizontal wheels, as on the plain. These mills are round, and look like
small Martello towers, and only a man below the average height can stand
upright in them. Poplars, willows, pear, and apricot trees contrast
pleasantly with the bare mountain-sides, and soften the grey outlines of
the small mountain town. Above Li-fan, and 2200 feet higher, is a
Man-tze village, in which the people have made Chinese intermarriages,
and have assimilated themselves to their conquerors.
Li-fan has one long, narrow, grey street of two-storeyed houses, the
upper storey with its balcony being of brown wood. It is very clean, but
cleanliness is not much of a merit—indeed, it is a necessity of that
altitude and in a dry atmosphere. It has no industry or trade of its
own, and subsists almost entirely on the through trade from Tibet at
certain seasons. It has a remarkable _yamen_, which, lacking space for
lateral expansion, has developed skywards; a temple on a rock,
brilliantly coloured; and a fine temple in the narrow street, rich in
effective wood carving, and possessing a huge bas-relief of the Dragon.
The rarefied air is singularly dry, and so it continues until the Pass
of Peh-teo-shan, 70 _li_ to the westward, marks a decided change to
humidity. On the nights of April 22nd and 23rd there were three and four
degrees of frost.
In this quaint town on the first day of the tenth month of each year,
the mandarin, with all the pomp which Li-fan can muster, fires the
biggest gun in the town at the opposite mountain to preserve “the luck
of the place.” It is believed, at least by the people, that if this
ceremony were not performed there would be tumults, followed by plague,
pestilence, and famine, and that the town would be given up to bad luck.
To save the luck some of the lamas make pilgrimages to an image cut in
the rock at the base of the Snow Dragon, a grand mountain to the south
of Li-fan.
The inn, where unwillingly I spent two days, is not bad, and was quite
free from smells. My room was at its extreme end, close to a crashing,
booming torrent, to the mountain, and to the red temple, which, like the
_yamen_, has developed skywards. It had two large holes in the floor,
and two windows under the roof, from which all the paper was torn, so
that the tremendous wind by day found easy entrance.
As soon as we arrived the usual official visit was paid, and with much
politeness of manner obstacles were thrown in the way of my further
progress. Two _chai-jen_ were placed at my door, one of them sleeping
across the threshold. Much consideration for the safety and comfort of a
lady was expressed—a novelty in China. There were neither roads nor
inns, it was said; the people were savages, the tribes were fighting, it
was dangerous to proceed. The next morning the prospect for departure
was badly clouded over. The veneer of politeness had disappeared, and
the official manner had become dictatorial. Senior officials from the
_yamen_ mounted guard, and a sentry was stationed at the inn gate. I was
a prisoner in all but the name. _Chai-jen_ could not be provided, they
said. The mandarin was absent, and no arrangements could be made till
the Viceroy of SZE CHUAN had been communicated with. Going beyond Li-fan
was a thing unheard of. All other foreigners had turned back,[48] they
could not be responsible for me any farther. They bullied and threatened
my men, and forbade the townspeople to give me supplies or porters.
[Illustration: ROCK TEMPLE, LI-FAN TING.]
The other difficulties, which I had foreseen from the first, came to a
head. Owing to the want of a contract I was in the power of the
chair-bearers. One of them was nearly incapable of carrying me, and not
having recovered from the severe blow at Lo-kia-chan I was not capable
of much walking. The only man in Li-fan who could carry a chair was
engaged in that man’s place in the morning, but was “ill” at night. The
authorities had forbidden him to go, and had taken the precaution of
laying the same prohibition on the mules, though if I could have
dispensed with the men I was prepared to make the journey on a pack
saddle. Finally and fatally, Mr. Kay, who was very much in the power of
the servant who had got the team together, when the men said that all
must go or none would go, engaged them all for the whole journey, and
under the circumstances we were then absolutely in their power so far as
going forwards was concerned. Such a tribe of rice-eating men, carrying
their loads from the shoulder, would, under any circumstances, have been
unsuited to the journey. But what was done could not be undone, and
there was “no use in crying over spilt milk.”
The _chai-jen_ smoked their opium pipes across my door, but retained
wits enough to pounce on me if I stirred, and even obtruded their
unwelcome presence when I climbed on the roof to photograph. On the
second evening the officials made a last effort to induce me to wait
till they sent a runner to the capital and back.
The last morning I woke everybody at 4.30, and was ready to leave at
5.30; but it was not to be. The officials were already there frightening
the coolies with stories, intimidating them, and threatening to have
them beaten for disobedience, and there was a violent altercation
between them and Mr. Kay, in which some very strong language was used on
both sides, which did not mend matters. When I came out they tried to
shut me into my room; but I managed to get into my chair. They told the
bearers not to carry me. 1 told them to move on. The officials then
tried to shut us in by closing parts of the outer door of the inn; but
Mr. Kay opened them, and held them open till the frightened porters and
my bearers had passed through. It was but fifty yards to the city gate.
I feared they would close it, but they contented themselves with
following us there, crying out, “We wash our hands of you!” and hurling
at us the epithet “Foreign dogs!” as a parting missile, throwing down
the gauntlet by sending us off without _chai-jen_, telling the brazen
lie that the road I proposed to take was not in China!
From this point there was the pleasurable excitement which attends a
plunge into the unknown, for I had not been able to learn that
missionary zeal, or geographical research, or commercial ambition had
penetrated the regions beyond, or that any English traveller has given
any description of it, and I only regret that my lack of scientific
equipment should make my account of it meagre, and in some respects
unsatisfactory.
CHAPTER XXXI.
LI-FAN TING TO TSA-KU-LAO
The sixty _li_ from Li-fan Ting to Tsa-ku-lao (spelled by Mr. von
Rosthorn of the Imperial Customs in a letter to me Tsaku-nao) have much
the same characteristics as those of the day before. The scenery is
magnificent, and even more fantastic. Nitrate of soda, sulphur, and iron
ore abound. Sandstone has disappeared, giving place to limestone,
conglomerate, schistaceous rock, grey and pink granite, basalt, and
mica. The Siao Ho, still a full-watered and vigorous stream,
occasionally narrowed to forty feet, plunges over pink granite ledges in
a series of cataracts as the canyon opens out, and there are smooth,
green lawns, with much wealth of dwarf, crimson roses, and much gloom,
in many graves and dismal remains of Man-tze houses partially destroyed.
Some of the potholes in the river are remarkable for their size, and
still contain the smoothly-rounded stones by the action of which they
have been formed. Pine woods appeared on hill crests and on the northern
slopes of mountains.
Many Man-tze villages, now deserted, are ready for occupation, and
others in romantic situations, now occupied by Chinese, are very
striking architecturally, each with a Man-tze feudal castle piled on a
rock above it. These villages were always built at the mouths of gorges
where lateral torrents joining the Siao Ho formed alluvial fans with
arable soil enough to support small populations. The picturesque stone
houses, more like fortifications than dwellings, straggling up these
gorges, perched on ledges of rock, harmonised most artistically with the
wildness of the landscape, but it was impossible to photograph them
owing to the tremendous wind.
Four hours after leaving Li-fan we halted at the large village of
Wei-gua, with a very large lama-serai, said to contain two hundred
lamas, cresting the rock above it, and a fine castle in a dominant
position. The illustration gives the lower and unpicturesque fragment of
the village grouped round the remains of a large square tower. There we
were overtaken by two _chai-jen_, the Li-fan officials having thought
better of it, and an hour later by a third on horseback! This tardy
courtesy roused my suspicions, and Mr. Kay and his servant went on ahead
to obtain accommodation and make inquiries at Tsa-ku-lao, little
thinking that the astute Li-fan officials had sent on a messenger in the
morning to the local magistrate ordering that accommodation and
transport should be refused! To this hour I am unaware of “the reason
why.”
After Mr. Kay went on, and the horseman arrived, I endeavoured to
circumvent the _chai-jen_, for I had seen them, with much mystery, slip
a letter into his hand, after which he tried to get in front of me. I
jumped out of the chair, and set up my tripod on the narrow road, which
he could not pass, and after a long attempt at photography, baffled by
the wind, told him and the others to keep behind, and not to leave me.
The horseman kept trying to get in front, but as the path is very narrow
and mostly on the edge of a precipice, I managed to dodge him the whole
way by holding a large umbrella first on one side, and then on the
other!
A few miles from Tsa-ku-lao the _chai-jen_ managed to pass me, and began
to run towards a short cut, impassable for a chair. I sent Be-dien to
stop them, and to my surprise he outran them, collared them, and held
them till I came up, when I again ordered them behind the chair. Mr. Kay
met me, saying that neither inn nor house would give us shelter, and
that he had found that it would not do to make any inquiries about the
farther route. However, we were received by a very good inn, where the
people were very civil, and where I had an excellent room, with a large
window looking on a mountain across a clean grassed space.
[Illustration: VILLAGE OF WEI-GUA.]
Soon after I got in difficulties began. Two officials arrived, and
politely told many lies. They said that there were no places to sleep in
on the road, that the snow on the passes was forty feet deep, and
crevassed, that the tribes were fighting each other, that they were
robbers and would rob us of everything, and repeated the Li-fan lie that
the route is not in China, and that they could give us no protection. I
produced a Chinese official map, and showed them that it lay far within
the limits of the jurisdiction of the Viceroy of SZE CHUAN, and, being
fairly roused, and determined to proceed at least to Somo, I produced my
passport, telling them that it had been granted on an application made
by the English Tsung-li _yamen_ at the request of the Grand Secretary
(the Premier), and that they could see for themselves that it gave me
rank, and enjoined on all mandarins not only not to put any obstructions
in my way, but that, whether by land or water, every aid was to be
given.
I further said that if this obstruction were persisted in, I should
write a formal statement of the case to the British Consul at Chungking,
to be officially forwarded by him to the highest quarter, and that they
knew what that would mean. On the top of all, I produced the Viceroy’s
letter to the _kuans_ of Pi Hsien and Kuan Hsien. They were quite
quenched, and said they would repeat this to the mandarin, and I should
have his decision in an hour, and they bowed themselves out, taking my
passport with them.
They returned in half an hour, saying that the mandarin would send
soldiers with us to the limits of his jurisdiction, but that then we
should be among the “Barbarians.” This seemed like a victory, yet I felt
by no means sure that we should not be prevented from hiring mules, and
be delayed into returning. The next day a last effort was made to hinder
my westward progress, with a vehemence which was almost piteous,
entreaties being resorted to when threats failed, but all collapsed on a
special clause in my passport being again pointed out to these
secretaries.
Tsa-ku-lao, the outpost of Chinese officialism, is gloriously situated
at an altitude of about 6210 feet,[49] where the mountains swing apart,
and at an abrupt bend of the river there are branching valleys and
unencumbered heights. There are poplars and willows about the little
town of 400 people, and a great Man-tze tower looks through them like an
English church tower. One long, clean, narrow, and highly picturesque
street, lined with shops vending gaily-coloured articles of Chinese
manufacture, cuts the town in twain. Above it, where the houses are
piled on ledges of rock in most artistic disorder, is a very large
lama-serai, with a very quaint pagoda temple on a height above it. The
houses in the street are two and three storeys high, with carved
projecting upper rooms, and peaked roofs with deep eaves, from which
depend carved wooden drops.
At the western exit the road drops abruptly down through the picturesque
gateway seen in the illustration by 500 feet of steep stone steps to a
bridge, which connects the trading with the official town. In the latter
the _yamen_ is an interesting-looking building in pure Tibetan style,
with a Man-tze tower sixty feet high adjoining it. The population of
Tsa-ku-lao is a mixed one, and many of the children show an agreeable
departure from the Chinese physiognomy. The red woollen habits and
peaked hats of the red lamas, the varied costumes of the tribesmen who
were in the town for purposes of trade, and the thirteen differing
styles of hats, the most interesting being made of a species of lichen,
were a very pleasant variety.
An agreeable variety it was, too, that the curiosity of the people for
the first time in a journey of two years was tempered by politeness, for
each batch of would-be sightseers, always women, sent in advance to know
if I would receive them, and they always left after visits of
conventional length, remarking that I must be tired!
We spent two nights there, because the coolies heard such tales of the
road that they engaged mules to carry their loads, the bamboo over the
shoulder with its dependent burdens being unsuited to the exigencies of
mountain climbing, and the mules were away on the mountain. During that
day, in which I visited the quaint official town, and photographed the
gateway amidst a crowd of red and yellow lamas, tribesmen, and Chinese,
who fell back when they were asked to do so, I received about fifty
visitors, so that their supposition that I was tired was not far wrong.
Of this number three, obviously of the Tsa-ku-lao “upper ten,” had been
in Kuan Hsien, a few had been in Weichou, but none had been in Matang or
Somo, and they said that there were very high mountains to cross, and
that the snow was very deep. No woman could get to Somo they thought.
They had never seen a foreign woman, and Russia was the only foreign
country that they knew by name.
[Illustration: STREET OF TSA-KU-LAO.]
Fine, strong, comely, healthy-looking women they were, with pleasant
faces and manners, and minds narrowed to the interests of Tsa-ku-lao.
Some of their children were really pretty. The court of the inn was
always full of red and yellow lamas, muleteers in picturesque jackets
and leggings, and hats like _sombreros_, Tibetans in sheepskins, and
tribesmen whose physiognomies showed a complete departure from the
Mongolian type. It was altogether exciting, and the keen air was bracing
and stimulating. The picturesqueness of the little outpost town in the
brilliant sunshine and under the clear blue sky was fascinating, and the
friendliness and politeness of the people created a new atmosphere which
it was pleasant to breathe. The sun went down in glory and colour, there
was a perfect blaze of stars in the purple sky, and the mercury fell to
the freezing point. The “Beyond” beckoned, and though I knew that the
travelling arrangements must break down from their inherent
unsuitability, I fell asleep prepared to follow.
CHAPTER XXXII.
THE “BEYOND”
The scanty hoar frost lay on the ground at five the next morning, and
the sun rose, as he had set, in glory, flooding the canyons with a
deluge of amber light. There was a considerable delay before starting,
and to the last I feared the wiles of Chinese officialism; but it turned
out to be only the usual difficulty of the first start with
animals—weighing and adjusting loads and the like. There were three
strong, whole-backed, pleasant-faced red mules, and the muleteer was
equally pleasant, a Man-tze lama, quite a young man, who proffered
hospitality for the next few days among his friends, inns having ceased.
The thought of “poisoned feasts” never crossed my mind!
The greater part of the bizarre population of the quaint mountain town
escorted us to the gateway. Superb weather favoured our departure. The
heat of the sun melted the snows towards midday, adding volume to the
thunderous roll of the Siao Ho, above which, after descending to the
water’s edge, the bridle track is carried over spurs and abutments of
limestone. There is a decided change in the scenery. The river, no
longer closely hemmed in by the walls of a tremendous cleft, is broader
and stiller; there are shingle banks and stretches of cultivated land,
and it cuts its way through the ranges instead of following their
clefts. A marked feature of this stretch of the Siao Ho is the
extraordinarily abrupt bends which it makes, and that at most of these a
sugar-loaf peak, forest-clothed below, and naked rock above, rises sheer
from the river-bed, possibly to a height of from 2000 to 3000 feet.
Great openings allow of inspiring views of high, conical, snow-clothed
peaks, heavily timbered below the snow; one group, called by the Chinese
“The Throne of Snow,” consisting of a great central peak, with nine
others of irregular altitudes surrounding it.
[Illustration: A SUGAR-LOAF MOUNTAIN, SIAO HO.]
Climbing the Peh-teo-shan spur by a long series of rocky, broken
zigzags, cut on its side through a hazel wood, and reaching an altitude
of about 9270 feet in advance of my men, I felt the joy of a “born
traveller” as I watched the mules with their picturesque Man-tze
muleteer, the eleven men no longer staggering under burdens, but
jumping, laughing, and singing, some of them with leaves of an artemisia
stuffed into their nostrils to prevent the bleeding from the nose which
had troubled them since leaving Weichou, the two soldiers in their rags,
and myself the worst ragamuffin of all. There were many such Elysian
moments in this grand “Beyond.”
The summit is thick with poles, some of them bearing flags inscribed in
Tibetan characters in honour of the Spirit of the Pass, and there is a
large cairn, to which my men added their quota of stones. Fifteen or
sixteen hundred feet below, the river looks like a green silk cord
interwoven with silver. There is a sharp bend and a widening, from which
rise two conical peaks, forest-clothed and craggy. Lateral gorges run up
from the river, walled in by high, frowning, forest-covered mountains,
breaking into grey, bare peaks, and crags gleaming in the sunshine. To
the north-west the canyon broadens. Mountains rise above mountains,
forest-covered, except where their bare ribs and buttresses stand
harshly out above the greenery, and above them great, sunlit, white
clouds were massed, emphasising the blue gloom of pines; and far higher,
raised by an atmospheric effect to an altitude which no mountains of
this earth attain to, in the full sunshine of a glorious day, were three
illuminated snow-peaks, whose height from the green and silver river,
judged by the eye alone, might have been 30,000 feet! They might have
been “the mountains of the land which is very far off,” for the lighted
clouds below separated them from all other earthly things, and their
dazzling summits are unprofaned by the foot of man.
The descent to the river is long and steep, the sun was hot; the aridity
and sparse vegetation of most of the road up to the pass are exchanged
for comparative humidity and a wealth of small trees and flowers; the
river broadens considerably, breaks up into several channels with
shingle beds and tamarisk, till it and the canyon narrow together at a
point where a wooden cantilever bridge is thrown across at a
considerable height from two natural piers of rock.
There, a very dirty Chinese village faces a Man-tze village of towers
and lofty stone houses. After a halt, during which I sat on a stone in
the broiling sunshine, much vexed by dust and the aggressiveness of both
children and pigs, we crossed the bridge and shortly entered Paradise.
There the hideous black pig was left behind! The river divides, each
branch having its own glorious gorge apparently closed by snow-peaks.
There are small fair lawns, on which nature has clumped maples and ilex;
great forest trees coming down to the water, wreathed with roses and
clematis; and a showy, detached temple—the only one in the region—the
household or lama-serai house of worship from thenceforth taking the
place of the public temple. At its entrance are two large prayer-wheels.
[Illustration: REVOLVING PRAYER-CYLINDERS.]
Close beside it the road passes under an arch, on each side of which are
six prayer-cylinders, which revolve on being brushed by the hand; and
near it is a much-decorated “prayer-wheel,” in a house of its own,
bestriding a stream, worked by water power, the lama in attendance
receiving so much for each revolution. This cylinder is twelve feet
high, with a diameter of four feet, and is said to contain 100,000
repetitions of the well-known Buddhist mantra “_Om mani padme hun_.”
Beyond, there was a man engaged in making idols after the fashion
described by Isaiah the prophet, a bridge of uncertain equipoise over
one branch of the river, and a little farther on the main branch of the
Siao Ho, descending from the north-west, is joined by streams of nearly
equal volume from the south and north, coming down through canyons full
of superb vegetation, above which rise, mostly in groups, peaks of
unsullied snow.
The vegetation above this meeting of the waters, and with few breaks for
many a day’s journey, is tropical in its luxuriance. The canyon is very
narrow. On the left the mountains descend to the torrent in a series of
precipices. On the right a space, averaging twenty yards in width, gives
room for the bridle path and for a perfect glory of vegetation. From
this rise forest-clothed precipices and peaks as on the other side.
Between them thunders the small river, narrower, but much fuller in
volume than below, green with a greenness I have never seen before or
since, and white with foam like unto driven snow, booming downwards with
a fall of over sixty feet to the mile, its brilliant waters hasting to
lose themselves 2000 miles away in the turbid Yellow Sea.
Mosses and ferns soften the outlines of boulders and drape the trunks of
fallen trees. Tree-stems are nearly hidden by ferns and orchids, only
one of the latter, a purple and brown spotted _dendrobium_, being in
blossom. A free-flowering, four-leaved white clematis, arching the road
with its snowy clusters, looped the trees together, and a white daphne
filled the air with its heavy fragrance. Large white peonies gleamed in
shady places. White and yellow jasmine and yellow roses entwined the
trunks of trees, and the flowering shrubs, mostly evergreens, were
innumerable. Ivies and varieties of the _ampelopsis_ lent their familiar
grace. Spring is fantastic there, and in freaks of colouring mimics the
glories of autumn. Maples flaunt in crimson and purple, in pale green
outlined in rose-red; the early fronds of the abundant hare’s-foot fern
crimson the ground; there were scarlet, auburn, and “old gold” trees;
and as to greens, there were the dark greens and blue-greens of seven
varieties of pines, the shining dark greens of ilex, holly, and yew, the
dull, dark greens of cedar and juniper, the shining light greens of
birch and beech and many another deciduous tree, and the almost
translucent pea-green of the feathery maple—red, purple, and green,
alike admitting the vivid sunshine as through stained glass.
The ground, concealed by mosses in every shade of green, gold, and
auburn, by a crimson-cupped lichen, and the crimson of the young
hare’s-foot fern, was starred with white and blue anemones, white and
blue violets, yellow violas, primulas and lilies, white and yellow
arabis, and patches of dwarf blue irises, while our own lily of the
valley looked out modestly from under the shrubs, and I recognised
lovingly among the beautiful exotic ferns our own oak and beech—our
_filix mas_ and _Osmunda Regalis_, at no disadvantage among their
foreign associates.
So exquisitely beautiful were the details that it was hard to look up
and take in the broader features of the unrivalled witchery of the
scene, where the foliage of the maple lighted up the gloom of holly and
ilex with its spring pinks and reds, where a species of poplar rivalled
it in lemon-yellow, where the delicate foliage of the golden-barked
birch was copper-red, and every shade approaching green was represented,
from the glaucous blue of the balsam pine, and the dark blue-green of
its coniferous brethren, to the pale _aqua marine_ of deciduous trees in
clumps among the pine woods below the snow.
For, piled above the forest-clothed cliffs and precipices which wall in
the river, and blocking up every lateral opening, were countless peaks
or splintered ranges, cleaving the blue sky with an absolute purity of
whiteness. High up, in extraordinary situations of dubious access, are
Man-tze villages, much like fortifications, their suggestion of human
interests and flutter of prayer-flags giving life to the scene. The
river sympathetically adapts itself to its changed surroundings. Its
colouring is a vividly transparent green, to which it would be an
injustice to liken an emerald. Over it drooped, from the contorted stems
of trees covered with ferns, orchids, and trailers, long sprays of red
and white climbing roses, and within the cool toss of its spray, film
ferns and the beautiful _trichomanes radicans_ flourished in boundless
profusion, almost transparent under the trickling sunshine. The river
descends in falls and cataracts, in sheets and glints of foam, under
bending trees, and trails of clematis and roses, pausing now and then in
deep green pools in whose mirrors roses, clematis, and snow-peaks meet;
but, its thunder-music, echoing from gorge and precipice, pauses never.
[Illustration: BRIDLE TRACK BY THE SIAO-HO.]
For hours we passed through this fairyland of beauty and fragrant and
aromatic odours, which it is a luxury to recall; then the odorous air
grew damp, the peaks flushed, the shadows on the road deepened, the
canyon “swung open to the light,” through the great gates of the west
the sunset glory rolled in waves of red and gold, and on a low hill
bearing the name of Chuang-fang, and a few traces of cultivation, there
was a lonely Man-tze dwelling.
The host, as a relation of our intelligent and courteous young lama,
made us very welcome, but his wife, a very handsome woman, on coming in
from the hill with a load of wood, looked astonished to find a foreign
woman and twelve men in possession of her house. That dwelling, typical
of the poorer class of Man-tze houses, has two roofs, each reached by a
deeply-notched tree-trunk, exactly like those used by the Ainu of Yezo.
It has an entrance-chamber common to men, mules, and fowls, an inner
room or kitchen, scarcely lighted, with a fire and “cooking range” on a
raised hearth in the centre, from which the stinging wood smoke finds
various outlets in the absence of a chimney. In the better houses, a
hole in the roof into which a hollow log is cemented offers a more
conventional exit. The fire is the place of family gathering and eating,
and man, wife, and children eat together. These people possess the term
“hearth-side.” The woman, though not young, was really beautiful, after
a European type, and had very fine teeth, but her rich complexion was
somewhat dulled by dirt; for these people, like the Tibetans, wash only
“once a year”—_i.e._, very rarely.
With much politeness I was escorted by her up the notched timbers to a
first and then to a second roof, which, being the threshing-floor, was
swept very, clean. At one end there was a high frame for drying maize
upon, and at the other a roof supported on four posts, but with an open
front, which is the granary. This space was divided by a great grain
tray and my curtains, I occupying one end, and the servants, soldiers,
and some of the coolies the other. The sharp frosty air was elixir, and
the redgold of sunset and the rose-pink of sunrise on the snows which
enclose the valley made a night in the open air very delightful.
It was too windy for a candle, and my food, prepared in the smoke below,
was eaten by the light of a nearly full moon in the delicious
temperature of 30°. To be away from crowds, rowdyism, unmannerly
curiosity, rice-fields, stenches—from slavery to custom, enforced by
brutality, and from many a hateful thing—to be out of China proper, to
be among mountains whose myriad snow-peaks glitter above the blue gloom
of pine-filled depths, to breathe the rarer air of 8000 feet, to be
free, and in a new uplifted world of semi-independent tribes, and fairly
embarked on a journey, with Chinese officialism apparently successfully
defied, and last, but not least, the complete disappearance of
rheumatism from which I had suffered long and badly, made up an
aggregate of good things. Anything might happen afterwards, but for that
one day I had breathed the air of freedom, and had obtained memories of
beauty such as would be a lifelong possession.
[Illustration: VIEW FROM CHUANG FANG.]
Sleep came in the middle of these pleasant thoughts, and I did not wake
till sunrise, with its waves of rosy light rolling up the glen, began to
take the chill off the frosty air. There was additional snow on the
mountains, and the higher pine woods were hoary.
These hospitable people do not receive payment for their hospitality,
nor do they use money—silver being only appreciated for its use in
jewellery, and copper not at all. The roof, or the guest-room, if there
be one, is at the disposal of any reputable wayfarer; but he must bring
his own food, for they have none to sell. Fortunately, I had needles,
scissors, and reels of silk with me, which there and elsewhere made the
hearts of many women glad.
The scenery the following day was, if possible, more glorious than
before, and the intense blue and singular _glitter_ of the sky. The road
still pursues the right bank of the river, the canyon is slightly wider,
and for most of the way seven snow-peaks are an apparent barrier. In the
forests near the road there were nine species of pines and firs, and
eight of maples, besides cedars, yew, juniper, elm, holly, oak, poplar,
alder, ilex, plane, birch, pear, etc. A white honeysuckle added its
exquisite fragrance to the aggregate of sweet odours. The woods were
full of white peonies, sky-blue larkspur and aconite abounded, and
yellow roses revelled in the sunshine on the smooth lawns by the river
on which the Tibetan traders camp in the season. My coolies, having no
loads to carry, were much excited about the peonies. The roots are an
expensive drug in China, and the men said they could get a dollar each
for them, so there was a great raid upon them.
After crossing and recrossing the Siao Ho on wooden cantilever bridges,
we reached Ku-erh-kio, a purely Man-tze village, piled on an abrupt
height where a lateral gorge with a tributary stream debouches on the
river. This was the last point to which I was attended by Chinese
officialism, and the first where there was a representative of the
_Tu-tze_ of Somo, the territory on which I then entered. There the
soldiers from Tsa-ku-lao, jolly young fellows, delivered the mandarin’s
letter to the _T’ou-jen_, or headman, and returned.
A Man-tze official escort was at once provided, consisting not of armed
and stalwart tribesmen, but of two handsome laughing girls, full of fun,
who plied the distaff as they enlivened our way to Chu-ti. Nor was this
fascinating escort a sham. Before starting each of the girls put on an
extra petticoat. If molestation had been seriously threatened, after
protesting and calling on all present to witness the deed, they would
have taken off the additional garments, laying them solemnly (if such
laughing maidens could be solemn) on the ground, there to remain till
the outrage had been either atoned for or forgiven, the nearest man in
authority being bound to punish the offender. Mr. Baker mentions a
nearly similar custom among the Lolos of Yunnan. _En route_ we passed
several Man-tze villages, and at each the people came out and brought us
wooden cups of cold water, indulging in much fun with my men, as several
of them could speak Chinese. Nearly all the women were handsome. They
were loaded with silver and coral ornaments, plied the distaff as they
joked, and were free, not to say bold, in their manners.
[Illustration: CASTLE AT CHU-TI.]
Chu-ti consists of two Chinese houses, a bridge, and a large Man-tze
house, with some cultivation round it, on the left bank. There we were
hospitably received by our muleteer’s elder brother, though when he saw
the army of coolies he said he did not keep an inn, and begged that
nothing might be stolen. I was at once provided with a clean room on the
roof, “the best guest-room,” with a window-frame, in which was fixed a
prayer-cylinder revolved by the wind, which whirred monotonously by day
and night. Many of the people from a village on a height, which is only
accessible by a series of ladders, spent the evening on the roof with
much frolic and merriment. Of the foreigner they have no notion, and as
I was clothed in brown wool they thought I was a Man-tze of another
tribe. Some of the women were beautiful, and even in middle life they
retain their good looks and fine complexions.
[Illustration: HEADMAN’S HOUSE, CHU-TI.]
[Illustration: ALTAR OF INCENSE ON MAN-TZE ROOF.]
This stone dwelling, arranged, as are all the better class of houses,
apparently for defence, has three floors, reached by steep, wide step
ladders inside. Cattle, mules, fodder, and agricultural implements
occupy the first, the family the second, and on two sides of its flat
roof, which is protected by a parapet two feet high, are the family
temple and guest-rooms. This flat roof, which is also the
threshing-floor, is the general gathering-place, the wrestling-ground,
and the place where the women weave their woollen stuffs on their
portable looms. On the roofs of the temple and guest-rooms, which are
partially covered for use as granaries, the men play cards, chess, and a
game resembling _Go_. On all roofs, even of the poorest class, there is
at the eastern corner a small clay furnace with a chimney, called “the
altar of incense.” In this at sunrise, the householder, man or woman,
looking eastwards, burns a bundle of the green twigs and foliage of the
yew, of which two species are accessible. This may possibly be a relic
of a nature-worship anterior to Buddhism. All well-to-do persons have a
temple on the roof, as in Tibet, with images of the Buddhist triad
against the wall, an altar with the usual emblems and offerings, a drum,
gong, horn, and cymbals, and as many of the insignia of Buddhism as
their means allow them to obtain. The householder can act as priest, and
every man or woman can present his or her invocations and offerings, and
in Man-tze homes there is scarcely an hour from sunrise to sunset in
which the dull beat of the drum and “_Om mani padme hun_,” reiterated in
a high-pitched monotone, are not heard.
Snow-peaks above, and snow-peaks below, reddened gloriously at sunset
and sunrise, the view from the roof was absolutely entrancing, and the
first half of the next day’s march was even lovelier than before. At one
of the finest parts some tribesmen were building a bridge, and from it
some muleteers, chiefly girls, with much laughter, were driving some
unladen mules through a very rough ford. Many of the men crossed, and
asked for help in building their bridge, which I would willingly have
given them, but that my silver was far behind on the mules. They became
very obstreperous, and one put his arm across the road to prevent my
chair from passing. We got on, however, for a few _li_, and waited there
for the mules. _Chai-jen_ had ceased at Chu-ti.
On the same morning the bearer who had always been unfit for his work,
and who denied himself food in order to get opium, for he was an
immoderate smoker, collapsed and fell by the roadside with a fluttering
pulse and a temperature of 104°. I put him in my chair and walked as
long as I could, and then he had to lie down, and I paid a man to stay
with him. An hour passed, and no mules; and I was so afraid that the men
at the bridge had robbed the muleteer, for they were a rough lot, that
Mr. Kay went back. Another hour passed, and then the mules came all
right, and the sick man, moaning and breathless, supported along by Mr.
Kay, who is both strong and kind.
Higher up the canyon opens out into a valley of divided streams and
shingle beds, either absolutely bare, or covered with the _Hippophæ
rhamnoides_ and a species of tamarisk. The receding mountain-sides are
gashed by summer torrents, and the vegetation is scanty. There was a
broad camping-ground among trees, and the coolies made fires and cooked
their rice, a number of Somo women from a village on a height—nearly all
of them handsome, in the Meg Merrilees style—looking timidly on.
[Illustration: SICK UNTO DEATH.]
The sick coolie was laid under a tree, and I put a wet
pocket-handkerchief on his burning brow. Then latent Chinese brutality
came out, showing that on these men the popular cult of Kwanyin, who is
really a lovable creation, had no influence. There were five baggage
coolies carrying nothing, and when I proposed that they should divide
one mule’s load among them and let him ride, they refused. He had been
working, sleeping, and eating with them for twelve days, yet when I
asked if they were going to leave him there to die, they laughed and
said, “Let him die; he’s of no use.” Though the water he craved for was
only a few yards off they did not care to give him any. When appealed to
again they said, “No matter; Mr. Kay can look after him.” And so he did,
for when I had walked till I was exhausted that he might be carried, Mr.
Kay nearly carried him for the remaining distance, and slept without his
wadded gown in the keen frosty air, that he might have it. The others
laughed at his sufferings, at me for bathing his head, and, above all,
at my walking to let him ride.
After we crossed to the right bank of the dwindling river a great number
of Man-tze men and women met us, and escorted us up steep stony slopes
to the large village of Mia-ko, with its many-storeyed houses, a feudal
castle, and a lama-serai like an ugly factory, with 150 monks. We were
received in the house of the _T’ou-jen_, the father of our muleteer, who
has a patriarchal household of married sons and daughters with their
children, and farms on a large scale.
[Illustration: LAMA-SERAI AND HEADMAN’S HOUSE, MIA-KO.]
The great treeless hillsides are well suited for agriculture, and though
the altitude of Mia-ko is nearly 10,000 feet, wheat ripens in July. At
that height, the Dover’s powder with which I dosed the coolie failed to
produce its usual effect, nor was any other sudorific more successful.
In the dry, rarefied air my umbrella split to pieces, shoes and other
things cracked, screws fell out of my camera (one of Ross’s best), my
air-cushion collapsed, a horn cup went to pieces spontaneously, and
celluloid films became electric, and emitted sparks when they were
separated!
The soil of the mountain-sides is sandy, and potatoes, which have only
lately been introduced, do well. There are many large villages scattered
over these slopes, and the people have great flocks of brown goats and
sheep, the latter a flop-eared, hornless, long-woolled breed, with fat
tails weighing from three to six pounds. They also breed herds of _dzo_,
a very valuable hybrid between the yak and cow, and capable of carrying
80 lbs. more than either the horse or mule. The male is used for
ploughing, and the female gives more milk than any other of the bovine
race. Of it they make butter, which, as in Tibet, appears to become more
valuable with years, and which is largely used, along with salt and
soda, in the preparation of tea, which is churned in a wooden churn till
it is as thick as chocolate. From the hair of the _dzo_ and yak the
Man-tze make a heavy felt, used for cloaks in cold and wet weather, and
for boots. As far as the divide, snow only lies for a few days at a
time, and judging from description, the frost is never severe.
Man-tze cultivation is rough and untidy as compared with Chinese.
Indigenous flowers muster strong among the crops, and irrigation is not
understood. Drought is the great enemy of agriculture, and the crops in
this great valley were in urgent need of rain.
In the late afternoon of our arrival Mia-ko was deserted, and a long
procession of men and women, each carrying a heavy burden on the back,
wound slowly up the hill to a point where it was reinforced by a
similarly burdened company from our village, and the united force was
met by a large body of lamas, including our muleteer, in their sacred
vestments, chanting Sanskrit prayers. The burdens under which the people
bent were the Buddhist scriptures, which, when complete, weigh 90 lbs.,
and to carry this sacred load is regarded as an acceptable act of merit.
Before the prolonged service ceased there was “a sound of abundance of
rain,” the wind rose, the rain fell in torrents, and the soil of
disintegrated granite imbibed it as if it never could be satisfied.
Mia-ko is a noisy and cheerful village, and after Tibetan fashion, very
religious. There is a low building on the hillside containing a number
of revolving prayer-cylinders, ranged round it at a convenient height.
Round this in the early morning the villagers go in procession turning
the cylinders. With brief intervals all day long in my host’s family
temple one or another repeated prayers in a monotone. On the roofs are
tall poles, each surmounted by a trident, or a ball and crescent, or
bearing narrow, white prayer-flags of their own length. Groups of poles
with similar flags are erected in memory of the dead, whose ashes often
rest below in small cinerary urns. It is “merit” to make clay
medallions, with which portions of these ashes are frequently mixed, and
to stamp them with Sakyamuni’s image, or to finger the clay deftly into
models of _chod-tens_.
We had any number of these jovial, laughing, frolicking people on the
roof at night, men and women on terms of equality. They drink _chang_, a
turbid barley beer, as the Tibetans do. We were detained for some days
at Mia-ko. The mules were lost on the hills, and stories were current of
two mighty robbers, who were making a part of the road dangerous, and
were keeping the country in alarm, and who successfully evaded capture,
though a reward of sixty taels (£9) was offered for them dead or alive.
The _T’ou-jen_ was averse to our taking that route without an escort of
ten spearmen, who had to be hunted up in the adjacent villages, and this
took time. Into the midst of this detention dropped down a Chinese
mounted officer, “a captain of a thousand,” with baggage and a mounted
servant, and orders to keep me in view, whether to help or hinder I knew
not, but strongly suspected the latter. Both carried swords and
revolvers. This was most unwelcome, and the delicious sense of freedom
in which I had been revelling vanished.
The food question caused me uneasiness, though I was always assured that
“everything was to be got at Somo.” The people would not sell us so much
as an egg, and the detention made such a serious inroad on our supplies
that I reduced myself to tea, and damper baked in the ashes and pullable
into long strings.
After the first curiosity, which was never vivid, was over the people
pursued their usual avocations on the roof, reciting prayers, weaving,
and making clothes in the day, and wrestling, fencing, and making a
general frolic in the evening. Mia-ko is a very well-to-do village, and
both sexes were loaded with silver jewellery.
The Siao Ho makes a preposterous turn above it, and we took a short cut
over the pass of Shi-Tze-Ping (10,917 ft.), rejoining the river twenty
_li_ later. Heavy snow fell on the mountains during the previous night,
whitening many of the lower hills, turning their shaggy pines into grey
beards, and lying heavily on the superb coniferæ of the pass, where red
and white rhododendrons and a large pink azalea were blooming profusely.
At that elevation the mercury was 26° at 6 a.m., and as a strong
north-east wind was blowing the cold was intense. At noon one thousand
feet lower the mercury stood at 72°.
From the summit there is a distant view of a long, snowy range, with a
blunt and wavy outline, on which five peaks, evidently of great
altitude, are superimposed. Hitherto the mountains, at least near the
river, though dazzling white, had not reached the majesty of eternal
snow, but on this range the guide said “it was always as it was then,”
that the peaks were known as “the Snowy Mountains,” that the highest was
called Tang-pa (sacred), and that the Great Gold River (Chin-shuan) rose
among them. It was a pass of that range that we afterwards crossed, and
it is probably identical with that mass of peaks and ranges marked on
the Chinese maps as “Snowy Mountains,” running on the whole in a
south-western direction between 29° and 32° N. lat. and 101° to 103° E.
long. It is only possible to make a rough guess at the altitude of those
peaks. In May Captain Gill found the snow line three degrees to the
eastward of this point at an altitude of 13,000 feet, and estimates the
limit of perpetual snow as at least 14,000 or 15,000 feet, which,
allowing for the steady rise in temperature of every degree west in that
latitude, would give a snow line of 15,000 or 16,000 feet above the sea
level. Taking the snow line in the middle of May as a rough basis for
calculation, I should estimate the height of the timber line at nearly
13,000 feet, and the height of Tang-pa as 5000 feet above that.
A steep descent of three hours through an entrancing forest brought us
back to the Small River, there a full-watered, clear, green torrent,
about forty yards wide, compressed within a narrow canyon, tumbling
among gigantic boulders in glorious cataracts, forest trees of larger
size than had been seen before bending over it, festooned with climbing
roses and white and sulphur-yellow clematis, while all lovely things
which revel in moisture and warmth—ferns, mosses, selaginellas, and the
exquisite _Trichomanes radicans_—flourished along the margin of its
turbulent waters. It was grander and far more beautiful than ever, and
absolutely solitary.
One feature of the vegetation west of Mia-ko is a pea-green trailer
(possibly _Lycopodium Sieboldi_) with pendants eight and ten feet long,
which takes possession of coniferous trees, dooming them to a slow
death, but replacing their dark needles by a tint which in masses is
very attractive. These trailers are used by the Man-tze for hats, much
worn by lamas. Some of the red trunks of the conifers, branchless for
fifty feet and more, measure from nineteen to twenty-one feet in
circumference six feet from the ground, hollies seven feet, yew eleven,
twelve, and even thirteen feet, and an umbrageous and very beautiful
species of poplar from seventeen to twenty feet. Occasionally the canyon
widens for a short distance, and there are smooth lawns, on which nature
has planted artistically clumps of pines and birches, the latter,
instead of white, with “old gold” bark, which they shed in spring.
Almost the only flowers at that altitude were a dandelion, with a stalk
an inch long, and a lovely, short-stalked, mauve primula, which in
places carpeted the ground. Some of the canyon walls, rising
forest-covered tier above tier, cannot be less than 3000 feet in height,
and at that season their luxurious covering embraced every tint of
yellow, red, and green.
After fully forty _li_ the canyon broadens into a luxuriant valley,
apparently closed at its western end by one of the great Tsu-ku-shan
ranges, and the yak and _dzo_ fed in large numbers on the rich
pasturages which confer prosperity on the Man-tze hamlet of Hang-Kia.
This should have been the halting-place, and though there was apparently
no accommodation the Chinese officer intended it to be so. High words
were exchanged between him and Mr. Kay, who went back to hurry up the
mules, while I sat in the roadway watching the snow which was then
obviously falling on the pass, while it was raining below. To make a
long story short, owing to unpropitious circumstances not worth
narrating, and a loss of heads and tempers, my better judgment was
overborne, and against it, and in spite of my showing that Matang could
not be reached anyhow in less than eight hours, the order to start on
this most foolhardy venture was given, and we left Hong-Kia at 3.15, the
coolies and I not having fed since eleven, and reached the foot of the
pass at 6.30. A few _li_ higher this branch of the Min rises as a
vigorous spring under a rock.
We ascended to a considerable height by a number of well-engineered
zigzags, meeting Man-tze travellers armed with lances and short swords,
and journeying in companies from dread of the notorious banditti. Some
of my men had armed themselves with lances. As darkness came on the
coolies were scared, and begged me to have the mule bells taken off.
They started at every rock, and asked me to have my revolver ready!
Their noses had been bleeding at intervals for some days, and at the
altitude we had attained the hemorrhage in some cases was profuse, and
was accompanied by vertigo, vomiting, and some bleeding from the mouth,
and the baggage coolie who had most unwillingly taken the sick bearer’s
place was at best a malcontent. When we got into mist, and broken shale,
and snow, after stumbling and falling one after the other, they set the
chair down, very reasonably I thought, and no arguments of Mr. Kay’s
addressed either to mind or body induced them to carry it another step.
It was then 8.30 and very dark. A snowstorm came on, dense and blinding,
with a strong wind. I was dragged rather than helped along, by two men
who themselves frequently fell, for we were on a steep slope, and the
snow was drifting heavily. The guide constantly disappeared in the
darkness. Be-dien, who was helping me, staggered and eventually fell,
nearly fainting—he said for want of food, but it was “Pass Poison,” and
he was revived by brandy. The men were groaning and falling in all
directions, calling on their gods and making expensive vows, which were
paid afterwards by burning cheap incense sticks, fear of the bandits
having given way to fear for their lives—yet they had to be prevented
from lying down in the snow to die.
[Illustration: ELEPHANTIASIS.]
_See page 442._
Several times I sank in drifts up to my throat, my soaked clothes froze
on me, the snow deepened, whirled, drifted, stung like pin points. But
the awfulness of that lonely mountain-side cannot be conveyed in words:
the ghastly light which came on, the swirling, blinding snow-clouds, the
benumbing cold, the moans all round, for with others, as with myself,
every breath was a moan, and the certainty that if the wind continued to
rise we should all perish, for we were on the windward slope of the
mountain. After three hours of this work, the moon, nearly at her full,
rose, and revealed dimly through the driving snow-mist, the round,
ghastly crest of the pass, which we reached and crossed soon after
midnight, when the snow ceased. I have fought through severe blizzards
in the Zagros and Kurdistan mountains, but on a good horse and by
daylight, and not weakened by a blow. On the whole this was my worst
experience of the kind.
An hour’s descent in deep snow on the edge of a precipice, from below
which came up the boom of tumbling water, brought us to a forest of the
straightest and tallest pines I ever saw, glorious in the moonlight, and
vocal with the crash of waters. Then I became aware that Mr. Kay, who is
very absent, and the guide had disappeared. The coolies declined to
carry me, and wanted to leave me there, and it was only after half an
hour’s altercation between them and my servant, during which my wet
clothing froze hard, that they took up the chair. The forest tracks were
baffling, and the true track was soon lost in the snow, not to be
recovered till at 2 a.m. we emerged on great, grassy slopes, and an hour
later, my party, exhausted, shivering, starving, drenched to the skin,
and all alike in frozen clothes, found a wretched shelter in the one
room of a Chinese hovel with a sloping floor on the bleak,
boulder-strewn hillside on which the forlorn village of Matang huddles
at an altitude of over 9000 feet.
The Pass of Tsu-ku-shan, which we had crossed, is the great water
parting of that region, the waters on the east seeking the Min, and
those on the west the Chin-shuan or Ta-kin Ho, both meeting in the
Yangtze at Sui-fu, this glorious region being geographically in the
Yangtze Valley. When I recrossed the pass, a very easy one, one hundred
and twenty-four snow-peaks were visible from its summit. Its approximate
altitude is 11,717 feet. It is a long, bare, unimpressive mountain wall.
The hovel allowed of my pitching my camp bed behind a cambric screen,
but there was no room for the wretched coolies to lie down, so they sat
round a big, log fire, cooked their food, talked, and thawed and dried
their frozen clothes. I thawed mine by rolling myself up in a blanket,
but unlike them was unable to eat, or even drink tea for many hours, and
lay there much stupefied until noon the next day, when we moved to what
posed as an inn, a wooden stable ninety feet long, with stalls seven
feet high for human beings on both sides, in one of which I was thankful
to find solitude, a fire-bowl, and necessary rest for some days.
The innkeeper and his wife, Kansuh Mohammedans, were kind. They gave me
an egg, and took me to sit by their big log fire in their horrible
kitchen, on the ground that we were worshippers of the same God. The
fire was welcome, for there were heavy snowstorms, and on one day the
mercury fell to 29°. Whether in storm or sunshine Matang, “out of the
season,” is a ghastly place, a forlorn, unpicturesque village of low
stone cabins, with rough, timber roofs kept down by stones. It is
bisected by a torrent of the same name, a feeder of the Chin-shuan,
rising on the pass above. There is a very good cantilever bridge. Its
population of 170 includes a number of Chinese who have married Man-tze
women. Snow lies there for six weeks.
In July and August the scene changes, and Matang becomes a great
international market. The inn is crammed with men and horses. Yaks and
Tibetan tents cover the grassy slopes, Chinese dig on the mountains for
medicinal roots, which are also brought from Tibet in incredible
quantities, and are bought up chiefly by Mussulman traders, broken
silver, the only currency accepted, passes freely from hand to hand,
goods are bartered, and for two months the Chinese and Tibetan traders
do a very large trade in cattle, horses, wool, hides, sheep, musk,
rhubarb, hartshorn, and much besides.
Some of the Matang Man-tze women were extremely beautiful, after the
Madonna type. I twice secured a giggling group in front of my camera,
but I no sooner put my head under the focussing cloth than there was a
stampede, and partly in fun and partly in fear the laughing beauties
fled like hares, so the reader must take their good looks on trust.
Outside a hole near the roof, which served for a window, a genuine
Tibetan dog was chained, as big as a small bear, with rusty brown wool,
four inches long, and a superb face. His voice was more like a roar than
a bark, and his growl was portentous. These dogs are very savage, and
his owner said that he could kill a man by tearing open his throat,
which is their method of attack. I got his owner, on whom he fawned
foolishly, to measure him, and from the root of his bushy tail to his
nose he measured four feet three inches. He kept a malignant watch on
me, and I could not move in my room without provoking his fierce,
resonant growl. These dogs shed their fur in the summer.
[Illustration: CHINESE OFFICER AND SPEARMEN, MIA-KO.]
After a detention, owing to snowstorms and difficulties of transport,
which made a further serious inroad on the stores, we left Matang early
in May, accompanied by the Chinese officer, who had wisely remained in
the Hang-Kia valley, and ten stalwart spearmen from Mia-ko. I started on
foot, accompanied by this escort, leaving the others to follow at their
leisure; some of the baggage being on _yaks_, which having been as usual
lost on the mountain, caused considerable delay. When our force was
mustered it numbered twenty-five men. Two of the wild-looking tribesmen
rode big yaks, monstrous in their winter coats; all were armed with
lances, and short, broad-bladed swords, and a few carried long and
much-decorated matchlock guns. Of course we saw nothing of the bandits,
and when we had passed their beat the spearmen quietly disappeared,
apparently ignorant of their right to _baksheesh_. The ghastly, grinning
head of a third bandit hung in a cage in the village.
The road, which is a singularly good one, crosses the Matang river by a
good bridge, near its junction with a vigorous stream descending from
the north-west, and then follows their united course in a southerly
direction for forty _li_ to their union with the Rong-kia.
The scenery on that day’s journey is the loveliest of all. This Matang
river whose birth we had seen on that awful night on the pass, raging in
cataracts, and great drifts of sunlit foam, and slowing at times into
deep green eddies, makes the most abrupt and extraordinary turns, each
one giving a new and glorious view. The canyon reminds me of some of the
finest parts of the Rocky Mountains, but the abundance of deciduous
trees and flowering shrubs, trailers, and plants, and the aquamarine
“Fairy Moss,” hanging in five-feet streamers from the trees, give it an
added beauty. Everything was draped in auburn, gold, and green. The pine
forests are vast and magnificent, and through the purple madder of the
leafless birches their terra-cotta stems gleamed. The dark, evergreen
ilex and holly contrasted with the brilliant spring green of the
elæagnus, hawthorn and willow; primulas, narcissus, and _scillae_
starred the mossy ground, maidenhair and other ferns flourished on the
tree trunks, trailers of a pure white clematis hung over the path,
mosses and film ferns draped every harsh angle and every boulder out of
sight, and gorgeous butterflies and dragonflies glanced like “living
flashes of light.” Every vista at every turn above the dark pine forests
is blocked by peaks, then in the dazzling purity of new-fallen snow.
[Illustration: VILLAGE OF RONG-KIA.]
Our course consisted of constant climbing over high steep spurs, which
descend on the right bank of the river. There is one fine waterfall. In
the afternoon a long and very severe ascent terminated at the top of a
spur crowned by a village and a lama-serai above the confluence of four
valleys and three streams, the Matang from the north, the Rong-kia from
the east, and the Kin-ta from the south. These unite to form a broadish,
full-watered river, very green, to which the Man-tze give the name,
which I reproduce as Rong-kia, or “Silver Water,” but which the Chinese
along its banks call the Ta Chin or Ta Kin-Shuan (Great Gold River),
which, if they are correct, is the upper portion of the Tatu or Tung
River.
[Illustration: CANYON OF THE RONG-KIA.]
After an ascent, and a halt at an extraordinary village of square
towers, from each of which a single, brown wood room projected at the
top, another steep ascent took us to the top of a spur, from which we
looked down on the valley of the Rong-kia below its junction with the
other streams, there a broad, swift river, free from rapids and
cataracts, and bridged in several places.
The first view of it sleeping in the soft sunshine of a May noon was one
never to be forgotten. The valley is fully one mile wide, and nine miles
long, and snow peaks apparently close its western extremity. All along
the “Silver Water” there were wheat fields in the vivid green of spring;
above were alpine lawns over which were sprinkled clumps of pine and
birch, gradually thickening into forests, which clothed the skirts of
mountains, snow-crested, and broken up here and there into pinnacles of
naked rock. At short distances all down the valley are villages with
towers and lama-serais on heights—villages among the fair meadows by the
bright, swift river, with houses mounted on the tops of high towers,
which they overhang, their windows from thirty to fifty feet from the
ground—and stretching half-way across, a lofty, rocky spur, then violet
against a sky of gold, developed into a massive, double-towered castle,
the residence of the _Tu-tze_ of Somo, the lord of this fair land. In
the late afternoon it looked like that enchanted region—
“Where falls not rain or hail or any snow,
Or ever wind blows loudly.”
The warm spring sunshine blessed it, the river flashed through it in
light, the sunset glory rolled down it in waves of gold, its beauty left
nothing to be longed for.
The Chinese officer rode up saying, “There is now no more fright,” (who
was frightened I know not), and passed on to Somo, saying he was “going
to make things smooth for us,” but, as I think, carrying orders to the
_Tu-tze_ from headquarters to bar my further progress. The castle gained
rather than lost, as we approached it by a bridge over a lateral stream
near a fine specimen of an ancient tower, about eighty feet high. It
occupies the greater part of a rocky spur or bluff, rising 390 feet
above the river. A few mean houses cluster on ledges outside the castle
wall.
The spur is so precipitous on the east side as to look inaccessible, and
is climbed with difficulty by anyone carrying a burden. At the foot of
the rock there is a covered, open gateway, with revolving
prayer-cylinders on both sides. The ascent is by steep zigzags, which we
were an hour in climbing. The climb brought us into the centre of a
Man-tze crowd, and of a cluster of mean and dirty Chinese hovels,
huddling against the rocks, in which we were told that the _Tu-tze_ “had
provided lodgings.” This was an insult. The lodging for the whole party
was one small, dark, dirty room, filled with stinging wood smoke from a
fire on the floor.
[Illustration: SQUARE TOWER, SOMO.]
I sat outside in the midst of a crowd which had no rudeness in it, while
Mr. Kay, with sanguine impetuosity, went up “to see the _Tu-tze_” and
claim fitting accommodation. He found both doors barred in his face, and
two savage dogs on guard. Nothing daunted, he climbed a wall and dropped
down into the outer court of the castle, and in the lion’s den itself
obtained a good room for me on the roof of a Man-tze house within the
great gate, high and breezy, and looking both up and down the valley.
[Illustration: DISTANT VIEW OF SOMO.]
“Passports and recommendations are no use here,” replied the haughty
ruler to a request for furtherance, and when a polite message was sent
asking at what hour Mr. Kay might have the honour of an audience, the
proposal was rudely negatived. The Chinese officer, who was entertained
in the castle, had obviously done his work efficiently.
Though Somo was nominally the goal of my journey, and I was more than
satisfied to have reached it, I cherished a project of getting down to
Ta-tien-lu (Darchendo) from Cho-ko-ki by a route only traversed
previously, so far as Europeans are concerned, by Mr. von
Rosthorn—involving a journey of twenty-one days. On making careful
inquiries, however, I learned that a tribal war had broken out, and that
the bridges over the Rong-kia had been destroyed, a fact which Mr. Kay
verified by a long day’s journey of investigation. This involved two
long days’ march on foot over a difficult mountain, and I was much
prostrated, and also suffering from my heart from the severities of the
night on the Tsu-ku-shan pass. In addition, the coolies, the bane of the
journey, were breaking down from fever one after another, the stock of
rice was nearly exhausted, and an order had been given that supplies and
transport southwards were to be refused. I was too weak to make a
resolute attempt to overcome these difficulties, which probably, as in
the case of other would-be Tibetan travellers, were insurmountable, and
every reader who is also a traveller will understand the indescribable
reluctance with which I abandoned the Ta-tien-lu project. After it was
given up, the _Tu-tze_ sent a present of salted goat, flour, honey, and
ancient and hairy butter, which enabled me to give my men a good meal.
The days passed quickly in learning as much as I was able to extract
from the Man-tze elders regarding their customs. The _Tu-tze_ sent
several times for my watch, and eventually sent a very big man with his
own, a valuable old thing, with many rubies, which had stopped for
years, and asked me to repair it! It was a very simple derangement, and
I put it right, when he sent again asking if I could mend pianos, as he
had one with broken strings! Then he sent for Be-dien, to whom he put
many questions, and fascinated him. He told him that he could only
protect us for forty _li_ farther, when we should reach the territory of
the Cho-ko-ki, a hostile tribe. At one time Be-dien came into my room
with an avalanche of “savages” behind him, one handsome young woman
clinging to his arm, to his great annoyance, for he was a “very proper
young man,” or posed as such.
Throughout the Man-tze villages the absence of any painfully disfiguring
diseases, goitre excepted, had been remarkable. In Somo, however, there
was one Chinese with a tumour on his jaw as large as a supplementary
head, and another suffering from severe elephantiasis, of which
distressing malady an illustration is given on page 427.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
THE MAN-TZE, I-REN, OR SHAN-SHANG-REN
In this chapter I put together such information as I was able to gather
about the people to whom I have introduced my readers. I only give such
statements as at least four persons were agreed upon, and confine my
remarks to the four tribes of the Somo territory, estimated at 20,000
souls, which are unified under the rule of the _Tu-tze_ of Somo.[50] The
designation Man-tze or I-ren, which is simply Chinese for “barbarian,”
is perforce accepted by these people from their conquerors. When
questioned, however, they divided themselves into Somo, Cho-ko-ki,
He-shui, and other tribes, and on being pressed further, they declared
themselves Shan-shang-ren, or mountain people. They said that they had
heard that in ancient times their fathers came from the setting sun, but
they knew of no days when they and the Chinese did not live among each
other. The tribal spirit is completely extinct among those tribes, who
have accepted one ruler; but the Somo people hate the Sifans to the
north-east and the Cho-ko-ki men to the south.
The head of one or more tribes is called a _Tu-tze_. He is appointed
directly by the Emperor of China, and for life; but a long-established
custom has made the office practically hereditary, and in the absence of
a son a daughter may be invested with it, as in the case of Somo, where
in recent years, and for a considerable time, a woman sustained the
dignity of the position. It is only in a case of flagrant misconduct
that the Emperor would exercise his right of removing a Man-tze ruler.
The _Tu-tze_ has absolute authority over his own tribesmen, including
the power of life and death. The land is his, and the cultivator pays a
tax of thirty per cent, of the produce, out of which the ruler
contributes the annual tribute to China. The tribesmen are free to build
anywhere without paying ground rent. Chinese under Man-tze rule have to
obtain permission to build, are not allowed to make charcoal, and pay
ground rent. In the case of the murder of a Chinese, the murderer may be
taken into Chinese territory to be tried by a mandarin, but actually he
is rarely caught, and the crime is usually compromised by the payment of
blood-money by his relations. If a Chinese wishes for a Man-tze wife he
must pay the _Tu-tze_ thirty taels (about £4 10_s._) for the privilege.
[Illustration: A MAN-TZE VILLAGE.]
Under the _Tu-tze_, and appointed by him, are village headmen or
_T’ou-jen_, who usually hold office for life, and are frequently
succeeded by their sons. They collect taxes, settle disputes, try small
cases by tribal law, and meet the _Tu-tze_ once a month at his castle to
report what has been going on, and to discuss what has to be done, and
once a year to choose the tribal representatives who are to carry the
tribute to Peking. China has done wisely in fringing her borders with
quasi-independent tribes whose autonomy is guaranteed by custom, and
whose love of the freedom they enjoy would convert men and women into a
respectable guerilla force in case of invasion.
The religion of the Man-tze is Buddhism or Lamaism of the Tibetan type.
Except in Western Tibet I have never seen a country in which the
externals of religion are so prominent. Nearly all the larger villages
have lama-serais on heights above them; rock Buddhas, and Buddhas in
relief on tablets are numerous; poles twenty feet long, with narrow
prayer-flags of nearly the same length, flutter from every house-roof;
groups of prayer-flags in memory of the dead are planted beside every
village; a temple is prominent on the roof of every well-to-do house;
and prayer-cylinders turned by water power or hand are common near the
roads. Daily offerings are made in all dwellings; every second son is a
lama; the formula, “_Om mani padme hun_,” is everywhere heard; the
presence of lamas is essential for every act in the round of social and
agricultural life; and literature is wholly confined to Buddhist
classics. Prayer-wheels revolved by the wind are common in windows; and
when people grow old, and dread such an unfortunate re-birth as a
reappearance in the body of a horse, dog, or mule, a prayer-cylinder,
revolved by swinging it, is constantly in their hands.
The lamas receive large sums for prayers, and for such ceremonies, in
cases of illness, as the reading of the Buddhist scriptures in the
house, accompanied by chanting, blowing of great horns, and beating of
drums. A death is their chief harvest, for, besides the fees paid to
them for the services customary at death and burial, any good clothing
which the deceased person has possessed is their perquisite, as well as
the silver and coral head-ornaments of the women, which go to help to
pay the expense of opening a passage for the soul into the other world.
If the family wishes for these it must redeem them from the lamas.
According to the wealth of the deceased is the time occupied in this
arrangement. It may be three months or longer. In the case of the poor
three days is the limit. A re-birth into the Western Heaven is reserved
for lamas.
They dispose of bodies after death by rules of their own. In a few very
rare cases, where the horoscope of life, death, and the future is
favourable, the corpse is buried “earth to earth” without coffin or
clothing. Throwing the body into the river, or exposing it on a
mountain-side to the fowls of the air, are also practised at their
bidding; but cremation, accompanied by the recitation or chanting of the
scriptures, is the usual method. Afterwards the ashes are placed in an
earthen pot, which is buried, a prayer-flag or flags being erected on
the spot. On the days of death and burial, as well as during the
interval, there is weeping, but it is not prolonged or repeated, and
ancestral worship is not practised. The clothing of a corpse is always
removed immediately after death, and it remains naked until it is
disposed of by one of these three methods.
Among the noteworthy characteristics of Man-tze life is the position of
women. They are not only on an equality with men, but receive
considerable attention from them, and they share their interests and
amusements everywhere. Men and women are always seen together. A woman
can be anything, from a muleteer to a _Tu-tze_. Social intercourse
between the sexes is absolutely unfettered. Boys and girls, youths and
maidens, mix freely. Love-matches are the rule, and I saw many a
handsome young face illuminated by a genuine love-light. The young
people choose each other, and either of them may take the initiative.
When they have settled the preliminaries, the prospective bridegroom
sends a friend to the prospective bride’s parents, informing them of his
wish to marry their daughter. Consent follows almost as a matter of
course, the bridegroom sends a present of a bottle of wine to the
bride’s father, and the courtship is fully recognised.
[Illustration: SOMO CASTLE (BACK VIEW).]
Next the lamas are consulted, to ascertain if the horoscopes of the
youth and maiden fit. If not, the difficulty may be overcome by
prolonged, vicarious chanting of the scriptures, and liberal fees. The
lamas also choose an auspicious day for the marriage. The marriage
ceremony consists in the bride and groom publicly joining hands,
drinking wine from a double-spouted bowl, and accepting each other as
husband and wife, after which there is a three days’ feast in the
bride’s home. She and her husband then go to their own house, and there
is another three days’ feast. There are no contracts of marriages for a
limited period, as in Western Tibet. Whether the choice has been for
good or ill, it is for life, divorce being permissible only in the case
of childlessness, and the contract can only be cancelled by the
_Tu-tze_. It would not be correct to infer from this that the Man-tze
are a moral people. Their standard of morality is low, and the lives of
the lamas have no tendency to raise it. Plurality of wives is an
appendage of the position of the _Tu-tze_, and is, I think, the practice
of rich men, but monogamy is the rule, and polyandry, though said to be
the custom of the Sifans to the north, does not exist. No presents,
except the bottle of wine previously mentioned, are made by the
bridegroom to the bride’s father; but her parents, according to their
wealth, endow her with cattle, horses, and fields, the last of which, to
use our own phraseology, are “settled upon her.” A widow does not wear
mourning, and is at liberty to make a second marriage. On the death of
her husband, unless she remarries, she assumes complete control over his
property, and at her death it is divided among the sons, who frequently,
however, agree to live together and keep it intact. If there is trouble
concerning property, the _T’ou-jen_ usually settles the matter, and if
he fails to make an amicable arrangement, it is referred to the
_Tu-tze_, whose decision is final.
Good health is the patrimony of these people. There are a few lepers
among them, and rheumatism is rather prevalent, but few maladies are
known, and measles appears to be the only epidemic which affects
children. I did not see one case of skin disease or deformity on the
whole journey. They spoke of old age and what they call “exhaustion” as
the usual causes of death. Goitre, however, is frightfully prevalent in
many of the villages. In some, _seventy-five per cent._ of the people
are afflicted by it, and it often begins in childhood. It does not seem
to affect either the health or spirits. The people think that it comes
from drinking snow-water, but it was specially common in some villages
where the sources of the water supply are far below the snow. The lamas
virtually prohibit all medicines not supplied by themselves, and it is
only those Man-tze who have been corrupted by contact with Chinese
civilisation who use any others. They incline to fatalism regarding
illness, relying chiefly on amulets, charms, and religious ceremonies.
“If a man is very ill he dies,” they say, “and when he is not he gets
better.”
They have a language of their own, but it is written in Tibetan
characters, and all notices and inscriptions on tablets and signposts
are in the same. In the villages nearest to China proper, many of the
people speak Chinese as well as Man-tze, and the _T’ou-jen_ in all
villages, but further west very few even of the elders understand it,
and the _Tu-tze_ himself is unable to read the Chinese characters.
The products of the Somo territory, so far as export goes, are _nil_.
The magnificent timber is useless, as the rivers, from their abrupt
bends and enormous boulders, in addition to their turbulence, do not
admit of its being rafted down. So far as I could learn, there are no
golden sands to tempt even the Chinese adventurer. Sulphur and nitrate
of soda abound. The Man-tze grow wheat, barley, oats, maize, buckwheat,
lentils, and a little hemp. In good years they raise enough for their
requirements, but more frequently have to barter their cattle and coarse
woollen cloth for food. Their transactions consist of barter only,
silver being known solely for its use in personal adornment. There is no
prospect for Manchester in that quarter. Pieces of red and green cloth
for the decoration of boots are brought from Russia through Tibet, and
these and the brass buttons on clothing are their only imports. Both
sexes dress in woollen materials, spun, woven, and dyed by themselves,
and sewn with their own hempen fibre.
Their views are narrow, their ideas conservative, and their knowledge
barely elementary. England is not a name to conjure with in their
valleys. They know of China and Tibet, and have heard of Russia, but
never of Britain. Of the war and the _wojen_ they were in complete
ignorance. I found them hospitable, friendly, and polite, not
extravagant in their curiosity, of easy morals, full of frolic and
merriment, singularly affectionate to each other, taking this life
easily and enjoying it, and trusting the next to the lamas.
In the regrettable absence of photographs it is difficult to give any
idea of their appearance. There are few under-sized men. They were a
little taller than my coolies, who were the average height of Chinese.
They are deep chested, as becomes mountaineers; their build is robust,
and their muscular limbs betoken strength and agility. Their walk is
firm and springy, and in wrestling and putting the stone—favourite
amusements—the display of muscle is superb. The tribes vary as to good
looks, though not as to physique, especially the women, some of whom
have the oval face, regular features, and beauty of the brunette type
which we associate with the Madonna, while others are plain, and
resemble Neapolitans. The complexion is as dark as that of the natives
of Southern Europe, but a trifle redder; the large dark eyes and
eyebrows are level, the nose straight, the mouth usually small and
thin-lipped, the foreheads high but not broad, and the ears large, and
rendered unshapely by the weight of the earrings. The cheek-bones are
not in any way remarkable. The characteristic of the Man-tze face is
that it is European in feature and expression, and recalls the Latin
races. Owing to a sort of timidity, and to the fashion of hair-dressing
of both sexes, it was unfortunately impossible to procure any head
measurements.
The men shave their heads and wear cloth or fur caps, but some of the
elders said that in former days all the hair was gathered above the
forehead, and twisted into a horn wrapped up in a cotton cloth, and
often “as long as a hand.” A similar style is mentioned by Mr. Baber as
characteristic of the Lolos of Yunnan. The _coiffure_ of the women is
most elaborate. The front hair is divided, and plaited into from twenty
to thirty plaits not wider than a watchguard, and waxed down each side,
considerably reducing the forehead. The back hair, with considerable
additions, is divided and brought round the head in two massive coils
over a folded blue cloth, which hangs a little over the brow. Strings of
large coral beads are twisted round these coils, but at the sides only.
The circumstances of a family are indicated by the size and beauty of
the coral and silver of the headgear. Jewellery is largely worn by both
sexes—earrings, necklets, chains of alternate coral and silver filigree
beads, and bracelets set with large turquoise or red coral. The
ornaments are often really beautiful and of fine workmanship. When I
asked by whom they were made, they invariably replied, “By the Arabs.”
The women wear woollen under-garments, short loose jackets with wide
sleeves, and skirts reaching a few inches below the knees, as closely
pleated as the kilt of a Highlander, sometimes exchanged indoors for a
long, loose robe. Dark brown and madder-red predominate in apparel. They
wear long leather boots, upon which are stitched up the front and sides
decorative strips of scarlet and bright green cloth.
The men wear a gabardine and girdle of native cloth, frequently dark
red, over a woollen under-garment; leggings, and decorated leather boots
or hempen shoes. The cloth or fur cap is often varied by the SZE CHUAN
turban. They have no soap, and never wash. A corpse is designated as the
“twice washed.” In the rarefied air of the high altitudes which they
inhabit, some of the most unpleasant consequences of dirt are not
apparent. I must add that every house in which I received hospitality
was tolerably clean, and that I was not aware of the presence of vermin.
There is a singular absence of bird-life in the Somo territory. A
species of francolin and ringed pheasants were seen, the blue jay, the
crow, and the ubiquitous magpie. The men said that there are boars,
small bears, and deer in the forests, but that the trade in hartshorn
and horns in the velvet for Chinese medicines had driven the latter
back, “they knew not where.” There are also at least two species of
monkeys, both large, and one with thick, long hair. The brown bear, the
yellow wolf, the musk deer, the badger, and the otter are also found,
but the Man-tze are not scientific in their descriptions.
The _Tu-tze’s_ rule only extends for forty _li_ to the south of Somo. He
is proud of his practically independent position, and when my servant
interpreter presented my Chinese passport, and a letter from the Viceroy
of SZE CHUAN, he said that he did not read Chinese, and that passports
and Viceroys’ letters were of no use there!
Somo castle, on its eastern side, is a most striking building, built
into the rock of the spur on which it stands. It has a number of windows
with decorative stone mullions, the lowest over twenty feet from the
ground. Its many roofs are planted thick with prayer-flags, and
projecting rooms and balconies of brown wood, with lattice-work fronts,
hang from its eastern side over the precipice. The castle yard is
spacious and singularly clean; the entrance is handsome, and is faced by
a huge dragon, boldly and skilfully painted on a plastered stone screen.
Poles with crowns from which yaks’ tails depend, and the trident, as in
Western Tibet, surmount the entrance. The whole is most substantially
built of stone, and I looked in vain for any trace of decay or
disrepair. The altitude is about 7518 feet.
[Illustration: ENTRANCE AND JUDGMENT-SEAT. SOMO CASTLE.]
CHAPTER XXXIV.
FROM SOMO TO CHENGTU FU
The refusal to sell food produced uncomfortable consequences. I bestowed
my personal stores on the coolies, and being left with only a little
chocolate, a few squares of soup, and a pound of flour, was often
compelled to still the gnawings of hunger with peppermint lozenges; and
what was worse, the men were on half-rations. Just before we left, the
_Tu-tze_ sent a welcome present of half a bag of flour, and as supplies
were not refused on the way down the worst was over. At Matang we were
detained two days by a severe snowstorm, which glorified the pine
forests on the skirts of the Tsu-ku-shan Pass, which was bare, pale, and
uninteresting, and took four hours to cross even in the sunny daylight.
From the summit about one hundred and twenty snow-peaks were visible,
some rising sharply into a very blue sky, others with snow-clouds
swirling round their ghastly crests—all clothed to a considerable
altitude with interminable forests of pine, hoary with new-fallen snow,
under the bright May sunshine.
Passing through fine herds of yaks and _dzo_, and by villages and
detached houses, we sought shelter in vain. The people were all “on the
mountain,” and every house was locked. After a severe day of twelve
hours we were directed off the road, through groves of fine Spanish
chestnut trees, to an alp, on which is a small Man-tze house inhabited
by one Chinese, where I slept on the roof, next two rows of humming
prayer-cylinders, and in the morning had a glorious view of snow-peaks
and forests.
It is scarcely credible, but the downward journey was more gloriously
beautiful than the upward. The peacock green, transparent Siao Ho, with
its snow-white cataracts, thundered through the trees in a yet goodlier
volume, between cliffs on which the great, red-stemmed pines are
securely moored, flashed past velvet lawns starred with blue and white
anemones, and pink and white peonies; past clumps of daphne giving forth
hot-house odours in the warm sunshine, under the living scarlet of
maples, through the blue gloom of colossal pines, every one of its
innumerable bends giving a fresh view. The ice was half an inch thick
every morning on the heights. We lodged in headmen’s houses, where at
one halt I had a guest-room twenty-four feet long.
[Illustration: HESHUI HUNTER, AND NOTCHED TIMBERS.]
At Ku-erh-Kio, where after a journey of eleven hours I sat nearly two
hours among dogs, pigs, and fowls, waiting for the people to return from
the mountain and give us shelter, I slept for the last time on a roof
under the stars, the earliest sight in the morning being glories of
light and shade, of forest, cataract, and mountain, and the sparkle of a
peak reddening in the sunrise, like unto the Matterhorn, which the
people called Ja-ra (king of mountains).[51]
[Illustration: A HESHUI FAMILY, KU-ERH-KIO.]
A thirteen hours’ journey thence took us to Tsa-ku-lao. We were
benighted and lost the road, and were “set in darkness in slippery
places,” on lofty precipice ledges, and the coolies were so exhausted
that they fell several times on the five hundred rocky steps by which
the quaint border post is reached. Chinese inns, officialism, passport
delays, and _chai-jen_ had to be endured again from that point. At
Li-fan Ting the officials sent presents when we arrived, saying that
they hoped I would forget their conduct, “and turn the light of my
countenance once more upon them to vivify them.”
The heat became severe as we descended; the vegetation near the road was
limited to grey, dusty tufts of a species of artemisia; the winds were
tremendous, and the Man-tze villages at great heights, where the people
have neither horses, cattle, nor sheep, and depend solely on the
rainfall for their crops, were praying for rain, and below Weichou,
finding Sakyamuni deaf to their entreaties, were turning to the
forgotten gods of the rivers and the hills.
From an ethnological point of view the Man-tze deserve some attention,
as they differ considerably from the Sifan to the north and the Lolos to
the south. In religion and many customs they approach closely to the
people of Western Tibet, while in appearance they differ most remarkably
from both Tibetans and Chinese. Their handsome, oval faces;
richly-coloured complexions; thick, straight eyebrows; large, level
eyes, sometimes dark grey; broad, upright foreheads; moderate cheek
bones; definite, though rather broad noses; thin lips, somewhat pointed
chins, and white, regular teeth are far removed from any Mongolian
characteristics, and it is impossible not to believe that these tribes
are an offshoot of the Aryan race.
During the week’s descent from Tsa-ku-lao, the winds were fearful,
almost carrying my chair and bearers over a precipice, and the country
was scorched, and afflicted with driving dust storms. The heat had then
set in for the summer, the Yangtze was rising, and I was suffering so
severely from the effects of the night’s “death-struggle” on the
Tsu-ku-shan pass, that I was anxious to reach a cooler climate, so only
rested a few days among the hospitalities of Kuan, and then crossed the
Chengtu plain for the fourth time, doing forty miles in one day with the
mercury at 93° in the shade, and arrived at Chengtu among very
unpleasant demonstrations of hostility from the military students who
were “up” for examination. Four of the examiners had passed me on the
road, or rather I respectfully cleared off it to make way for, and
contemplate them. Besides four bearers to each chair, a number of
soldiers were roped on, and behind them came a train of twenty-six laden
mules, and twenty-five laden porters, carrying, I doubt not, much
besides personal baggage. I was told that these officials make large
investments in SZE CHUAN drugs, on which, as they pay no taxes _en
route_, and the unfortunate local officials bear the cost of carriage,
they make great profits in Peking. Numbers of attendants are essential
to dignity in the East. A mandarin going to pay a visit in his
much-decorated chair is usually preceded and accompanied by an irregular
procession of lictors with staves or whips, boys carrying red boards
bearing the official’s name and style, and _chai-jen_ in red-tasselled
official hats. The lictors push the people to one side, the boys shout,
and the bearers yell. When the great man leaves his own _yamen_ three
small mortars are fired, and if he visits an official, the same noisy
process is repeated.
Forced labour for relays of bearers, porters, and horses for the lesser
dignitaries, is called for, and on a much-travelled main road this is a
heavy burden on the villagers.
[Illustration: A DRAGON BRIDGE.]
CHAPTER XXXV.
DOWNWARD BOUND
The deep blue, glittering skies of the high altitudes were exchanged for
the mist and dulness which have conferred upon SZE CHUAN the name of
“The Cloudy Province,” and with the lower levels came mosquitoes and
sandflies, and a day shade temperature from 82° to 93°, very little
alleviated during the night. I left the capital in a small flat-bottomed
_wupan_, drawing four inches of water, with a mat roof, and without
doors at either end. Yet my cambric curtains were never lifted, and when
I desired it I enjoyed complete privacy at the expense of partial
asphyxiation. At that time, May 20, the water was so low that no bigger
boat could make the passage, and numbers of small, trim house-boats were
aground.
It was the start for a river journey of over 2000 miles, the first
thousand of which were accomplished in this and similar boats. It was a
delightful and most propitious journey, and introduced me to many new
beauties and interests, and to a most attractive area of prosperity. For
the first day the boatmen made more use of their shoulders than of their
oars, lifting and shoving the boat, which “drave heavily” over sand and
shingle and often bumped like a cart over paving stones. For the ascent
of the river breast-poles are used by men wading. From Chengtu Fu to Sui
Fu the Min is called by the Chinese the Fu, from the three Fu cities on
its banks. After Be-dien had shopped for three hours, the result being
only a small bag of charcoal, we dropped down under a fine stone bridge
of several arches to a pretty village with a pagoda, “a sweet place,”
where we tied up for the night.
[Illustration: VILLAGE ON THE MIN.]
We joined the main river, not then more than eighty yards wide, below
the An-shun Bridge, an antiquated or ancient structure, and spent a long
day in battling with the shallows, and with the peasant farmers, who had
thrown many dams of shingle in bamboo cages across the river to keep up
the water for their own purposes. They refused to open a passage, though
this only involved kicking away the stones between the cages and
replacing them, demanded 2000 cash as toll, and seized on my boat, and
with shod poles and much vociferation barred my progress several times.
Native boats were passing through for thirty cash, and some thirty or
forty at each dam were smashing against each other for the first turn.
Eventually, when forty men got hold of my little _wupan_ and tried to
intimidate me, I asked them to show me the paper authorising them to
demand this toll, on which they collapsed.
In a number of places there are rows of gigantic waterwheels, four or
five together, from thirty to forty-five feet in diameter, by which all
the adjacent country is bountifully irrigated. The sleepy hum of these
huge wheels, the richness of the cultivation, and the fresh greens of
the woodland, in which prosperous-looking villages basked drowsily in
the summer sunshine, were all charming. But at times the water was so
shallow that the boatmen had to precede my boat to work a channel for
her, one of them leading her by the nose, and another pushing her from
behind. This dragging, and the quarrels with the peasants about getting
through their dams, occupied the first day.
The next day was a rapture. A river locally called the Nan joins the Min
at Chiang Ku, about sixteen miles below Chengtu, and after the junction
water was abundant. Su-ma-tou, a busy place in lat. 30° 28′ (Baber), is
the limit of navigation for large junks. At Peng-shan Hsien the river
widens out after the union of all its perplexing subdivisions. Below
Meichow, a large and busy place, the country breaks up into picturesque
hills of no great height, divided by fertile valleys, through one of
which I caught a momentary and only glimpse of the unrivalled majesty of
Mount Omi.
Villages embowered in fruit trees, of which the illustration is an
average specimen, adorn the banks of the bright river. Young wheat,
mustard and beans in blossom, with mulberry trees between the fields,
clumps of bamboo, and pines cresting every knoll and hill, made up a
lovely picture—a vision of peace, plenty, and prosperity. Indeed, the
whole river journey from Chengtu to Chungking consists of a series of
beautiful pictures, combined with varied and prosperous industries. It
is a lovely part of China, and the white, timbered houses, the vividly
red soil, and red sandstone rock, the dark, light, blue, and yellow
greens, and the fascination of the smooth, fine lawns, which ofttimes
slope down to the sparkling water, have a very special charm. The
“Cloudy Province” failed to keep up its character, and if the sky was
not very blue, the sunshine was brilliant. The gardenia, often a large
shrub, grows profusely on the slopes, and it and the bean gave forth
delicious odours. Strings of gardenia blossoms hang up at that season in
all houses, every coolie sticks them into his hair, and even the beggars
find a place for them among their rags. For a farthing a large basket of
them can be bought.
I reached Chia-ling Fu (1070 ft.), where I remained for some days, in
eighty hours from Chengtu Fu, including stoppages—the estimated distance
being about 130 miles. The approach to this attractive and important
city from the north is extremely pretty, indeed beautiful. The country
is very hilly, and great, red sandstone bluffs, heavily wooded, with
pagodas and temples, and much carving in rock recesses, with scarlet
azaleas and gardenia blossoming everywhere, would have riveted my
admiration to the left bank had it not been for the overhanging red
sandstone cliff and the picturesque houses of the city on the right.
Chia-ling Fu, said to be a city of 50,000 souls, is a place of great
importance commercially, as three large rivers—the Min, Ya, and
Tatu—there form a junction, and for a brief space the river is like a
lake. It is perhaps the greatest centre of sericulture and silk weaving
in the province, and is also the eastern boundary of the white wax
trade. Its white silks are remarkable for lustre and purity of colour.
It is a rich city, and the capital of one of the most fertile and lovely
regions on earth. It is besides the starting-point for most of the
pilgrims to the temples of Omi-Shan and “The Glory of Buddha.” The city
wall is of bright red sandstone, which is finished with a few courses of
hard grey brick. The south gate was rigidly closed against the Fire God.
A handsome, uphill, residential street, green and peaceful, leads to the
west gate, and on this the China Inland Mission and Canadian Methodists
have their mission houses. In Mr. Endacott’s garden are some specimens
of the singular rock-dwellings so fully described by Mr. Baber in his
papers on Western China. Chia-ling trades in opium and timber as well as
in silk and white wax. Silk and umbrella shops are conspicuous. Every
view from every point is beautiful.
[Illustration: WEST GATE, CHIA-LING FU.]
On the face of the cliff on the opposite side of the river is a figure
in the rock, cut in very high relief, of Maitreya Buddha—truly colossal,
being 380 feet in height. The nose is said to be nearly five feet long,
and the head from thirty to forty feet high. Grass is allowed to grow on
the head, eyebrows, upper lip, and ears, to represent hair. This figure
is unfortunately partly concealed by the redundant vegetation which
surrounds it. It is an interesting specimen of the religious art of
about a thousand years ago.
Leaving the hospitalities of Chia-ling Fu for a boat journey of 345
miles, in a rather old and leaky little _wu-pan_, which, however, did
133 miles in seventeen hours, I halted several times on the way down to
visit some of the remarkable rock dwellings in the cliffs which in many
places border the river. They are difficult of access, and besides
tearing my stout Chinese dress to pieces, I was considerably bruised and
scratched. I took ropes, grippers, and three men with me.[52]
[Illustration: FRIEZE IN ROCK DWELLING, MIN RIVER.]
At a farmhouse where I landed near the hamlet of Sing-an, there was a
sandstone coffer, seven feet long, used as a cistern. The farmer sold me
two axe-heads of a hard, green stone, with a dull polish, which he found
along with the coffer while digging a buffalo pond. To the finest of the
excavated dwellings that I visited, I descended, holding on to trees and
rock projections with hands and grippers, having a rope round my waist.
There was a rock platform in front of the opening, not now accessible
from below. The face of the rock has been smoothed, and eaves which
project two feet have been left. The four times recessed doorway is five
feet six inches high. At one side of this, as well as in the doorways of
the interior, there are the remains of stone pivots on which doors could
be hung. Above the doorway is a frieze as represented in the
illustration, eighteen inches in depth, which is repeated over a stone
altar against the wall, and again over several recesses, one of which is
obviously for a fire, and has a stone shelf above it, and the others
were probably beds. Two doorways give access to rooms, one of which is
14 ft. by 12 ft., the other 12 ft. by 12 ft. The former is nine feet
high, and has a rounded roof, below which runs a deep and well-executed
frieze carved with arabesques and curious human figures, the faces of
which are certainly not Mongolian. In this room are both an altar and a
stone tank. The outer room measures 30 ft. by 20 ft. 7 in., and is 7 ft.
4 in. in height. In another of these singular excavations there are
settees cut into the rock with a fashionable slope of seat and back, the
front being actually rounded for comfort! In a third there is a curious
arrangement resembling pigeon-holes for letters, and the frieze
resembles one figured in Mr. Baber’s paper, and is what is known in
heraldry as the “disc-and-label” pattern—a severe but very decorative
ornament. In that dwelling there was an arrangement of holes in the
doorway, showing that the doors had worked on some description of hinge.
Over the lintel of one doorway is the trident symbol. All the dwellings
(five) visited by me, had what must have been small sleeping chambers
attached to them. The walls of the principal rooms show traces of
careful finish, and some have obviously been panelled. There is a
stately seemliness about these abodes, which implies that those who
constructed and occupied them must have made some advances in
civilisation, and have valued privacy.
[Illustration: BOAT ON THE MIN.]
The finest of them, so far as is known, both in size and decoration, is
a day’s journey only from Sui Fu, but the access involves severe
climbing, and risks which I did not care to run. These dwellings occur
in great numbers, from a point not far above Chia-ling Fu down nearly to
Luchow, a distance of fully 220 miles.
The ever broadening and deepening Min, passing through lovely and
prosperous country, took me rapidly to Sui Fu (Hsu-chow Fu), a large
city with a population, according to the officials, of 150,000. It is
well situated on a high, much wooded, rocky promontory between the Min
or Fu and the Chin-sha, which there unite to form the great river known
by us as the Yangtze, where a temple-crowned point of rock dominates the
busy city. On the opposite side of the Min are fantastic mountains with
singular rock forms, on one of which is the highly picturesque temple of
“The Sleeping Buddha,” approached by steps cut in the rock below.
The Chin-sha is only navigable to Ping-shan, a difficult forty miles
above Sui Fu. It was rising fast, and its great volume of turbid water
contrasted with the clear bright Min, which kept apart from it in
disgust for some time. Sui Fu is a very lively place, being the great
entrepôt of the large transit trade between SZE CHUAN and Northern
YUNNAN, as well as a considerable distributing point.
Above Ping-shan, the Lolo, tribes which the Chinese have failed to
subdue in two thousand years, keep the country in a state of chronic
insecurity, fatal to trade routes. Besides the transit trade, Sui Fu
does a large business in silk, opium, and sugar. The “residential
suburbs” are full of good houses in wooded grounds, extending far up the
Min, their owners reaching their pleasure boats by handsome flights of
stone stairs. The American Baptists and the China Inland Mission do
mission work in Sui-Fu, and a great deal of valuable medical work.
Though “child-eating,” as elsewhere, is believed in, the people are not
unfriendly, and the mandarin was specially courteous. Before I left he
sent round to all the street officers to say that, whether I went
through the city in a chair or on foot, there was to be no crowding,
following, or staring. He sent four _chai-jen_ in official hats to walk
in front of me, and go down with me to Luchow, and two petty officers to
see that no one interfered with my camera, on pain of being beaten.
I left Sui Fu on the glorious evening of a blazing day, and once more,
after a land journey in SZE CHUAN of nearly 1200 miles, was afloat on
the Yangtze—there a deep, broad river, flowing among low, pretty hills,
much wooded, and terraced for cultivation.
[Illustration: TOWN ON THE YANGTZE.]
[Illustration: SUBURB OF SUI FU.]
[Illustration: TSIANG NGAN HSIEN, WITH ENTRANCE TO ROCK DWELLING.]
CHAPTER XXXVI.
LUCHOW TO CHUNG-KING FU
On the brilliant afternoon of the day after leaving Sui Fu, I reached
Luchow, an important trading city, with a reputed population of 130,000.
It is prettily situated on rising ground at the confluence of the
Yangtze and To rivers. The latter drains a considerable area, and by it
and its connections cargo boats of about fifteen tons can reach the
Great River from Kuan Hsien. Luchow appears to be a quiet, fairly well
governed, busy city. One great industry is the making of umbrellas, and
it has a large trade in sugar and other SZE CHUAN products. According to
its own officials, eighty per cent. of its male population are opium
smokers. In good shops, there and elsewhere, opium pipes are supplied
gratuitously to customers in back rooms, just as cups of tea are in
Japan. The China Inland Mission has both men’s and women’s work in
Luchow, and I was hospitably received in the mission house. The mercury
was 93°, and no one could sleep at night.
The people are not what would be called hostile, yet they curse Mr.
James, the missionary, in the streets, and believe that all the five are
“child-eaters,” and that the comeliness of the ladies is preserved by
the use of children’s brains! This scandalous accusation is current
everywhere in SZE CHUAN. Even at quiet Chia-ling Fu, when two beggar
boys were brought into the compound to be photographed, the report
spread like wildfire through the city that they been taken in for the
purpose of being fatted for eating! The hostility to foreigners has
increased rapidly in many parts of the province. Mr. A. J. Little,
writing from SZE CHUAN some years ago, mentions that the phrase “Foreign
devil,” and other opprobrious epithets applied to foreigners elsewhere,
were unknown, and other travellers have mentioned the same thing. Now, a
language rich in abominable terms is ransacked for the worst, to hurl at
the foreigner.
I left Luchow on May 30th in great heat, and contrary to custom,
travelled till nine o’clock, making fast to a snag in a broad reach or
bay of shallow water. The mercury stood at 91° at four p.m., and the men
suffered from the heat. I have observed that sunstroke is far more to be
dreaded in damp than in dry climates. It is common in SZE CHUAN among
the Chinese. The boatmen called it _lei-su_, “death from exhaustion.”
They feared it, and well they might, for their shaven heads were only
protected by small towels. The blue turban, much worn in the province,
may have originated in an instinct of defence. The Chinese suffer
greatly from mosquitoes. I have seen curtains of a heavy, green canvas
even in poor men’s houses, but men as poor as my boatmen have no
protection, and, being compelled by the heat to sleep naked, their
bodies are covered with inflamed lumps from mosquito bites. They are
very patient. They suffered so much from this cause that in the stifling
twilights, when thousands of these pests were abroad, I almost grudged
myself the immunity gained by sitting under a mosquito net made by
attaching a net roof and curtains to a Chinese umbrella frame.
The men fanned themselves as long as they could keep awake. As the heat
increased the use of the fan became universal among men. Coolies fanned
themselves at the treadmill pump, bearers as they ran along with chairs,
porters with loads, travellers on horseback and on foot, men working and
resting, shopkeepers at their doors, mandarins in their chairs and on
the judgment-seat, and sentries on guard. Soldiers marching to meet an
enemy fan themselves on the march, as I saw in Manchuria during the
Japanese war, and the bloody field of Phyong-yang was strewn with the
fans of the dead and dying Chinese. Fan-making is one of the great
industries of China. Nearly 2,000,000 fans were imported into Chung-king
in 1897.
[Illustration: PAGODA NEAR LUCHOW.]
Except for the heat, the downward journey was quite delightful; the
country is so fertile and beautiful, and has such an air of prosperity.
So long as we were in motion there was a draught, as the boat was quite
open, but the still nights were stifling, specially with the curtains
down. The boatmen were harmless, good-natured, obliging fellows. They
tied up whenever I wanted to land if it were at all possible, and though
they were obliged to pass from bow to stern through my “room,” they
always asked leave to do so if the curtains were down. The lovely
country was a very great charm. The variety of scenery, trees, flowers,
and cultivated plants was endless, and new industries were constantly
becoming prominent. The only matter for regret was that the rush of the
fast-rising river carried us all too swiftly past much that was worthy
of observation.
A visit to a coal-mine interested me greatly. The mine was in a
hillside, three miles from the river, and employed eighty men. The
manager said that the output was the equivalent of forty tons daily. The
men got sevenpence per day, with rice, broad beans, cucumbers, and tea.
Each hewer and carrier (in pairs) must deliver at the pit’s mouth daily
the equivalent of a ton. The pay with food comes to tenpence per day,
and the actual cost in labour of a ton is twentypence. The mine is
extremely well ventilated by three revolving fans, which drive the air
into it through bamboo tubing. The men work in two shifts of twelve
hours per day of twenty-four hours, eating their rice in the mine three
times daily. Every tenth day is pay-day and a holiday. Each carrier
burns nine ounces of Tung oil daily, and each hewer six, the lamps being
attached to the brow by a band round the head. There was a bath for the
miners, which in the dim light appeared to be a stone coffer, supplied
with hot water. The tunnel by which the workings are reached, and down
which the coal is carried in wheeled baskets running on a wooden
tramway, is six feet high, and about six hundred feet long. I could do
no more than glance at the workings. The coal seam was about four feet
thick, the galleries very low, and the hewers lay on their sides and
hacked the coal sidewise. It appeared to be a fairly hard bituminous
coal, and there is a great demand for it at the town of Peh-Shi, where,
after land and river transit, it sells at seven shillings per ton. The
manager, an intelligent and fairly polite man, told me that hard coal is
also found in the neighbourhood, but is much more expensive to work.
This coal-mine appeared well appointed, and the miners well fed and
cheery. They seemed to have less consideration for the Dragon’s back
than those on the Paoning route!
The night after leaving Luchow, while tied up to a snag in a broad and
shallow reach, all in my boat were wakened out of a sound sleep by what
might have been the “crack of doom.” There was a sound as if all the
cannon of the universe had been fired close to the _wu-pan_ on either
side, accompanied by a hiss in the water, a glare of blue light, a gust
which lifted the boat, and stripped off some of the mats of the roof,
and then a torrent of rain. By the next morning the Yangtze had risen
twelve feet, and our snag had “gone under,” forcing us to seek the
familiar protection of the shore.
Among many storms, one only, at St. Paul, Minnesota, has fixed itself in
my memory. That was in a hotel lighted by gas and full of people. This
was out in a lonely place in “darkness which could be felt,” among men
of another race and speech, in a frail craft. The thunder, not rolling,
but bursting like explosions; the ceaselessness and vividness of the
forked lightning; the otherwise pitch darkness of the night; the hot and
mephitic atmosphere; the occasional terrific gusts of wind, threatening
to blow the half-unroofed boat to pieces; the roar of the rain, the
loneliness and mystery of our position; the silence from human movement
and speech; the hours it all lasted; the surprise after every tremendous
explosion to find myself alive, and the fear that some of the men were
killed, made that night an awful memory.
During the whole storm no one spoke or moved hand or foot. I felt
paralysed, a sensation, as I afterwards found, common to all Europeans
who passed through the same experience. The boatmen, who were lying in
the water, never stirred. When the explosion gave place to magnificent
rolls, and the rain moderated, the men spent an hour in baling the boat.
All the matches were afloat and much else, and our food was mostly
spoiled. A thousand waterfalls tumbled down the hillsides, the stony or
sandy river banks were no more, of a few riverine villages the roofs
alone were to be seen, fields in numbers with their growing crops had
slid bodily down the slopes, leaving great patches of naked rock behind,
and the Yangtze, a broad, turbid, terra-cotta flood, was rioting over
the submerged confusions of its rocky bed in swirls and violent eddies.
[Illustration: THE AUTHOR’S _WU-PAN_.]
After hurrying through a less beautiful and much devastated region,
landing only at Shih-men, on the left bank, where there is a fine temple
with five green-tiled roofs, and much fishing is done, the scenery again
changed, and for four hundred miles is a succession of indescribably
beautiful pictures, combining hill and valley, rock and woodland, with a
greenery and fertility of which no word-painting could give any idea.
Towns and villages, piled on knolls, looked out from among fruit trees;
and temples and pagodas on heights lent their infinite picturesqueness.
One of the most beautifully situated towns is the unwalled town of
Peh-Shih, with a (reputed) population of 11,000. Timbered white houses
run steeply up diverging limestone cliffs; every outline is broken by
the configuration of the ground; the ornamental and economic trees are
superb; the density of their foliage was phenomenal. The centre of the
town, which has no room for expansion, is picturesquely crowded with
striking temples and guildhalls, much enriched with gold and colour. The
great industry of the town is “wine” making. Wine is exported on a large
scale in forty-gallon jars, which come down on bamboo rafts from
Lu-chien, where they are made, and these afterwards take the wine up the
Ya and other turbulent rivers. A fleet of these quaint constructions and
a great number of junks lay along the shore, and there was an air of
prosperous business about the town.
The roof of my boat had to be refitted with mats, some of which had been
blown off in the storm, and I took a long inland walk, and without
molestation! The cultivation was marvellous. I have no space to dwell
upon the infinite variety of the crops or on the trees of all climates
which were flourishing in juxtaposition,[53] or upon the striking fact
that there, 1600 miles up the river, the social and commercial
organisation, and the arrangements for what the Chinese regard as
comfort and convenience, were as complete as in Che-kiang. A little
later it might have occurred to me that this beautiful and prosperous
region is claimed as in the British “sphere of influence.” Carefulness
and thrift were shown by what was to me a novelty. All along the river
shore people were fishing from rocks with nets, for straws, twigs, and
bits of wood to use for their cooking fires.
[Illustration: METHOD OF CARRYING _CASH_ AND BABIES.]
I reached Chung-king, the westernmost of the treaty ports, and the
commercial metropolis of SZE CHUAN early the next morning (June 1st),
after coming slightly to grief in a rapid above it, and remained there
during three grey, steamy, misty days, in which the mercury was almost
steady at 87°. Between Chung-king and Sui Fu, if not higher, steam
navigation at that season appeared perfectly practicable. The junk and
raft traffic is very large. Coal and lime are found in abundance near
Chung-king, and at Pa-Ko-Shan, five miles below Sui Fu, and also twenty
miles above it. Specimens of this coal brought to England have been
pronounced to be suitable for steam purposes.[54]
[Illustration: FISHING VILLAGE, UPPER YANGTZE.]
CHAPTER XXXVII.
THE JOURNEY’S END
Whether Chung-king (altitude 1050 ft.) is approached from above or
below, it is a most striking city. It is surprising to find, 1500 miles
inland, a town of from 400,000 to 500,000 people, including 2500
Mohammedans, as the commercial capital of Western China, one of the
busiest cities of the empire. Its founders chose a site on which there
is no room for expansion, and its warehouses, guildhalls, hongs, shops,
and the dwellings of rich and poor, are packed upon a steep sandstone
reef or peninsula lying between the Yangtze and its great northern
tributary, the Chia-ling, and rising from 100 to 400 feet above the
winter level of these rivers. As I descended upon it down a somewhat
turbulent rapid, which half filled the boat and drowned a fowl, it
reminded me of Quebec, and made me think of the packed condition of
Edinburgh when it was yet a walled city.
[Illustration: WALL OF CHUNG-KING, WITH GATE TOWERS.]
A noble-looking, grey city it is, with towers, pavilions, and temples
rising above its massive, irregular, crenelated grey wall, with broad,
steep, and crowded flights of stone stairs, twenty feet broad, leading
up from the river to the gates, with an amphitheatre of wooded and
richly cultivated hills rising steeply 1600 feet from the water for its
background; the fleets of big junks, and craft of all descriptions,
which lie crowded along its shores and in every adjacent bay and reach,
and the life and movement on land and water, combining to form a noble
and most striking spectacle. Nor is Chung-king as a city “alone in its
glory,” for on the Yangtze, just below its junction with the Chia-ling,
which divides it from Chung-king, stands the walled city of Limin-fu,
its white houses covering a number of hills and cliffs, and at its feet
hundreds of junks. Another city, Kiang-peh, completes the trio. These
cities, with their commercial organisation owing nothing to Europe, I
think more than all others, gave me an idea of what China _is_ and
_must_ be.
[Illustration: CHUNG-KING SOLDIERS, CUSTOMS GUARD.]
Chung-king Fu has often been described in detail, and I will only give a
few impressions of it. Passing to the Taiping gate up a flight of stone
stairs, always sloppy from the passage of water carriers, and crowded
with cotton-laden coolies, I reached the house of the Commissioner of
Customs by steep streets cut in the rock. The Customs House, infinitely
picturesque, is on a small rock plateau, with only four feet of space
between it and the rock behind. The view is ideally picturesque, with
the pagoda and gardens of a Guild of Benevolence below the plateau, and
the great flood of the Yangtze, then two-thirds of a mile wide, rolling
between the city and the fine hills on the further shore. But space is
lacking. The Chinese soldiers who guard the Commissioner seemed to block
up the little that there is, and trees and trailers there and everywhere
in the hot, moist climate of Chung-king, choke up every foot of ground.
The mercury stood at 87° during my three days’ visit; there was no
sunshine for the dogs to bark at, and the moist air was absolutely
still. As compared with many or most, the “grounds” of that house are
spacious!
Chung-king was opened as a treaty port in 1891, but the China Inland
Mission rented a house there in 1877, and were followed by missionaries
of other societies, who, however, all had to fly from a severe riot nine
years later. Mr. Archibald Little settled there as a merchant eight
years before the opening—a rare instance of mercantile pluck with few
imitators, and now, besides the foreigners on the Consular and Customs’
staffs, there are other “venturers,” chiefly “transients,” and about
thirty missionaries of different societies, with mission chapels,
schools, and hospitals. The English and German steamers, which are to be
placed on the route from Ichang next year (1900), will doubtless
stimulate foreign settlement, and will bring Chung-king within the
globe-trotter’s sphere. If specially-built gunboats can “patrol” the
upper Yangtze, outbreaks of hostility to foreigners will doubtless
cease, and the quarrels will be among the foreign nationalities, each
anxious to circumvent the others in the matter of concessions.
Below the huge reef on which Chung-king stands, is a town of mat and
bamboo houses outside the wall. As the Yangtze rises some ninety feet in
summer above its winter level, and was rising fast when I arrived on
June 1st, this town had mostly disappeared, and the highest remnant was
being carried away hurriedly on men’s backs, each hour of removal giving
an added dignity to the grand, grey city, looking down on the grand,
yellow-ochre flood. In Chung-king, as in many another city of the upper
Yangtze, the harmony between man’s work and nature is yet unbroken, and
the evil day of foreign inartistic antagonisms, incongruities, and
uglinesses has not yet dawned.
This commercial capital has a great present, which we are hoping to
improve upon to our advantage.[55] It is connected by water with nearly
every considerable town in the province, and wholesale trade is by boat.
Exports bound east must pass it, and also the imports brought up to pay
for them. For foreign goods it is the sole wholesale market in SZE
CHUAN, and is so for provincial trade to a great extent, and the
province, it must be repeated, is as large as France, and vastly more
populous. To it the merchants and shopkeepers of the whole population of
from 55,000,000 to 70,000,000, which includes Tibetan tribes, Lolos, and
a few so-called “dog faces,” resort to make their purchases.
[Illustration: GALA HEAD-DRESS, “DOG-FACED” WOMAN.]
(_See also page 177._)
Mr. A. J. Little is the only British merchant resident in Chung-king.
The Chinese merchants deal directly with Shanghai through their own men.
More than half of the buyers sent down have an interest in the business.
They deal with the Chinese importers, and pay ready money in Shanghai,
but sell to the provincial merchants on long credit, the rate of
interest being 14⅖ per cent. per annum on foreign cotton goods. The
seller naturally wishes payment to be deferred, and the buyer desires to
hasten it, as he receives the same percentage as discount. Exchange
between Chung-king and Shanghai is always in favour of Chung-king, and
when the Yangtze is in its summer flood, 1000 taels in Shanghai can
often be bought in Chung-king for 880.
The intricacies of Chinese business at Chung-king are appalling.
Excessive subtlety and ingenuity characterise all the trade rules and
customs, and even the “Blackburn Commission,” aided by the experience of
Mr. Bourne, found it a work of much labour to master their
complications! It is scarcely wonderful that the average British
merchant, who knows nothing better than _Pidgun_, instead of following
in the steps of our bold “Merchant Venturers,” sticks at Shanghai.[56]
At Chung-king, more almost than elsewhere, I was impressed with the
completeness of Chinese commercial organisation. It may be too complex,
and lacking in initiative, to serve our purposes, but it serves their
own, and I heard there, as elsewhere, that the high standard of
commercial honour and probity which has been worked out, renders
dealings with Chinese merchants very satisfactory.
Eight of the other provinces are represented by guilds in this great
trading city, with their handsome guildhalls, and rigid laws of
association. There are an abundance of exchange banks (banks selling
drafts on distant places), seventeen of which are in the hands of men
from SHAN-SI, which has a speciality for banking talent, and there are
over twenty large _cash_ shops or local banks, which exchange _cash_
against silver and _vice versâ_. These banks do not make advances on
goods, but lend on personal security at from ten to twelve per cent. per
annum, and employ agents who hang about the business quarter, learning
the proceedings of customers, so as to gauge their credit. A bank would
lend as much as 200,000 taels to a merchant on personal security only.
They have very rigorous methods of ensuring the honesty of _employés_.
[Illustration: THE AUTHOR’S LAST _WU-PAN_.]
It was with great regret that I left Chung-king on my last _wu-pan_
voyage. There were few, if any, small house-boats on the berth, and the
big ones would only go down at an enormous price, because of the
difficulty and profitlessness of the return. Foreigners of the two
services, as well as merchants, regard a _wu-pan_ as we regard a
steerage passage, and even my kind host declined to connive at my
proceedings, but Mr. Willett, of the China Inland Mission, befriended
me; the _wu-pan_ was engaged, and I left Chung-king on a sultry June
afternoon, with the mercury at 88°, and never regretted my firmness on
the subject of a boat, for I was thoroughly comfortable, could create
draughts at will, and my boatmen were quiet and most obliging, and were
ready to land me at any place where landing was practicable.
The force and volume of the river, which had then risen about forty-five
feet above its winter level, were tremendous. Its low-water width at
Chung-king, according to Blakiston, is 800 yards, but it was then about
two-thirds of a mile wide, a swirling, leaping, yellow flood, laden with
the mud with which it enriches the Great Plain. Caught in its torrent,
the _wu-pan_, with two men rowing easily, descended at great speed. When
we reached rapids, five men pulled frantically with yells which posed as
songs, to keep steerage way on her, and we went down like a flash—down
smooth hills of water, where rapids had been obliterated; down leaping
races, where they had been created; past hideous whirlpools, where to
have been sucked in would have been destruction; past temples, pagodas,
and grey cities on heights; past villages gleaming white midst dense
greenery; past hill, valley, woodland, garden cultivation, and signs of
industry and prosperity; past junks laid up for the summer in quiet
reaches, and junks with frantic crews, straining at the sweeps, chanting
wildly, bound downwards like ourselves; and still for days the Great
River hurried us remorselessly along. There was no time to take in
anything. A pagoda or city scarcely appeared before it vanished—a rapid
scarcely tossed up its angry crests ahead, before we had left it astern;
one fair dissolving view was all too rapidly exchanged for another; and
we were tying up among the many hundred junks which fringed the shore of
the “Myriad City,” which is as beautiful from above as from below,
before I realised that we were half-way thither.
But in this delirious whirl there were episodes of rest, when I landed
on green and flowery shores above the submerged boulders, or below
picturesque cities and temples, and had leisure either to enjoy detail
or to loathe it. The latter was my mental attitude when I landed with my
_chai-jen_ (rather an infliction in a small boat) at the important town
of Fu-chow, where a clear stream, about 200 yards broad, and navigable
for 200 miles, joins the turbid Yangtze. There are many queer crafts on
the branches of the Yangtze. The navigation of some of these rivers is
so intricate and dangerous, that the owners of these risky constructions
are obliged to consent to provide coffins for their crews in case of
disaster, and there are colliers built for _one_ down-river voyage,
after which they are broken up; but the queerest of all crafts are the
_Wai-pi-Ku_—the “twisting stern” junks used for the navigation of the
Fu-ling, locally known as the Kung-tan Ho, or “River of the Rapid of
Kung.” I saw one of these at Wan, and thought it was a junk which had
had a severe accident! The sight of forty or fifty large junks at
Fu-chow, each one with her high stern twisted a quarter round, so that
the stern deck is at right angles to the quarter deck, was absolutely
laughable. The stern deck is nearly perpendicular, and is climbed by
rungs. These extraordinary boats are without rudders. My boatmen said
that none but “twisted stern” junks could twist through the whirlpools
and reefs of the river. It was not very wise for me to enter Fu-chow,
and as I was followed by an immense and not over polite crowd I did not
dare to use my camera on the _Wai-pi-Ku_.
Fu-chow is perhaps the most picturesque city on the Yangtze, built on
ledges of rock, tier above tier, at the head of a reach so enclosed by
steep hills as to look like a lake. There is a fine pagoda on a height
near it, and it abounds in large temples in commanding positions. The
deep gateway in the thick wall is scarcely more than eight feet high.
The narrow street into which it leads was thronged, and even women were
carrying creels, either loaded with coal dust, or small children. I
managed to dodge the fast accumulating crowd, and get on the wall, from
which the view up the Fu-ling is magnificent. My visit, however, was
rather “a fearful joy.”
The city appears full of temples, literary monuments, and public
buildings, but it has an air of neglect and decay, and it and its
suburbs are dirty and malodorous. It is a great junk port, and at times,
though not, I think, increasingly, the Fu-ling is used for the transit
of goods both to Hankow and Canton. The latter city can be reached by
this method with only two portages(?). There are large mat and bamboo
suburbs below one part of the wall, but very little of them was left,
owing to the rapid rise of the river, which also had led to the removal
of many of the mat villages of the trackers. Fu-chow again looked
glorious from below. A tremendous whirlpool, in which, sometimes,
descending junks are caught to their destruction, is formed in summer
near the city. We went uncomfortably near its vortex.
[Illustration: “STONE PRECIOUS CASTLE,” SHI-PAO-CHAI.]
I landed also at Shih-pao-chai (“Stone Precious Castle”), a place of
pilgrimage. The south-east side of the rock (not given in the
illustration) has a nine-storeyed pavilion, resting on a very strikingly
decorated temple built against it, through which access to the summit is
gained. On the flat top there is a temple of three courts. The pavilion
building has curved and decorated roofs, and looks like a magnificent
eleven-storeyed pagoda. A large village lies at its feet. My films were
spotted with damp, and would have failed anyhow, owing to the
overpowering curiosity of the people. This rock and its talus are about
300 feet in height.
A glorious sunset and a morning of crystalline purity in a bay above the
“Wind-box Gorge”; a rapid swirl through the solemnity and grandeur of
the gorges which I ascended slowly and toilsomely six months before; the
Yeh-tan, fierce and perilous; the Hsin-tan, a mere water-slide, down
which my _wu-pan_ slipped easily; a lovely walk up the Nan-po glen, and
in fifty-six hours from Chung-king, exclusive of stoppages, the boat
emerged from the Ichang gorge upon the broad reach of eddying water, on
which the pleasant treaty port of Ichang is situated.
After receiving hospitality for a few days at the British Consulate I
left Ichang, and found the mirrors, enamel, and gilding of one of the
fine river steamers very distasteful after a thousand miles in a
_wu-pan_. Hankow, though by no means at its worst, was damp and sultry,
with a temperature over 90°, and alive with mosquitoes. Even on the
voyage down to Shanghai, which was devoid of any incident,—except that
five minutes after leaving Chin-kiang we cut the anchored steamer
_Hai-how_, tea-laden for Canton, down to the water’s edge—the damp heat
was severe, and even the breeze was hot.
It was the end of June when I reached Shanghai, to find it sweltering in
a “hot wave,” sunless and moist. My journey on the whole had been one of
extreme variety and interest, and I was truly thankful for the freedom
from any serious accident which I had enjoyed, and for the deep and
probably abiding interest in China and the Chinese which it had given
me, along with new views of the physical characteristics of the country,
and of the resourcefulness and energy of its inhabitants.
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
THE OPIUM POPPY AND ITS USE[57]
My acquaintance with the opium poppy began in the month of February on
the journey from Wan Hsien to Paoning Fu. It is a very handsome plant.
It is expensive to grow. It has to be attended to eight times, and needs
heavy manuring. It is exposed to so many risks before the juice is
secured that the growth is much of a speculation, and many Chinese
regard it as being as risky as gambling. Besides its cultivation for
sale, on a majority of farms it is grown for home use, as tobacco is,
for smoking. It is a winter crop, and is succeeded by rice, maize,
cotton, beans, etc. Certain crops can be planted between the rows of the
poppies. Much oil, bearing a high price, is made from the seed. The
lower leaves, which are abundant, are used in some quarters to feed
pigs, and also as a vegetable. They were served up to me as such twice,
and tasted like spinach. In some places the heavy stalks are dug into
the ground; in others they are used as fuel, and after serving this
purpose their ashes provide lye for the indigo dyers. It appears from
much concurrent testimony, that in spite of heavy manuring the crop
exhausts the ground.
The area devoted to the poppy in SZE CHUAN is enormous, and owing to the
high price of the drug and its easy transport its culture is encroaching
on the rice and arable lands. The consequences of the extension of its
cultivation are serious. It is admitted by the natives of SZE CHUAN that
one great reason of the deficient food supply which led to the famine
and distress in the eastern part of the province in 1897, was the giving
of so much ground to the poppy that there was no longer a margin left on
which to feed the population in years of a poor harvest.
I shall not touch on the history of the growth and use of opium in
China. The authorities evidently regarded the introduction of both as a
grave peril, and they were prohibited under Imperial decrees. I learn on
what I regard as very reliable authority, that sixty years ago, when
Cantonese brought opium cough pills into KWEICHOW and YUNNAN, and the
consumers found themselves unable to give up the medicine, that the
authorities were most active in suppressing its use, and even inflicted
the punishment of death on many of the refractory in YUNNAN. It was then
and later smuggled about the country in coffins!
Now, on many of the SZE CHUAN roads opium houses are as common as gin
shops in our London slums. I learned from Chinese sources that in
several of the large cities of the province eighty per cent. of the men
and forty per cent. of the women are opium smokers; but this must not be
understood to mean that they are opium “wrecks,” for there is a vast
amount of “moderate” opium smoking in China. In my boat on the Yangtze
fourteen out of sixteen very poor trackers smoked opium, and among my
chair and baggage coolies it was rare to find one who did not smoke, and
who did not collapse about the same hour daily with the so-called
unbearable craving.
The stern of my boat was a downright opium den at night, with fourteen
ragged men curled up on their quilts, with their opium lamps beside
them, in the height of sensuous felicity, dreaming such Elysian dreams
as never visit the toiling day of a Chinese coolie, and incapable of
rousing themselves to meet an emergency until the effect of the pipe
passed off. Farther astern still, the _lao-pan_ and his shrieking virago
of a wife lay in the same blissful case, the toothless, mummied face of
the _lao-pan_, expressive in the daytime of nothing but fiendish greed,
with its muscles relaxed, and its deep, hard lines smoothed out. Some of
these men, whose thin, worn, cotton rags were ill-fitted to meet the
cold, sold most of them at Wan, rather than undergo what appeared to be
literally the _agonies_ of abstinence. On my inland journey I heard
incidentally of many men who had sold both wives and children in order
to obtain the drug, and at Paoning Fu of a man and his wife who, having
previously parted with house, furniture, and all they had, to gratify
their craving, at the time of my visit sold their only child, a nice
girl of fourteen, educated in the Mission School, to some brutal Kansuh
fur traders, who were returning home. It is quite usual when a man
desires a house and land which are the property of an opium smoker, for
him to wait with true Chinese patience for one, two, or three years,
certain that the owner will sooner or later part with it for an old song
to satisfy his opium craving when he has sold all else. It is common for
the Chinese to say, “If you want to be revenged on your enemy you need
not strike him, or go to law with him—you have only to entice him into
smoking opium.”
The Chinese condemn all but most moderate opium smoking and gambling as
twin vices, and not a voice is raised in defence of either of them, even
by the smokers themselves. The opium habit is regarded as a disease, for
the cure of which many smokers voluntarily place themselves in opium
refuges at some expense, and at a great cost of suffering, and in the
market towns, thronged with native traders, there is to be seen on many
stalls among innumerable native drugs and commodities, a package
labelled “Remedy for Foreign Smoke,” “foreign smoke” being the usual
name for opium in Western China. I was impressed with the existence of a
curious sort of conscience, if it can be called such, among the devotees
of opium, which leads them to consider themselves as moral criminals.
The Chinese generally believe that if a man takes to the opium habit it
will be to the impoverishment and ruin of his family, and that it will
prevent him from fulfilling one of the first of Confucian obligations,
the support of his parents in their old age. The consensus of opinion
among smokers and non-smokers, as to the crime of opium smoking and its
woeful results, leads me to believe that it brings about the
impoverishment and ruin of families to an enormous extent. Chinese said
several times to me that the reason the Japanese beat them was that they
were more vigorous men, owing to the rigid exclusion of opium from
Japan.
In May I saw the crop harvested. Women and children are the chief
operators. In the morning longitudinal incisions are made in the seed
vessel, the juice exudes, and by the evening is hard enough to be
scraped into cups, after which it turns black, and after a few days’
exposure is ready for packing. Heavy rain or a strong west wind during
this process is very injurious. Maize, tobacco, and cotton have been
previously planted, and make a good appearance as soon as the poppy
stalks have been cleared away.
Eight years ago it was rather exceptional for women and children to
smoke, but the Chinese estimate that in SZE CHUAN and other
opium-producing regions from forty to sixty per cent. are now smokers.
Where opium is not grown the habit is chiefly confined to the cities,
but it is rapidly spreading.
Its existence is obvious among the lower classes from the exceeding
poverty which it entails. Millions of the working classes earn barely
enough to provide them with what, even to their limited notions, are the
necessaries of life, and the money spent on opium is withdrawn from
these. Hence the confirmed opium smoker among the poor is apt to look
half starved and ragged. Still I am bound to say that I did not
encounter any of those awful specimens of physical wreckage that I saw
some years ago in the Malay States from the same cause.
Among the well-to-do and well-nourished classes the evils of opium are
doubtless more moral than physical; among the masses both evils are
combined. The lower orders of officials and “_yamen_ runners,” with
their unlimited leisure, are generally smokers. Among my official
escorts in SZE CHUAN, numbering in all 143 men, all but two were
devotees of opium, and I was constantly delayed and inconvenienced by
it. My coolies frequently broke down under the craving, and that at
times as inconvenient to themselves as to me. In two towns I had to wait
two hours to get my passport copied because the writers at the _yamen_
were in the blissful haziness produced by the pipe.
So far as I have seen, the passionate craving for the drug, called by
the Chinese the “_Yin_,” (which appears to be the coming on of severe
depression after the stimulant of the pipe has passed off), involves
great suffering, and total abstinence, whether voluntary or enforced,
produces an anguish which the enfeebled will of the immoderate smoker is
powerless to contend with. The craving grows, till at the end of
eighteen months from the commencement of the habit, or even less, the
smoker, unless he can gratify it, becomes unable to do his work.
He feels disinclined to move, miserable all over, especially at the
stomach and between the shoulders, his joints and bones ache badly, he
perspires freely, he trembles with a sense of weakness, and if he cannot
get the drug, he believes that he will die. I cannot learn how soon a
man comes to consider himself a victim of the habit. Those who place
themselves in opium refuges with the hope of cure, endure agonies which
they describe to be “as if wolves were gnawing at their vitals,” and
would, if permitted, tear off their skin to relieve the severe internal
suffering.
On my SZE CHUAN journey we were benighted on a desolate hillside, and
had to spend the night in the entrance to a coal-pit, cold, wet, and
badly fed. My coolies had relied on being able to buy opium, and though
they were comparatively moderate smokers, they suffered so much that
some of them were rolling on the ground in their pain. Dr. Main, of
Hangchow, thinks that very few can be cured in opium refuges, which they
enter for twenty-one days, for the debility, stomachic disorder, and
depression which follow the disuse of the drug are so great, that six
months of tonics and good feeding would be necessary to set them on
their feet again. On the contrary, the poor wretch, low in purse,
depressed, feeble, trembling, leaves the shelter of the refuge to be
tempted at once to a smoke by old associates, while in cities like
Hangchow and Fuchow from eight hundred to a thousand registered opium
shops display their seductions, and he turns aside to the only physical
and mental comfort that he knows.
I have little doubt that in the early months of the habit there is a
widespread desire to abandon it. Opium refuges, in spite of the fair
payment which is asked for, are always crowded. The shops and markets
abound in native and foreign remedies for “foreign smoke.” The native
cures all contain opium, chiefly in the form of ashes, and the foreign,
which are white, contain morphia. The attempts at self-cure number tens
of thousands, and are very piteous, but in many cases it is merely the
exchange of the opium habit for the morphia habit, and at this time
morphia lozenges are making great headway in China, as an easy and
unsuspected means, specially in travelling, of obtaining the sensations
which have become essential to existence. The importation of morphia
into China is now enormous—135,283 ounces in 1898. It is sold
everywhere, and in the great west, as well as nearer the seaboard, shops
are opened which sell a few articles as a blind, for the lucrative sale
of the much-prized morphia pill or lozenge. Among the native cures which
I have heard of the only one which seems at all efficacious is the
so-called “Tea Extract,” _Scutellaria vicidula_. The _Jsai li_ sect,
which makes abstinence from opium one of its tenets, uses this cure
invariably, but the ordinary smoker is unwilling to face the severe
suffering which it entails.
Smokers, I have learned, may be divided into three classes: first, the
upper class, not driven by failure of means or sense of duty to abandon
an indulgence which they can well afford, and which they do not enjoy to
excess; second, the respectable class of small merchants, innkeepers,
shopkeepers, business men, and the like, who find their families pinched
and themselves losing caste by reason of their habit; third, the
class—which the Chinese estimate to consist of forty per cent. of the
whole in the cities, and twenty per cent. in the country—which has
drifted beyond hope, and is continually recruited from those above it.
In this are found thieves, beggars, actors, the infamous, the lost and
submerged, the men who have sold lands, houses, wives, and children, and
live for opium only, much as the most degraded of our dipsomaniacs live
for spirits.
Besides these, there are many who are not obliged to have recourse to
selling and pawning to get along, but who curtail such things as the
education of their children, and flowers for their wives’ heads, and
who, from having eaten meat twice daily, eat it only once, or substitute
for it a purely vegetable diet, which must contain much honey and sugar
to relieve the heat and dryness of the mouth which the pipe produces.
Then there are large numbers of smokers who have barely enough to feed
themselves upon, who must eat in order to work, and who have not one
_cash_ left for opium. These borrow right and left, and part with all
they can pledge for anything, borrowing every year from fresh lenders,
and paying back a fraction of the old debts till they can borrow no
longer, and drop into the submerged class aforesaid. Among these are
seen the ragged, mummied wretches, who _kotow_ to former acquaintances,
and beg from them the ashes of their opium pipes, even drinking these
with hot water to satisfy the craving.
Rich smokers smoke what is known as “Canton opium,” the import from
India, which they compare to a coal fire, and the native drug to a wood
one. But the manufacture of the latter is improving rapidly; and as it
is increasingly used to mix with the Indian, a generation is growing up
in the upper class which knows only the mixed drug, and apparently only
the old, rich smokers use pure Indian opium, the consumption of which
has fallen off enormously, though in 1898 the value of the Indian import
was £4,388,385.
The mysteries of the preparation and the varieties of the product baffle
the non-smoker. Both Chinese and Indian opium are now largely prepared
with the ashes of the drug already once smoked, much of it flowing, only
imperfectly burned, into the receiver of the pipe. In the strongest
prepared opium, four ounces of ashes of the first degree are added to
every ten of crude opium. Ashes of the second and even the third burning
are also used. Many of the poorer classes have to content themselves
with a smoke of opium ashes only, and the lowest of all users of the
drug have to satisfy themselves with eating or drinking the ashes of the
third burning.
There is a class which can afford to buy the pure drug, but which finds
that it does not satisfy the craving, but this is merged in a far larger
one of old and inveterate rich smokers of one tael’s weight per day, who
smoke not even the very best prepared Indian drug, for their craving
needs far stronger stimulation, but ashes of the first degree. Such men
give the prepared extract, weight for weight, value for value, for the
ashes, and contract with opium shops to be supplied with all their ashes
of the first burning. For the rich, inveterate smoker an ounce of
prepared extract is mixed with six ounces of ashes of the first degree.
This habit has in Chinese a specific bad name.
Pure opium appears to be seldom sold, as it fails to satisfy the craving
of the practised smoker. It is not only that ashes are mixed with the
fresh drug, but that they are reboiled, and after being made up with
treacle to the proper consistence are resmoked, and their ashes are then
eaten by the poorest class.
Morphia, the active principle of opium, not being consumed in the smoke
owing to its lack of volatility, the eating of the ashes, which contain
seven per cent. and upwards of it, has a very serious effect. The fact
that opium is smoked three times makes it impossible to estimate either
the quantity consumed or the amount spent on the indulgence, but these
are, of course, greatly in excess of that indicated by any possible
returns.
Among the adjuncts of opium smoking used by rich smokers is what is
called “water tobacco,” supposed erroneously to be all washed in the
water of the Yellow river. It is retailed in thin cakes of a brick-red
colour, and is said to be mixed with arsenic, and that its excessive
use, with or without opium, is dangerous to health.[58] This tobacco is
invariably smoked in “water pipes” by the upper classes in SZE CHUAN.
In the chapter on the Hangchow Hospital I have mentioned the impetus
given to suicide by the painlessness of death by opium, and will not
refer to it again. In this chapter I have only touched upon such
mysteries and results of opium smoking as I have seen in my limited
experience, or have heard of directly from Chinese through my
interpreters, or facts stated in a careful paper, _The Use of Opium_, by
Dr. Dudgeon, of Peking. Except for the quotation of a remark of Dr.
Main, of Hangchow, on opium refuges, I have not obtained any of my
material from missionaries.[59]
From all that I have seen and heard among the Chinese themselves, I have
come to believe that even moderate opium smoking involves enormous
risks, and that excessive smoking brings in its train commercial,
industrial, and moral ruin and physical deterioration, and this on a
scale so large as to threaten the national well-being and the physical
future of the race.
The most common reasons which the Chinese give for contracting the habit
are pain, love of pleasure, sociability, and the want of occupation.
They say that a moderate use of the pipe “advances the transaction of
business, stimulates the bargaining instinct, facilitates the striking
of bargains, and enables men to talk about secret and important matters
which without it they would lack courage to speak of.”
It is strangely true that in this industrial nation there are hundreds
of thousands of people with little or nothing to do. There are the wives
of the wealthy, retired, and expectant mandarins, leisured men of
various classes, _literati_ waiting for employment, the great army of
priests and monks, and the hangers-on of _yamens_, besides which there
are Government officials whose duties occupy them only one day in a
month. These remarks apply chiefly to urban populations.
Outside of commercial pursuits an overpowering shadow of dulness rests
on Chinese as upon much of Oriental life. The lack of an enlightened
native press, and of anything deserving the name of contemporary
literature; the grooviness of thought and action; the trammels of a
rigid etiquette; the absence of athletics, and even of ordinary
exercise; the paucity of recreations, other than the play and the
restaurants, which are ofttimes associated with opium shops and vicious
resorts; and the fact that the learned having committed the classics to
memory, by which they have rendered themselves eligible for office, have
no farther motive for study—all make the blissful dreams and the
oblivion of the opium pipe greatly to be desired.
It is obvious that opium has come to “stay.” So lately as 1859, in SZE
CHUAN, which now exports opium annually to the value of nearly
£2,000,000, the penalty for growing it was death, in spite of which the
white poppy fields were seen in conspicuous places along the Great
River; and in 1868 an Imperial edict against its cultivation was
supplemented by a proclamation to the same effect by the Viceroy of the
province, and both have remained dead letters.
At all times the beautiful _Papaver somniferum_ has been regarded as the
enemy of China. There are no apologists for the use of opium except
among foreigners. The smokers themselves are ashamed of their slavery.
All alike condemn it, and regard opium as a curse as well as a vice, and
from all which came under my own observation in fifteen months, I fully
agree with them.
I will conclude this chapter with a few extracts from officials whose
knowledge of the evils which are following the constantly increasing use
of the drug, cannot be gainsaid. The first quotation is from the British
Consul at Tainan, Formosa. Consul Hirst says:—
“As long as China remains a nation of opium smokers there is not the
least reason to fear that she will become a military power of any
importance, as the habit saps the energies and vitality of the
nation.”
The next is from Consul Bourne, who accompanied the “Blackburn
Commission” to the west and south of China, in the winter and spring of
1896–97. Mr. Bourne believes that the provinces of YUNNAN and KUEI-CHOW
raise opium annually to the amount of about three millions sterling.
“There is no doubt,” he writes, “that here (Kuei-chow) the officials
tried to stop the cultivation of the poppy, but this must have been
very difficult, because an export such as opium, light in weight for
its value, is just what these provinces, with their wretched means of
communication, want. To-day, without opium, Yunnan and Kuei-chow would
have no means of paying for imports. Unfortunately,” he says, writing
of YUNNAN, “opium has become almost the medium of exchange in this
province, as I explained in a former report.”
Writing on the deplorable condition of YUNNAN (p. 58), he says:—
“After Yang-kai, poppy fills the whole cultivated area, covering the
valley with white and purple (this is in the province of Yunnan), a
gorgeous spectacle to the eye, though not agreeable to the mind, for
one must attribute chiefly to opium, I think, the extraordinary
failure of this province to recover from the devastation of the
rebellion.
“The drug is so cheap and handy that the men almost all smoke, and
most women, especially among the agriculturists, who tend the poppy
and collect and sell the juice—the class that is elsewhere the
backbone of China, if, indeed, China can be said to have a backbone. I
was assured by an English missionary who has long resided in the
province, and in whose judgment I have great confidence, that in
eastern and western circuits (Tao) of the province, which embrace more
than two-thirds of its area, 80 per cent. of the men and 60 per cent.
of the women smoke opium. In the southern circuit the habit is not
quite so general. He had no doubt that the vice had a very bad effect
on the race. At all events, every traveller must be struck by the
great extent to which the fertile valleys—the only land well
cultivated—are monopolised by the poppy; by the apathy and laziness of
the people; and by the very slow recovery, during twenty-five years,
from the losses of the rebellion. Another bad result of opium being so
ready at hand is the frequency of suicides, especially among women.”
At the close of 1898, a book was published by H. E. Chang Chih-tung, who
is described by foreigners long resident in China as having been for
many years one of the most influential statesmen in the country, and as
standing second to no official in the empire for ability, honesty,
disinterestedness, and patriotism. He has filled in succession three of
the most important Viceroyalties in the empire. He deals with the opium
habit as with a huge national evil. Under the heading “The Expulsion of
the Poison,” he writes thus:—
(1) “Deplorable indeed is the injury done by opium! It is [as] the
Deluge of the present day or [an invasion of] some fierce beasts, but
the danger [arising from it] is greater than [the danger arising from]
those things.... The injury done by opium is that of a stream of
poison flowing on for more than a hundred years, and diffusing itself
in twenty-two provinces. The sufferers from this injury amount to
untold millions. Its consequences are insidious and seductive, and the
limit has not yet been reached. It destroys men’s abilities, it
weakens the vigour of the soldier, it wastes their wealth,[60] until
it results at length in China being what she is to-day. This
destruction affects the ability of civilians and soldiers alike. The
injury is worse than any waste of wealth. Men’s wills are weakened,
their physical strength is reduced. In the management of business they
lack industry, they cannot journey any distance, their expenditure
becomes extravagant, their children are few. After a few tens of years
it will result in China becoming altogether the laughing-stock of the
world.”
(2) “Shanghai and Yangchow both have associations for breaking off the
opium habit. Their general object may be said to be that each member
should control his dependents. As for the opium smokers, masters will
not employ them as servants, teachers will not have them as scholars,
generals will not take them as soldiers, farmers will not use them as
labourers, merchants will not employ them as assistants, foremen will
not have them for workmen.”
The writer concludes by saying:—
“If Confucius and Mencius were to live again, and were to teach the
empire ... they would certainly begin by [teaching men] to break off
opium.”
How is China to emancipate herself from this rapidly increasing habit,
which is threatening to sap the hitherto remarkable energy of the race?
CHAPTER XXXIX.
NOTES ON PROTESTANT MISSIONS IN CHINA
Two thousand four hundred and fifty-eight Protestant workers (including
wives) represent the missionary energies and the many divisions of
Christendom. The native Protestant communicants number 80,632.[61]
The shock which China received through her defeat by Japan has produced,
among other results, a disposition to make inquiries regarding the God,
faith, and learning of those “Western Barbarians” from whom Japan
received the art of war. Although hostility to Christianity as a
destructive and socially disintegrating power has been recently
evidenced by the anti-Christian riots at Kien-ing and elsewhere, the
spirit of inquiry gathers volume, and expresses itself in large
gatherings in street-chapels and churches, the thronging to mission
schools, and the avidity with which Christian literature is purchased.
Those who profess themselves ready to abandon heathenism and connect
themselves with Christianity are more than the missionaries can
instruct. In MANCHURIA there are six thousand inquirers in connection
with the Scotch and Irish missions. In the FU-KIEN province the movement
towards Christianity is on so extensive a scale as to attract the
serious attention of the provincial authorities, as well as emphatic
recognition by our own consuls. In one mission alone of the American
Board, in another province, the number of inquirers into the Christian
religion is estimated at 12,000.
The growing influence of Christianity, however, cannot be measured
either by the numbers of communicants or inquirers. For many years past,
large numbers of Christian men and women have been scattered through
nearly all the provinces of China, making their homes among the Chinese,
with the avowed object of promulgating what is known as the “_Jesus
Religion_.” Their methods of propagandism—preaching, conversation,
schools, dispensaries, hospitals, and the circulation of Christian
literature only differ slightly. Their knowledge of Chinese is
necessarily imperfect, and they often make grotesque and even serious
blunders. As their methods and mistakes in the language are much alike,
so too are their lives. The keenest Chinese critic finds no difference
in conduct and the motives which rule it, between the Scotch
missionaries in MANCHURIA, the China Inland Mission and Canadian, etc.,
in SZE CHUAN, the Church Missionary Society in the FU-KIEN Province, and
the German and American in KWANTUNG. These 2500 men and women are seen
under the “fierce light” of criticism which beats upon them, whether at
home or abroad, to lead pure, just, truthful, kind, honest, virtuous,
patient lives, restraining temper and suffering long. These lives preach
a higher standard of living than is inculcated by the highest Chinese
teaching, and by slow degrees produce results which cannot be tabulated.
The fame of the foreign teacher’s payment of wages agreed upon, without
drawbacks, his truthfulness, justice, kind treatment of servants,[62]
control of temper, and accessibility, travels far, and each life so
lived is an influence making for righteousness in the neighbourhood,
exciting inquiry into the “Jesus Religion” and foreign learning, and
exercising a distinct influence on surrounding morality in certain
directions.
The direct part of missionary work need scarcely be touched upon. It
consists in awakening the conscience to a sense of sin, by the preaching
of “righteousness, temperance, and judgment to come.” It dwells upon the
justice and love of God, on the atonement of Christ, on that Divine
Fatherhood before whose infinite compassions there is not a stranger, an
alien, a foreigner; on the “one sacrifice for sin once offered”; and
teaches that the purpose of the sacrifice, and of law and gospel, is,
that men may live “soberly, righteously, and godly in this present
world,” in preparation for a stainless and endless life. It teaches that
the morality of the Great Teacher is but a “shadow of good things to
come”—of the higher and perfect morality demanded by the Divine law, and
that the power outside ourselves which “makes for righteousness” and
“helps our infirmities,” is the power of God; that “God is love,” and
yearns over His wandering children; that He has “showed man what is
good,” and that “His only begotten Son,” who in some mysterious manner
“bore our sins in His own body on the tree,” is “He who is alive for
evermore,” and “ever liveth to make intercession,” and that He “hath
abolished death, and brought life and immortality to light through His
Gospel.”
This, in brief, is the teaching of all Protestant missionaries in China,
to whatever church they belong, and with one or two exceptions all
regard baptism as an obligatory confession of faith, and as the evidence
of a complete break with the beliefs and practices of heathenism.
Under such teaching 80,000 Chinese in 1898 were making a public
profession of the Christian faith. Many annually lapse; the greater
number owing to family influence, and difficulties in the abandonment of
the time and custom-honoured social observances connected with idolatry;
some because they find the moral restraints of Christianity too hard for
them, and others because they hoped for worldly advantages which they
failed to obtain. A large number of professing converts are employed by
missionaries as servants, gatekeepers, teachers, printers, translators,
and writers, of whose sincerity it may not always be possible to judge,
as foreign employment is much coveted.
But after putting these and other dubious converts aside, there remains
a large body of native Christians, gathered into societies, which after
long and careful inquiry I believe to be fully up to the average mark of
our churches at home in essential knowledge, and above it in practice,
specially in propagandist zeal and liberality—societies of men and
women, in which the virtues of purity, honesty, self-denial, and charity
are apparent. These converts contribute liberally out of their poverty
to Christian objects, specially for the advancement of Christianity in
their own country, in some regions contributing 6_s._ per head per
annum. These Christian societies are constantly showing an increasing
disposition to help themselves by the building of church edifices, as at
Paoning Fu and elsewhere, and by contributing the entire support of not
a few of their own pastors.
A large number of these converts are earnest and successful
propagandists, and the very large increase in the number of Christians
during the last five years is mainly owing to the zeal, earnestness, and
devotion of Chinese converts, both men and women, who owe their
conversion and instruction, as well as guidance and inspiration, to the
foreign teachers. In Manchuria a few years ago the senior missionary
told me that out of between three thousand and four thousand converts he
estimated that not more than twenty had received Christianity directly
from the European missionaries, and the same proportion holds good with
regard to the 8875 inquirers at the present date. In Che-kiang the
present Bishop of Victoria estimated the number of converts through the
work of Chinese as 80 per cent. of the whole.
These societies, in the beginning very small, and numbering from ten up
to over four hundred members, are gradually crystallising into
brotherhoods, with a very strong bond of union and definite aims of
their own. They show in a marked degree the strong Chinese tendency to
combination and association, and may be regarded as guilds. At present
among the communicants there is a strong desire to conserve the purity
of the churches by a careful exercise of discipline. Members who fall
back into evil ways, as many do, are “suspended,” and if incorrigible
are sloughed off, and it certainly would not be possible for such abuses
as disgraced the church of Corinth to exist in the infant churches of
China.
In brief these Christian societies are earnest in propagandism, zealous
for purity and discipline, liberal in their contributions, desirous for
instruction, docile and teachable, and apparently increasingly anxious
to translate Christian doctrine into righteous living. These bodies in
very many places are slowly exercising an influence in favour of
righteousness, and are thus among the many influences which are tending
to undermine the old superstitions.
If China is to be Christianised, or even largely leavened by
Christianity, it must inevitably be by native agency under foreign
instruction and guidance. The foreigner remains a foreigner in his
imperfect and often grotesque use of the language, in his inability to
comprehend Chinese modes of thinking and acting, and in a hundred other
ways, while a well-instructed Chinese teacher knows his countrymen and
what will appeal to them, how to make “points,” and how to clinch an
argument by a popular quotation from their own classics. He knows their
weakness and strength, their devious ways and crooked motives, and their
unspeakable darkness and superstition, and is not likely to be either
too suspicious or too confiding. He presents Christianity without the
Western flavour. It is in the earnest enthusiasm of the Chinese converts
for the propagation of the faith that the great hope for China lies.
Until now Christianity has made very slow progress. Among the special
obstacles are: First, the national vanity, and the contempt for anything
introduced by the foreign barbarians. Second, the posthumous influence
of Confucius, whose moral teaching, negative and defective as it is on
some points, is regarded as final, and his maxims as perfect in their
adaptation to the needs of society and government for all time. Third,
the Chinese language itself, with its absence of an alphabet, the
peculiar inflections and tones, the guttural and aspirated modulations
which must be carefully observed, and the necessity of creating a
vocabulary which shall rationally express the Christian ideas, and yet
not be offensive to a critical and literary people. Fourth, the
carefulness and universality of home education in superstitious and
idolatrous beliefs and practices, children being taught from early
infancy that reverence for the divinities of the Chinese Pantheon, shown
according to established forms, is necessary to success in life.
Fifth, greater than all these special obstacles combined, is that of
ancestor-worship, the actual and universal cult of the Empire. To
abandon idolatrous worship and practices is easy, but withdrawal from
the worship of the ancestral tablets, with its rites and sacrifices,
brands a man as a reprobate and a brute. These rites represent
reverence, sacredness, and filial piety; they have the sanction of
immemorial usage and of the earliest memories of home, and the first act
of worship recorded is the worship of ancestors by the Emperor Shun on
his accession, in the dawn of Chinese history.
The practice probably took its rise in a tender and beautiful filial
feeling, but apparently it has come to be largely inspired by fear. A
Chinese truly “passes the time of his sojourning here in fear,” and is
in slavery not only to the terror of a dim and demon-haunted future, but
to the present dread of the evils wherewith he may be afflicted in this
life by the malevolence of the dissatisfied spirits of his ancestors.
Dr. Yates, a very careful student of things Chinese, in an able paper on
ancestor-worship, states that, including the cost of the festivals for
the destitute dead, the enormous sum of 151,752,000 dollars is annually
expended by the Chinese in quieting the spirits of the departed, and
securing the living from their malignant action. If this worship ever
dies, it will die hard.
Islam is absolutely intolerant of every form of ancestor-worship. The
Roman Catholic missions, as my readers are aware, were agitated by a
controversy as to concessions on this subject from 1610 to 1758, when
Pope Benedict XIV. rejected all compromise. Protestant missions take the
same course.
While making careful inquiries into mission work, both from the workers
and from outsiders, and comparing the present status and conduct of
Chinese converts with what they were when I was in China twenty years
ago, I formed certain opinions on Protestant missions in China, which I
now place briefly before my readers. At this time missions constitute so
important a factor in the awakening of the empire, that no sensible or
thoughtful person can ignore them without sacrificing his reputation for
both sense and thoughtfulness. If I venture to write of myself at all in
connection with the subject, it is but to say that I am not an
enthusiast regarding foreign missions, but soberly believe that to
“teach all nations” is the path of duty and of hope.
During the earlier period of my eight years of Asiatic travel the
subject was of little or no interest to me. I may even have enjoyed the
cheap sneers at missions and missionaries which often pass for wit in
Anglo-Asiatic communities, among persons who have never given the work
and its methods one half-hour of serious attention and investigation,
and in travelling, wherever possible, I gave mission stations a wide
berth.
On my later journeys, however, which brought me often for months at a
time into touch with the daily life of the peoples, their condition even
at the best impressed me as being so deplorable all round, that I became
a convert to the duty of using the great means by which it can be
elevated. To pass on to these nations the blessings which we owe to
Christianity—our eternal hope, our knowledge of the Divine Fatherhood,
our Christian ideals of manhood and womanhood, our best conceptions of
the sanctities of domestic life and of the duties involved in social
relationships, our political liberties, the position of women, the
incorruptible majesty of our equal laws, the reformatory nature of our
punishments, the public opinion permeated by Christianity which sustains
right and condemns wrong, and a thousand things besides, which have come
to us through centuries of the “Jesus Religion”—is undoubtedly our
bounden duty. It is surely the height of unchristian selfishness to sit
down contentedly among our own good things, and practically to regard
China merely as an area for trade. Is it not also the height of
disloyalty and disobedience to our nominal Master, whose last command,
ringing down through centuries of selfishness, we have been satisfied to
leave unfulfilled?
I was influenced not so much by seeing the good work done by
missionaries, as the tremendous need for it and the hopelessness of the
religious systems of Asia. Several of the Asiatic faiths, and notably
Buddhism, started with noble conceptions and a morality far in advance
of their age. But the good has been mainly lost out of them in their
passage down the centuries, and Buddhism in China, aiming at
eclecticism, absorbed so much of the dæmonism, nature-worship, and
heathenism of the country, that in the number and puerility of its
superstitions, its alliance with sorcery, its temples crowded with
monstrous and grotesque idols, the immorality of its priests, and the
absence of the teaching of righteousness, it is now much on a level with
the idolatries of barbarous nations. There is nothing to arrest the
further downward descent of these systems, so effete, and yet so
powerful as interwoven with the whole social life of the nation. _There
is no resurrection power in any one of them_, and to the men who here
and there are athirst for righteousness, and are groping after Him “who
is not far from every one of us,” they offer neither guidance nor help.
That there are such seekers is certain. Among the many “secret
societies” of China, a “good few” are mainly religious, and a great
number of the Christian converts in North China have been in their
membership. An attempt to attain righteousness is their characteristic,
and something may be learned from them of self-denial and aspiration.
Their efforts all take more or less of an ascetic direction.
Among them are “Vegetarians,” who abstain from meat with the object of
“rectifying the heart, accumulating merit, and thus avoiding calamities
in this world and retributive pains in the next.” Several others are
pledged to abstain from gambling and the use of opium, wine, and
tobacco. The chief teaching of another is the duty of maintaining a
patient spirit under injuries.
The books of the religious secret societies contain the best maxims and
the highest moral teaching of “The Three Religions.” They exhort to
chastity, benevolence, carefulness in speech, self-denial, good works,
the _conservation of the mental energies by rest and reflection_, the
cultivation of the heart, and to much besides which is good. In alliance
with the good are idolatrous rites, incantations, divination, and many
grossly superstitious and puerile practices. It is believed that even
the best among these societies are not altogether free from seditious
tendencies, _i.e._, the accomplishment of reform by destruction. But
after making due allowance for what is foolish and evil, it is evident
that in these unsatisfied spiritual instincts and cravings after
righteousness, and above all in the substitution of a dissatisfied and
earnest spirit for the self-satisfied complacency of the Confucianist,
and the stolid materialism of the average Chinese, Christianity has
allies not to be despised.
Up to this time (1899) the slow success which has been won has been
almost entirely among the lower classes, and it has not been possible,
by the methods hitherto pursued, to reach the _literati_, who in China
are the leaders of a people whose reverence for letters is phenomenal.
Of the 2458 Protestant missionaries, including wives (many of whom are
incapacitated for work by maternal duties), accredited to China, a large
number are always at home “on furlough.” Promising Christian work is
often broken up by the departure of the missionary. A substitute may or
may not be appointed, but the “personal equation” counts for much in
China as elsewhere. The force available for actual work ought not to
include the large number of new missionaries, who must inevitably spend
the first year or two in learning to speak Chinese, during which period
they are useful chiefly by lives of consistent righteousness. Throughout
my long journeys I never saw a mission station, except perhaps Paoning
Fu, which was not undermanned, _i.e._, in which mission work was not
seriously crippled and denied its natural expansion by lack of men.
In this time of inquiry into Western religion and science it becomes
more and more important that missionaries, both men and _women_, should
study the difficult language carefully, so as to fit themselves for
conversation with the _literati_, and not be content with a limited
command of the colloquial speech of coolies. It is being recognised in
most influential quarters that if our trade is to expand, clerks and
others going into mercantile life in China must begin the study of
Chinese here under competent Chinese teachers. It might possibly be
desirable for intending missionaries to do the same, and it would have
the advantage of testing in each case the capacity for learning a
difficult language, the incapacity being under present methods only
discovered when it is too late to draw back. It appears very important
that medical missionaries should have an undisturbed year after arriving
in China for the study of the language.
Women’s work has grown, and is growing so rapidly in China that its
regulation needs serious consideration. Admirable as much of it is, and
might be, it is beset with special difficulties. The fact of a young
unmarried woman living anywhere but under her father’s roof, exposes her
character to the grossest imputations, which are hurled at her in the
streets, and which can only be lived down by scrupulous carefulness. The
Chinese etiquette, which prescribes the conduct seemly for women, and
limits the freedom of social intercourse between the sexes, certainly
tends to propriety, and though to our thinking tiresome, no young
foreign woman attempting to teach a foreign religion can violate its
leading rules without injury to her work.
For instance, it is improper for a woman to “ride” in an open chair, to
receive men visitors at her house, or to shake hands with men, or to
walk through the street of a town or village or to visit at native
houses unattended by a middle-aged Chinese woman. It is not only
improper but scandalous for a woman to be seen in a tight bodice, or any
other fashion which shows her figure, and a foreign girl lays herself
open to remarks which I scarcely think she would like to hear, when she
appears in a fly-away hat, bent up and bent down, on which birds,
insects, feathers, grasses, and flowers have been dumped down
indiscriminately! The Mission Board of one large and successful Mission
has found it desirable to issue rules for missionaries regarding dress
and etiquette, and the China Inland Mission everywhere, and the Church
Missionary Society missionaries in SZE CHUAN have solved the difficulty
by adopting Chinese costume, the only Oriental dress which Europeans can
wear with seemliness and dignity. I think it would add much to the
safety of female missionaries, and to the respect in which they are
held, if those missionary societies which object to Chinese costume
would agree upon neat, simple uniforms for summer and winter, fulfilling
the Chinese demand for propriety, and the European demand for
tastefulness, and which should indicate at once that the wearer belongs
to a large and important international union, and cannot be insulted
with impunity.
Again it is necessary for young women to remember that a yellow skin
makes no difference, and that any familiarity of manner or carelessness
in deportment, which would be unsuitable here, is ten times more
unsuitable in the case of Chinese men, such as servants, teachers, and
“native helpers.” In one province in which lady missionaries are
specially numerous the violations of etiquette by some of them have been
regarded as so likely to lead to outbreaks that the attention of our
Foreign Office has been called to the subject. The openings for the work
of sensible “godly” women are very great, but as a large proportion of
those who go out are young and inexperienced, and the number is
increasing, it is desirable that the whole subject should be
reconsidered, and that women’s work and general conduct should have the
advantage of experienced and effectual supervision for the protection of
the workers, and the prevention of those hindrances to the work which
arise out of ignorance and inexperience, and in a few cases out of
self-conceit and self-will.
Having ventured on these criticisms and suggestions, I must add that
much of the wisest, most loving, most self-denying, and most successful
work that I saw done in China was done by women.
My earliest ideas of missionary work were taken from a picture which
represented a white man standing under a tree, preaching to an earnest,
quiet, and dark-visaged crowd. Crowds gather round the foreign preacher
in China, but this is often a temporary phase, with curiosity for its
leading motive. His appearance, mistakes in speech, and attitudes are
satirised, jeered at, and mimicked. One of the most popular theatrical
performances in Shanghai a few years ago was a clever farce,
representing a foreign missionary preaching to a crowd of Chinese.
Preaching is not a Chinese mode of instruction. Confucianism, still the
great force in China, never had a preacher, and was propagated solely by
books. It is said that there is not a lecture-hall in the empire. The
Chinese methods of influencing are chiefly literary, catechetical, and
conversational. The results of preaching have not been what was once
hoped for, nor what they have been in some other countries. Many
missionaries have told me that even the Chinese preaching in the “street
chapels” is not fruitful in results.
It is possible that the introduction of Western modes of evangelising,
not applicable to China, was at least premature, and has been the cause
of much failure and disappointment. The foreign element, whether in
methods, church architecture, house building, or the ignoring of Chinese
custom, though partly inevitable, must always tend to represent
Christianity as a “foreign religion,” and to perpetuate it but as a
sickly exotic. It is, I think, of great importance that Christianity
should ally itself with all that is not evil in the national life, that
it should uphold Chinese nationality, that it should incorporate Chinese
methods of instruction with our own, and conserve all customs which are
not contrary to its spirit. The teachings of experience have not been
thrown away, and many missionaries have come to see that these are the
lines of progress.
Those competent to judge have no doubt that Christianity is about to
make great progress in China. With this, many questions already emerging
will come to the front, and among the foremost is that of native agency
in foreign pay. There is on one side the certainty that China can only
be Christianised by the Chinese, and on the other the risks connected
with the worldly or mercenary element, which have been fatal to many
such persons whose sincerity had not been suspected. Here again
experience is teaching useful lessons, one being that Christianity is
never so extensively and rapidly propagated as by the spontaneous
efforts and renovated lives of private Christians.
Among other questions are: How far the differences between Western
churches are to be perpetuated in China; the place of the Chinese
classics and of English in missionary schools; the obligation of the
Sabbath; the attitude of Christianity to certain Chinese customs, and to
any modified form of ancestor-worship; social intercourse between
foreigners and Chinese; the social and pecuniary position of a native
pastorate; the self-government of churches; and in Anglican missions the
retention of the Prayer Book, as it at present stands, as the sole
manual for public worship.
In conclusion I think that there is now an “open door” for the gospel in
China, and that the prospect for Christianity is fairer than at any
former period, but that if the Christian nations fail to realise their
obligations to enter that door promptly and in force, with an army of
earnest and well-equipped teachers, China may follow the example of
Japan, and accept Western civilisation, while rejecting the Christian
religion.
“Talk,” said Mr. Gladstone on one occasion, “about the question of the
day; there is but one question, and that is the gospel. It can and will
correct everything needing correction.”
It may be that the gospel will yet bring about the regeneration of
China.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
The subjects of our political and trade relations with China have been
so ably and exhaustively treated by Lord Charles Beresford, M.P., and
Mr. Colquhoun, and have been threshed out by so many other writers, that
in these brief remarks I shall chiefly confine myself to the Chinese
people and to my impressions of them, received in fifteen months of
journeyings in three of the most important years in modern Chinese
history.[63]
I doubt very much whether China is “breaking up.” _If_ she breaks up it
will be owing to the policy of the great European nations in making her
“lose face,” and thereby weakening the authority of the Central
Government over the provinces, local risings and possible
disintegrations being the result. The “sphere of influence” policy, if
pursued in earnest, would undoubtedly break up the empire.
In the three years in which I was travelling, off and on, in China, the
Dragon Throne reeled, but righted itself, and the Government survived
the Japanese war, the heavy indemnity, the loss of the suzerainty of
Korea, and the aggressions of Russia. It extinguished, in blood, the
serious Mohammedan rebellion in KANSUH, and has lately brought about the
collapse of the rebellion in SZE CHUAN. The bond of union which connects
the provinces with each other and with Peking has survived all these
mishaps, and if it is broken, I believe it will be by foreign
interference, and by the shifting and opportunist policy, enormous
ambitions, and ill-concealed rivalries of certain foreign powers.
Nor do I believe that China is “in decay.” I have travelled more than
8000 miles in the empire, and have seen, in some regions, roads, canals,
temples,[64] and some ancient public works, falling into disrepair. The
Oriental throughout Asia prefers construction to renovation, and
alongside of these decaying works there are new temples, new pagodas,
new and handsome bridges, new _pai-fangs_, new bunds, and new works,
rather of private than public origin.
The reader who has followed the foregoing chapters with any degree of
interest can scarcely think that SZE CHUAN, at least, is in decay.
Commercial and industrial energy is not decaying, the vast fleets of
junks are not rotting in harbours and reaches; industry, thrift,
resourcefulness, and the complete organisation both of labour and
commerce, meet the traveller at every turn. Mercantile credit stands
high, contracts are kept, labour is docile, teachable, and intelligent,
its earnings are secure, and, on the whole, law and order prevail.
Nor is it like “decay” that in 1898—in spite of a political situation
full of menace, of sporadic rebellions which largely checked business in
their localities, of the serious news from Peking in September, which
disorganised the trade of the northern ports, and of the disasters in
connection with the Yellow River—the elasticity was such that the value
of the import trade exceeded all previous records, while that of the
export trade exceeded that of every previous year except 1897, the total
volume of trade being the highest on record.
There was no export of silver, but a net import of Hk. Tls. 4,722,025,
and there was no scarcity of it in any part of the country. China met
the whole of her obligations without any depletion of her currency, and
imported nothing that she did not obtain in exchange for exports.[65]
The importance of stimulating the Chinese export trade is apt to be
overlooked. China will only purchase from foreign countries that for
which she can pay with her own products. The verdict of the
Inspector-General of Maritime Customs in China on the commercial
situation for 1898 is, “No doubt the Government is hard pressed for
funds, but _the country grows wealthier every year_.”[66]
Among the reasons given for the alleged “decay” of China is its
“over-population.” It is true that there are seriously congested areas,
even in SZE CHUAN, but if we take 400,000,000, the extreme estimate of
the population, it is but ten times that of Great Britain, while the
area of the empire is from sixteen to eighteen times as great.
What is “in decay” is the administration of government. The people are
straight, but officialism is corrupt.[67]
The subject has been fully dwelt upon in other books, with which I
suppose my readers to be acquainted. The theory of the Chinese
Government is one of the best ever devised by the wit of man. Against
every possible abuse apparent safeguards were provided. The enjoyment of
property and life was secured to the people. The laws in the main were
just, concise, and of equal pressure. The right of rising against a
corrupt and oppressive official was guaranteed. Literary examinations
were made the entrance to official life. Inferior birth was no bar to
the attainment of high position. The laws of the country embodied the
highest teaching of political ethics which it had received. The
patriarchal theory of government was never so systematised, or acted
upon for so long, and with so much consistency. The ethical teaching and
the laws based upon it remain, and the strongest power in China to-day
is Confucius; but the admirable theory of government has proved weak in
presence of the neglected factor of the downward tendency of human
nature in a pagan nation. The infamies of Chinese administration to-day
have been riveted upon China by centuries of political retrogression,
and the gradual lowering of the standard of public virtue in the absence
of a wholesome public opinion. Certain forms of bribery, corruption, and
peculation have obtained the force of custom, seven-tenths of the
revenue is arrested by the “three hands” of officials, all sums allotted
for public works, repairs, and military and naval equipment, suffer
enormous depletion _en route_ to their destinations, so that in the
Japanese war “a straight people with a corrupt Government” were easily
subdued by “a corrupt people with a straight Government.”[68]
One of the heaviest indictments against the system is, that under it it
is hardly possible for a good man to be rigidly honest, and there are
good men: and there are mandarins who, after a long and laborious period
of office, actually live and die poor. A well-meaning man, finding
himself entangled in the meshes of this system, is greatly to be pitied.
Custom is all in favour of peculation, and however much such men would
welcome a way of escape, to break with custom is as hard as to break off
the opium habit. Another difficulty besets the well-intentioned man—his
knowledge that his best efforts will certainly be frustrated by the
unscrupulous clerks and retainers of his _yamen_.
In Chapter XXIII. I just touched on the very laborious life of a
mandarin, who has to perform the work of six men, and rarely gets a
holiday. For this amount of work he is virtually unpaid, far more than
his wretchedly insufficient salary being expended on the necessary state
of his office. These nominal salaries are the deadly upas tree, which
has cast its fatal shadow over Chinese official life. They are the
_crux_ of the situation. They make peculation and corruption all but an
absolute necessity. Short periods of office, paying for appointments,
the evil custom of making presents to official superiors, the practice
that, after paying into the Imperial Exchequer the fixed quota of
taxation for his district, the magistrate can appropriate all that he
can squeeze beyond it, subject to liberal gifts to the high officials of
his province, are only a few of the evils of the Chinese administrative
system. It is chiefly out of this margin squeezed out of the people that
the fortunes of the higher officials are made.[69]
Every writer on China exposes the iniquities of the system, and they
come more or less to the ears and under the observation of every
traveller. They affect a fourth of the human race, and have brought the
most ancient of existing empires into the position of a “sick
man”—helpless, appealing, with voracious Western nations gnawing at his
extremities, and prepared to prey upon his vitals.
But China bristles with contradictions. The “sick man” ought to be “in
decay,” but he is not. His innate cheeriness is scarcely clouded by our
repeated assertions that he ought to be dead, and he faces the future
which we prophesy for him without misgiving! On the whole, peace, order,
and a fair amount of prosperity prevail throughout the empire. The gains
of labour are secure, taxation, even with the squeezes attending it, is
rarely oppressive in the country, and in the towns is extremely light.
The phrase “ground down” does not apply to the Chinese peasant. There is
complete religious toleration. Guilds, trades unions, and other
combinations carry out their systems unimpeded, and the Chinese genius
for association is absolutely unfettered. The Chinese practically in
actual life are one of the freest peoples on earth!
The reader may be staggered by what appears a monstrous paradox, in face
of the opinions regarding the infamies of administration previously
expressed, but if a single statement is applicable to the whole empire
it is this, that freedom is the birthright of the people, that they
possess “inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness,” and that China is one of the most democratic countries on
earth. The Government, feeble and evasive in its dealings with
foreigners, when it sets its mind on something among its own people, is
quite capable of carrying out its will, and is not nearly so impotent as
many suppose. Yet it habitually plays only a most minute part in the
economy of national life, and a Chinese may live and die without any
other contact with it than the payment of land-tax. He is free in all
trades and industries: to make money and to keep it: to emigrate and to
return with his gains: free to rise from the peasant’s hut to place and
dignity: to become a millionaire, and confer princely gifts upon his
province: free in his religion and his amusements: and in his social and
commercial life.
I have not space, knowledge, or ability to enter into the inwardness of
these extraordinary contradictions, and would only remark that we have
to deal in China not with a mass of downtrodden serfs, but with a nation
of free men.
I may be permitted, however, very diffidently to point out a few of the
reasons which, in my opinion, militate against the evils of
administration, and tend to the stability of the country. First among
these is the village system. In China the unit is not the individual but
the family, indivisible and sacred, the members of which are bound to
each other in life and death by indissoluble ties, of the strength of
which we cannot form a conception. Villages consist of groups of such
families, with their headmen and elders, who are responsible for each
individual, the step above them being the _hsien_, or district
magistrate, who may be regarded as the administrative unit. The Chinese
have a genius for self-government, and are by no means the “dumb, driven
cattle” which some suppose them to be. The villages are self-governing,
and no official dares to trench on their hereditary privileges. Every
successive dynasty has found itself bound to protect them in these, and
no “Son of Heaven” who called them in question could occupy the Dragon
Throne for six months.
These privileges, which by established custom have become actual rights,
consist primarily in the complete control of local affairs, the
possession of lands, and absolute freedom for trade and industry. Among
the many advantages of the village system is, that it enables villagers
in countless civil cases to avoid the serious evils of litigation in the
_yamens_ by the simple method of referring them to arbitration before
their headmen and elders.
Among other causes which tend to counterbalance the evils of the
administration, is the system of strict surveillance and mutual
responsibility, under which no man stands alone, and which as a vast
network holds China together. This has its own evils, one of which is
_mutual distrust_, which has, however, the good result of preventing men
from combining intelligently against the Government. The system makes
government easy, and certainly does not tend to disintegration.
Besides these there are the recognised right of rebellion when
grievances become intolerable; the execution of a species of lynch law
on culpable officials, which often takes the place of memorials to the
Throne, and courts of appeal; a certain dread on the part of magistrates
of being reported for corruption or inefficiency by the many spies of
the Central Government, or by the Censors, who, though said not to be
altogether free from venality, can, on occasion, be most remarkably
outspoken; the general education of the people in the principles on
which government is based; the genius for association which gives
strength to the weak; and the universal training both at home and school
in “The Five Duties of Man,” which are: (1) Loyalty to the Sovereign,
(2) piety to parents, (3) submissiveness to elders, (4) harmony between
husband and wife, (5) fidelity to friends.[70]
This is the empire which we speak of “partitioning” and “breaking up,”
with as little emotion as if it were an ant’s nest, with all its
singular contradictions, and emphatic antagonisms of good and evil.
There is a wide difference between bullying, in diplomatic language
“applying strong pressure,” and making righteous and politic demands
upon China. Nothing could be better for herself than the drastic reforms
suggested by Lord C. Beresford, but some of them involve what I think
would be an unwarrantable interference with her internal organisation.
Among righteous demands may certainly be placed the fulfilment of treaty
obligations—the giving security to the lives and property of foreigners
throughout the empire, which can only be attained by the formation of an
efficient army, or _gendarmerie_, well disciplined, drilled, armed, and
paid, and _mobile_—giving foreigners the right to live for trade
purposes in the interior (a right only conceded by Japan in July, 1899),
and an equable rearrangement of _likin_ and _loti-shui_.[71]
_Likin_ and _loti-shui_ are obnoxious taxes, and hamper trade
effectively, and the abuses of the system are very great, but abrupt and
sweeping changes would be very dangerous. It must be remembered that the
provincial governments have lost seriously through the operations of the
Imperial Maritime Customs (see p. 155), and rely mainly on _likin_ for
their revenue, that its abolition would involve a resort to direct
taxation, which would be intolerable to a people accustomed to indirect,
and would certainly lead to very serious risings in the West River and
Yangtze valleys. Official needs, established custom, and the relations
of the masses to custom, render the forcing of abrupt fiscal changes of
this nature upon the Chinese most impolitic, risking the disorganisation
and break up of China.
By bullying the Central Government it is made to “lose face” with its
subjects, and its authority is by so much weakened. The value of our
treaties absolutely depends on the power of the Government to give
effect to them. The sole security of the Chinese bondholder, and for the
sums invested, or to be invested in the railroads of the future, is the
integrity and cohesion of the Chinese Empire. Touch this integrity,
whether by active claims for “spheres of influence,” with consequent
disintegration, the enforced abolition of _likin_, or any policy of
pressure, and our treaties will be but waste paper. With regard to most
arrangements, however desirable in the way of reform they may be, the
word “insist,” pointing to coercion, should be blotted out of the
vocabulary of discussion.
I am still a believer in the justice and expediency of the “Open Door”
policy, as opposed to what I think is the fatal alternative policy of
“spheres of influence.” Many who would “rush” reforms in China, and are
impatient of delay, and are perhaps bitten by the “lust of domination,”
assert that it is too late for it, but I fail to see the reasons for
such a “counsel of despair.” The Marquess of Salisbury, at the end of
June, 1898, said: “If I am asked what our policy in China is, my answer
is very simple. It is to maintain the Chinese Empire, to prevent it
falling into ruins, to invite it into paths of reform, and to give it
every assistance which we are able to give it, to perfect its defence or
to increase its commercial prosperity. _By so doing we shall be aiding
its cause and our own._”[72] This announcement of policy has not been
recalled.
In the meantime it is impossible for China, pressed on every side, and
vaguely conscious that she stands at the “parting of the ways,” that
“the old order” is changing, and that she is in the grip of new forces,
to collect herself with a view to the reforms from which she cannot hope
to escape, and she falls back on her old idea of statesmanship—the
playing off one foreign country against another. After a career of
empire of two thousand years, in which she has increased in wealth and
population up to the present time, she finds herself at the dawn of a
new century, confronted by problems of which her classics and her
experience offer no solution, and the greatest of these is the
FOREIGNER.
In concluding this chapter, it is worth while to consider whether there
are any indications of reform from within, and whether the phrase, “The
awakening of China,” represents fact or not.
Our mechanical inventions, steamers, railroads, gas, telegraphs,
electric light, steam machinery, dredgers, artillery, torpedoes, arms of
precision, submarine telegraphy, steam printing, photography—our
surgery, the beauty and “up-keep” of our foreign settlements, and their
admirable municipal government, and our obvious wealth, have all been
emissaries knocking the conceit out of those who come in contact with
them. Chinese now work telegraph lines, own and run steam launches in
large numbers, enter our hospitals as medical students, and take
admirable photographs, nearly perfect in _technique_, only lacking in
artistic feeling. Factories owned and run by Chinese are springing up
here and there, and may eventually be successful. One of the great
passenger lines on the Lower Yangtze belongs to the “Chinese Merchants’
Company.”
Inland, for many years, foreign families have been living lives
elsewhere described—of different nationalities, but all worshippers of
one invisible God. Such persons have introduced into remote regions
kerosene lamps—which are doing much to alter social life in China, soap,
lucifer matches and vesta lights, condensed milk and tinned provisions,
sewing machines—enormously adopted by tailors, and much else, the
utility of all of which has been recognised, and which have compelled
the Chinese to admit the ability of the “barbarians.”
It is known, at least to the Chinese within fifty miles of the coast,
and up the Yangtze, on which Japanese steam lines are now running, that
the Japanese, who received from themselves the Chinese classics
centuries ago, have adopted the political and legal systems, industries,
and naval and military methods of foreigners; that they have a straight
Government, which no foreign power dares to bully; that they have been
received on equal terms into the family of nations, and that their
methods of warfare, before which China collapsed, were foreign methods.
The fact that a yellow people, venerating and teaching their own
classics, with a social order founded on Confucian principles, and with
Chinese as its official language, has adopted, to a great extent,
Western civilisation, and with manifest advantage, has produced a
remarkable effect since the war.
Last, but very far from being least, as it affects the brain of the
country and its natural leaders, is the circulation of the scientific,
historical, and Christian literature of the West. This is the Western
ferment which may “leaven the whole lump.” This circulation received an
enormous impulse when the reform edicts of the Emperor were promulgated,
making a knowledge of Western learning imperative on students, and has
not been greatly affected by the subsequent retrograde movement. It
cannot be doubted that those edicts, premature and unwise as some of
them were, were the direct result of the foreign literature which the
Emperor had previously been reading with avidity.
The larger portion of this literature, which I believe is destined to
reform and transform China, has been published by a society founded
twelve years ago by some of the leading men in China, and named the
“Society for the Diffusion of Christian and General Knowledge.” Sir
Robert Hart, G.C.M.G., is its president in China, and Mr. Timothy
Richards, an enthusiast about the language and people, and an optimist
about the future of the empire, is its secretary and inspiring spirit.
The literature for which the demand is now greater than the supply,
consists of distinctly Christian books, such as _Butler’s Analogy_; _a
Life of Christ_; _Christianity, and the Progress of Nations_; scientific
books, as on _Agricultural Chemistry_ and _Astronomy_; books on economic
subjects, such as _Productive and Non-Productive Labour_, _The Relation
of Education to National Progress_, etc., and some of our best standard
books are now in circulation, together with such special literature as
_Essays for the Times_, _The Renaissance of China_, _Progress of China’s
Neighbours_, a periodical called _A Review of the Times_, and various
others. The drift of the desire for knowledge is shown by the very large
sale of Mackenzie’s _History of the Nineteenth Century_, and of a
_History of the Japanese War_; _Sixty Years of Queen Victoria’s Reign_
being also much in demand.
These books and many others, circulating largely among the _literati_,
at once creating and expressing aspirations, all present in some form or
other that higher ideal which produced those reformers, greatly led by
Kang Yen-Wei, who advocated political, commercial, educational, and
religious reform in 1898, rendering it memorable in Chinese history as a
year in which men showed that the welfare of their country was dearer to
them than life itself.
A few instances taken at random show how the Western leaven is working.
Large sums have been subscribed by the Chinese for the object of
teaching Western languages and learning, specially in the ports. Two
wealthy Chinese offered to raise 10,000 dollars for the enlargement of
the Women’s Hospital in Shanghai, if Dr. Reifsnyder, the lady medical
missionary, would consent to teach Western medicine to Chinese girls. A
Cantonese, one of the managers of the China Merchants’ Co., was so
impressed by Mr. Richards’ translation of Mackenzie’s _History of the
Nineteenth Century_, that he bought a hundred copies, and sent them to
the leading mandarins in Peking.
A HUNAN gentleman, visiting Shanghai two years ago, met with the
“C.L.S.” magazine, _Review of the Times_, and was so impressed with its
helpfulness to China, that he ordered two hundred copies, and
distributed them monthly in HUNAN to those who had specially opposed
foreigners and Christianity. These men, in their turn, ordered a
complete set of the “C.L.S.” books, and read them for two years in order
to be sure of their contents. Recently the Literary Chancellor of the
province wrote to the “C.L.S.” to the effect that China must reform, and
on the lines indicated in the Society’s publications, and in the name of
the governor and gentry of HUNAN invited the Chinese editor to become a
professor in the college of the provincial capital.[73]
The volume on _Agricultural Chemistry_ has been very largely read. Early
in 1899 the Viceroy of Nanking and others raised £50,000 for an
agricultural college, and invited Mr. Bentley, the author of the book,
an American missionary, to be its head. The Viceroy in Central China,
Chang-Chih-Tung, whose views on the use of opium I have previously
quoted, actually sympathised with the Yangtze anti-foreign riots in
1891, but by 1894 had been so profoundly influenced by the study of
Western literature that he sent a large donation to the “C.L.S.,” and
has lately published a book in which he strongly advocates the immediate
adoption of a modern system of education.
It is not alone among the older men that our literature is producing
marked effects here and there, but the literary students in considerable
numbers are fired with the desire for Western learning. Fifteen hundred
applied for entrance to the new Peking University, of which the learned
Rev. W. Martin, author of _A Cycle of Cathay_, is principal.
Occasionally foreign literature produces almost grotesque effects. A
_Hsien_ magistrate, having read Dr. Faber’s _Civilization, East and
West_, was much impressed by the chapter on our Western treatment of
prisoners, and at once set his own to work at spinning, weaving, and
basket-making, to the intense amusement of the retainers of the _yamen_.
In SZE CHUAN I saw few, if any, indications of the awakening which
undoubtedly exists. A foreign traveller, whether he speak Chinese or
not, does not see below the surface, and the province is far away from
the centres in which the Western leaven is working most energetically,
but in several places where I halted the mandarin sent to inquire if I
had any “foreign books?” Kuei-chow is one of the most anti-foreign of
the provinces, and it is noteworthy that lately her governor has sent to
the “C.L.S.” for 1000 dollars’ worth of Western literature.
I think that there is no doubt that the leaven of Western thought is
working surely though slowly among the literary class, and that the
reform movement, scotched, but not killed, by the strong measures of the
Empress Dowager, grew out of it.
Two causes favour the spread of Western literature; first that the four
hundred millions of the empire possess one written language, and second,
that there are 200 examination centres in China, and that at each, from
5000 to 10,000 students, the mandarins, lawyers, and leaders of the
future, a million in all, are under examination every year. Our best
literature, and our Christian literature, supplied to these centres
reaches the most influential homes in the country. Mr. Archibald Little,
the pioneer of steam navigation on the Upper Yangtze, and himself a
Chinese scholar, strongly urges the supply of “C.L.S.” literature to all
these centres. He considers that the mental revolution now proceeding,
and the reform movement, are largely due to the influence of books, and
even says that in the circulation of Western literature he sees the
great hope for the “Open Door!”
That irresistible forces are beginning to drive China out of her conceit
and seclusion is evident. Ten years ago there were only two or three
papers in the vernacular besides the official _Peking Gazette_. To-day
there are over seventy, and native journalism is actively developing.
Through the press the Young China Party—the creation of Anglo-Chinese
schools and foreign influence, chiefly in the ports—gives expression to
those feelings of unrest and discontent which its wider outlook on
affairs produces. Through it the younger _literati_, awakened to a new
conception of patriotism by contact with Western thought, denounce the
ignorance and corruption of the magistracy, and urge as a remedy the
introduction of mathematics and political economy into the provincial
examinations! The Viceroy, ChangChih-Tung, not only founded a paper
“which was to engage the sympathies of the literary class in the work of
progress and reform, and to interest its readers in questions of
international and general importance,”[74] but made its support
compulsory in all the _yamens_ and libraries in the _Hu_ provinces. Its
staff is said to be composed of men who combine broad views with
classical scholarship, and it is reputed to have great influence with
the upper classes, even though the reforming Viceroy has had to withdraw
his official support from it.
It is too early to write of the probable influence of the coming
railroads. It is easy to take an exaggerated view, but undoubtedly rapid
communication is a great foe to darkness and ignorance. Everywhere there
are indications of a change in the “classes” which lead the “masses.”
There is a Chinese saying, that “if you wish to irrigate a piece of land
you must first carry the water to the highest level, so, if you wish to
enlighten a nation, you must begin with its leaders.” Very important and
valuable inquiries have been made into all subjects connected with
trade; but this mental change, which will probably exercise an enormous
influence on trade and our relations with China, has been singularly
overlooked.
It is perhaps best that there should be no abrupt rupture with the past.
The reform edicts, though abrogated, have kindled a flame; and though
there may be suspended progress, China can never really go back any
more, for the forces which have been set in motion have never yet
suffered defeat. “The mills of God grind slowly,” but they grind
inexorably. Let us be patient with our ancient ally, and “invite” rather
than bully her into “paths of reform.” I fear much that the desperate
determination of the European nations to secure her potentialities of
trade by fair means or foul, may be driving her to her doom, and that in
the clash and turmoil the symptoms of an increasing desire for reform
from within—a reform which would slowly give us all we can righteously
ask—are being overlooked or ignored.
Into her archaic and unreformed Orientalism the Western leaven has
fallen for good or evil. Rudely awakened by the Japanese victories out
of her long sleep, China, half dismayed and wholly dazed, with much loss
of “face,” and shaken confidence in the methods of diplomacy which have
served her so well in the past, finds herself confronted by an array of
powerful, grasping, ambitious, and not always over-scrupulous powers,
bent, it may be, on over-reaching her and each other, ringing with
barbarian hands the knell of the customs and polity which are the legacy
of Confucius, clamouring for ports and concessions, and bewildering her
with reforms, suggestions, and demands, of which she sees neither the
expediency nor the necessity.
In this turmoil, and with the European nations thundering at her gates,
it is impossible for China to attempt any reforms which would not from
the nature of the case be piecemeal and superficial. The reform of an
administration like hers needs the prolonged and careful consideration
of the best minds in the empire, with such skilled and disinterested
foreign advice as was given by Sir Harry Parkes to Japan when she
embarked on her new career.
It must be remembered that the remodelling of the administrative system
of China is beset with difficulties which have not existed in any other
country, and which are accentuated by the vast population and area of
the empire. Chinese statesmen (if there be such) have to consider what
reforms could be carried out with the approval of the masses, _i.e._,
without bringing about a revolution. The very abuses of administration
have gained something of the sanctity which attends on custom among this
singular people. It is most important that those who have to deal with
Chinese affairs should be able to obtain such information as would
enable them to make a just estimate of the strength and probable
diffusion of the desire for reform among the _literati_, at whose feet
the masses lie with a genuine reverence.
China is certainly at the dawn of a new era. Whether the twentieth
century shall place her where she ought to be, in the van of Oriental
nations, or whether it shall witness her disintegration and decay,
depends very largely on the statesmanship and influence of Great
Britain.
ITINERARY
_Li._[75]
Wan Hsien to San-tsan-pu 65
Ting-tsiao 63
Liang-shan Hsien 50
Wen-kia-cha 60
Chai-shih-kiao 60
Hsia-shan-po 73
Kiu Hsien 60
Ching-sze-yao 60
Siao-kiao 65
Sha-shih-pu 55
Hsieh-tien-tze 75
King-kiang-sze 65
Heh-shui-tang 65
PAONING FU 65
Hsia-wu-li-tze 40
Sin-tien-tze 90
Mao-erh-tiao 90
Tien-kia-miao 70
Wu-lien 115
Tze-tung Hsien 80
Cheng-hsiang-po 80
Mienchow 43
Lun-gan (?) 90
Mienchuh 70
Shuang-tu-ti 45
Peng Hsien 80
Kuan Hsien 70
Sin-fan Hsien 105
Sin-tu Hsien 30
CHENG-TU FU 40
Kuan Hsien 120
Fu-ki 30
Sin-wen-ping 60
Shuo-chiao 40
Wei-cheo 60
Li-fan Ting 65
Tsa-ku-lao 60
Chuang-fang 60
Chu-ti 45
Miao-ko 50
Matang 105
Somo 60
Cheng-tu Fu to Shanghai, by water, 2000 miles.
APPENDICES
APPENDIX A.
The Rules of the Chinese Guilds are too long and elaborate for insertion
in this appendix, and condensation would do them an injustice.
APPENDIX B.[76]
1. NET VALUE OF TOTAL
TRADE OF PORTS IN THE
YANGTZE BASIN, 1898.
£
Shanghai 13,296,643
Chungking 2,614,031
Ichang 194,359
Sha-shih 25,666
Hankow 8,065,717
Kiukiang 2,625,083
Wuhu 1,527,079
Chinkiang 3,471,532
Soochow 229,113
Hangchow 1,199,022
—————
£33,248,245
===========
2. TRADE OF SHANGHAI, 1898.
_Foreign Goods_— £ £
Total import =19,073,534=
Less re-exported—
(_a_) To foreign countries and Hongkong 745,000
(_b_) To Chinese ports (chiefly to
northern and Yangtze ports) 13,914,558
——————————
14,659,558
Making net total foreign imports =4,413,976=
_Native Produce_—
Imported (chiefly from northern and Yangtze
ports, Ningpo, Swatow, Canton, and =11,413,637=
Hangchow)
Less re-exported to foreign countries and
Chinese ports 9,724,673
——————————
Making net total Native imports =1,688,964=
Native produce of local origin exported =7,193,704=
to foreign countries =4,676,674=
Ditto to Chinese ports =2,517,029= „
—————————— ——————————
Gross value of trade of Shanghai =£37,680,875=
Net „ „ „ =£13,296,643= ==========
==========
3. TOTAL NET IMPORT OF
OPIUM INTO CHINA FOR
1898.
Quantity 6,638,333 lbs.
Value £4,388,365
4. TOTAL VALUE OF FOREIGN TRADE OF CHINA IN 1898.
= Hk. Taels 368,616,483 = £55,292,472.
5. SHARE OF ENGLAND IN CHINA’S TRADE FOR 1898.[77]
I. _Shipping._
───────────────────┬───────────┬───────────┬───────────────────────────
Flag. │Entries and│ Tonnage. │ Percentages of Tonnage.
│Clearances.│ │
───────────────────┼───────────┼───────────┼─────────────┬─────────────
„ │ „ │ „ │ (A.) │ (B.)
│ │ │ Including │ Excluding
│ │ │ Chinese. │ Chinese.
British │ 22,609│ 21,265,966│ 62·12│ 81·65
Chinese │ 23,547│ 8,187,572│ 23·92│
Other nationalities│ 6,505│ 4,780,042│ 13·96│ 18·35
───────────────────┼───────────┼───────────┼─────────────┼─────────────
│ 52,661│ 34,253,580│ 100│ 100
───────────────────┴───────────┴───────────┴─────────────┴─────────────
II. _Trade._
───────────────────┬───────────┬─────────┬───────────┬─────────────────
Flag. │ Total │ Transit │ Total. │ Percentages of
│ Values │ Trade. │ │ Value.
│ Foreign & │ │ │
│ Coast │ │ │
│ Trade. │ │ │
───────────────────┼───────────┼─────────┼───────────┼────────┬────────
│ £ │ £ │ £ │ (A.) │ (B.)
British │ 76,236,290│2,695,437│ 78,931,727│ 51·88│ 79·40
Chinese │ 50,163,445│2,410,663│ 52,574,108│ 34·56│
Other nationalities│ 19,385,235│1,217,343│ 20,602,578│ 13·56│ 20·60
───────────────────┼───────────┼─────────┼───────────┼────────┼────────
│145,784,970│6,323,443│152,108,413│ 100│ 100
───────────────────┴───────────┴─────────┴───────────┴────────┴────────
6. PRINCIPAL IMPORTS INTO CHINA FROM FOREIGN COUNTRIES,
1898.[78]
Quantity. Value.
Opium 6,638,000 lbs. £4,388,385
Cotton goods 11,642,824
Raw cotton 30,534,000 lbs. 425,959
Woollen Goods 478,525
Metals 1,468,061
Matches (mainly Japanese) 11,352,304 gross 389,561
Oil (Kerosene) 96,882,126 gallons 1,787,205
Sugar 10,793 tons 2,029,267
Other imports 8,827,113
———————————
Total £31,436,900
===========
7. PRINCIPAL EXPORTS FROM CHINA TO FOREIGN COUNTRIES,
1898.[78]
Quantity. Value.
Silk, of all kinds 35,651,333 lbs. £8,415,584
Tea „ „ 205,146,667 lbs. 4,331,922
Other Exports 11,108,066
———————————
Total £23,855,572
===========
INDEX
A.
Aconite, Trade in, 339.
_Agricultural Chemistry_, Circulation of the vol. on, 541.
Albumen factories, 65.
Allen, Consul Clement, his report on mission hospitals, 47.
Altar of Incense, An, 418.
American Baptists, The, 471.
Ancestor-worship, 522.
An Hui, North, 6.
An-shun Bridge, The, 460.
B.
Baber, Mr., 3, 265, 451;
his papers on Western China, 156;
on rock-dwellings, 467.
Baggage coolies, 196.
Baian Kara range, The, 2.
Baker, Mr., 416.
Bamboo suspension bridges, 378.
“Barbarians,” Villages of the, 376, 377, 382–385.
Barbers, Itinerant, 80.
Be-dien, The author’s interpreter, 55, 155;
his character, 207.
Beggars, Treatment of, 187.
“Bellows” gorge. See Feng Hsiang.
Benevolent guilds, 182.
Benjamin, Bishop, 99, 100, 102.
Beresford, M.P., Lord Charles, 530;
his suggested reforms, 536.
Blakiston, Captain, his description of the “Pillar of Heaven,” 106;
of trackers, 142.
Bourne, Consul, 140, 142, 149 (note), 496 (note), 499;
on opium smoking, 515.
Brick tea factories, 65.
Bridges, 231, 232, 252.
British Merchant, Dependence of the, upon the Chinese compradore, 20,
21;
decrease of his trade, 64.
Buffalo, The water, 232, 235.
Bullock, Mr. and Mrs., 15.
C.
Callum, Mr., 348.
Canadian Mission, The, 519.
_Canons of Filial Duty_, The, 277.
“Canton opium,” 512.
Carles, Consul, 188 (note);
on missionaries helping trade, 47.
Cassels, Bishop, 281, 286.
Census, The taking of a, 270.
_Century of Surnames_, The, 277.
Chai-jen, 211, 390, 393, 396.
Chair travelling, 202.
Chang, 423.
Chang Chih-tung, H. E., on opium smoking, 516;
on education, 541;
influence of Western literature on, 541.
Chang-fei, The temple of, 166, 167, 168 (note).
_Chang-wo_, The s.s., 83.
Chapel of Meditations, The, 358.
Che, 145.
Che-kiang, Province of, 1;
use of _pahs_ or haulovers in, 32;
Christian converts in, 521.
Chengtu, 2, 8, 351, 352, 458, 463;
musk trade of, 339;
canals and bridges of, 355;
population of, 343;
temples of, 357;
wall of, 355.
Chengtu plain, The, 194, 324, 329, 334, 347, 458;
products of, 343, 348.
Chia-ling Fu, 3, 464, 477.
Chia-ling river, The, 3, 273, 280, 281, 314;
affluents of, 4;
walls on, 86.
Chiang-Ku, 463.
Ch’ien Tang river, The, 34.
China, administration of Government in, 532;
books most in demand in, 540;
contradictions in, 534;
examination centres in, 542;
maritime customs of, 155, 531;
newspapers in, 542;
population of, 532;
trade of, 531, 546–548;
travelling necessaries in, 56 (note);
village system in, 535;
Western literature in, 539–542.
“China ink,” 58.
China Inland Mission, The, 471, 477, 495, 519, 527.
Chinese brutality, 420;
Buddhism and Western civilisation, 12;
charities, 181–193;
civilisation, 12;
classics, 276–279;
cotton factory, 59;
curiosity, 210;
currency, 92;
delicacies, 298;
divinities, 193;
drinks and food, 300, 302;
education, 274 _et seq._;
energy and skill, 6, 10;
genius for self-government, 535;
guest-room, 175;
inns, 202, 205;
justice, 214;
medicines, 52;
mob, 219;
proverb, 7;
roads, 243;
social and commercial organisation, 13;
theatricals, 330;
towns, 250;
trading instincts, 12;
views of humanity, 182;
women, 242, 270.
Chinese bondholder, Security of the, 537.
_Chinese Gazetteer_, The, 8.
“Chinese Merchants’ Company,” The, 538.
Ching-chou Fu, 87–89.
Ching-sze-yao, 246.
Chinkiang, 3, 9;
benevolent institutions in, 184 _et seq._;
British concessions at, 56 (and note), 57;
grand canal at, 6;
guilds and trade of, 57, 58;
influence of the Yangtze river at, 7;
situation of, 56.
Chin Sha river, The, 471;
source and course of, 2;
junction with the Min, 2, 3;
navigable portion of, 2.
Chin-shuan river, The, 429.
Chin-tai, 224.
_Chipa_, 118, 128, 147.
_Chod-tens_, 423.
Cho-ko-ki tribe, The, 442, 443.
Christian converts, 524.
Christianity, Influence of, 48, 518, 522, 529.
Chuang-fang, 413.
Chungking, 3, 463, 486;
effect of opening as a treaty port, 142, 155, 180;
importation of cotton into, 8;
Mr. Little’s voyage to, 138;
position of, 490;
products of, 490;
rapids near, 8;
rise of the Yangtze at, 4, 5, 7;
trade of, 339, 496, 499;
union of Chia-ling and Yangtze at, 280.
Chung-ku-lo temple, The, 179.
Church Missionary Society’s Mission, 286, 519, 527.
Chusan archipelago, The, 55.
Chu-ti, 415, 416.
Classics, Chinese school, 276, 277.
“Cloudy Province,” The, 460, 464.
Coal-mine, A visit to a, 481.
Coffins, 313.
Colquhoun, Mr., 530, 536 (note).
Confucianism, 11, 12, 528, 532.
_Cores de Vries_, The s.s., 184.
Cormack, Mr. and Mrs., 323.
Cottons, English, 308.
Couching Dragon, Gorge of the, 338.
“Cross Beam” rapid, The, 136.
“Cycle of Cathay,” A, 541.
D.
Davies, Mr., 176.
Dudgeon, Dr., 513.
Dust storms, Agency of, 5.
_Dzai-zen-pusa_, or the God of Wealth, 356.
Dzo, Herds of, 422, 425, 455.
E.
Educated, Ignorance of the, 177.
Education in China, 274 _et seq._
“Eight Cliffs,” Gorge of the, 171.
Elephantiasis, A case of, 442.
Elgin, Lord, his visit to Hankow, 61.
“Emily Clayton Memorial,” The, 320.
Endacott, Mr., 83, 114, 149;
rock-dwellings in his garden, 467.
Erh-Wang temple, The, 340.
_Esk_, the gunboat, Accident on, 96.
F.
Faber’s _Civilization East and West_, Dr., 541.
Fans, Export and manufacture of, 37, 478;
use of, 478.
Feng Hsiang gorge, The, 110, 151, 155, 505.
Fire wells, 273.
“Five Duties of Man,” The, 536.
“Five Hundred Disciples,” Temple of the, 38.
Foot-binding, The practice of, 240.
“Foreign smoke,” 508.
Fou river, The, 316, 319.
Fox, Mr., escorts the author over native Shanghai, 25.
Fu river, The, 280.
Fu-chow, 4, 501, 502.
Fuh-ri-gan pass, 224, 227.
Fu-ki, 366.
Fu-kien, Christianity in, 518.
Fu-ling river, The, 3, 4, 501, 502.
Funeral ceremonies, 314.
Fung Shui mystery, The, 96.
G.
Gandar, Père, 6.
Gardner, Consul, 114.
Gerard, M., 101.
“Get-down-from-horse” rapid, The, 151.
Gill, Capt., 142, 357 (note), 377, 389, 393 (note), 424, 457 (note).
“Glorious Rapid,” The, 140.
“Glory of Buddha,” Pilgrimage to the, 464.
Goitre, Prevalence of, 442, 449.
“Goose-tail” rock, The, 152.
Government administration, Corruption of, 532.
Gowers, Miss, 291.
Grainger, Mr., 339, 343.
Grand Canal, The, 3;
at Chinkiang, 6;
between Hangchow and Chinkiang, 31.
“Great Gold River,” The, 424, 434, 514.
Great Plain, The, 4;
characteristics of, 5;
dust storms in, 5;
annual inundations on, 10, 501.
Guilds, 58, 66, 499, 534.
H.
Han river, The, 4;
trade on, 6, 9;
at Hankow, 77.
Hangchow, 29–54;
the entrance to, 33;
silk looms at, 37;
situation of, 38;
the “bore,” 38;
wall of, 43;
population of, 43;
Japanese settlement in, 43;
the Medical Mission Hospitals at, 44–54.
Hang-kia, 425.
Hankow, 4, 505;
rise of the Yangtze at, 4, 7, 8, 62;
communication with, 9;
first impressions of, 59;
the Bund, 61;
Lord Elgin’s visit to, 61;
chief buildings in, 61;
foreign community in, 62;
climate of, 62;
currency in, 63;
trade in, 63, 64, 65, 66;
loss of English trade in, 64;
guilds of, 66;
native quarter, 67;
the wall and streets of, 67, 68;
coffin shops of, 72;
the harbour of, 78, 79;
English Wesleyan missionaries in, 81;
charities at, 189.
_Hankow Times_, The, 62.
Han Yang, 61.
Hart, G.C.M.G., Sir Robert, 540.
Heng-liang-tze rapid, The, 128.
“Henrietta Bird” Hospital, The, 291.
Henry of Canton, Dr., 182.
Hicks, Mr., 104.
Hill, Rev. David, 82, 181.
Hing-lung-t’an rapid, The, 140.
Hirst, Consul, on opium smoking, 515.
Hoang Ho, The, 6.
Ho, Admiral, 149.
Ho-chow, 4.
Holland, Mr., 99.
Honan, Province of, 1, 6.
Hongkew, the American settlement of Shanghai, 17.
Honton, or Fu river, The, 4.
Horsburgh, Rev. Heywood, 323, 324, 361.
Hsai-shan-po, 239.
Hsiang river, The, 4;
trade on, 6.
Hsin-tan rapid, The, 118, 121, 123, 127, 505.
Hsin-tan village, 121.
Huai and its tributaries, Commercial routes on the, 6.
Huang-pu river, Trade on the, 16, 24.
Hunan, Province of, 1;
possibilities for Lancashire trade in, 65.
“Hunan Tracts,” The, 257.
Hunan “braves,” 88.
Hupeh province, 1.
—— ranges, The, 8.
I.
Ichang, 4, 505;
cotton imports into, 8;
first view of, 95;
foreigners in, 96;
junks at, 95;
mission buildings at, 95;
rapids near, 8;
Roman missions at, 99–101;
the Yangtze at, 8.
Ichang gorge, The, 106, 109, 505.
Idols, Dealers in, 71.
Indian opium, Use of, 512.
Inland mission work, 285 _et seq._
—— sanitarium, 292.
I-ren, The. See Mantze.
“Iron Coffin Gorge,” The, 150.
Itinerary, The author’s, 545.
J.
James, Mr., 477.
Jamieson, Consul-General, 221.
Japanese commercial activity, 65, 91;
adoption of Chinese classics and Western methods, 539.
Ja-ra Peak, The, 457.
Jardine, Matheson, and Co., 18.
John, Dr. Griffith, 60.
Jsai li Sect, The, 511.
Junks, 79, 95, 138–149;
at Fu-chow, 502.
_Juvenile Instructor_, The, 278.
K.
Kanpo, Towers at, 383.
Kan river, The, 4;
junction with the Yangtze, 6.
Kansuh, S.E. drainage area of, 1, 3;
the Mohammedan rebellion in, 530;
trade of, 280.
Kay, Mr., 361, 362, 393, 394, 396, 419, 420, 425, 429, 438, 441.
Kelly and Walsh, Book-store of, 20.
Kerosene oil, Import of, 66.
Kiang-peh, 490.
Kiangsi china, 66.
—— Province of, 1.
Kiangsu, Province of, 1;
influence of the Yangtze on, 7.
Kien-ing, Anti-Christian riots at, 518.
Kimber, Dr., 44, 54 (note).
_Kin hwa_, or “golden flowers,” 161.
King Ho stream, The, 249.
King-kiang-sze, 269.
King-mien-sze, 249.
Kin-ta river, The, 434.
“Kitten” rapid, The, 151.
Kiu-ho river, The, 244.
Kiu Hsien, 244.
Kiu-kiang, 9, 59.
Koko Nor, The, 339.
Ku river, The, 4, 280.
Kuan, 458.
Kuang Yuen, 280.
Kuan Hsien, 2, 338;
the city temple of, 362;
hostility to foreigners, 347.
Kueichow, 31, 128.
—— Province of, 1;
import of opium into, 507, 515;
demand for Western literature in, 542.
—— City, dust storm in, 5.
Kueichow Fu, or Kuei Fu, 8, 152–165;
inhabitants’ hostility to foreigners, 153;
value of _Likin_ at, 154;
New Year’s Day at, 160–165.
Ku-erh-kio, 415, 456.
Kukiang, Benevolent institutions at, 189.
Kung-tan river, 501.
_Kwan Yin_, the goddess of Mercy, 55.
Kwa-tung rapid, The, 118.
Kyin-pan-si pass, 244.
L.
Lamas, Earnings of, 445.
Lao-ma, or “Old Horse” rapid, 166.
Lao-min-tze, 117.
Lao-pan, or skipper, The, 104, 124, 141, 145, 149.
Lawton, Rev. W., 181, 188 (note).
Liang-shan Hsien, 219, 222.
Li-fan Ting, 361, 377, 382, 384, 389, 457;
a custom at, 390.
_Likin_, 93, 537;
at Kuei Fu, 154, 155.
Limin-fu, 490.
Li Ping, Temple of, 339, 343;
irrigation works of, 344.
Literary examinations, 532.
Literati and Christianity, The, 525;
Western literature chiefly circulated amongst, 540;
its influence, 542, 544.
Literature, The god of, 312, 313.
—— of the West, Circulation of, 539–542.
Little, Mr. A., at Chung-King, 495;
his description of the “Pillar of Heaven,” 106;
estimate of volume of water in Yeh-tan rapid, 132;
his voyage on the Yangtze, 138;
estimate of the loss of junks, 140;
on Sze Chuan, 477;
on trackers, 142;
on the influence of books, 542.
—— Mrs. Archibald, 241 (note).
Litton, Mr., 280;
his report on Sze Chuan, 11 (note), 194;
on the use of “water tobacco,” 513 (note).
Lo-kia-chan, 331;
assault on the author at, 332.
Lolo tribes, The, 471.
Longevity, The temple of, 166.
Loti-shui, 537.
Louvets, Mons., 518 (note).
Lu, Dr., 48.
Lu-chien, 485.
Lu-chow, 3, 477.
Lu-fang, 311.
Lu Yew, the traveller, 31, 32.
M.
Mackenzie’s _History of the Nineteenth Century_, 540.
Main, Dr., 33, 44, 48, 49, 50, 54 (note), 510, 513.
Maitreya Buddha, Figure of, 467.
Malcolm, Dr., 54 (note).
Manchuria, Scottish and Irish missions in, 518.
Mandarins or _kuans_, 253, 533.
Mantze cultivation, 422;
custom, 415;
dwellings, 377, 382–386, 389, 395, 408, 410, 413, 415;
hospitality, 413.
Mantze, The, absence of disease amongst, 442;
burials amongst, 445;
character of, 450;
customs of, 444;
dress of, 451;
language of, 449;
maladies and morals of, 449;
position of women amongst, 446;
religion of, 445;
trade and commerce of, 450.
Mao-erh-tiao, 302.
Martin, Rev. W., 541.
Matang, 339, 430, 455;
beauty of Mantze women at, 430.
Matang river, The, 433, 434.
Meadows, Mr., 534 (note).
Medical missions, 44–54.
Meichow, 463.
Mei-ling pass, The, 6.
Meitel, Bishop, 102.
Melon seeds, Games with, 299.
Mia-ko, 421–423.
Miao Chitze, or “Temple Stairs” rapid, 166.
_Middle Kingdom_, Dr. W. Williams’s, 276 (note), 314 (note).
Mien-chow, 319;
temple of Confucius at, 320.
Mien-chuh Hsien, 324;
C.M.S. House at, 329.
“Military Code,” Gorge of the, 128.
_Millenary_, The, 277.
Min, or Fu river, 337, 338, 339, 340, 460;
source of the, 2;
navigable waters of, 2;
junction with the River of Golden Sand, 3;
importance in the eyes of Chinese geographers, 3;
affluents of, 3;
traffic on, 8;
bamboo bridges over, 365;
character of, 366;
branches of, 374, 426;
villages on, 375;
junction with the Ya and Tatu, 464;
rock-dwellings on, 467, 468, 471.
Min gorge, The, 367.
Mission hospitals, 44–54;
Dr. Christie’s at Mukden, 49 (note);
patients in, 52.
Missionaries, Attitude of Chinese towards, 528;
protection afforded to, 258;
troubles of, 320.
Mitan gorge, The, 110, 128.
Money annoyances, 212.
Morphia, Importation of, 510.
Morrison, Dr., of the _Times_, 172.
Mosquitoes, 478.
Mou-kung Ting road, The, 373.
Moule, Bishop, 44.
Mount Omi, 463.
Mukden, 533 (note);
suicides in, 51.
Musk trade, 339.
N.
Nan river, The, 463.
Nanking, 9, 59.
Nan-mu-yurh, 150.
Nan-po glen, The, 505.
Nan-pu, 274, 280.
Nan-to, 110, 117.
Nganhui, Province of, 1;
manufacture of “China ink” in, 58.
Nganking, 9, 59.
Niang-tze-ling pass, 366.
Ningpo, 55.
—— varnish, 44, 72.
Nitrate of soda, 381.
Niu-kan gorge, The, 110, 118.
Niu-kau-tan rapid, The, 128.
O.
_Odes for Children_, 277.
Official visiting, 459.
Omi-shan precipice, The, 4;
pilgrimages to, 366, 464.
“Open door” Policy, The, 537.
Opium poppy and its use, 348, 506–517.
Orphan rocks, The, 59.
P.
_Pah_, The, or haulover, 4, 32.
_Pai-fangs_, 198, 218, 252.
Pai-shui Chiang, 280.
——river, The, 4, 280.
Pa-ko-shan, 490.
Paoning Fu, 86, 280, 282;
solitary journey to, 194;
result of using opium at, 507;
church building at, 520;
mission stations at, 526.
Parkes, Sir Harry, 544.
Passport difficulties, 397, 399.
Passports, 211, 441, 452.
Peh-shi, Trade in coal at, 481;
trees at, 485 (note).
Peh-teo-shan pass, 390, 405.
Pei-shih, 151.
Peking Government, Weakness of the, 13, 14.
Peng Hsien, 333, 334.
Peng-shan Hsien, 463.
Phillips, Mr. and Mrs., 329.
Photographic difficulties, 156.
Pigou, Mr., 24.
“Pillar of Heaven,” The, 106.
Ping Shan, 2, 471.
Ping-shu gorge, The, 121, 124.
_Poyang_, The s.s., 56;
runs down a junk, 59.
Poyang lake, The, 4;
area of, 6.
Prayer-flags, 445.
—— wheels, 408, 422, 445.
“Prince’s Temple,” The, 357.
Prjevalsky, Colonel, his exploration of the Yangtze, 2.
Protestant missionaries, 102, 518 _et seq._
Pruen, Dr., 291.
Putu, The Island of, 55.
Pu-tung Point, 17.
Pyramid Hill, 96.
R.
Railroads, Probable influence of, 543.
Ramsay, Miss, 175–177.
“Red Basin,” The, 16, 63, 246, 247, 248, 264.
Reed-beds of the Yangtze, 85.
Reifsnyder, Dr., 540.
Religious dramas, 329.
_Review of the Times_, The, 541.
Rhubarb, Importation of, 339.
Rice-fields, 7.
Richards, Mr. Timothy, 540.
_River of Golden Sand_, Captain Gill’s, 357 (note).
Rock-dwellings, 467, 468, 471.
Roman missions, 99–103, 523.
Rong-Kia river, The, 433, 434.
Rope bridges, 369.
Rosthorn, Mr. Von, 3, 8, 395, 441.
S.
Sai-pei-tu pass, 228.
Salisbury, The Marquess of, on England’s policy in China, 538.
Salt boilers, 152.
—— wells, 273.
Sampans, 85, 124, 140.
San-tsan-pu, 202.
Sar-pu, 224.
Schjöltz, Mr., 96.
Secret societies, 524.
Shan-Shang-Ren. See Mantze.
Shanghai, Astor House at, 21;
author’s return to, 505;
Benevolent Society at, 22;
British and American settlements in, 19, 23;
Chinese element in, 18, 24–26;
country round, 5, 15, 16;
French settlement in, 23;
hospitality in, 21;
impressions upon landing at, 17;
Ladies’ Benevolent Society at, 22;
missions at, 22;
why called “the model settlement,” 19;
municipality of, 19;
Royal Asiatic Society’s branch at, 23;
Sailors’ Home of Rest, at, 22;
Women’s Hospital in, 540.
Shang-wa-li-tze market-place, 296.
Shanjin, 31.
Shan-rang Ho river, The, 266.
Shan-rang-sar, 224.
Shan-si, Banking talent in, 499.
Shantung, S.E. drainage area of, 1.
Shao Hsing, 55, 161.
Sha-shih, 4, 85, 86, 87;
character of the Yangtze at, 6;
commercial routes from, 93;
cottons of, 308;
fish market at, 90;
missions in, 91;
pagoda at, 89;
population of, 89;
refugees at, 89;
trade of, 91, 92.
Shen-kia-chao, Pass of, 214.
Shensi, trade route to, 93.
Shensi, S.E. drainage area of, 1.
Shih-men, 482.
Shi-Tze-Ping pass, 424.
Shih-pao-chai, 502.
_Shui Li Fu_, or “Prefect of the Waterways,” The, 347.
Shun, The Emperor, 522.
Shuo-chiao, 374;
scarcity of food at, 375.
Shu river, The, 4.
_Siao Hioh_, The, 278.
Siao-Ho, The, 361, 366, 377, 384, 395, 404, 409, 424, 455;
gorge of, 378.
Siao-Kiao, 249.
Sifans, The, 443, 449.
Si-hu, 38, 49.
Silk, Manufacture of, 37.
Silver Island, 56.
Sing-an hamlet, 467.
Sing-fang Hsien, 348.
Sing-king-pa Hsien, 266.
Sin-tien-tze, 292, 296.
Sin-tu Hsien, 311, 348.
Sin-wen-ping, 371.
“Sleeping Buddha,” Temple of the, 471.
Small River, The, 424.
Smith’s _Chinese Characteristics_, Rev. Arthur, 181, 183, 192.
Snowstorm, A blinding, 426.
“Snowy Mountains,” The, 424.
Soil, god of the, Shrines to the, 344.
Soldiers, 81.
Somo, 377, 441;
absence of bird-life in, 452;
the people of, 443;
product of, 450.
—— Castle, 452.
Spearmen, An escort of, 433.
“Sphere of Influence” Policy, The, 530, 537.
Squibb, Dr., 320.
Stevenson, Mrs. Owen, 104, 135, 136, 168.
Su-chow creek; 17, 23, 29.
Suicide in China, 51.
Sui-fu, 2, 3, 429, 471;
rapids between and Kueichow Fu, 8.
Su-ma-tou, 463.
Sun Bridge mountain, The, 2.
Sundius, Mr., 43.
Sung-pan-ting, 339.
—— road, 373.
Sunstroke in Sze Chuan, 478.
Superstitions, 122, 162, 188.
Sze Chuan, Area, climate, population, etc., of, 9–11, 532;
coal-fields of, 4, 224, 239;
cotton fabrics of, 8, 91;
exports from, 149 (note);
fanaticism in, 477;
famine in, 89;
demand for foreign books in, 542;
inns in, 251 (note);
junks of, 95, 138–149;
markets of, 265, 266;
objection to open chairs in, 196;
oil trade of, 71;
opium exports from, 514;
_pai-fangs_ of, 198;
prevalence of sunstroke in, 478;
poppy cultivation in, 506;
province of, 1, 194;
the rebellion in, 530;
“Red Basin” of, 16, 63, 246–248, 264;
resources of, 3, 247, 531;
revenue, sources of, 155;
sale of drugs in, 459;
sale of girls in, 270;
salt exports from, 153;
silver of, 63;
travelling in, 207;
villages in, 264;
women of, 176;
women’s dress in, 242.
T.
Ta Chin, or Ta Kin-Shuan River, 434.
Ta-fan, 386.
Ta-ho, The, 377.
Tai-hu lake, Area of the, 6.
_Tai-kung_, or bowsman, The, 141, 142, 145, 147.
Taiping Fu, 59.
Taiping Rebellion, The, 31, 59.
_Tai-wan-ti_, The, 145.
Ta-Kin Ho river, The, 429.
Ta-ling, 151.
Ta-lu road, The, 311, 313.
Ta-miao, Temples of, 316.
Tang-pa mountain, The, 424.
Taoism, 11, 12.
Ta-tan rapid, The, 118.
Tatu, or Tung river, The, 434, 464.
Ta-tien-lu, 441.
_T’au-lao_, or head tracker, 141.
_T’au-tai-kung_, or pilot, 141.
“Tea Extract,” 511.
Theatrical companies, 330.
Thompson, Mr. and Mrs., 175, 176, 190 (note), 196, 205, 207.
“Three Religions,” The, 525;
temple of, 178.
“Three Water Guardians,” The, 171.
“Throne of Snow,” The, 404.
Tibetan dogs, 430.
—— drugs, 338.
Tien-kia-miao, 307.
Tiger Teeth gorge, 94.
Ting-hai, 55.
Ting Library, The, 34.
Torii of Japan, The, 219.
To river, 3.
_T’ou-jen_, The, 444.
Towers, Ancient, 383.
Trackers, 132, 135, 136, 141, 142, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149;
clothing of, 146;
at dinner, 159.
Trackers’ villages, 118, 123.
Trade requirements, 308.
Travelling outfit, 195.
_Trimetrical Classic_, The, 276.
Tsa-ku-lao, 395, 457;
population of, 400;
situation of, 399.
Tsing-pu hills, The, 5.
Tsu-ku-shan pass, 429, 455.
Tsung-ming, The island of, 7.
Tung or Tatu river, The, 3, 282.
Tungting lake, The, 4;
junction of the Hsiang and Yuan at, 6;
traffic on, 64, 65, 84.
Tung Yangtze cataract, 166.
_Tu-tze_, The, 443.
_Twenty-four Filials_, The, 277.
Tze-tung Hsien, 312, 316.
U.
_Use of Opium_, by Dr. Dudgeon, 513.
V.
Vale, Mr., of Chengtu, 362, 372.
Vegetarians, 525.
Village system, The, 535.
W.
_Wai-pi-ku_ boats, 501.
Wan-cheng Ti Dyke, 85, 86.
Wan Hsien, 104;
charities of, 190;
China Inland Mission house at, 172;
cotton trade of, 180;
first sight of, 171;
junk-building at, 138, 179;
population and trade of, 172, 178;
temple of, 178, 179;
the Yangtze at, 5.
War, The God of, 312.
“Water tobacco,” The use of, 513.
Waterwheels on the Min, 463.
Weichou, 366, 367, 369, 377, 378, 382;
nitre works at, 381.
Wei-gua, 395.
Wen-chuan Hsien, 376.
Wen-shu-Yuan Temple, 357.
Went-Zu, Temple of, 285.
Wesleyan missionaries, 102.
Wheelbarrow traffic, 324.
Widows, care of, 187, 188.
Widows’ arches, 198.
Willett, Mr., 500.
Williams, Rev. E. O., 281, 285, 296.
—— Dr. Wells, 164 (note), 182, 240, 276 (note).
“Wind-box” gorge. See Feng Hsiang.
“Witch’s Mountain” gorge, The, 150, 151.
Women’s work in China, 526.
Woodruff, Mr., 99.
Woo-sung, 15, 16.
Wu-chang, 59, 61.
Wuhu, 9;
trade of, 58;
benevolent institutions at, 188.
Wu-lien, 312.
_Wupans_, 124, 140, 460, 482, 500.
Wushan, 151.
—— gorge, The, 110, 150.
Wu-sueh, 6.
Y.
Ya, The, 3, 464, 485.
Ya-chow, the centre of the brick tea trade, 3.
Yak, Herds of, 425, 455.
_Yamen_ runners, 81, 196, 211.
_Yamens_, 26, 81, 261.
Yangchow, 9, 59.
Yangtze Kiang, Mouth of the, 16.
Yangtze river, alluvial deposit of, 7, 16;
annual rise and fall of, 4, 5, 496;
ascent of British fleet up, 7;
change in character of, 6;
craft on, 501;
a flood on, 482;
at Ichang, 95;
influence of the tide on, 7;
junction with the To, 477;
length of, 2;
navigable affluents of, 3, 4, 471;
navigable portion of, 8;
reed-beds in, 85;
source of, 2;
at Sui Fu, 471, 472;
trade on, 8, 9, 10;
various names of, 3;
volume of water in, 7.
Yangtze, The Lower, trade on, 9.
—— The Upper, bed of, 117;
coal workings on, 131;
life on, 138;
perils on, 149;
rapids of, 114 _et seq._;
steam navigation on, 5;
trackers on, 118 _et seq._;
trade on, 8, 9, 10;
travelling on, 104.
_Yangtze Pilot_, The, 149.
Yangtze valley, Bridges in, 10;
British treaty rights in, 14;
commerce of, 15;
drainage area, 1;
inhabitants of, 10, 11;
as a “sphere of interest,” 13.
Yao-tsai village, 121.
Yates, Dr., 523.
Yeh-tan rapid, The, 128, 131, 505.
Yellow river, Outbreak of the, 31.
Yellow Sea, The, 16.
_Yen-tun_, or “smoke towers,” 171.
“_Yin_,” The, 509.
Ying-san Hsien, 253, 261.
Yo-chow monastery, 84.
Yo-chow Fu city, 84.
Yokohama Specie Bank, Shanghai, 21.
Yuan Ho, The river, 4;
trade on, 6.
_Yulows_, 110, 145.
Yungtze, 93.
Yun-i, 236.
Yun-Yang Hsien, 166;
Roman Christians at, 168.
Yunnan, Province of, 1;
valleys of, 247;
importation of opium into, 507, 515.
PLYMOUTH
WILLIAM BRENDON AND SON
PRINTERS
[Illustration:
SKETCH MAP OF THE YANGTZE BASIN SHOWING M^{RS}. BISHOP’S ROUTE.
Stanford’s Geog^l Estab^t, London.
_The red line indicates the Author’s route_
London: John Murray, Albemarle Street.
]
-----
Footnote 1:
Politically, as H.M.’s Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs
defined it in the House of Commons on May 9th, 1899, it is “the
provinces adjoining the Yangtze River and Honan and Che Kiang.”
Footnote 2:
The lowest latitude which it is believed to reach is 26° N., east of
its junction with the Yalung at its great southerly bend, and its
junction with the ocean is in lat. 31° N.
Footnote 3:
_The Geographical Journal_, September, 1898, p. 227: “The Yangtze
Chiang,” W. R. CARLES, H.B.M.’s Consul at Swatow.
Footnote 4:
_Land of the Lamas_, p. 218.
Footnote 5:
It is the Mur-usu (“Tortuous River”) in Tibet, the Chin or Kin Sha
where it is the boundary between Tibet and China, and from the
junction of the Yalung to Sui Fu the Chin Ho. Between Sui Fu and Wan
Hsien it is called the Ta Ho (“Great River”) and the Min Chiang. At
and below Sha-shih it is the Ching Chiang, and below Hankow for 400
miles it is called the Chiang, Ch’ang Chiang (“Long River”), or
Ta-Kuan Chiang (“Great Official River”).
Footnote 6:
Lest it should be supposed that I am taking an unduly favourable view
of the position of the Chinese, and especially of the Chinese of Sze
Chuan, under their government, I fortify my opinion by quoting that of
Mr. Litton, British acting consul at Chungking. He writes in his
official report to our Foreign Office, presented to both Houses of
Parliament in May, 1899, thus:—“The government, though obstructive and
unintelligent, is not as a rule actively oppressive; one may travel
for days in West China without seeing any signs of that reserve of
force which we associate with the policeman round the corner. The
country people of Sze Chuan manage their own affairs through their
headmen, and get on very well in spite of, rather than because of, the
central government at Chengtu. So long as a native keeps out of the
law courts, and does not attempt any startling innovations on the
customs of his ancestors, he finds in the general love of law and
order very fair security that he will enjoy the fruit of his labour.”
This general disposition towards law and order, though it may have
something to do with race, is undoubtedly on the whole the result of
the teachings of Confucius.
Footnote 7:
For Shanghai and the other open ports, it is the gross value of trade,
exports and imports, including re-exports, which is given in this
volume.
Footnote 8:
Yachting Club, Golf Club, Athletic Club, Lawn Tennis Club, Polo Club,
Volunteer Club, Boating Club, Bowling Club, Swimming Club, Cricket
Club, Blackbird Club, Drag Hound Club, Steeplechase Club, Racquet
Club, Racing Club, Rifle Club, Fives Court, Gymnasium, Fire Flies
Society, Lurderfatel Society, Amateur Dramatic Company; and of a
graver cast, the Philharmonic and Photographic Societies, the Royal
Asiatic Society, the Fine Art Society, etc., etc. (List by W. S.
Percival, Esq.)
Footnote 9:
Situated a few miles from the junction of the Huang-pu with the
Yangtze, in lat. 31° 10′ N. and long. 121° 30′ E., nearly on the same
parallel as Charleston and Alexandria, the port is the great outlet of
the commerce of the rich and populous provinces of Central China, and
the sole outlet of that of Sze Chuan, besides communicating by
waterways with Hangchow, Soochow, and other great cities on the Grand
Canal, and with cities innumerable by canals innumerable.
Footnote 10:
Hangchow, though not geographically in the drainage area of the
Yangtze, as the capital of Chekiang, which has been declared
officially to be within our “sphere of interest” in the Yangtze
Valley, is treated of here as being specially interesting. Of Ningpo,
Wenchow, and Soochow, open ports in the same province, merely the
_net_ value of their total net trade for 1898 is given, along with
that of Hangchow:—
Ningpo £2,162,780
Wenchow 215,669
Soochow 229,113
Hangchow 1,199,022
Footnote 11:
Another of the crack mission hospitals of the East, of which I had
lengthened opportunities of judging, is Dr. Christie’s hospital at
Mukden, Manchuria, which has been largely instrumental in bringing
about similar results in the friendliness of the officials and people.
Footnote 12:
In a paper called _Medical Missions at Home and Abroad_ for 1898, p.
70, the reader will find such experiences very graphically told by Dr.
Malcolm.
Footnote 13:
These hospitals and dispensaries under the care of Dr. Main and Dr.
Kimber treated 47,000 patients in 1898, of which number 1000 were
in-patients, and besides these 187 would-be suicides received back the
unwelcome gift of life. These benevolent Christian institutions
comprise hospitals for men and women, an opium refuge, three leper
hospitals, two convalescent homes, and a home for the children of
lepers.
Footnote 14:
In China the necessaries of existence, food, clothing, shoes,
waterproofs, and travelling-trunks and baskets are always to be
procured, and there, as everywhere, if a traveller uses native
arrangements, he has much less difficulty in getting them handled or
repaired.
Footnote 15:
Concession is not, as is supposed by many, a synonym for settlement. A
concession is a piece of land leased by the Queen’s Government and let
to Western merchants, a stipulation being made that the land is not to
be sub-let to Chinese, while a settlement is an area within which
Europeans may lease land directly from the native proprietors. In both
cases the Queen’s Government stipulates for the right of policing and
controlling the land, and delegates it to a council of resident
merchants.
Footnote 16:
A specimen of guild rules is given in Appendix A.
Footnote 17:
For brief statistics of the trade of the Yangtze open ports see
Appendix B.
Footnote 18:
For minor causes of the loss of the import trade see _Trade of Central
and Southern China_, BOURNE, Foreign Office, May, 1898.
Footnote 19:
In 1868 the average consumption of tea per head of the population of
the United Kingdom was 3·52 lbs., of which 93 per cent. was Chinese
tea, and 7 per cent. Indian. Since that date the consumption has risen
to an average of 5·73 per head of the population, but only 11 per
cent. is Chinese tea, while the tea grown in India and Ceylon is 89
per cent.
Footnote 20:
“There is no harbour in the world where one may see so many craft as
at Hankow. Anchored in several rows, they reach for miles along the
river banks.”—Consul BULLOCK, _The Geography of China_.
Footnote 21:
Foreign Office Report No. 2086, May, 1898.
Footnote 22:
It is usual for the missionaries of the China Inland Mission and for
those of the SZE CHUAN mission of the C.M.S. to live in Chinese houses
actually among the city populations, a course which is considerably
criticised on grounds of health and safety.
Footnote 23:
Diplomatic and Consular Reports, No. 458, China, Foreign Office, May,
1898.
Footnote 24:
_Through the Yangtze Gorges_, A. J. LITTLE, p. 246.
Footnote 25:
Consul Bourne “risks” an estimate of the value of goods exported from
Sze Chuan by this route at £3,300,000 annually, while imports coming
up the rapids and passing through the Imperial Customs amounted to
£1,776,586 in 1897. The freight on cotton goods from Ichang to
Chungking is estimated at £3 8_s._ 6_d._ per ton, a scarcely
appreciable increase in cost on every yard after a transit of 500
miles.
Footnote 26:
These pits are reported as producing 132 lbs. of salt daily each.
Captain Gill learned at Kuei Fu that SZE CHUAN salt brings in a
revenue of about £2,000,000 sterling annually, but this seems
incredible, as it would make the annual salt production of the
province about 237,946 tons.
Footnote 27:
Dr. WELLS WILLIAMS, on p. 812 of _The Middle Kingdom_, vol. i., says
that a literary man would have such a sentence as—
“May I be so learned as to secrete in my mind three myriads of
volumes”;
“May I know the affairs of the world for six thousand years.”
While a shopkeeper would adorn his door with such mottoes as these—
“May profits be like the morning sun rising on the clouds”;
“May wealth increase like the morning tide which brings the rain”;
“Manage your occupation according to truth and loyalty.”
“Hold on to benevolence and rectitude in all your trading.”
Dr. Williams adds that the influence of these and countless similar
mottoes which are to be seen throughout the land is inestimable, and
is usually for good. At all events it is better to have a high ideal
than a low one.
Footnote 28:
Although the Temple of Chang-fei stands 200 feet above the river at
low water, the one which preceded it was carried away in a great flood
in 1870, when the water actually rose to the height of the present
roof. The present gorgeous structure cost 10,000 taels.
Footnote 29:
The volume from which this picture was taken and enlarged was printed
in Shanghai.
Footnote 30:
This term “dog-faced” apparently does not bear the meaning which we
put on it, for the woman in the illustration on page 496 with a
head-dress of solid silver and heavy white silk from the mountains of
FU KIEN is a member of what the Fu-chow Chinese call “dog-faced”
tribes.
Footnote 31:
The charities of China have been several times alluded to, and it
seems fitting before leaving Wan Hsien, where they are both numerous
and active, to devote a special chapter to them. The sketch is an
imperfect and limited one, but it may help to point the way to a field
of very interesting inquiry.
Footnote 32:
A mow, roughly speaking, is about one-seventh of an acre.
Footnote 33:
I am indebted for most of the foregoing facts to Mr. W. R. Carles,
lately H.B.M.’s consul at Chinkiang, and to the very careful
investigations made by the Rev. W. W. Lawton for the Christian
Literary Association of Chinkiang.
Footnote 34:
For these very interesting facts regarding Wan, I am indebted to my
host there, Mr. Thompson, of the China Inland Mission. Statistics are
not available.
Footnote 35:
I must also mention, in extenuation of sundry faults of which I am
conscious, that I went to Western China solely for interest and
pleasure, and not with any intention of writing a book, and that,
instead of having careful and copious notes, I have only journal
letters to rely upon.
Footnote 36:
This word, which we apply universally to Chinese officials, is
Portuguese. The Chinese designation is _kuan_.
Footnote 37:
I was told afterwards that a foreign missionary in an open chair had
passed through not long before, and being annoyed at the curiosity and
crowding of the people, had gone with a complaint to the _yamen_, and
it was supposed by some of my friends that they were avenging this on
me.
Footnote 38:
I cannot give the local distances in English miles, because, though
the Chinese _li_ is 1818 English feet, the _li_ of the mountain and
the plain, and even of the good and bad road, differ in length.
Footnote 39:
I was present at a “drawing-room meeting” in Shanghai when Mrs.
Archibald Little, of Chungking, took the humane initiative of
establishing an “Anti-Footbinding Society,” which has now many
branches, and is undoubtedly commending its aims to many men of the
intelligent classes. The mission schools for girls are in general
absolutely against the crippling process, and the wives of many of the
younger Christians have “big feet.”
Footnote 40:
See Mr. Bourne’s Report on the Trade of Central and Southern China,
Foreign Office, May, 1898.
Footnote 41:
I must repeat that there are very good inns in SZE CHUAN in the
cities, _i.e._ good for China, and at the regular stages, but, besides
that I was avoiding cities because of the rough element which they
contain, I was travelling less than the usual distance daily, and had
to put up with the Chinese equivalent of the “hedge alehouse”
accommodation, which the ordinary travelling Chinese would have
disdained.
Footnote 42:
These are all attainable in scholarly translations, and, along with
chapter ix. of Dr. Wells Williams’ invaluable volumes, _The Middle
Kingdom_, should be read by everyone who takes more than a merely
superficial or commercial interest in China.
Footnote 43:
A translation of these is given in the _Chinese Repository_ (vol. vi.,
p. 131).
Footnote 44:
Dr. WELLS WILLIAMS, _Middle Kingdom_.
Footnote 45:
Funeral ceremonies and superstitions are given in detail in _The
Middle Kingdom_, vol. ii., p. 244.
Footnote 46:
A detailed description of this building is given by Captain Gill in
_The River of Golden Sand_, vol. ii., p. 13. Chengtu has been often
visited, and two or three times described by English travellers, so
that I consider myself exonerated from giving more than mere notes of
my impressions of it.
Footnote 47:
The fall of the Min between its bifurcation at Weichou and Kuan Hsien,
taking the altitudes of these two towns as the basis of the
calculation and the Chinese _li_ at its average length, is
twenty-seven feet to the mile, but from Weichou to Li-fan Ting it is
no less than forty-five feet to the mile.
Footnote 48:
I could not hear of any but Captain Gill, and three Russians a few
months before, and all had reasons of their own for doing so.
Footnote 49:
A pony had rolled on my hypsometer, and I spent much of the day at
Li-fan in constructing another with the aid of a tinsmith. It was but
a rude construction, but as it made the height of Li-fan come to
within ten feet of that given by Captain Gill, I venture to present
the altitudes of Tsa-ku-lao and a few other places as approximations
to the truth.
Footnote 50:
In this case a _Tu-tze_ is a tribal chief, recognised as such by the
Chinese Government.
Footnote 51:
Captain Gill met with a mountain of the same name on his Tibetan
journey, so it would appear that Ja-ra is a Tibetan name. I could not
unearth any Chinese name for the mountain.
Footnote 52:
A careful and deeply interesting account of these excavations is given
by Mr. Baber in “A Journey of Exploration in Western _Sze Chuan_.” See
_Supplementary Papers_, vol. i., _Royal Geographical Society_.
Footnote 53:
Among the trees and plants behind Peh-Shih, which were interesting as
growing in one locality, were: the orange, pommeloe, pomegranate,
apricot, peach, apple, pear, plum, persimmon (_Diospyros Virginiana_),
loquat (_Eriobotrya Japonica_), date-plum (_Diospyros Kaki_), the
Chinese date tree (_Rhamnus Theezans_), walnut, Spanish chestnuts, the
_Ficus religiosa_, palms, bamboos, cypresses, pines, the “varnish
tree” (_Rhus-vernicifera_), the Tung oil tree (_Aleurites cordata_),
mulberry, oak, the _Cudrania triloba_, much used for feeding young
silkworms, a hibiscus, plane, the _Sterculia platinifolia_, the
_Paulonia Imperialis_, three varieties of soap trees (_Acacia negata_,
_Gymnocladus Sinensis_, and _Gleditschia Sinensis_), the tallow tree,
and very many others, my specimens of which were so destroyed by damp
as to render subsequent botanical identification impossible. Hemp was
considerably grown, and of two economic shrubs, both new to me, there
were several patches, the _Boehmeria nivea_, from the fibre of which
grass cloth is manufactured, and the _Fatsia papyrifera_, from the
pith of which rice paper is made.
Footnote 54:
The estimated distance to Cheng-tu by the windings of the rivers is:—
Chung-king to Luchow 125 miles.
Luchow to Sui Fu 87 „
Sui Fu to Chia-ling Fu 130 „
Chia-ling Fu to Cheng-tu Fu 133 „
———
Total 475 miles.
Footnote 55:
Mr. Bourne estimates the imports of cotton and cotton goods as
follows:—
Raw cotton £500,000
Native piece goods, home spun 1,000,000
Indian yarn 600,000
Lancashire cottons 300,000
——————————
£2,400,000
And the exports, which are chiefly raw or half-manufactured produce,
as follows:—
Opium £1,800,000
Salt 300,000
Drugs 400,000
Silk 200,000
Miscellaneous articles, insect wax, tobacco, sugar, musk, 600,000
wool-skins, hides, feathers, bristles, etc.
——————————
£3,300,000
The returns for 1898, not yet out, are expected to show a very
considerable increase.
Footnote 56:
Readers are referred to sections 28 to 33 of Mr. Bourne’s report on
_The Trade of Central and Southern China_, May, 1898. (Eyre and
Spottiswoode.)
Footnote 57:
In order to avoid the fragmentariness of references to the Opium Poppy
and Protestant Missions, at intervals throughout this volume, I have
adopted the more convenient arrangement of giving a chapter on each of
these subjects.
Footnote 58:
_Report of a Journey to North Sze Chuan_, 1898. By Mr. G. J. L.
LITTON, of H.B.M.’s Chinese Consular Service.
Footnote 59:
This is not from any distrust of the accuracy of their facts, for no
foreigners know the lives and ways of the Chinese so well as they do,
but simply because many people think that they are prejudiced.
Footnote 60:
“This year the value of foreign goods imported amounted to more than
eighty million [taels]. The export of Chinese products might be about
fifty million [taels] or more. The foreign drug [_i.e._, opium] was
valued at more than thirty million [taels]. Thus there was a leakage.
China is not impoverished by commerce, but the impoverishment comes
from the consumption of opium.”
Footnote 61:
In _Les Missions Catholiques_, vol. xxiii. (1891), M. Louvets returns
the number of Roman Catholic converts in Pechili, Manchuria, Mongolia,
and Shantung as 73,620 in 1870, and in 1890, including 2000 in Kansuh,
as 155,900.
Footnote 62:
A servant of my own, not a Christian, gave a quaint reason for liking
to serve missionaries—“I never get boots at my head in the foreign
teachers’ houses.”
Footnote 63:
If I seem to pronounce opinions _ex cathedrâ_ on very insufficient
bases, it is owing to the avoidance of the constant repetition of the
modest phrase “I think,” which in nearly all cases must be understood.
Footnote 64:
Hundreds of temples, however, had undergone recent and thorough
repair.
Footnote 65:
See Appendix B.
Footnote 66:
_Imperial Maritime Customs. Report on the Trade of China for 1898._
King & Son. London.
Footnote 67:
A couplet from a well-known anonymous lampoon, largely current as an
expression of popular opinion, is translated thus:—
“Three hands has every magistrate,
And every officer three feet.”
(The hands to clutch at bribes, the feet to run away from the enemy!)
Footnote 68:
In Mukden, early in that war, I saw Chinese regiments of remarkably
fine physique marching to their doom, armed with matchlock and “Tower”
guns, and pikes, the money which should have provided them with modern
rifles having enriched the officials who had the spending of it. The
modern rifles with which some of the rank and file were armed were of
all patterns, so cartridges of a dozen different makes and sizes were
dumped down on the ground in a vacant space in the city, without any
attempt at classification, and the soldiers fitted them to their arms,
sometimes throwing eight or ten back on the heap before finding one to
suit the weapon. The commissariat officials were grossly dishonest,
and where stores had accumulated, sold them for their own benefit. It
is a common practice for a military mandarin to draw pay for 800 men,
having only 400 with the colours, and, on an inspection day, to
impress 400 coolies of the city, put them into uniforms, and parade
them with the soldiers.
Footnote 69:
Mr. Meadows states that the highest mandarins get about ten times and
the lowest about fifty times the amount of their legal incomes by
means of “squeezes.”
Footnote 70:
Since writing the above pages I have read Mr. A. R. COLQUHOUN’S
chapters on “Government and Administration,” “The Chinese People,” and
“Chinese Democracy,” in which I find views similar to my own stated
with great force, breadth, and intimate knowledge. The last chapter
concludes with these important words: “It is only fitful glimpses
which strangers are able to obtain of the inner working of Chinese
national life—quite insufficient to form a coherent theory of the
whole ... but the data ascertained seem sufficient to warrant the
inference of a vast, self-governed, law-abiding society, costing
practically nothing to maintain, and having nothing to apprehend save
natural calamities and national upheavals.”
Footnote 71:
Many people think that _likin_, an inland tax, levied by the
provincial authorities on foreign goods in transit (_loti-shui_ being
a terminal tax), is an illegal blackmail, but it rests on precisely
the same foundation as every other Chinese ordinance—an Imperial
Decree—and its legality was certainly recognised by the British and
German Governments when they accepted seven _likin_ collectorates as
collateral security for the last Anglo-German loan.
Footnote 72:
The italics are my own.—I. L. B.
Footnote 73:
It was what are known as the “Hunan Tracts,” an infamous literature
circulated throughout the Empire, which accuses Christians of the
vilest crimes, and urges the populace to expel them, which have been
the cause of several of the anti-foreign riots. Now HUNAN is welcoming
Western learning and Christian teachers.
Footnote 74:
_Times’_ Shanghai correspondent.
Footnote 75:
The Chinese _li_ is 1814 English feet, but the mountain and the plain
_li_ differ in length.
Footnote 76:
These tables were kindly prepared for this volume by W. H. Wilkinson,
Esq., H.B.M. Consul at Ningpo, from the Trade Report for 1898 of the
Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs. The Haikwan tael, in which the
Customs accounts are kept, has been taken at 3_s._, as a fairer
current equivalent than the ²⁄₁₀–⁵⁄₈ average, by the advice of Mr.
Jamieson, C.M.G., late Consul-General at Shanghai.
Footnote 77:
Note that these figures include trade conducted by Chinese, or under
the Chinese flag, passing through the Maritime Customs.
Footnote 78:
These tables, giving an excess of imports over exports, will be seen
not to tally with my statement in the final chapter. In other years
similar tables have given rise to the belief that China is being
denuded of silver to pay for the balance, and is drifting towards
bankruptcy. But the Inspector-General, in the Customs Report for 1898,
from which these figures are taken, points out that, taking into
account the value of the gold exported from China, of the tea sent to
Siberia and Russia _viâ_ the Han River, of the twenty million pounds
of tea exported annually to Tibet, of the junk traffic to Korea and
the South, and of other exports of which the Customs take no
cognizance, there is an actual excess of exports over imports, as was
shown by careful statistics in 1897. He also points out as a positive
proof that the nation is well able to pay its way, that the Government
remittances to Europe for the service of loans, amounting in 1898 to
about Hk. Tls. 18,000,000, were made through foreign banks by the
medium of bills of exchange against exports.—I. L. B.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
● Typos fixed; non-standard spelling and dialect retained.
● Corrected the Errata.
● Used numbers for footnotes, placing them all at the end of the last
chapter.
● Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.
● Enclosed bold font in =equals=.
● The caret (^) serves as a superscript indicator, applicable to
individual characters (like 2^d) and even entire phrases (like
1^{st}).
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE YANGTZE VALLEY AND BEYOND ***
Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions will
be renamed.
Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright
law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works,
so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United
States without permission and without paying copyright
royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part
of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG™
concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark,
and may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following
the terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for use
of the Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for
copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is very
easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation
of derivative works, reports, performances and research. Project
Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and printed and given away—you may
do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks not protected
by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the trademark
license, especially commercial redistribution.
START: FULL LICENSE
THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
To protect the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting the free
distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase “Project
Gutenberg”), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full
Project Gutenberg™ License available with this file or online at
www.gutenberg.org/license.
Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg™
electronic works
1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg™
electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or
destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in your
possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a
Project Gutenberg™ electronic work and you do not agree to be bound
by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person
or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
1.B. “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark. It may only be
used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few
things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See
paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works if you follow the terms of this
agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg™
electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.
1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (“the
Foundation” or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection
of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works. Nearly all the individual
works in the collection are in the public domain in the United
States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in the
United States and you are located in the United States, we do not
claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing,
displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as
all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope
that you will support the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting
free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg™
works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the
Project Gutenberg™ name associated with the work. You can easily
comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the
same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg™ License when
you share it without charge with others.
1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are
in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States,
check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this
agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing,
distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any
other Project Gutenberg™ work. The Foundation makes no
representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any
country other than the United States.
1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other
immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg™ License must appear
prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg™ work (any work
on which the phrase “Project Gutenberg” appears, or with which the
phrase “Project Gutenberg” is associated) is accessed, displayed,
performed, viewed, copied or distributed:
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you
are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws
of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is
derived from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not
contain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the
copyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in
the United States without paying any fees or charges. If you are
redistributing or providing access to a work with the phrase “Project
Gutenberg” associated with or appearing on the work, you must comply
either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or
obtain permission for the use of the work and the Project Gutenberg™
trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is posted
with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any
additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms
will be linked to the Project Gutenberg™ License for all works
posted with the permission of the copyright holder found at the
beginning of this work.
1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg™
License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg™.
1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
Gutenberg™ License.
1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including
any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access
to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg™ work in a format
other than “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other format used in the official
version posted on the official Project Gutenberg™ website
(www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense
to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means
of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original “Plain
Vanilla ASCII” or other form. Any alternate format must include the
full Project Gutenberg™ License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg™ works
unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
access to or distributing Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
provided that:
• You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
the use of Project Gutenberg™ works calculated using the method
you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is owed
to the owner of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark, but he has
agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments must be paid
within 60 days following each date on which you prepare (or are
legally required to prepare) your periodic tax returns. Royalty
payments should be clearly marked as such and sent to the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the address specified in
Section 4, “Information about donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation.”
• You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg™
License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all
copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and discontinue
all use of and all access to other copies of Project Gutenberg™
works.
• You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of
any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days of
receipt of the work.
• You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
distribution of Project Gutenberg™ works.
1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project
Gutenberg™ electronic work or group of works on different terms than
are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing
from the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the manager of
the Project Gutenberg™ trademark. Contact the Foundation as set
forth in Section 3 below.
1.F.
1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
works not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating the Project
Gutenberg™ collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg™
electronic works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may
contain “Defects,” such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate
or corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or
other medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or
cannot be read by your equipment.
1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the “Right
of Replacement or Refund” described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
Gutenberg™ trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
Gutenberg™ electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
DAMAGE.
1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you
received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium
with your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you
with the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in
lieu of a refund. If you received the work electronically, the person
or entity providing it to you may choose to give you a second
opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If
the second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing
without further opportunities to fix the problem.
1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you ‘AS-IS’, WITH NO
OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT
LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of
damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement
violates the law of the state applicable to this agreement, the
agreement shall be interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or
limitation permitted by the applicable state law. The invalidity or
unenforceability of any provision of this agreement shall not void the
remaining provisions.
1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
providing copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in
accordance with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the
production, promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg™
electronic works, harmless from all liability, costs and expenses,
including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of
the following which you do or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this
or any Project Gutenberg™ work, (b) alteration, modification, or
additions or deletions to any Project Gutenberg™ work, and (c) any
Defect you cause.
Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg™
Project Gutenberg™ is synonymous with the free distribution of
electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of
computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It
exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations
from people in all walks of life.
Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg™’s
goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg™ collection will
remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
and permanent future for Project Gutenberg™ and future
generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help, see
Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation information page at www.gutenberg.org.
Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non-profit
501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
Revenue Service. The Foundation’s EIN or federal tax identification
number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent permitted by
U.S. federal laws and your state’s laws.
The Foundation’s business office is located at 809 North 1500 West,
Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact links and up
to date contact information can be found at the Foundation’s website
and official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact
Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation
Project Gutenberg™ depends upon and cannot survive without widespread
public support and donations to carry out its mission of
increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
freely distributed in machine-readable form accessible by the widest
array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations
($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
status with the IRS.
The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations
where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To SEND
DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any particular state
visit www.gutenberg.org/donate.
While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
approach us with offers to donate.
International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
Please check the Project Gutenberg web pages for current donation
methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other
ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations. To
donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate.
Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project
Gutenberg™ concept of a library of electronic works that could be
freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and
distributed Project Gutenberg™ eBooks with only a loose network of
volunteer support.
Project Gutenberg™ eBooks are often created from several printed
editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by copyright in
the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not
necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper
edition.
Most people start at our website which has the main PG search
facility: www.gutenberg.org.
This website includes information about Project Gutenberg™,
including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
